2010-11 Newsletter
September
The year began with a mixture of pleasure and sadness. We were delighted to welcome two new tenure-system faculty members, Priscilla Ybarra and Masood Raja. Priscilla specializes in Latina/o literature and culture, as well as ecocriticism. She comes to us from Texas Tech University, where she had been an assistant professor since 2006. She received her Ph.D. from Rice University, and her publications include an article in MELUS, as well as several contributions to essay collections. She is currently working on a book project entitledMedioambientes/ Environments: A Literary History of Chicana/o Environmental Writing from 1848 to the Present. Masood comes to us from Kent State University, where he was an assistant professor for three years. His Ph.D. is from Florida State University in 2006. He is the author ofConstructing Pakistan: Foundational Texts and the Rise of Muslim National Identity, 1857-1947, and his articles have appeared in such journals as Prose Studies, South Asian Review, andMosaic.
In late September we were were shocked and saddened by Scott Simpkins's untimely death. Scott had been a member of the department since 1989, having previously taught at South Dakota State, and having received his Ph.D. from the University of Tulsa in 1986. He was the author of Literary Semiotics: A Critical Approach (2001), nearly 40 published articles, and an equal number of notes and reviews. From 1993 to 2003, he edited Studies in the Novel, and he also edited several volumes of the annual, Semiotics. In addition, he was an innovative and much loved teacher. A generous gift of $10,000 from the Simpkins family has allowed us to create an annual $500 award that will last for at least twenty years. Additional contributions will allow us to extend the life of the scholarship or permanently endow it (if we reach a total of $25,000). For information on how to donate, see the Support Our Programs page.
Faculty Accomplishments: Matthew Heard's article, "Hospitality and Generosity," appeared inJAC: Journal of Advanced Composition. Kyle Jensen's article, "A Matter of Concern: Kenneth Burke, Phishing, and the Rhetoric of National Insecurity," was accepted by Rhetoric Review.Jack Peters placed two essays: "Joseph Conrad's Literary Response to the First World War" inCollege Literature and "A Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides on Joseph Conrad" in The Conradian. Jean Roelke's long poem, "The Shape of Breathing," was accepted for publication as a chapbook by Red Mare Press.
Student Accomplishments: Amanda Kellogg, a Ph.D. student in early modern English literature, won a Newberry Renaissance Consortium Grant for travel to the Newberry Library for archival work.
October
Faculty Accomplishments: David Holdeman led a UNT Travel-Learn trip to Ireland and lectured at the University of Limerick and at Queen's University, Belfast, on "W. B. Yeats: Magic and Textual Production." Jack Peters's essay, "Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the World of Western Women," was accepted for publication by Studies in Short Fiction.
Student Accomplishments: Kelly Ledbetter presented a paper entitled "An Analysis of Religious and Folkloric Syncretism in Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard" at the Sirens Conference in Vail, CO.
November/December
Faculty Accomplishments: In November, Bruce Bond won UNT's Creative Impact Award. In December, his book, The Visible, was accepted for publication by LSU Press. In addition, his poem "Empire of Light" was featured by Verse Daily and he reported the following poems as forthcoming in literary journals: "The Unfinished Slave" in The Antioch Review; "Water Scripture" in Third Coast; "Acolyte," "Cézanne's Doubt," "The Collector," and "New York Drive" in The Fiddlehead (Canada); "For the Lost Cathedral" (sections 6, 9, and 11) in Blackbird; and "For the Lost Cathedral" (sections 4 and 8) and "Rearview" in The Mayo Review. James Duban's article "'How to Hate, and Whom': Ahabian Ire in Roth's The Great American Novel and The Plot Against America" appeared in Philip Roth Studies. Jack Peters's article, "The Original and Posthumous Editions of Takamura Kôtarô's The Chieko Collection: A Study of Editorial Practice and Poetic Intent," appeared in Journal of Oriental Studies. Alex Pettit's co-edited collection,The Enlightenment by Night: Essays on After-Dark Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, was published by AMS Press. Nicole Smith's book, Sartorial Strategies: Aristocratic Attire, Medieval Romance, and the Making of Moral Comportment was accepted for publication by the University of Notre Dame Press.
Student Accomplishments: Recent Ph.D. graduates (and current adjunct instructors) Ashley Bender and Wayne Gay both had acceptances. Ashley's essay "Containing Identity in The Plain Dealer and The Way of the World" was accepted by Eighteenth-Century Life, and Wayne's stories, "Fries with Jaybo: Oklahoma City, 1969" and "Garage Apartment," were accepted bySpilling Ink.
January
Faculty Accomplishments: Jacqueline Foertsch's essay, "Against the 'Starless Midnight of Racism and War': African American Intellectuals and the Anti-Nuclear Agenda," appearedPhilological Quarterly. Corey Marks's book, The Radio Tree, won the 2011 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press and will be published next spring. Amos Magliocco's short story, "Saturday Children" was accepted by Redivider Journal. Jack Peters placed a note on "Under Western Eyes: An Explosive Review" in The Conradian. Daryl Scroggins placed three brief fictions inGreen Mountains Review ("Small Journeys," "Pear Wine on Stanton Street," and "Neighbors Helping Neighbors"); five brief fictions in New York Tyrant: ("I'm Out," "Pedagogy and the Labial Arts," "Settling the Estate," "Trashy," and "Natural Mnemonic"); and three micro-essays inSentence ("Plans for a Prose Poem," "The Prose Poem and Matters of Scale," and "Why a Prose Poem?"). Kelly Wisecup's piece on the future of Atlantic Studies, "The History of Atlantic Science: Collective Reflections from the 2009 Harvard Seminar on Atlantic History," was published in Atlantic Studies 7.4 (2010). Her essay, "Invisible Bullets and the Literary Forms of Colonial Promotion," won the Society of Early Americanists Best Essay Contest Award.
Student Accomplishments: Emily Allen placed three poems ("St. Denis Immaculate Conception Cemetery," "Explanation," and "Parallax") in Poetry Quarterly; three other poems ("Apology," "Field Trip," and "The Necessity of Movement") were scheduled for inclusion in Southern Poetry Anthology. Hella Bloom was accepted to present at the 2011 South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference; her paper was entitled "Dressing Down in the Eighteenth-Century Colonial Novel." Elishia Heiden had her paper, "Discovering Ancient Rhetoric Through Frank Warren's PostSecret," accepted for presentation at NeMLA. Nate Logan published a poem in Lonesome Fowl and placed another in NOÖ Journal. Hillary Stringer's paper, "Beyond Freewriting: Navigating the Intersection of Forms in an Introductory Level Multi-Genre Workshop," was accepted for presentation at the 2011 Associated Writing Programs Conference. Jessica Hindman's paper, "Moving from the Private to the Public in Personal Essay and Memoir," was also accepted for presentation at AWP. AWP also featured a panel organized by Britta Coleman: authors Matt Bondurant and Ann Cummings and agents Alex Glass, Jenny Bent, and Marcy Posner discussed the author/agent relationship. Zach VandeZande's short pieces "Stand stock still," "Notes on the cruelty of being alive," and "Breathe in, hold, release" were accepted by Walrus Literary Journal.
February
Faculty Accomplishments: Kevin Curran's article, "Hospitable Justice: Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare's Sonnets," was accepted by a leading legal studies journal, Law, Culture and the Humanities. The University of Georgia Press edition of The Works of Tobias Smollett, for whichAlex Pettit serves as General Editor, released a new volume: Smollett's translation of Alain René Le Sage's The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, ed. by O. M. Brack, Jr., and Leslie A. Chilton.
Student Accomplishments: Doctoral student Beth Neely Clauser was invited to present her poetry next September in a session sponsored by the Bread Loaf Conference in the medieval town of Erice, Sicily. The session will feature eight each of poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, and Beth will have the opportunity to work with her former mentor, poet Ellen Bryant Voigt.
March
Faculty Accomplishments: Etruscan Press accepted three of Bruce Bond's new full-length books (Water Scripture, Earth's Apprentice, and The Burning Casket) for publication as one trilogy volume entitled Choir of the Wells. In addition his poem "Jon Faddis and the High Note" won a William Matthews Prize. He also reported the following poems as accepted in literary journals: "My Death Space Dot Com" in Poetry; "Snow" and "Tympanum" in Stand (Great Britain); "Elegy for the Spanish Republic" in Agni; "The Gate" in Pleiades; "Water," "John Cole and the Water Fall," and "Small Hands of the Lesser Gods" in Poetry East; "The Island" in Measure; "The Visible," "Purity," "Oracle," and "The Desert Fathers," in Zone 3; "Jon Faddis and the High Note" in The Asheville Poetry Review; "The Invention of Clouds" in IN QUIRE; and "Boo" in Rattle. Also, the poem "Ringtone" was selected for the anthology Saying What Happened: American Poetry After the Millennium (McFarland Press) and "The Whiteness of the Cane" for Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (Linebreak). Bruce also had two critical essays accepted for publication: "Introduction to 'Regeneration' by Henry Vaughan" in Poetry East: Special Issue on Poems Before 1900 and "An Abundance of Lack: The Fullness of Desire in the Poetry of Robert Hass" in Poetry for Students (Gale Publications, Cengage Learning, Great Britain). Stephanie Hawkins lectured at a workshop on "Bridging Psychophysics & Neurophysiology" held at the Marriott Hotel teleconference room. Participants included an international cohort of mostly physicists, neuroscientists, and experts in "network science." Stephanie's lecture, "'Moving clouds of swarming atoms': William James and Psychophysics," appeared as part of a panel that also included Ken Norwich of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto, and Gerhard Werner of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, UT-Austin.
Kyle Jensen's article "Rhetorical Listening in Principle: A Burkean Apology" was accepted byJAC: Journal of Advanced Composition. Kyle also learned that a collection he was invited to contribute to - Writing Posthumanism Writing - has received a contract from Parlor Press: his contribution will be titled "I am SPAM; or, Writer's Block in a Posthuman Era." In addition his review essay, "Reforming Method: An Invitation to Enchantment" was published in JAC 31.1-2.Kelly Wisecup's article, "African Medical Knowledge, the Plain Style, and Satire in the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy," was published in Early American Literature. She was also invited to do a state of the field article for Literature Compass on "Transatlantic Approaches to Science in the Eighteenth-Century Americas," and she received a short-term fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library to do research on a second book project, a scholarly edition of Pilgrim Edward Winslow's Good News from New England (1624).
Student Accomplishments: Doctoral student Dale Dewoody had three poems - sections 1991, 1996, and 2003 of "Road Debris" - accepted for publication by Reunion: The Dallas Review. The poem "Silence is Pleased" by recent Ph.D. creative writing graduate and current adjunct instructor Wayne Lee Gay appeared in print and online in the 2011 edition of the journal New Millennium Writings.
April
In early April, our six undergraduate research fellows, Kathleen Daly, Eliscia Kinder, Alyssa Quintanilla, Mariel Rushing, J. D. Smith, and Sarah Wilson, made an overnight research trip to the Harry S. Ransom Research Center in Austin, where they examined rare books and manuscripts associated with such figures as Kenneth Burke and W. B. Yeats. Each fellow subsequently presented his or her work at Scholars Day and at our annual Departmental Awards Ceremony, where scholarship and award winners were recognized. Faculty award winners included Kristen Keckler (the Vann Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Lecturer);Robert Upchurch (the Kesterson Award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching); and Jacque Vanhoutte, who won both the Preston Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching and the Stevens Award for Outstanding Departmental Service. Another highlight of this busy month was the Faculty Reading, at which six of our creative writing faculty, Bruce Bond, Corey Marks,Ann McCutchan, Miroslav Penkov, Barbara Rodman, and John Tait read brief selections from their recent work.
Faculty Accomplishments: Kevin Curran was awarded a Short-Term Research Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC for work on his critical edition of Samuel Daniel's play, The Tragedy of Philotas. Ann McCutchan's essay collection, Circular Breathing: Meditations from a Musical Life, was published by Sunstone Press. She was also awarded a residency at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, New York for the month of August, and the New York Public Library endorsed the importance of her earlier work by taking custody of the papers surrounding the writing of her book, Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute (Amadeus Press, 1994).
Stephanie Hawkins won a prestigious $6,000 Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a project entitled Modern Science, Modernist Art: The Radical Empiricism of William James. Miroslav Penkov was selected for this year's Honor Professor teaching award by the UNT Student Government Association. Jack Peters's "A Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides about Joseph Conrad -- Part 1: 1910-1979," was published in The Conradian, 36.1 (spring 2011). Masood Raja's co-edited collection, The Postnational Fantasy: Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction was published by McFarland. John Tait's novel,Poplar Crescent, won the 2010 Everett Southwest Literary Award ($5,000) judged by Sandra Cisneros. Nicole Smith received the 2011 J. H. Shelton Excellence in Teaching Award; named for UNT alumnus Joe Houston Shelton to recognize outstanding contributions in creating an effective and stimulating learning environment, the Shelton Award is one of UNT's most prestigious teaching awards. Kelly Wisecup was accepted to an NEH Summer Seminar at MIT this July on "European Encounters with the Americas, 1550-1610."
Student Accomplishments: Recent Ph.D. graduate and current adjunct instructor Wayne Gay'sshort story, "Ondine," was selected for inclusion in the collection Best Gay Stories 2011. His story, "Every Sunday After Church," was accepted for the 2011 issue of descant, and another story, "Hunger in America," was accepted by Main Street Rag. Wayne also won the David B. Saunders Award for Nonfiction from Cream City Review for his lyrical essay, "Bird of Paradise."
May
In May we learned that James Baird had applied and been approved for participation in the university's Voluntary Separation Program and would retire from his faculty position at the end of the summer. Jim is by far the longest tenured member of our department, having taught at UNT since 1966, so the prospect of his departure certainly marks the end of an era. Jim's classes -- on Bob Dylan and the Blues in particular -- have been student favorites for many years. He's written dozens of essays on various aspects of twentieth-century American culture and especially on the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. We also learned that prizewinning poet B. H. Fairchild had accepted our offer of a senior position; he joins Laila Amine (African-American literature) and Ryan Skinnell (rhetoric/composition) as new additions to our faculty.
Faculty Accomplishments: Bruce Bond won the New South Poetry Prize ($1000) given by New South magazine (and judged by poet Rodney Jones) for a poem entitled "Benthos."Ploughshares accepted Bonnie Friedman's essay "Coming of Age in Book Country" for publication in its Winter 2011 issue. Amos Magliocco's novel, Remedy Wheel, was announced as a semifinalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Contest. Jack Peters's essay, "Mirrors and Money: Constructing and De-Constructing Revolution in Mariano Azuela's Los de abajos and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo" appeared in Yearbook of Conrad Studies. Jacque Vanhoutte'sarticle, "Age in Lust: Lyly's Endymion at the Court of Elizabeth I," was accepted for the June issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture, and her paper, "Falstaff among the Minions of the Moon," was selected in the Shakespeare Association of America's open competition for papers.