Alumni News

Kelly Chroniger (MA, 2008) recently received a Fulbright grant to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she is teaching English and American Studies at the University of Sarajevo for the 2008-2009 school year, and putting together a video pen pal program for Bosnian and American teens.

Kyle Dargan (MFA English 2008/BA English 2002 in the Area Program for Poetry Writing) is the winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for his most recent book, Bouquet of Hungers (University of Georgia Press, 2008). Presented annually, the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award provides a platform for the national community of Black writers to honor the work of their peers and, in the process, speak not just to the nominated writers, but to the world at large about the profound significance, endurance and genius of Black writers and the stories they tell. A panel of published authors in each genre reviewed submissions and selected one winner from each category.

Catherine Parisian (PhD, 2007) has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. Catherine completed her dissertation under the direction of David Vander Meulen, Cynthia Wall, Paul Hunter, and Terry Belanger.  Her book in progress, “A Publication History of Frances Burney’s Cecilia,” focuses on Burney’s second novel and chronicles its life from the composition, printing, and publication of the first edition in 1782 through the present-day Oxford World’s Classics paperback. Building on the work of G. Thomas Tanselle and D. F. McKenzie, this study unites the methods of the book historian with those of the bibliographer to show how the two usefully inform one another and bear on the interpretation of the literary text. Identifying and examining sixty different editions of Cecilia, it will consider what these editions reveal about Cecilia’s historical reading audiences and what insights these books provide into the printing and publishing trends of two hundred years.

Michael Rutherglen (BA English 2006 in the Area Program in Poetry Writing), a 2008 graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, is a recipient of this year’s highly competitive and prestigious Ruth Lilly Fellowship of the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine.  Further details about the award may be found at this site:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/programs/prizes_fellowship.html

Kevin Seidel has accepted a full-time continuing position as assistant professor of English literature in the Language and Literature department at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Kevin is teaching across the curriculum during his first year: a survey courses in world and British literature, college writing, an introduction to literary theory, and a senior seminar in eighteenth-century literature.

Kevin completed his dissertation, “Leisure to Repent: Essays on the Bible at the Origins of the English Novel,” under the direction of Ralph Cohen, Paul Hunter, and David Vander Meulen. He describes his project as follows:

“Leisure to Repent” used original research on the history of the English Bible to open up new ways of thinking about the history of the English novel. It was sparked by my observation that in English prose fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Bible appears as a physical object consistently and almost exclusively in those works later canonized as novels. I decided to investigate how the appearance of the Bible in fiction by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson situates their fiction within wider circuits of Bible criticism, printing, and reading, respectively. I showed that the authority of the Bible, far from waning during the period, became intertwined with the authority of books generally, and I argued that Bunyan, Defoe, and Richardson appropriate the authority of the Bible differently—as a force of moral law, an invaluable commodity, a plumb of the conscience—in order to raise the literary status of their fictions. I am currently at work expanding the dissertation to include fiction by Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, and Henry Fielding.”

Alan Shepard (PhD English 1990) and his partner Dr. Stephen Powell immigrated to Canada in 2002. They have adopted two boys from the Toronto area who are now 7 and 8, and they are having a fantastic time being dads. Alan started a new job in 2007 as Provost and Vice President Academic of Ryerson University (24,000 students) in Toronto.