A Note from the Chair(s)

Somehow, suddenly, it’s August again! We at GW English find it hard to believe that classes start three weeks from today, on Monday, August 29. Our faculty, as usual, has been hard at work over the summer, planning great courses for our students, and pursuing our research in numerous places around the world. We hope to fill you in on some of our summer projects and travels in the coming months. This blog, in short, is coming back to life as the new semester begins!

Former GW English Chair
Robert McRuer

GW English Chair
Professor Marshall Alcorn

There have been some big changes for our department. Robert McRuer finished his term as Department Chair on June 30 and handed the baton to our new Chair, Marshall Alcorn. Evelyn Schreiber returned from sabbatical and is again our Director of Undergraduate Advising. Patricia Chu finished her term as Deputy Chair; our new Deputy Chair is Antonio López. Your former Chair and Deputy Chair are still around; don’t hesitate to stop by and say hello to each of us, in the new and old administration of the department. And, as you know if you’ve been watching this blog, we’re very excited to welcome our newest faculty member this fall, Jung Yun, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, with a specialization in fiction writing. If you missed the blog post on Professor Yun, you can access it here.

We’re getting ready for what promises to be another noteworthy academic year. Indeed, the faculty will meet again in late August for our third annual retreat to talk about all the ways we hope to make Academic Year 2016-2017 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. 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.

Professors Alcorn and Schreiber have been among those organizing one of the major events for Fall 2016, a conference titled Listening to Trauma: Insights and Actions, to be held October 20-22. You can see more details about that conference in an earlier blog post here. On September 9, our annual Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare lecture will be delivered by Professor Katherine Rowe of Smith College. Watch this space for more details on that upcoming event! GW Creative Writing will host, on September 23, this year’s Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington, Melinda Moustakis, author of Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories. Other readings will be announced as the semester continues; be sure to check our calendar (to the right) for the latest. Our Wang Visiting Professor-in-Residence this year will be Stacy Alaimo, of the University of Texas at Arlington. Professor Alaimo works in ecocultural theory and environmental humanities, and will be in residence the week of October 10. We will have details on that visit here within the next two weeks! The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies students will have an October 28 conference on global migration, refugees, crisis, pedagogy, performance, and home; the full list of GW MEMSI events is available here, and we will fill out all of these events on our blog over the coming weeks. The GW Digital Humanities Institute will also announce its events for the coming year soon.

As outgoing and incoming Chairs, we 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 our colleagues, who are always inspiring to us. Part of the report lists selected publications that appeared over the past year (from June 1, 2015 – May 31, 2016); below our 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. Thanks in advance for your generosity and your continued support of all we do.

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Yours truly,
Marshall Alcorn and Robert McRuer
Professors and (incoming and outgoing) Chair(s)

Selected Publications from the GW Department of English, 2015-2016:

Books:

Thomas Mallon, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years, New York: Knopf-Doubleday, 2015. Named a Notable Book of 2015 by The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, and one of the best books of 2015 by The San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

David McAleavey, Rock Taught, Milton, DE: Broadkill River Press, 2016.

Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi, Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach, London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016.

Ayanna Thompson [35,000-word introduction], Othello: The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, by William Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016.

Edited Collections and Special Issues:

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds., Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates, eds., Object Oriented Environs, New York: Punctum Books, 2016.

Christopher Sten, Guest Co-Editor with Tyler Hoffman, Melville the Civil War Poet, special issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 17.3 (October 2015).

Selected Essays and Articles:

Jennifer Chang, “Pastoral and the Problem of Place in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows,” A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cherene Sherrard-Johson, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. 187-202.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Sea Above,” Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, ed. Cohen and Duckert, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2016. 105-133.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On the Necessity of Ignoring Those Who Offer Themselves as Examples,” How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, punctum books, 2015. 44-56.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, “Eleven Principles of the Elements,” Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, ed. Cohen and Duckert, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2016. 1-26.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates, “Introduction (An Environing of this Book),” Object Oriented Environs, ed. Cohen and Yates, punctum books, 2016. xi-xxv.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Environing,” Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen, ed. Cymene How and Anand Pandian, Cultural Anthropology (2016).

Patricia P. Chu, “Jade Snow Wong,” Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People, Cremona, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2015. 422-425.

Patricia P. Chu, “Chinatown Life as Contested Terrain: H. T. Tsiang, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee,” Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, ed. Rajini Srikanth and Min Song, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 155-170.

Kavita Daiya, “Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction,” The Cambridge History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria, London: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 221-236.

Kavita Daiya, “Partition,” Blackwell Encylopedia of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 1278-1286.

Kavita Daiya, “Zoos and Provincial Intimacies,” American Book Review 36.6: 9.

Kavita Daiya, “Why Partition Survivors in the U.S. believe it’s vital to keep talking about the trauma of 1947,” Scroll 23 April 2016.

Daniel DeWispelare, “‘What we want in Elegance, we gain in Copiousness’: Eighteenth-Century English and Its Empire of Tongues,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 57.1 (Spring 2016): 119-138.

Daniel DeWispelare, “Fugitive Pieces: Language, Embodiment, and the Case of Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28.2 (Winter 2015-2016): 345-373.

Holly Dugan, “Seeing Smell,” The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558-1660, ed. Jacqueline Wilson and Simon Smith, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. 91-110.

Holly Dugan, “A Natural History of Ravishment,” Renaissance Posthumanism, ed. Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano, New York: Fordam University Press, 2015. 120-144.

Jennifer Green-Lewis, “Realism and Photography,” Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates, ed. Lee Behlman and Anne Longmuir, London: Routledge, 2016. 107-116.

Jonathan Hsy, “Watery Metaphor,” Oceanic New York, ed. Steve Mentz, New York: Punctum Books, 2015. 177-185.

Jonathan Hsy, “Disability,” Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 24-40.

Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington, “Remediated Verse: Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee and Patience Agbabi’s ‘Unfinished Business,’” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 6.2 (Summer 2015): 136-145.

Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington, “Global Chaucers: Reflections on Collaboration and Digital Futures,” Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 2.2 (2015), ed. Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury.

Jonathan Hsy and Richard H. Godden, “Analytical Survey: Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages,” New Medieval Literatures 15, ed. Laura Ashe, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase, 313-339.

Alexa Alice Joubin, “Intercultural Theatre and Shakespeare Productions in Asia,” Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre, ed. Siyuan Liu, New York: Routledge, 2016. 504-526.

Alexa Alice Joubin, “The Little Mermaid in Illyria,” Lunch poetry journal, Punctum Books, 2015.

Alexa Alice Joubin, “Translation as a Theme in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Source: A Quarterly Publication of the American Translators Association’s Literary Division 65 (Fall 2015): 24-32.

Alexa Alice Joubin, “Global Shakespeare,” Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, 2^nd ed., ed. Michael Dobson, Stanley Wells, Will Sharpe, and Erin Sullivan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 146-147.

Alexa Alice Joubin, “Boomerang Shakespeare: Foreign Shakespeare in Britain” and “Global Diasporas as Reflected in the Work of Ong Keng Sen,” The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, Vol 2: The World’s Shakespeare, 1660-Present, ed. Bruce Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 1094-1101 and 1212-1219.

Alexa Alice Joubin, “Meditation on Hamlet,” Man Ray-Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare, ed. Wendy Grossman and Edouard Sebline, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2015. 174-175.

Alexa Alice Joubin and Tom Bishop, Preface to “Shakespeare and the Human,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook 15, ed. Tom Bishop, Alexa Alice Joubin, and Tiffany Jo Wreth, 2015. ix-x.

Antonio López, “Lourdes Casal,” “Georg Sanford Brown,” and “Tony Pérez,” Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Franklin K. Knight. London: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Thomas Mallon, “Frenemies,” “Washington Scribe,” “A View from the Fringe,” and “Room Service,” The New Yorker, 1 June 2015, 28 September 2105, 11 January 2016, and 14 March 2016.

David McAleavey, “Oppen: His Impact,” The Oppens Remembered, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 149-158.

Robert McRuer, “Crip,” Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late Capitalist Struggle, ed. Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor, and AK Thompson, Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016. 199-125.

Robert McRuer, “Sexuality,” Keywords in Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, New York: New York University Press, 2015. 167-170.

Robert McRuer, “Epilogue: #YoSoy,” Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies, ed. Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016. 259-264.

Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow, “Fattening Austerity,” special issue on Fat Agency, ed. Nina Mackert and Jürgen Martschukat, Body Politics: Zeitschrift fűr Körpergeschichte 5 (2015): 25-49.

Robert McRuer and Margrit Shildrick, “Crip/Queer Performance: A Dialogue with Margrit Shildrick and Robert McRuer,” composed with Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier, Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, ed. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016. 263-278.

Robert McRuer, “Lo Queer y lo Crip, como formas de re-apropiación de la dignidad disidente. Una conversación con Robert McRuer,” composed with Melania Moscoso Pérez and Soledad Arnau Ripollés, Dilemata: Revista Internacional de Éticas Aplicadas 20 (2016): 137-144 [this interview was conducted in Spanish and has not been published in English].

David T. Mitchell, “Disability, Diversity, and Diversion: Normalization and Avoidance in Higher Education,” Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, ed. David Bolt, New York: Routledge, 2015. 9-20.

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “Global In(ter)dependent Disability Cinema: Targeting Ephemeral Domains of Belief and Cultivating Aficionados of the Body,” Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts, ed. Benjamin Reiss, New York: Wallflower Press, 2016. 18-32.

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “Narrative,” Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, New York: New York University Press, 2015. 126-130.

Lisa Page, “Things American: Writers Remember James Salter,” American Short Fiction, July 2015.

Lisa Page and Achy Obejas, “Achy Obejas: In Deeper Waters,” Origins 1 (2016).

Christopher Sten and Tyler Hoffman, “Introduction: Herman Melville and Walt Whitman Write the Civil War,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 17.3 (October 2015): 1-6.

Ayanna Thompson, “Desdemona: Toni Morrison’s Response to Othello,” A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, 2^nded., ed. Dympna Callaghan, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 494-507.

Ayanna Thompson, “Comparing Wilson and Shakespeare: Teaching the Politics and Practices of Race in Performance,” MLA Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson, ed. Sandra Richards and Sandra Shannon, New York: MLA, 2016. 24-31

Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi, “Embodiment and the Classroom Performance,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 724-737.

Ayanna Thompson and Dawn Monique Williams, “Ayanna Thompson in Conversation with Dawn Monique Williams,” The Diverse Bard: Shakespeare, Race and Performance in Contemporary Britain, ed. Delia Jarrett-Macauley, London: Routledge, 2016. 47-60.

Gayle Wald, “On Gina Prince-Bythewood,” Virtual Roundable on Women Directors, Public Culture, February 2016.

Gayle Wald, “Why We Keep Rediscovering the Flamboyant Godmother of Rock,” Zocolo Public Square, February 2016.

Gayle Wald, “‘Empire’ and Entrepreneurship,” Public Books, September 2015.

Tara Ghoshal Wallace, “’To One Thing Constant’: The Passion of Pope’s Eloisa,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 56.4 (Winter 2015): 411-426.

Tara Ghoshal Wallace, ed. “A Symposium: Jane Millgate: The Making of Scholarship,” Scottish Literary Review, 7.2 (Autumn/Winter 2015): 1-12.

Selected Creative Non-Fiction:

Jennifer Chang, “On Writing ‘A Horse Named Never,’” Harriet: A Poetry Blog, October 2015 [solicited essay on the composition process, published to coincide with the poem listed below].

Selected Poems:

Jennifer Chang, “It Was Your Birthday Again,” A Public Space 24, April 2016.

Jennifer Chang, “On Trees (envoi),” Orion 35.2, March/April 2016.

Jennifer Chang, “A Horse Named Never,” Poetry, October 2015.

Jennifer Chang, “Patsy Cline,” Poem-A-Day, August 2015 [Poem-A-Day is an Academy of American Poets program that posts solicited new poems every day by the senior content editor].

Jennifer Chang, “Mount Pleasant” and “Signs,” The American Poetry Review 44.4, July/August 2015.

David McAleavey, “Levitating the Pentagon, 1967” and “Mother love,” PoetLore 110.3-4, Fall/Winter 2015: 62-63.

Jane Shore, “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” The New Yorker, 7 September 2015: 60-61.

Jane Shore, “Our Fathers,” Moment, September/October 2015: 33.

Jane Shore, “The Watch,” Lilith 41.1: 19.

Selected Dramatic Work:

Patricia Griffith, “Margo,” Original Play read at Theater Three, Dallas, Texas.

Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers. An operatic adaptation of this novel recently had its world premiere at the Cincinnati Opera. It has also been optioned for dramatization on cable television by Anonymous Content.

Exhibition Catalogue:

Margaret Soltan, “Wojciech Fangor,” short memoir for exhibition catalogue for exhibit of Fangor’s work, January 2016. Warsaw.