Faculty news

Steve Cushman has published a third book of poems, Heart Island (David Robert Books, 2006), and has also agreed to serve as the General Editor of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

Susan Fraiman’s new essay, “Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye” appears in the current issue of New Literary History (volume 37, 2006).

Eric Lott has published a book, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (New York: Basic Books, 2006) and three recent essays: “The Wages of Liberalism: An Interview with Eric Lott,” Minnesota Review 63-64 (2005), “Anti-American Studies,” in Prospects: The Annual of American Cultural Studies 30 (2005), and “The First Boomer: Bill Clinton, George W., and Fictions of State,” in Representations 84 (2004). He has also given invited lectures at Princeton, Stanford, Dartmouth, Emory, and the University of Minnesota.

Deborah McDowell will be awarded an honorary doctorate by Purdue University in a ceremony on December 17, 2006. The award is a particularly meaningful one because Purdue is Debbie’s alma mater. Congratulations!

Jerome McGann was awarded a grant of $798,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support his work to develop digital tools for scholarship in the humanities. This grant, which adds to the support that the Mellon Foundation began when it awarded Jerry a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in 2003, will enable him to complete projects such as “Ivanhoe,” an online game-space for interpreting literary texts, and “Collex,” a tool that will enable users to organize and disseminate digital collections.

Barbara Nolan has published a new essay, “Chaucer’s Poetics of Dwelling in Troilus and Criseyde” in an essay collection entitled Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Boydell and Brewer, 2006).

Greg Orr fills us in on his recent publications. “A piece I did for NPR's ‘This I Believe’ series, which was broadcast in February of this year on ‘All Things Considered’ [see feature story above] has been issued along with the other pieces from that series and a number of the pieces from the original series edited by Edward R. Murrow. This book, THIS I BELIEVE: THE PERSONAL PHILOSOPHIES OF REMARKABLE MEN AND WOMEN was just published by Henry Holt and also issued as an audio book by Audio Renaissance. My essay on the contemporary painter Jake Berthot entitled ‘Turnings and Returnings: the Art of Jake Berthot’ appears in the current (Fall 2006) issue of THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW.”  (http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/fall/orr-jake-berthot/)

Nine poems from my ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE: A LYRIC SEQUENCE will be woven into a performance by the Glimmerglass Opera company at a special show at the Morgan Library in New York on October 13. The performance will consist of arias and songs from four Orpheus operas (Gluck/Berlioz, Monteverdi, Offenbach, and Philip Glass) held together narratively by the poems recited between the songs.

An essay “Praxiteles and the Shapes of Grief” is about to appear in the “Healing and Literature” issue of New Literary History, the fall 2006 issue.

Cynthia Wall won a Boots Mead Endowment Teaching Award to construct and teach her “dream class,” an undergraduate course on the eighteenth-century English theater that would bring the class’s reading and research to fruition in a live performance of an eighteenth-century play. The course, offered in Fall 2006 and just concluded, climaxed with the students organizing, designing, and finally staging a performance of Eliza Haywood’s The Opera of Operas, a 1733 adaptation of Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The History of Tom Thumb the Great.