Some Current Research in the English Department
As you plan your end of the year giving, we hope that you will keep the GW English Department in mind. Here is some of the faculty research that the generosity of our supporters fosters:
Jonathan Gil Harris
· Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Oxford University Press) to be published in May 2010. Editing collection of essays about Michael Neill (the postcolonialist Shakespearean from New Zealand) called Dislocating Shakespeare. Has essays forthcoming on Shakespeare and race, early modern thought and political theology, the work of Alain Badiou, and Islam and the posthuman. New book project underway: Becoming Indian: Untimely Transmigrations in the Global Renaissance.
Gayle Wald
· Shout, Sister, Shout: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Beacon Press 2007), a New York Times Book Review notable book. Currently working on a study of the Black Arts/Black Power movements and television through a case study of the PBS show Soul! (1968-73).
Antonio López
· Book project: Unbecoming Blackness: Literature, Culture, and Afro-Cubans in the United States, identifies an archive of Latino literature and performance by Afro-Cubans from the early twentieth century to the present that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences.
Robert Ganz
· Project clarifying Robert Frost’s connection to philosophical pragmatism
Tara Wallace
· Imperial Characters (2010). Two separate conference papers (one eventually to be article) on Frances Burney. Essay for Edinburgh Univ Press collection on Walter Scott.
Jane Shore
· Putting New and Selected Poems together. Poems forthcoming from The Yale Review.
Judith Plotz
· Book-in-progress: Kipling and the Little Traditions (children’s literature, Indian art, and American popular science). Article for Cambridge Companion to Kipling on “Kipling in America, America in Kipling”; and a paper just accepted called “Kipling’s Moral Torturers” (about school discipline-abuse as a preparation for colonial administration). Work for the Phoenix Committee of the Children’s Literature Association on Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical tragedies.
Jennifer Green-Lewis
· Writing an essay on photography for the new Oxford handbook on the Victorian novel. Completing a book of essays on memory and photography in the nineteenth century. Planning book on Modernism and the visual arts.
Robert Combs
· Projects on G. B. Shaw and intertextual readings of American drama. Essay on O’Neill and D. H. Lawrence forthcoming in Eugene O’Neill Review, as well as a book review in the same issue.
Christopher Sten
· Making final changes for a historical collection, “Literary Capital: Writing on Washington,” an anthology of more than 70 selections from two centuries of writing on Washington, DC. Book of essays on Herman Melville’s short stories, informed by a combination of visual arts and cultural studies perspectives. Edited collection of essays “Melville, Media, New Media,” covering adaptations, appropriations, and “remixings” of Melville’s writings in traditional visual and musical arts forms as well as in contemporary, electronic new media.
Robert McRuer
· Co-editing an anthology with Anna Mollow (under contract with Duke University Press): Sex and Disability, which will bring together humanities and social science scholars in disability studies working on issues of culture, sex, and sexuality. Monograph tentatively titled Globalizing Disability Studies, project on transnational disability issues, particularly focusing on film studies.
Patrick Cook
· Forthcoming: Four Hamlets on Film: Most Miraculous Organ (Ohio University Press). Articles on staging the medieval Hamlet and Aristotle’s theory of comedy. Currently working on projects applying neuroscience to film, in conjunction with his Shakespeare on Film course, and developing new applications of the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein to literary texts.
Jeffrey Cohen
· Monograph on medieval “stories of stone” (geology, deep history, prehistory and medieval narrative). Articles on Jewish-Christian neighboring in the Middle Ages. Special issue of the journal postmedieval on new Critical Modes.
Gregory Pardlo
· Composing a manuscript of poems that take as their subject matter the poet’s practice of reading. Swallow raises issues regarding the impact of such influence on the construction of social identity as it pertains to race, class and presumptions of authority.
Evelyn Schreiber
· Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison in production with LSU Press
James Miller
· “Jazz and the Freedom Struggle in South Africa and the United States, 1959-1976”
Faye Moskowitz
· Collection of memoirs with three pieces finished. Article on growing up with Jewish music.
Kathleen Lawrence
· New Cambridge Edition Of Henry James, Volume 22: The Siege Of London And Other Tales; Caroline Sturgis, Transcendental Muse; William Wetmore Story And His Family: The Saga Of Expatriate Americans In Gilded Age Rome
David McAleavey
· After (& Over), a book manuscript of poems written in response to canonical poems; this manuscript is veined with social, literary, and historical themes, as well as personal and even confessional material; The Push of Things We Pull, a book manuscript of mainly personal and often domestic poems.
Jonathan Hsy
· Book on the relationship between merchants and literary writers in late-medieval London; one of the project’s major aims is to trace how international trade and travel influenced the writing of multilingual authors. Completed article on Chaucerian lyrics and French music manuscripts. Book chapter on Chaucer’s interactions with French merchants (for the Oxford Handbook to Chaucer) and an essay on sea travel in The Book of Margery Kempe.
Patricia Griffith
· Sixth novel set in East Texas from 1909-1930, presents the political and social world of that time and place as well as the involvement of the local law enforcement officials.
H. G. Carrillo
· Twilight of the Small Havanas, a novel largely focused on the question of Cuban identity in the wake of the most recent shifts in Castroism and the newest changes in the US Administration and its attitude about the island. The characters of the novel—most of whom came into the country as refuges, looking for political asylum and opportunity—wonder how they are to act, how they perform cubanidad in their American lives now that the dictatorship on which they predicated their US citizenship and lives begins to fade.
Ann Romines
· Scholarly Edition of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Feminine Endings: Last Chapters in the Careers of Four Southern Women Writers. Directing the Willa Cather Foundation’s annual spring conference in June 2010. Editing At Willa Cather’s Tables: A Cather Foundation Cookbook. Editor of the Willa Cather Newsletter and Review.
