A Note from the Chair
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| Professor McRuer in the late night sun of Copenhagen, Denmark |
August does have a way of sneaking up on us! It’s hard to believe that classes at The George Washington University start three weeks from today, on Monday, August 31. Our faculty, as usual, has been hard at work over the summer. We’ve been in England, Scotland, India, New Zealand, Germany, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey and numerous other places over the past few months. Most of this travel is connected to research projects that we are working on or conferences we are attending; the GW English Department faculty is often in hot demand for plenary talks, keynote presentations, and workshops. We hope to fill you in on some of our summer projects and travels in the coming months.
We’re getting ready for what promises to be another noteworthy academic year. Indeed, the faculty will meet again in late August for our second annual retreat to talk about all the ways we hope to make Academic Year 2015-2016 one of our best years ever for our undergraduate majors, our graduate program, our alums, our colleagues across the university, and our friends in the community. It’s my final year as Department Chair and so I am especially committed to working hard to make this a memorable one. Alums, please remember that we love to tell your stories here; Professor Margaret Soltan remains the alumni liaison for this blog for the coming semester and will be very happy to hear of your success and adventures and feature them here.
The loss of our dear friend and colleague James A. Miller has been very painful for our department and for our colleagues in American Studies and Africana Studies, where Professor Miller also held appointments. We look forward to gathering with the GW and Washington, DC communities on September 11 for “A Celebration of the Work of James A. Miller,” which will be the department’s first major event for the year. A previous blog post here provides you with the schedule for the day; please spread the word about this important event.
Later in September, the annual lecture for the Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare will be delivered by Professor Jean Howard of Columbia University. Professor Howard’s lecture is titled “Countering the Lucrece Effect: Performing Rape on the Early Modern Stage.” GW Creative Writing will host this year’s Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington, Kseniya Melnik, author of Snow in May; she will read in September as part of the Jenny McKean Moore Reading Series. GW Professor Ann Romines retired this past May, and a panel, lecture, and performance on October 2 will celebrate her many years of service to the department and University. The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute and the GW Digital Humanities Institute will again have a full range of programming in the year ahead. Remember that our calender (to the right) will have all the details for upcoming GW English events.
I urge you to consider using the CONTRIBUTE link at right, and designating your gift to the Department of English. The Department continues to thrive; as many readers of this blog know, the Chair has to submit a Departmental Annual Report each year. One of the pleasures of that report is noting the incredible productivity of my colleagues, who are always inspiring to me. Part of the report lists selected publications that have appeared over the past year (from June 1, 2014 – May 31, 2015); below my signature line here, take a look at that section of the report — and of course feel free to read the creative work and scholarship we’ve been generating. I thank you in advance for your generosity and your continued support of all we do.
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter (our plan is to be much more active on Twitter in the year ahead). And please stop by and see me in the main office of the Department.
Yours truly,
Robert McRuer
Professor and Chair
Selected Publications from the GW Department of English, 2014-2015:
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Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Gayle Wald, It’s Been Beautiful: “Soul!” and Black Power Television, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
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Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Inhuman Nature, punctum books, 2014.
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Jennifer Chang, “Pastoral and the Problem of Place in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows,” A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
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Jennifer Chang, “Statement of Purpose,” The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, ed. Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap, Albany: Fence Books, 2015, 53-59.
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Holly Dugan, “Seeing Smell,” The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558-1660, ed. Jacqueline Wilson and Simon Smith, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
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Holly Dugan, “The Senses in Literature: Renaissance Poetry and the Paradox of Perception,” Cultural History of the Senses, Vol. III: The Renaissance, ed. Herman Roodenburg, London: Bloomsbury, 149-167.
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Jonathan Hsy, “Translation Failure: The TARDIS, Cross-Temporal Language Contact, and Medieval Travel Narrative,” The Language of Doctor Who: From Shakespeare to Alien Tongues, eds. Jason Barr and Camille D. G. Mustachio, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, 109-123.
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Jonathan Hsy, “Disability,” Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, eds. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 24-40.
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Jonathan Hsy, “Co-Disciplinarity,” Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, Studies in Medievalism, eds. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014, 43-51.
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Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington, “Global Chaucers,” Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, ed. Gail Ashton, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015, 147-156.
Alexa Alice Joubin, “Screening Dutch Formosa in 2000: Taiwan as China’s Renegade Province in Wu Ziniu’s The Sino-Dutch War 1661,” Scenes from Dutch Formosa: Staging Taiwan’s Colonial Past, ed. Llyn Scott, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014, 153-160.
Alexa Alice Joubin, “Meditation on Hamlet,” Man Ray-Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare, eds. Wendy Grossman and Edouard Sebline, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2015, 174-175.
Alexa Alice Joubin and Angelica Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work and the Politics of Literary Humor,” Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2014, 153-166.
Jennifer James, “Looking,” Special “Teaching about Ferguson” forum, Feminist Studies 41.1 (2015): 123-127.
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Jennifer Chang, “The World,” New England Review 36.1 (2015).
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Jennifer Chang, “Whoso List to Hunt” and “There Are Too Many Other Birds to Write About,” Salt Hill 34 (2015).
Jonathan Hsy, “The Poem That Should Not Exist,” Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies (11 August 2014).
David McAleavey, “Lost in the Rough,” “Off again, on again,” “So is it not,” and “Surge,” Adirondack Review.
David McAleavey, “Mystical,” “Sweater here,” “Thought-provoking songs,” and “Today a magnolia stump,” Cricket Online Review 10.2
David McAleavey, “War games,” Passager 58 (Winter 2015): 43.
David McAleavey, “Loose crown for Claude McKay,” Gargoyle 61: 132-138.
David McAleavey, “Summer of love,” Entasis 5 (2014).
David McAleavey, “Big ifs,” The Evansville Review 24 (2014): 54.
David McAleavey, “Balancing Act,” Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies (11 August 2014).
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