Graduate Student News

Photo by Kristen Taylor

Kevin Allardice had stories published in the Santa Monica Review and Green Mountains Review.

Gail Aw presented a paper on “Closets in Skeletons: Furnishing Mental Space in the Eighteenth Century” at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Portland, Oregon on March 28th and also presented on “ECCO and the Palace of Learning” for a roundtable titled “Got ECCO? The Contents and Discontents of Electronic Media for Early Modern Studies” at the Modern Language Association convention in Chicago in December 2007.

Jasmine Bailey had poems published by Lilliput Review and the Adirondack Review.

Ileana Baird presented “Diasporic Redefinitions of the Exilic Place in Petru Popescu’s The Return (1991)” at the Georgetown University Round Table, Washington DC in March. She also received a fellowship from the South Central Society for the Eighteenth Century Studies to attend their conference in New Orleans.

Evan Beaty had poems published by the North American Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

George David Clark was a finalist in the North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize.

Jim Cocola won a resident scholarship at the Georgia O'Keefe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico for 2008-2009. The Research Center sponsors research in American Modernism (1890—present) in the fields of art, architecture & design, literature, music, and photography. Jim’s dissertation, which he will be completing during his tenure at the Center, is being directed by Eric Lott, Jahan Ramazani and Jennifer Wicke. He describes his project as follows:

“‘Topopoiesis: Contemporary American Poetries and the Imaginative Making of Place’ maps a broad range of poets active from the 1940s to the present who have used language not for its own sake but for the sake of evoking the world. Moving beyond default classifications such as landscape poetry, loco-descriptive poetry, nature poetry, and pastoral poetry, my inquiry presents a distinct taxonomy in the form of topopoiesis, or the imaginative making of place, which occupies a space between epic and lyric modes, relying simultaneously on auditory and visual effects, attuned to proximate and remote phenomena, and proceeding at once in the interests of environmental and social justice, often in contradistinction to the hegemonies of print culture, modernism, and global capitalism. Positing place as a pivotal axis of identification and heralding emplacement as a crucial model for cultural, intellectual, and political activity in a period marked and imperiled by a tendency toward dislocation, my project examines canonical place-makers such as Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams before turning to more recent multiethnic and transnational figures including Jimmy Santiago Baca, Kamau Brathwaite, Joy Harjo, and Myung Mi Kim.”

Ryan Cordell attended (or will shortly attend) several conferences this year: at the upcoming American Literature Association meeting in San Franscisco, he will be moderator and respondent for the “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nineteenth-Century Religious Communities” panel and also will be giving his own paper, “Thoreau’s Walden and Freshman Comp.” He gave his paper, “‘The Light Which Puts Out Our Eyes’: The Spring Apocalypse in Thoreau’s Walden,” at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference in Bellingham, Washington and “‘Dim and Wondrous Imagery’: Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the End of Time,” at the Popular and American Culture Associations of the South conference in Jacksonville, Florida, both in 2007. And Ryan also one forthcoming publication: “‘Enslaving You, Body and Soul’: The Uses of Temperance in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and ‘Anti-Tom’ Fiction,” forthcoming in June 2008 in Studies in American Fiction.

Lauren Culley won the Balch Prize for the best short story by a graduate student in English for her story entitled “Starlings.” 

Tim Duffy presented “Spenser and the Catholic Past/Present: Admiration, Revision, and Reformation.” at the Renaissance Society of America Conference in May 2008. He’ll also be presenting a paper entitled “Love and Ire: Petrarchanism and Spenser’s Imperial Discourse” at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in St. Louis in October 2008. Finally, he’ll be giving a paper with the International Spenser Society at the Renaissance Society of America Conference in Los Angeles in 2009 entitled: “New Methods of Empire: Revisions of Imperial Space in Spenser’s Complaints.”

Paul Fyfe won the North American Victorian Studies Association Graduate Award for best paper delivered at the annual conference (Victoria, BC, 2007).

Richard Gibson was awarded the All University Teaching Award in Arts and Humanities, the University’s highest award conferred to graduate teaching assistants.  The award of $1,000 was given to him at the annual Celebration of Teaching Awards Banquet, held in the Rotunda on April 23.

Madigan Haley won the English Department’s Thomas J. Griffis Prize for the best essay by a first-year graduate student for his essay “Le Grand homme de Dublin: Realism, Matter and Colonial Modernity in ‘Aeolus’”. As he describes it, “This paper reconsiders the constellation of realism, modernism and colonialism in relation to Ulysses. By examining how the “Aeolus” episode maps the Balzacian narrative of the provincial “big shot” onto colonial Dublin, I show how Joyce takes up rather than disrupts realist convention in order to fashion a representational mode alive to the contradictions and imperatives of the provincial capital.”

Julia Hansen was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize for the best poem or group of poems by a graduate student in English for her group of five poems. 

Stephen Knepper published his essay “‘Do You Know What the Hail You’re Talking About?’: Deliverance, Stereotypes, and the Lost Voice of the Rural Poor” in the 25th Anniversary issue of the James Dickey Newsletter 25.1 (Fall 2008): 17-29. He also published a story entitled “The Conversation,” in Now and Then: The Appalachian Magazine (Fall/Winter 2007), and reviewed Paul Christian Jones’s Unwelcome Fiction: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South in H-Southern-Literature, March 11, 2008.

Ryan McDermott will continue as an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture this coming year. His essay, “Poetry Against Evil: A Bulgakovian Theology of Poetry,” is forthcoming in Modern Theology. And his review of Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature by Nicholas Boyle (Notre Dame University Press, 2005) is forthcoming in Books and Culture.

Daniel Thomas Moore received the Skinner Scholarship for the 2008-9 year from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church across from grounds (awarded to undergraduate and graduate Episcopal students).

Justin Neuman ran an a seminar entitled “Globalization and the Holocaust” at the American Comparative literature association’s annual conference in Long Beach in April, and presented a paper at said panel entitled “Globalization and the Holocaust: Two Iranian Examples”

Ken Price will be chairing the Research and Professional Development Committee for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Council. Apart of this, he would be happy to hear from faculty or students about their concerns about these issues, especially as they related to the GSAS and graduate study. He will also be organizing the Huskey Research Exhibition in the spring and would also be happy to hear about how this event might better emphasize current grad work from the humanities.

Jonathan Readey is the winner of a Faculty Senate Dissertation Fellowship for 2008-09.  The fellowship, in the amount of $25,000, is awarded excellence in teaching and scholarship, is given out to only six graduate students across the University.

Brian Roberts’s essay “Passing into Diplomacy: US Consul James Weldon Johnson and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” has been accepted for publication by Modern Fiction Studies.  

Scott Selisker and Mike Spiegel both won the $1000 prize for excellent teaching awarded by the University’s Teaching Resource Center in conjunction with the 7 Society. This prize is entirely student-based: winners are nominated by undergraduate students and chosen on the basis of student letters and surveys, by a panel dominated by students. Scott and Mike each received $1000 in an April award ceremony that included moving testimonials from students.

Lily Sheehan was awarded the Zora Neale Hurston Essay Award from U.Va’.s Studies in Women and Gender program for the best essay by a graduate student this year for her essay “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Frock Consciousness’: The Gender and Politics of Fashion.” She also won one of the English Department’s awards for outstanding teaching by a graduate student.

Amanda Sigler’s article “Unsuspecting Narrative Doubles in Serial Publication: The Illustrated Turn of the Screw and Collier’s U.S.S. Maine Coverage” appeared in the Henry James Review (Winter 2008). Amanda also received an Award for Excellence in Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences from U.Va., and has won a fellowship from The Trieste Joyce School to attend the one-week school this summer.

David Sigler and Mike Spiegel shared the Thomas J. Griffis prize for the best esay by a student beyond the first year of graduate work in English. David’s essay, “Dead Faith and Contraband Goods: Joanna Southcott and the Logic of Sexuation” “takes up the work of nineteenth-century feminist prophetess Joanna Southcott, finding in her Dispute Between the Woman and The Powers of Darkness an explication of sexual difference and a purification of Romantic ideology.” Mike’s essay, “‘In the Days of Knights and Dragons’: Atwood’s New Medieval Dystopia” approaches Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake through the lens of the international-relations theory New Medievalism in order to illuminate Atwood's narrative strategy as well as provide New Medievalist theory a vision of human and societal interaction within such a scenario.”

Kim Shirkhani’s article “‘The Mr. Basts of the Future’: The Economy of Recognition in Howards End” will appear soon in Twentieth-Century Literature.

Maggie Simon will serve as the Coordinator of Studies for Hereford College, one of the University’s undergraduate residential colleges, in the 2008-09 academic year.

Rebecca Strauss has received a research fellowship from the James Joyce Research Centre at University College Dublin.

Mark Wagenaar had poems published in Poetry East and the Apalachee Review. He also placed third in the Pinch's national poetry competition.

Maria Windell won a dissertation-year fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is working on a dissertation on American sentimentalism with Professor Anna Brickhouse.