Faculty News

Sylvia Chong recently published an article entitled “‘Look, an Asian!’: The Politics of Racial Interpellation in the Wake of Virginia Tech” in the Journal of Asian American Studies (February 2008 issue). She has also traveled around the country, presenting this new research at Brown University and Swarthmore College, as well as at the national meetings for the Association of Asian American Studies and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Greg Colomb joined the late Wayne Booth and Joseph Williams in reconceiving Turabian’s classic A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. The seventh edition (Chicago, 2007) has been entirely rewritten by Booth, Colomb, and Williams and now includes an extended section on the process of designing and reporting research.

Steve Cushman’s new book of poetry, Riffraff has been accepted by LSU Press for publication, probably in 2011.

Johanna Drucker’s Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, in collaboration with artist-designer Emily McVarish, appeared in February 2008 from Pearson-Prentice Hall. The 400+ page, heavily illustrated, and elegantly designed book is the first significant attempt to rework the approach to graphic design since the classic by Philip Meggs, originally published a quarter of a century ago. Combining media studies, art history, literary criticism, and cultural studies frameworks, the book is intended to provide ways of thinking about graphic media rather than to “tell the story” of their history. The fifteen-chapter book begins with prehistory and extends to digital media and current debates. Drucker is also the recipient of the Digital Humanities Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center for the academic year 2008-09 and will be working on a project titled “The Diagrammatic Imagination” as part of a project to create conventions for interpretative activity in electronic archives and networked environments. Her book SpecLab: Speculative Computing and Digital Aesthetics, is in press with University of Chicago and will be out in late 2008.

Rita Felski has edited a collection entitled Rethinking Tragedy, which includes essays by George Steiner, Martha Nussbaum, Terry Eagleton, Page Dubois, and many others. She also has a new book coming out entitled Uses of Literature, a book designed to “bridge the gap between literary theory and common-sense beliefs about why we read literature.” Here’s an advance review by Gerald Graff, the 2008 President of the Modern Language Association: “For decades now, the picture of how we read held by literary theorists and that held by everyday common readers have been galaxies apart. But in this lucid, readable, and highly persuasive book, Rita Felski demonstrates the impossible: that recent literary theorists and common readers not only have something to say to each other, but actually need one another.”

David Golumbia’s book, The Cultural Logic of Computation, has been accepted by Harvard University Press and will be coming out in Spring 2009. In addition, his essay, “Minimalism Is Functionalism,” on Noam Chomsky’s very recent work, is forthcoming in Language Sciences and another essay, “Games Without Play,” in part on World of Warcraft, is forthcoming in a special issue of New Literary History on the topic “Play.”  Finally, his review-essay on Evelyn Ch’ien’s Weird English, entitled “The Trouble with Normal English,” came out in January 2008 in the online journal Politics and Culture.

Katharine Maus is one of the co-editors of the new, second edition of the Norton Shakespeare, co-edited with Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, and Jean Howard, which appeared in March. It features introductions and bibliographies revised to take account of the latest scholarship, recommendations for Shakespeare on film, and ancillary materials such as maps, genealogies, and timelines. The Norton Shakespeare is available as a one-volume clothbound edition, as a two-volume paperback chronological “split,” and in four paperback volumes split by genre: tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances/poems. Each genre split has a new introduction written by one of the editors (Katharine’s is “Comedy”). Norton supports, on its website, further resources for some of the most widely-taught plays, as well as the texts of two plays in which Shakespeare had a hand, The Book of Sir Thomas More and The Reign of King Edward the Third.

Deborah McDowell was named Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies; she had served as interim director in 2007-08 (see the full story in this newsletter).

James Norhnberg’s most recent publication relates Shakespeare to the poet Spenser:

“Alençon’s Dream/Dido’s Tomb: Some Shakespearean Music and a Spenserian Muse”: Spenser Studies, Vol. XXII (2007), gen. eds. William A. Oram, Anne Lake Prescott, and Thomas P. Roche, Jr.; (guest) ed. David Galbraith and Theresa M. Krier (New York: AMS Press, 2007), 73-102., Prof. Nohrnberg has also recently spoken on the literary relations of Spenser to Sir Walter Raleigh:
 
“Raleigh in Ruins, Raleigh on the Rocks: Sir Wa’ter’s Two Cantoes of Spenserian Mutabilitie,” for ‘Raleigh and the Atlantic World, An Interdisiplinary Symposium,’ Department of English, Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, East Carolina University, April 10-12, 2008. 

Jim Norhnberg is also listed ted on the editorial boards for the Spenser Encyclopedia, Spenser Studies, and The Manchester Spenser (this last a new series). He is the only person on all three.

John O’Brien, who moonlights as the humble editor of this e-newsletter, has recently published two essays: “John Locke, Desire, and the Epistemology of Money,” in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy (October 2007), and “Pantomime” in the new Cambridge Companion to the British Theatre, 1730-1830.

Lisa Spaar has two new books coming out. The first is her anthology of poems about London entitled All That Mighty Heart (see the story in this issue) and a book of her own poetry, Satin Cash.

Tony Spearing gave the keynote address at the conference of the Illinois Medieval Association in Chicago in February 2008. Then in March he made a recording of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale in the U.Va. Digital Media Lab, with the technical assistance of Hiroshi Miura, Professor of Phonetics at Senshu University, Japan. It will be published in Japan, where, as Tony hopes, “it is expected to go straight to the top of the charts.”

Chip Tucker’s new book, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1810, has just been published by Oxford University Press. This is how the publisher describes the book: “This book is the first to provide a connected history of epic poetry in Britain between the French Revolution and the First World War. Although epic is widely held to have been shouldered aside by the novel, if not invalidated in advance by modernity, in fact the genre was practiced without interruption across the long nineteenth century by nearly every prominent Romantic and Victorian poet, and shoals of ambitious poetasters into the bargain. Poets kept the epic alive by revising its conventions to meet an overlapping series of changing realities: insurgent democracy, Napoleonic war, the rise of class consciousness and repeated reform of the franchise, challenges posed by scientific advance to religious belief and cherished notions of the human, the evolution of a postnationalist and eventually imperialist identity for Britain as the world's superpower. Each of these developments called on nineteenth-century epic to do what the genre had always done: affirm the unity of its sponsoring culture through a large utterance that both acknowledged the distinctive flowering of the modern and affirmed its rootedness in tradition. The best writers answered this call by figuring Britain's self-renewal and the genre's as versions of one another. In passing Herbert Tucker notices scores of mediocre congeners (and worse), so as to show where the challenge of a given decade fell and suggest what lay at stake. The background these lesser works provide throws into relief what the book stresses in extended discussions of several dozen major works: an unbroken history of daring experimentation in which circumspect, inventive, worried epoists engaged because the genre and the age alike demanded it.” Chip add that he has also given talks, on topics in Victorian poetry that were nonethleless “blessedly unrelated to that book,” this year at William & Mary and at the American University of Beirut.

Last fall David Vander Meulen took advantage of one of his more esoteric professional memberships and as the sole North American member of the Aberystwyth Bibliographical Group contributed a book from his collection to the organization’s exhibition at the National Library of Wales.

Charles Wright and Bob Hicok of Virginia Tech will share the $10,000 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Library of Congress recently announced. Mr. Hicok was chosenfor his 2007 book “This Clumsy Living” (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Charles for lifetime achievement. The prize—donated by the family of Mrs. Bobbitt, a sister of President Lyndon B. Johnson—is awarded every two years.