Going Places

Report from Clare Kinney, Director of Graduate Placement

I should first note that the list that follows is still a work in progress; one job applicant is currently negotiating a visiting position, and past experience has shown that other visiting positions may emerge very late in the summer. It was a tough year for job-seekers: there were about 23% fewer listings of tenure-track positions in the MLA job information list at the start of the academic year than in September 2007, and drastic budget cuts caused the eventual cancellation of many job searches that were listed. Our list of successes is shorter than last year’s, but our candidates have nevertheless performed impressively in very difficult circumstances.  The scholarship and teaching abilities and general professionalism of UVA doctoral candidates (and recent recipients of the Ph.D.) continue to impress search committees. 

Tenure Track Assistant Professorships (* indicates job-seekers who moved from a previous tenure track position)

Ben Bateman      
California State University, Los Angeles (Genders & Sexualities/ Modernism)

Wilson Brissett     
United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs (American Literature)

Jim Cocola             
Department of Humanities and Arts, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Modern   American Literature, Film, and Media)

Paul Fyfe                
Florida State University (Victorian Studies and Digital Humanities)

Richard Gibson       
Wheaton College, Illinois ( Nineteenth-Century British Literature).

Omaar Hena           
Wake Forest University (Postcolonial Literature)

Erich Nunn              
Auburn University (Literature and Culture of the American South)

Eric Song*               
Swarthmore College (Renaissance Literature) 

Rivka Swenson       
Virginia Commonwealth University  (British and translatlantic long 18^th centuryliterature and culture; will also teach in VCU's interdisciplinary program in Media, Art, and Text)

Lauryl Tucker*        
University of the South, Sewanee (British Modernism)

More detailed accounts follow below:

Wilson Brissett has accepted an assistant professorship in American Literature at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.   Wilson’s dissertation, "Beauty among the Puritans: Aesthetics and Subjectivity in Early New England," was completed under the directorship of Marion Rust, Eric Lott, and Eleanor Kaufman.  He describes his project as follows:

"’Beauty among the Puritans’ offers a new account of aesthetics in puritan New England in order to better understand its relationship to American literature. From the early conversion narratives offered in congregational churches, through the devotional lyric poetry of Edward Taylor, to the mature historical consciousness of Jonathan Edwards and John Milton, puritans maintained a fundamentally aesthetic understanding of religious and political life that sought to bridge the gap between orthodox theology and natural philosophy. The project’s close reading of the puritan aesthetic tradition re-frames puritan literary subjectivity as a substantial source for early American nationalist literature. It also reveals the surprising secularity of puritan aesthetics as well as the persistence of religious structures within the secularizing American literary tradition.”

You may contact Wilson at

Jim Cocola has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship in modern American literature, film, and media in the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  Jim is currently completing his dissertation, "Topopoiesis: Contemporary American Poetries and the Imaginative Making of Place," under the direction of Eric Lott, Jahan Ramazani, and Jennifer Wicke while on a fellowship at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 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.”

You may contact Jim at .

Richard Gibson has accepted a tenure track assistant professorship in Nineteenth-Century British Literature at Wheaton College, Illinois.  Richard is currently completing his dissertation, "The End of Forgiveness in Victorian Fiction (1846-1896)" under the supervision of Karen Chase (director), Herbert Tucker, and Alison Booth.  He describes his project as follows: 

“My dissertation addresses the urgent questioning and renegotiating of the concept of forgiveness in fictions by five major Victorian authors: Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. For these writers, the complexities of the modern (and increasingly secular) world frustrate the application of conventional forms of forgiveness—forms which have often been assumed to be nearly universal in Victorian literature. Their novels suggest that the terms of forgiveness—who may forgive, what may be forgiven, and what forgiveness achieves (for a community or a psyche)—must be amended for the practice to remain meaningful. My project discloses, moreover, that this radical redefinition of forgiveness transforms the practice’s traditional narrative function in shaping narrative closure. For these novelists, forgiveness does not settle conflicts or abate resentments; rather, the giving or withholding of forgiveness complicates the conclusions of their texts and obliges their readers to confront disturbing faultlines between ethics and praxis.”

Omaar Hena has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in postcolonial literature in the Department of English at Wake Forest University. Omaar is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Cornell University and last summer completed and defended his dissertation "Global Imaginaries: Postcolonial Poetry and Transnational Literary Exchange" (written under the direction of Jahan Ramazani, Jennifer Wicke, and Michael Levenson). He describes his project as follows:

Intervening within recent debates in literary studies over the postcolonial and the global, “Global Imaginaries” examines how world Anglophone poetry from the Caribbean, South Asian Britain, and Ireland re-imagine the imperial consequences of global modernity. Throughout my study, I trace how a cosmopolitan Irish modernism circulates in postcolonial poetry, which redraws national boundaries of poetic categorization into complex circuits of transnational literary exchange. Beginning with an analysis of W.B. Yeats's turn to the East, which beyond merely reflecting orientalism also constitutes an incipiently globalized aesthetic, subsequent chapters consider Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990) and global literary economy, Imitiaz Dharker's The Terrorist at My Table (2006) and the implicit gendering operative in discourses of global terror, Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover (2007) and transnational literary citizenship, and Paul Muldoon's Madoc: A Mystery (1990) and cross-cultural identity formation. Summoning the Anglophone poetic tradition, from Homer’s Odyssey in Derek Walcott’s Black Caribbean to Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” in Daljit Nagra’s Punjabi London, postcolonial poetry bodies forth “global imaginaries”: heterogeneous and resistant forms that, while often invisible in other modes of discourse, are illumined through the singularity of poetic language. The global dimensions of postcolonial Anglophone poetry invite new approaches for reading and mapping world literature in an increasingly interconnected twenty-first century.”

You may contact Omaar at .

Erich Nunn has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in the Department of English at Auburn University where he’ll be teaching courses on the literature and culture of the American South.  Erich is currently completing his dissertation, "Sounding the Color Line: Race, Music, and American Modernism," under the direction of Eric Lott, Jennifer Wicke, Anna Brickhouse, and Richard Will. 

He describes his project as follows:

“Sounding the Color Line: Race, Music, and American Modernism” investigates the ways that discourses of racial identity and musical authenticity structure literary and cultural production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My analysis focuses in part on the effects of the culture industry’s commodification and mass mediation of vernacular musical productions—in the form of phonograph records, radio broadcasts, and sheet music, for example—on understandings of racial whiteness and blackness. Drawing on major texts by such writers as Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson, alongside cultural materials and artifacts including sound recordings, collections of folk songs, and films, it offers a novel in-depth analysis of the cultural effects of the color line through the combined lenses of text and sound. Bringing an interdisciplinary cultural studies methodology to bear on literary texts, musical recordings, and critical artifacts, my project situates modernist literary and cultural production within a conceptual field defined by the intersections of race, music, and media.

You may contact Erich at .

Rivka Swenson has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she'll teach courses on the literature and culture of the British and transatlantic long eighteenth century. Rivka will also be teaching in VCU's interdisciplinary doctoral program in Media, Art, and Text.

Rivka completed her dissertation, "Aesthetics, Politics, and Aggressive Forms: Structures of Progress and Restoration in Eighteenth-Century Narrative Britain," under the supervision of J. Paul Hunter (director), Cynthia Wall, and John O'Brien. She recently held the Shannon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in our own department and in 2008-09 was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University.

Rivka describes her current book project as follows:

“Revolution’s Narrative: Siting the Self in British Thought and Novels After Union,1707-1822” explains how and why a culture marked by apparent certainty about the inessentiality of self produced so many narratives organized around that self’s recovery. It argues that eighteenth-century British prose writers used restoration as a formal device to rethink the dominant onto-political model, articulated by the 1707 creation of Britain, which pictured the nation as an incorporated body politic. It examines how eighteenth-century prose narratives challenge that developmental model by exiling and returning principal subjects to original locations of identity; such narratives reinflect the defense of individualism in the earlier Bill of “ancient” Rights by reviving the categorical integrities of subjects whose contours were redrawn by the Union. Prevailing accounts of eighteenth-century British thought and novels often depict an age of progressive realism that privileges but imperfectly imagines the individual. In contrast, this project reads epic patterns in novels, travel narratives, and national histories against popular, philosophical, and scientific discourse to expose how the doubly directed meanings of “progress” and “revolution” enabled prose narratives to defend categorical selfhood within the organicist vision of social contract under Union.

Maria Windell has accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the English Department at Wake Forest University.  Maria has recently completed her dissertation, “The Diplomacy of Affect: Transamerican Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century US Literary History” under the direction of Eric Lott, Anna Brickhouse and Marion Rust.   She describes her project as follows:

Building upon recent work on sentimentalism, US imperialism, and national identity in American and transamerican studies, this dissertation identifies a new model of “affective diplomacy” in a range of late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century narrative genres. I trace the ways in which US literary sentimentalism exceeds its ostensible domestic purview, at the level of both the home and the nation, by appearing unexpectedly in the margins of narratives by African American, European American, Native American, and Cuban authors whose writings are situated amidst the wider Americas. By deploying strains of affective discourse to confront revolution and rebellion throughout the hemisphere, these works reveal sentiment’s ability to unsettle—or reinforce—the dominant literary culture’s narrative consolidations of US boundaries. “The Diplomacy of Affect” illuminates sentimentalism’s role in shaping transamerican literary and cultural scenes in the nineteenth-century US.