Going Places

Elizabeth Anker will be moving from her current position as assistant professor at Wake Forest University to take up a tenure track assistant professorship in 20th Century British and Anglophone literature at Cornell University. Elizabeth’s book in progress, Necessary Fictions: Narrating Human Rights and the Postcolonial Subject, a revised and expanded version of her dissertation, directed by Rita Felski, Peter Brooks, and Michael Levenson, explores how the contemporary world novel intervenes within current debates over the legal and cultural regime of human rights. Through case studies of texts by Salman Rushdie, Nawal El Saadawi, and J.M. Coetzee, it shows how literature can critique and expose the limits of human rights discourses, while, at the same time, revitalizing our appreciation for rights as necessary vehicles for approaching global social justice. “Necessary Fictions” argues that literature, because of its ability to inhabit conditions of indeterminacy, uniquely can imagine the ambivalences and contradictions that accompany rights but that are commonly suppressed within legal and political discourses.

John Carlson has accepted the position of Digital Production Editor at Yale University Press. He will be responsible for overseeing the digitization of the “Annals of Communism” series and coordinating editorial and technical work on creating an electronic archive of Joseph Stalin’s papers from the Kremlin archives. He will also be working with scholars in various departments at Yale (and collaborating institutions like Harvard) on creating a digital archive of the medieval manuscript materials preserved in the Beinecke Library. John may be reached at .

John’s dissertation, “The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Hyper-Critical Edition,” was completed under the supervision of Hoyt Duggan, David Vander Meulen and Peter Baker. John writes: My edition of the Morte Arthure demonstrates a new approach to hypertextual editing that eschews the archival model for critical engagement with the literary object. The core of this project is a text of the Morte Arthure’s first 1221 lines encoded in extensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML is a syntax that allows editors to indicate a theoretically limitless number of features for any character, word, or phrase that can be displayed and searched in differing ways by the text's audiences. Readers can use this particular XML document to view the poem with metrically deficient lines highlighted, conjectural emendations correcting such deficiencies, or the unaltered manuscript reading among other options. Furthermore, they can choose to display only select emendations based on conditions like whether a reading is supported by codicological evidence or is the most probable of all potential interventions. This freedom, while mediated by critical arguments, is accompanied by transparent representations of textual evidence that expose every editorial decision to immediate scrutiny. Such openness requires from the audience in return an active consideration of disciplines ranging from codicology to statistical analysis.

Beyond any impact on its audience’s reading habits, however, this work also challenges those preconceptions impeding the growth of electronic editing more generally. In the past, some critics are suggesting that work in the digital medium is “post-critical” and dependent more on the reader/viewer than the editor. While experience proves the collaborative nature of hypertext, the endeavor is hypercritical rather than “post-critical” since mediation itself becomes an object of study. Even when the decision between variants is left to individual readers, a choice to view emendations based on either codicological or metrical evidence must be anticipated by a decision to encode those options and explain their value. Therefore, the editor is not diminished but rather takes on new responsibilities as an advocate for competing variants who must also suggest the most plausible readings to his audience. In essence, this edition of the Morte Arthure underscores the importance of traditional textual disciplines while demonstrating new applications for these skills in digital media.

Jason Coats will be the English Department’s Edgar G. Shannon Fellow for 2008-09. 

Omaar Hena has accepted a two-year post doctoral fellowship at Cornell and will also be teaching in the Cornell English department. Omaar’s dissertation, written under the direction of Jahan Ramazani, Jennifer Wicke and Michael Levenson, is “Global Imaginaries: Transnational Exchange in Contemporary Postcolonial Poetry.”

He writes: “Global Imaginaries” examines how contemporary Anglophone poetry from the Caribbean (Derek Walcott), South Asia (Daljit Nagra), and Ireland (Paul Muldoon) distills in language and form disjunctive and overlapping processes of global modernity in the context of postcoloniality. Beyond extending Anglo-Modernism’s poetics of fragmentation to mourn the legacy of empire in the postcolonial world, world Anglophone poetry also textually constructs transnational webs of cross-cultural connection and recuperation. Written in the context of diaspora and migration, postcolonial poetry figures alternative globalizations based on shared experiences of dispossession, affiliation, and solidarity.

Alwin Jones has accepted a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of African-American and African literatures at Sarah Lawrence College.

Alwin is completing his dissertation, entitled “African Mater: Migrant Maternity in the Making of New Social Orders,” under the direction of Marlon Ross, Deborah McDowell, and Mrinalini Chakravorty. Alwin describes his project as follows: “African Mater” is a multi-genre study that builds on recent exciting scholarship focusing on the mother figure in the literature and culture of the African diaspora. Focusing on texts from 1760 to the present, I posit that the engagement of a ‘migrant maternity’ remains crucial to ‘migrant’ writers maneuvering in and against the dominant social orders. In the first half of the study, the years 1760s-1830s, I interrogate how James Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince employ a fluid conception of maternity to navigate the politics of chattel slavery and the pre-emancipation moment. In the latter half, 1950s to 2006, I examine how Michelle Cliff, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid and Saul Williams construct a mobile maternity, rooted in African diaspora, as the postcolonial, (post)national and neocolonial moments reorient long-standing questions related to freedom, identity, language, nativity, and place-(less)-ness.

Michael Lundblad has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in twentieth-century American literature and culture at Colorado State University, located in Ft. Collins, CO. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Syracuse University.

Michael’s current book project, “The Progressive Animal: Evolutionary Fictions and the Discourse of the American Jungle,” began as a dissertation that was directed by Eric Lott, Jennifer Wicke, and Steve Cushman, and defended in July 2007. The book explores the mutually constitutive relationship between new discourses of animality and progressive cultural politics in American literature and culture from the 1890s to the 1920s. Complicating traditional readings of literary naturalism, “The Progressive Animal” also illustrates how representations of animality are more central to constructions of key American identities than often imagined. Ultimately, the book argues that historicizing animality can lead to new ways of thinking about human subjectivity, difference, and otherness. Portions of this project have been published or are forthcoming in American Literature, PMLA, and American Quarterly.

Rei Magosaki has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship in American multicultural literatures (with an emphasis on Asian-American literature) at Chapman University in California. You may contact Rei at .

Rei’s dissertation, which she is completing under the direction of Rita Felski, Eric Lott, Jennifer Wicke and Ian Grandison, is “Sexing the City: Contemporary U.S. Women Writers and the Global Metropolis.”

Rei describes her project as follows: This dissertation revises accounts in American literature and in cultural theory which narrate the post-WWII American city as a “city in crisis,” characterized by alienation, fragmentation, paranoia, or postmodern dispossession. My project argues for an alternative matrix of women’s writing from the late 1950s to the present, which recognizes the problems in the postindustrial city but also envisions the city as a site of matrilineal empowerment, creative connections, multicultural catalytic energies, and diasporic homecoming. Drawing on a diverse range of U.S. ethnic and Asian Anglophone women writers, this study uncovers a specifically female lens on urban literature and urban theory that, in and through reconfigurations of female identity in city space, embraces and anticipates the problematics of American ethnicity, transnationalism, and the globalization of the city.

Lee Manion has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship in medieval literature at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University. You may contact Lee at . Lee’s dissertation, “‘In another kynde’”: Modes of Recognition in Late Medieval English Literature,” was written under the supervision of Elizabeth Fowler, Tony Spearing and Gordon Braden.
He describes his project as follows:
This dissertation reveals medieval literature’s pervasive interest in the topos of recognition in three genres: the historical romance, the chivalric romance, and the crusade romance. I examine how works such as Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale or the anonymous Alliterative Morte Arthure explored and shaped new habits of recognition through discourses (philosophy, political theory, crusade discourse) that were closely associated with specific genres. Our current understanding of the performance of identity is put into question by these medieval practices of recognition by “kynde,” which may document historical changes in cognition itself.

Justin Neumann has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship in Contemporary Anglophone Literature at Yale University.  Justin is completing his dissertation, “Faith in Fiction: Post-Secular Culture and the Global Novel,” under the supervision of Peter Brooks, Michael Levenson, and Jennifer Wicke. He describes his project as follows:

“Faith in Fiction: Post-Secular Culture and the Global Novel” argues that globally informed contemporary fiction is a post-secular cultural form and maps the origins, range, and significance of the post-secular in our time. By exploring the resurgence of religiosity in novels by J.M. Coetzee, Anne Michaels, Salman Rushdie, and Orhan Pamuk and in major works of political theory, theology, and philosophy I demonstrate literature’s ability to shape and reflect the vexed role of religion in global culture. The post-secular perspective I forge in this project offers fresh resources for approaching the secular/sacred nexus, redirects literary studies toward the marginalized terrain of religion, and clarifies the intricate politics of faith.

Wesley Raabe has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in Textual Editing and American Literature at the English Department of Kent State University.

Wesley’s dissertation, entitled “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: An Electronic Edition of the National Era Version,” was directed by David Vander Meulen, Jerome McGann, and Stephen Railton.

His current project, entitled “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: An Electronic Edition of the National Era Version,” will provide authoritative transcriptions, archival image facsimiles, and a textual apparatus for the surviving manuscript pages and for selected American publication forms of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: the National Era version, of publisher John P. Jewett’s three initial print versions, and of the 1879 Riverside Press edition. The edition will feature a textual introduction, an historical collation of the manuscript and the five printed texts, and a critically established reading text that promotes the study of authorial revision and other textual alterations.

Brian Roberts has accepted a tenure track assistant in American Literature at Brigham Young University. You may contact Brian at .

Brian is completing his dissertation, entitled “Artistic Ambassadors and African American Writing at the Nation’s Edge, 1889–1956,” under the supervision of Deborah McDowell (chair), Marlon Ross and Eric Lott.

Brian describes his project as follows:
Reading literature produced by a vibrant community of black writers involved (directly and indirectly) with the US State Department, this dissertation offers a critical rethinking of black internationalism’s relation to artistic innovation, US imperialism, and the formation of black transnational consciousnesses. The study draws upon the rich literary and diplomatic dossiers of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, and Angelina Grimké, recontextualizing this material by recovering the literary works of lesser known African American diplomats and by situating these writings vis-à-vis the internationalist concerns evinced by figures including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Informed by postnationalist American Studies, postcolonial theory, and performance studies, the project sheds light on African American writers operating within a state-oriented global network that tested the demarcations between a series of often conflicted spheres: domesticity and internationalism, nationalism and exile, and (in W. E. B. Du Bois’s terms) “American” and “Negro.”

David Sigler has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (both Romantic and Victorian) at the University of Idaho. David’s dissertation, written under the direction of Marlon Ross, Michael Levenson and Eleanor Kaufman, is entitled “Romantic Sexuation: The Enjoyment of Sexual Difference in British Romanticism.” Considering poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction alike, and with a particular emphasis on gothic and women’s writing, “Romantic Sexuation” suggests how some Romantic authors codified sexual difference as a logical system, how others applied pressure to that system’s fault lines, and how several rendered imaginable interdicted forms of sexuality. Attuned to the ways that unusual configurations of desire could gain momentum within British Romanticism, this study makes available a fuller view of gender and sexuality in the period.

Chloe Wigston Smith has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship in 18th Century Literature at the University of Georgia. Chloe wrote her dissertation under the direction of Cindy Wall, Paul Hunter and Pat Spacks. You can read below her description of her book-in-progress and you may contact her at .

Practical Habits: Clothes, Gender, and the History of the Novel

This study uncovers how metaphors of dress and ornamentation helped to shape the history of the novel. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the intersections and differences between novels and the material world, I argue that novels uncouple the classical, rhetorical analogy between expression and dress. Juxtaposing authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth with a rich range of non-canonical texts, periodicals, court cases, engravings, and clothes, I show how novels imagine clothes as “practical habits,” rather than as the ornaments of style, suggestively revising and reshaping narrow gender categories. In so doing, novels attempt to reform cultural perceptions of women and their work. The possibility of reform is put in question by certain visible discrepancies between the representation of clothes in prose fictions and the exigencies of fashion culture. My study discloses the tensions between novels and material culture that were central to the genre's complicated engagement with eighteenth-century commodity culture and aesthetics.

Tim Stinson has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in medieval literature in the English department at North Carolina State University. This is not Tim’s only recent success: he has also been awarded a one year NEH Digital Humanities Fellowship which he will be taking up during the academic year 09-10.

Tim’s dissertation was “The Siege of Jerusalem: An Electronic Archive and Hypertext Edition”; he worked under the supervision of Hoyt Duggan, David Vander Meulen  and Jerry McGann. Tim describes his project as follows:

“The Siege of Jerusalem: An Electronic Archive and Hypertext Edition” illuminates how this critically ignored poem is both an important socio-cultural artifact and an unusually rich source of evidence of scribal transmission of alliterative verse. It also illustrates ways that digital media facilitate a representation of medieval textuality that corrects misconstructions of medieval authority, authorship, and textual transmission present in print representations of medieval literary works. The archive comprises a critical introduction and digital images of all 231 extant pages of manuscript materials accompanied by and linked to diplomatic transcriptions and critical texts.

Brad Tuggle has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship in Renaissance Literature at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama Brad’s dissertation, which he is writing under the direction of Elizabeth Fowler, James Nohrnberg, Clare Kinney and Katharine Maus is entitled “Thought and Movement in Early Modern English Literature” Brad writes:

“Thought and Movement in Early Modern English Literature” seeks to elucidate the role of emotion in early modern aesthetics. Drawing on philosophical ideas from Aristotle, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hobbes, the American Pragmatists, and recent ethicists, I am able to show how the movement from thought to action presents a complex problem for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets and thinkers. Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton all explore the significance of emotion to what I call their ethical aesthetics. My project thus situates the work of these poets within current discussions of emotion, instruction, and thinking in Renaissance poetry.