Faculty News

Steve Arata’s Norton Critical Edition of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine appeared in January 2009. He also co-edited, with Linda Dryden and Eric Massie, a volume of essays titled Stevenson and Conrad: Writers of Transition, due out from Texas Tech University Press in May 2009. He was also elected to the Advisory Board of the North American Victorian Studies Association.

In 2009-2010, Alison Booth will be Associate Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia in order to pursue her ongoing project, Collective Biographies of Women (CBW), which has been hosted at the University of Virginia Library since 2003 (http://womensbios.lib.virginia.edu). This online annotated bibliography emerged from the rediscovery of nearly 1000 collections of biographies of women published in English between 1830 and 1940—featured in her 2004 book How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present. The quantity and the diversity of these collections challenge the notions that such records of historical women don’t exist and that women were only praised for obscure domestic lives. In fact, a dazzling range of women’s roles receives complex rhetorical treatment in books aimed at children or adult audiences (sometimes very adult). In the past three years, CBW has joined NINES (a consortium of digital projects in nineteenth-century studies, also based in UVA’s English department) and developed into an experiment in digital studies of life narrative. CBW is an open-source, collaborative project for the recovery and analysis of an overlooked subgenre and its varied forms. These collections (prosopographies)—spatial and visual as well as narrative, encyclopedic as well as selective, inducing the audience to browse, copy, or in a sense view in cascade or split screen—readily lend themselves to the malleable digital medium. The project will develop widely-useful tools for aligning and analyzing various versions of one life or comparable lives, and for picking up on the common elements or motifs in non-fiction narrative. We already have the Pop Chart of most frequent subjects in different periods; in the near future, we will add a chart of rates of publication across the decades; and we envision an interactive spatial timeline combining the publications, historical developments such as civil wars or women’s education, and subjects’ lives. Booth’s keynote address at the seventeenth annual British Women Writers Conference, “Recovery 2.0: Exhibiting Women’s Collective Biographies” (April 4, 2009, University of Iowa), outlined a current pilot project on the network of biographical representation of one famous woman, the saintly nurse Sister Dora.

David Golumbia’s book, The Cultural Logic of Computation was published by Harvard University Press on April 15.

In a review, the journal CLIO said Christopher Krentz's Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century Literature"Will revolutionize the way scholars understand United States literary culture." Calling the book "innovative and memorable," the review concluded: "Even scholars who do not accept Krentz's argument . . . will perceive literature anew after reading this book." Krentz has given talks based on the book at the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Gallaudet University, the Society for Disability Studies conference, the Virginia Festival of the Book, and other locations.

Jerome McGann published Are the Humanities Inconsequent? An Interpretation of Marx's Riddle of the Dog with Prickly Paradigm Press, of the University of Chicago Press, and an edition of Byron's Manfred, with Illustrations by Virgil Burnett with Pasdeloup Press in Stratford, Ontario.

David Morris (Emeritus) writes: “On 26 March, I read a paper on a panel at the annual meeting of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies in Richmond in March. The title was “Dark Matter(s): Sacramental Humanscape in *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*.”

On April 24 I gave an invited plenary lecture in Chicago to the annual meeting of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities. The title was “Bedside Eros.”

 The invited plenary lecture to the APS meeting in San Diego—a big deal that draws clinicians and researchers worldwide—was on May 7. The title, deliberately odd, is “Google Pain: The Place of Narrative.”

Debra Nystrom’s new book of poems, Bad River Road, was published this spring by Sarabande Books. Her work has recently appeared in The Best American Poetry of 2008, and has been featured on the Academy of American Poets website for the National Poetry Month series.

Jahan Ramazani’s new book, A Transnational Poetics, was published this spring by the University of Chicago Press. Michael North of UCLA observes that “In A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani continues to address an obvious but persistent imbalance in the American academy's understanding of world Anglophone literature. A distinguished success."

Lisa Spaar won two major awards this spring. First, she was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation for 2009. She was also the winner of one of the University’s All-University Teaching Award, UVa’s highest honor for work in the classroom. Her work was also included in The Best American Poetry 2008 (Scribner, 2009).

Chip Tucker reports: “This spring 2 special issues of journals appear under my editorship. Just out this week is "Tennyson at Two Hundred," the latest issue of Victorian Poetryand the fattest ever. A signal contributor is our colleague Jim Nohrnberg, who condenses a lifetime's erudition into an extended-contexts reading of Tennyson's "Ulysses." Soon to appear is an issue of New Literary Historydevoted to "Play," this one again tapping our Department for a piece, David Golumbia's "Games Without Play," an unsparing assessment of certain prominent modes of digital gaming.

“I was a keynote speaker at the "Tennyson's Futures" conference held last month in the UK at the University of Oxford, where among the chosen panelists was a PhD candidate in our Department, Jason Nabi. “A couple of MLA papers in San Francisco: "Marginalia: The Littoral Figure in Victorian Poetry" and "Shock Troupers: Browning, Bidart, and the Drama of Prosody." They both look like the kind of title journalists love to scoff at, don't they.”