Graduate Student News

Gail Aw received an ASECS/Clark Library fellowship (jointly sponsored by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA) to work at the Clark for a month. She also received a month-long research fellowship from the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale.

Peter Capuano won the Thomas J. Griffis prize for the best essay by a graduate student beyond the first year of graduate work in English for his essay “handling the Perceptual Politics of Identity in Great Expectations.” 

Carolyn Creedon won the Academy of American Poets prize for the best poem or group of poems by a graduate student in English.

Sean Cullen presented “American Gangster Time:  The Rhetoric of Gangsterism after Bush”  at the Chesapeake American Studies Association Conference, "America After Bush" at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. My paper was titled "American Gangster Time: The Rhetoric of Gangsterism after Bush."  He also traveled to Josai University in Tokyo in May to present "Decoding the Lattice of Coincidence: Repo Man (1984), Punk Rock, and the Critique of Postmodernity."

Tim Duffy will be giving a paper entitled “Liminality and the Baroque:  Towards a Crashavian Milton” at the Modern Language Association Convention in December.

Amy Elkins won the Thomas J. Griffis Prize for the best essay by a student in the first year of graduate work in English for her essay “Visiting the Past:  Space and Narrative in the Paratext of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” 

In January 2009, Barbara Heritage was one of seven graduate students who were awarded prizes for excellence in scholarship in the humanities and social sciences by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at UVa. In March, she presented at the Society for Textual Scholarship at New York University on the textual history of George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Feverelweb, the Web-based tool she is designing, in collaboration with programmer Carsten Clark, to compare different versions of the novel. Her article, entitled "Collecting Litho Jam Jar Labels and Teaching Wood-Engraved Elephants: Rare Book School's Printing Surfaces Collection" (based on a talk she gave at the American Printing History Association at Columbia University in October 2008), will appear in the next issue of Printing History.

Reed Johnson won the Balch Prize for the best short story by a graduate student in English for his story “Reversals.”

Wesley King’s article “The White Symbolic of Emily Dickinson” appears in the current (spring 2009) issue of The Emily Dickinson Journal.

Steve Knepper won the Faulkner Society's John W. Hunt Scholarship, which will fund his trip to this year's Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford, Mississippi.  He is also presenting the keynote address at Lynchburg College's first annual graduate English conference, a paper entitled.  "Poetically the PhD Student Dwells."  He is also presenting at the Agricultural History Society's annual meeting, with a paper entitled "The Machine (or the Mule) in the Garden?: The Mechanization of the Rural South in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and William Faulkner's Flags in the Dust."    

Jonathan Readey's article "A Bulwark Against the Modernity of New York: Mutual Delusion as Conservative Self-Defense in Henry James's 'The Jolly Corner'" is forthcoming in the book collection The Literature of New York (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).  He also presented this paper at the Modern Language Association annual convention in December 2008. 

Christine Schott received a Leifur Eiriksson Foundation scholarship to study literature in Iceland, and also won the Prize for best graduate student paper at Sewanee’s annual Medieval Colloquium

The Zurich James Joyce Foundation in Switzerland invited Amanda Sigler to give a lecture, "Advertising Modernism,,” in March 2009.  She will also be presenting a paper, "Revisiting the Censorship of Ulysses: An Investigation of the Little Review Archives," at the 2009 North American James Joyce Conference in Buffalo, New York this summer.

Rebecca Strauss gave a paper at the Modern Language Associate annual meeting in December 2008 entitled "'A Series Originating In and Repeated To Infinity: Ulysses, List-Making, and the Ethics of an Unbound Form." She was also a finalist for the UVa Seven Society's Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.