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Last Update: July 25, 2006
Miller Selected for NEH Award
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Professor David Lee Miller has been awarded a prestigious National endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2006-2007. The award supports David's work on the new three-volume edition of Spenser for Oxford University Press, which will be accompanied by an ambitious digital archive, which will serve as a scholarly tool and a teaching resource, providing a rich hypertext environment for study of Spenser's works.
Rhu Returns Trailing Clouds
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Professor Larry Rhu spent the Spring 2005 semester as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lisbon, where he taught a graduate seminar called “The Availability of Philosophy in Film and Literature” in the Program on Literary Theory. Also, at Lisbon’s national film museum, the Cinemateca Portuguesa, he co-curated a two-week film cycle, “Stanley Cavell and Classic Hollywood Cinema,” launching the seminar with much publicity and involving a cross-section of cinephiles and philosophers, both amateur and professional, in its conversations. Larry traveled with his wife, Karen, and their two children, Sarah (12) and Danny (10), whom they home schooled. Their residence along the seacoast at the mouth of Tagus made marine biology and early modern voyages of discovery inevitable subjects of study for all four of them together. Larry gave lectures and led seminars on Shakespeare, philosophy, and film at Portuguese universities in Faro and Covilhã and at the University of Alicante in Spain; and, at their annual meeting in Lisbon, he addressed the Portuguese Association of English Professors on “American Scholars and Hollywood Movies.” The family enjoyed numerous visits to cities and towns both in the Iberian peninsula and in Italy, where they took delight in cordial encounters with local hosts eager to share their ways of life with American visitors. Larry’s book, Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies (forthcoming in May 2006 from Fordham UP) benefited greatly from these opportunities to share its concerns with such diverse audiences. Rhu is doing penance for all this pleasure and profit by serving as undergraduate director this spring.
Fenske Wins Major Award
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Professor Mindy Fenske was awarded the Golden Anniversary Monograph Award at the National Communication Association convention in November. This award is given for the most outstanding article published in any journal or edited collection in the prior calendar year by any member of the association. With a membership of over 7000, the award is extremely competitive, including junior and senior scholars in both the humanities and social sciences. During her release time this Fall, Mindy completed two other essays that will appear in 2006 and 2007 in leading communication journals.
William Rivers Wins William Mitchell Prize
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Congratulations to Professor Bill Rivers, who on January 27 was awarded the William L. Mitchell Prize for Bibliography or Documentary Work, given by the Bibliographical Society of America, for Bill’s accomplishment in Nicholas Amhurst, Terrae Filius; or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford, published last year. Bill accepted the award, which includes a substantial cash prize, at the BSA’s annual meeting in New York. For more information, see http://www.bibsocamer.org.
Madden Wins Legacy Award
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Professor Ed Madden has been selected as the first recipient of the Human Rights Campaign of the Carolinas Legacy Award. The Legacy Award “recognizes an individual who has contributed efforts to improve the lives and visibility of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people over a long period of time and is seen as a role model to others.” Specifically, Ed is being recognized for his leadership in the SC Gay and Lesbian Pride Movement, in the SC Equality Coalition, and with the Harriet Hancock Community Center. He is also noted for initiating and leading campaigns on marriage equality, for organizing the first ever LGBT booth at the SC State Fair, and for spearheading the formation of Rainbow Radio, the state’s first gay and lesbian radio program, broadcast weekly on Air America 1230 AM in Columbia. The Award will be presented at the HRC Carolinas gala on Saturday, Feb 25, at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, NC. For more information, go to www.hrccarolinas.org. Madden has also recently been selected by the South Carolina State Parks Service as one of the 2006 SC State Parks Artists-in-Residence. Ed will be doing a short residency at the Keowee Toxaway State Park (in the northwest corner of the state).
Steele's New Book from Cornell
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Professor Meili Steele’s new book, Hiding From History: Politics and Public Imagination, has just been published by Cornell University Press. An “excellent book on an important issue,” according to the philosopher Charles Taylor, Hiding from History challenges an assumption crucial to a wide range of influential thinkers, including Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Judith Butler, Foucault, John Rawls, and others, who believe that it is impossible to reason through history. Meili shows how “the public imagination,” on the contrary, embracing historical and cultural specificity rather than trying to transcend it, creates a space for discourse and debate.
New Film Studies Director Publishes Major Book
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Professor Susan Courtney, who has replaced Professor Ina Hark as the director of the Film Studies Program at USC, recently published a book with Princeton University Press, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967. About Susan's book Tom Gunning, a preeminent film scholar at the University of Chicago, writes: "This could be the most important book published on film and race in America. It contains superior film analysis, a strong sense of film history, and breathtaking insights."
Berube Publishes Nanohype
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Professor David Berube’s recently released book, Nanohype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz (Prometheus), has sold out of its first printing. German, Spanish, and Japanese translations are being negotiated. The book has already received a very nice review from Small Times, a regular-sized journal devoted to nanotechnology. Berube’s book is praised for its unflinching honesty and careful cultural analysis, as he shows how Mike Rocco and others convinced President Clinton to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in nanotechnology by dramatically overstating the potential, and understating the risks. (Interestingly and impressively enough, Rocco contributed the preface for Berube’s book.) Berube has also recently accepted the position of Communications Director of ICON (the International Council for Nanotechnology), which is connected to the National Science Foundation’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology. ICON, which is based at Rice University, involves a number of multinational corporations as well as research universities.
Fox's "Satchel Paige" on Best Book
Posted Before July 16, 2006
The Library Journal has selected William Price Fox's Satchel Paige's America (University of Alabama Press) as one of the "Best Books of 2005." The selection appears in the January issue of the Library Journal (where it sits right before Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, winner of the $50,000 Lincoln Prize, and just after Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, winner of the National Book Award). To read the Library Journal's commendation of this "lively, moving, and often hilarious tale" (as the LJ puts it), which is a finalist for the Baseball Writers of America prize, go to www.libraryjournal.com.
David Shield's Many Broadway Stars
Posted Before July 16, 2006
This past fall Professor David Shields premiered a remarkable website at http://broadway.cas.sc.edu, “Broadway Photographs: Art Photography and the America Stage 1900-1930,” which provides incredible illustrations, critical overviews, and biographies for the sixty most significant photographers of Broadway’s personalities in the early twentieth century. For fifty-two of these figures, the profile found on the site is the first published account of their work. The opening of the website was celebrated with an exhibition of vintage prints at McMaster College depicting the “invention of glamour.” Shields also prepared a catalogue for the exhibition. Shields’ many recent activities also included delivering a public lecture at the Charleston Museum, “The First Taste of Tea in the West,” and chairing the program of the upcoming American Antiquarian Society conference, entitled “Liberty/ Egalite/ Independencia: Enlightenment and Revolution in the Americas, 1776-1826” (for more information, see http://www.americanantiquarian.org/liberty.htm).
A Sampling of Other Faculty Publications
Posted Before July 16, 2006
• In the current issue of storySouth, Professor Tara Powell presents “Six Southern Women Poets,” which features twenty-four poems selected, edited, and introduced by Powell. Find the link at www.storysouth.com.
• Professor Pat Gehrke’s "The Ethical Importance of Being Human: God and Humanism in Levinas's Philosophy" has just been accepted for publication in Philosophy Today. It will appear in late 2006.
• Professor Greg Forter guest-edited a special issue of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies devoted to the Iraq War. It will include essays from the symposium Greg organized last May, and will appear in April 2006. Greg also wrote an essay on Faulkner and crime fiction, "Faulkner, Trauma, and the Uses of Crime," for the forthcoming Blackwell's Companion to William Faulkner, edited by Richard Moreland. His "Against Melancholia: Contemporary Mourning Theory, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the Politics of Unfinished Grief," which appeared in differences in 2003, will be reprinted in the forthcoming Modernism and Mourning, edited by Patricia Rae, published by Bucknell University Press. And Professor Forter’s "F. Scott Fitzgerald, Modernist Studies, and the Fin-de-Siecle Crisis in Masculinity" will soon appear in the most excellent journal American Literature.
• Professor Ben Greer’s muse has recently crossed over into poetry. Ben, who has published nine poems in the past year, most recently published in Runes, a California anthology that contains work by W. S. Merwin and Phillip Levine, among others. Ben has also recently ventured into detective fiction, completing a forthcoming novel that is set in Charleston and features an aristocratic and eccentric amateur sleuth, as well as a literary novel.
Adjunct Faculty Publish
Posted Before July 16, 2006
A short story by David Bajo, "The Day the Earth Caught Fire," published in the summer 2005 issue of the Cimarron Review, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Robert Lamb’s Atlanta Blues, a novel, was published by Harbor House last September.
Fall Festival of Authors
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Professor Fred Dings, with the logistical assistance of Tom McNally (Thomas Cooper Library) and Mark Sibley-Jones, hosted an excellent festival this fall. Attendance was very strong, topping 500 for Edward Albee, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who spoke on October 26 about his life and his influences and the future of education. Charles Wright, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, gave a powerful reading on October 27, and Francine Prose, National Book Award finalist, winner of four Pushcart Prizes and numerous other awards, offered a heroic performance, enchanting the audience in spite of an impressive case of laryngitis. The English Department and the Thomas Cooper Library remain extremely grateful to the anonymous donor who has endowed the festival.
An Americanist in Paris
Posted Before July 16, 2006
For one amazing week in the fall, Professor Matthew Bruccoli and his students moved their study of Hemingway and Fitzgerald to Paris. The students held classes in historic venues, including the restaurant in which Hemingway and Fitzgerald met, and they were able to experience many important literary sites first-hand. Claudia Brinson wrote a great article on the trip for The State newspaper (October 30, 2005), and the students reported that it was an inspiring and instructive trip. Professor Bruccoli is considering a detective fiction trip to London, as well as a return engagement to Paris.
A Sampling of Other Faculty Activities
Posted Before July 16, 2006
• In the last six months, Professor David Cowart has lectured or presented keynote addresses in four foreign countries. Last spring he was a keynote speaker in Kraków at the tenth of the Jagiellonian University’s triennial April conferences (say that three times fast) and subsequently lectured at the Charles University in Prague. In July and August, he toured Japan as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, speaking at universities in Tokyo and Nagoya before teaching a graduate class at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, and giving a keynote paper at the last of the annual Kyoto American Studies Summer Seminars. This month David lectured at the University of Sussex and served as external examiner on a dissertation there. He has also agreed to serve as external examiner for an Australian dissertation. His new book, Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America, is scheduled for publication next year by Cornell University Press.
• Professor Patrick Scott, currently on extended assignment in Rare Books & Special Collections, gave an illustrated lecture on "Robert Burns and America" at the University of Kentucky, November 18, 2005. Scott also gave an illustrated talk on the history of camellias and camellia illustration at USC-Lancaster for the Friends of Medford Library on November 15.
• In the fall semester Professor Qiana Whitted launched a graphic novel reading group. Watch out for upcoming sessions!
Faculty Colloquia
Posted Before July 16, 2006
If you missed the Fall Faculty Colloquia, there is unfortunately no podcast available. On November 16, we had an entertaining and instructive discussion of Professor Holly Crocker's paper on "Affective Politics in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale: 'Cherl' Masculinity after 1381." Professor Greg Forter, the series organizer, kicked things off with his stimulating paper on "Gender, Trauma, and the Problem of History." When the search season is over, the Colloquia may return. Faculty with drafts they’d like to share should contact the chair (Greg is on leave in the spring).
Some Recent Visitors
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Michael Uebel, University of Texas at Austin, read “Masochism in America:
WWII and the aftermath of Shame.” The Poetry Initiative hosted Simon Armitage, British poet, novelist, essayist, who has also worked in film, television, and radio. And José Manuel Gonzalez (University of Alicante) lectured on Shakespeare and Cervantes as prophets of the modern.
Citings of Former Graduate Students
Posted Before July 16, 2006
The legacy of James Dickey continues as the careers of our graduates and his students unfold. Casey Clabough (PhD 2000), an Assistant Professor at Lynchburg College, has published two books with Mercer University Press: Elements: The Novels of James Dickey, and (more recently) Experimentation and Versatility: The Early Novels and Short Fiction of Fred Chappell. Gordon Van Ness (PhD 1987), Professor and Chair at Longwood University, has recently published The One Voice of James Dickey: His Life and Letters, 1970-1997, completing and complementing his earlier volume of the letters and life of Dickey. Craig Wright (MFA 1994), Associate Professor at Southern Oregon University, has a collection of stories coming out soon. His musical group, Elijah, recently released a CD called Dreams of Trudy.
MFA Students Win Places in Faulkner Prize
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Nuke Deloach and Mark Sibley-Jones have won distinction in the prestigious William Faulkner Creative Writing prize for the novella. With over 500 entries from across the nation, Nuke was named a runner-up and Mark was named a semi-finalist. Both now have their novellas under consideration by the University of Mississippi Press. The Faulkner Prize has been a reliable predictor of future literary success: the winner from a few years back (Julia Glass) went on to win the National Book Award for her novel.
Acute Angle: Graduate Student Places First Novel
Posted Before July 16, 2006
Kimberly Greene Angle's first novel, Hummingbird, has been accepted for publication with Farrar Straus & Giroux of New York. Kimberly says she is deeply grateful for the help of Professor Dianne Johnson and others who read early drafts in last fall’s Children's Literature course. Kimberly also gives much credit to her advisor, Professor Christy Friend, who supported her Comp-Rhet specialization in creative writing. The novel will be out in the Fall of 2007.
Some Events from the Past Year
Posted Before July 16, 2006
• Poetry Initiative: Third Annual Poetry Contest
The deadline for entering the Third Annual Poetry Contest, sponsored by the SC Poetry Initiative and The State newspaper, is Feb. 15. For more information, see the English Department website at www.cas.sc.edu/engl.
• Irish Studies Conference, Geographies and Gender, February 23-26, 2006
The University of South Carolina will host the 2006 Southern Regional Conference of the American Conference for Irish Studies in Columbia, SC, February 23-26, 2006. Special guests will include poets Eavan Boland and Vona Groarke. More info is available at the department’s website.
• 19th and 20th Century Literature Conferences
“In the City and on the Road: Stasis and Mobility in the 20th-Century” will be held here March 25-26, 2006. The keynote lecture will be by Gordon Ball of Virginia Military Institute. The Fourth Annual 19th-Century Literature Conference will be held March 31- April 1, 2006: “Nineteenth Literature and the Cultural Moment." The keynote lecture will be by Eric Wilson, from Wake Forest University. For more information about these conferences, see the department’s website.
To Be Announced
Posted Before July 16, 2006
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