Updated October 22, 2008
Dawes honored alongside literary giants with Hurston/Wright Award
by Louise Fry Scudder
Professor of English Kwame Dawes has been named the winner of the 2008 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation’s Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction.
The honor places Dawes in distinguished company: other winners of this year’s Hurston/Wright Award include Edwidge Danticat, for her acclaimed memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, and Junot Diaz for the lauded bestseller The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Presented annually, the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award provides a platform for the national community of Black writers to honor the work of their peers and, in the process, speak not just to the nominated writers but to the world at large about the profound significance, edurance, and genius of Black writers and the stories they tell. The Hurston/Wright Foundation is the nation’s resource for writers, readers, and supporters of Black literature.
Dawes, who teaches twentieth-century, postcolonial, and African American literature, is also the author of several acclaimed collections of poetry, a play, a memoir, and numerous scholarly works.
Professor Patrick Scott honored with Lucy Hampton Bostick Award
For his role in significantly expanding the Rare Books Collection at Thomas Cooper Library, Dr. Patrick Scott has been awarded the 2008 Lucy Hampton Bostick Award by the Friends of the Richland County Public Library.
During the past 10 years, under the direction of Dr. Scott, the Rare Books Collection at the University of South Carolina (USC) has doubled in size – growing to well over 100,000 volumes. Many of the materials have also been digitalized and shared worldwide. In 2007, Scott helped launch the digitalized Phillis Wheatley project, which contains Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book published by an African-American author, and the front is piece portrait of Wheatley, which is the only surviving work by the African-American slave artist Scipio Moorhead.
Scott is a Professor of English and the Director of Rare Books and Special Collections in the Thomas Cooper Library at USC. In 1985, he was named the USC English Department Teacher of the Year, and in 2004, he received the university-wide Mungo Teaching Award.
Scott earned his bachelor of arts at Merton College, Oxford; his masters of arts at Leicester University and his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to coming to South Carolina in 1976, he taught at the secondary level in Nigeria and Britain, at the college level at Leicester and Edinburgh and was a visiting lecturer at the College of William and Mary.
"I have worked in university research libraries for nearly 40 years and have met many rare books librarians" said Paul Willis, former Dean of Libraries at USC, in a letter supporting Scott's nomination. "I have never met Patrick's equal. (He) brings great genuine interest and intellect to books and libraries and is eager to share his knowledge and the extraordinary collections...with faculty, students and the greater community."
The Friends' Lucy Hampton Bostick Award was established in 1978 to honor the memory of Ms. Bostick, the Richland County Public Library's director from 1928-1968. Bostick is credited with fostering interest in Southern literature and history, improving cultural life in Columbia and promoting library appreciation throughout the state. Scott is the second English professor at Carolina to receive the Bostick award in recent years. Carolina Distinguished Professor and Distinguished Writer in residence Janette Turner Hospital was honored with it in 2005.
For more information about the Bostick award and the Friends of RCPL, visit www.myrcpl.com/friends.htm.
Holly A. Crocker with Melissa Crofton received a $6,000 award from the Graduate School’s Research Assistantships Program, 2007-2008.
Paula Feldman won the Distinguished Scholar Award for 2007 from the Keats-Shelley Association of America. It was presented at dinner in her honor at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago.
Janette Turner Hospital's work is the focus of a special journal issue, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Vol. 48, no.4, summer 2007). In addition, her newest novel, Orpheus Lost, is currently a finalist for Australia's major literary award, the Miles Franklin Award.
Leon Jackson received an Excellence in Teaching Award from the South Carolina Alpha Chapter of the Mortar Board Society.
Ed Madden was selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2007, the annual anthology of the best poetry by “emerging writers.” His poem, “Sacrifice,” was also chosen as one of the collection’s 3 open competition winners. The judge for the contest this year was Pulitzer poet Natasha Trethewey. Best New Poets 2007 is published by Samovar Press in cooperation with Meridian magazine at the University of Virginia. http://www.bestnewpoets.org/
BOOKS:
Posted Before June 10, 2008
Elise Blackwell
Grub, Toby Press, September, 2007.
Elise Blackwell published her third novel. A retelling of New Grub Street, Grub satirizes the contemporary literary marketplace as it chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a group writers living in and around New York City. http://www.amazon.com/Grub-Elise-Blackwell/dp/1592641997
Robert Brinkmeyer
Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West. 2000; Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Paperback edition, with new preface.
This book was originally published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000 and is a revision of the lectures delivered as the 42nd Annual Lamar Lectures at Mercer University in 1998.
http://www.ugapress.uga.edu/0820329975.html
Holly A. Crocker
Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture’s mounting obsession with vision through his varied constructions of masculinity. Because medieval theories of vision relied upon distinctions between active and passive seers and viewers, optical discourse had social and moral implications for gender difference in late fourteenth-century England. By exploring ocularity’s equal dependence on invisibility, Chaucer offers men and women access to a vision of “manhed,” one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity. http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=140397571X
Erik Doxtader
Erik Doxtader and Philippe-Joseph Salazar, eds. Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa – The Fundamental Documents. Cape Town: David Philip, 2007.
In the wake of South Africa’s transition from apartheid, this volume aims to provide an explicit view of the work undertaken by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the name of understanding the Commission’s development, work, and findings, the book features a variety of materials, including many selections from the TRC’s archive of testimony and its Final Report that have yet to receive significant public scrutiny.
Stan Dubinsky
William D. Davies and Stanley Dubinsky, eds. New Horizons in the Analysis of Control and Raising. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007.
Raising and control have figured in every comprehensive model of syntax for forty years. Recent renewed attention to them makes this collection a timely one. The contributions, representing some of the most exciting recent work, address many fundamental research questions. What beside the canonical constructions might be subject to raising or control analyses? What constructions traditionally treated as raising or control might not actually be so? What classes of control must be recognized? How do tense, agreement, or clausal completeness figure in their distribution? The chapters address these and other relevant issues, and bring new empirical data into focus.
http://www.springer.com/west/home/linguistics/syntax?SGWID=4-40382-22-173735440-0
Mindy Fenske
Tattoos in American Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Since the rise of the dime museum in the 19th century, tattooed bodies have been parading across stages both live and mediated. This book takes a close look at images of tattooed bodies in live performance, advertising, and photography. In so doing, the book combines the craft of cultural analysis with theories of performance while also generating a largely untold history of the tattooed body on display in the United States. Because of this unique combination, the book is truly interdisciplinary and appeals to multiple audiences. At the same time, it sustains a deep theoretical engagement with the central concepts of social and visual agency and the disruption of restrictive social norms. In the end, this study of the visual argues that the agency of images is located within, and not only in opposition to, cultural discourses such as gender, class, and exoticism. http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=0230600271
Janette Turner Hospital
North of Nowhere, South of Loss:
French edition, AU NORD DE NULLE PART, Paris, Rivages, May 2007.
W.W.Norton paperback edition, May 2007.
Orpheus Lost:
Australia, Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, May 2007
Canada, Knopf, October 2007
USA, W.W.Norton, October 2007
Australian Reviews of Orpheus Lost
Los Angeles Times Review of Orpheus Lost
Leon Jackson
The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
The first full-length study of authorship and economics in nineteenth century America in more than fifty years, this book brings the perspectives of sociology, anthropology and the new economic criticism to explore how authors begged, borrowed, bartered, gifted, and sold the works they wrote. http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=5705%20%20
David S. Shields
David S. Shields, ed. American Poetry: The Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries. New York: Library of America, 2007.
http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=273
(See Professor Shields’s WWW interview about this anthology in the LOA Newsletter:
http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/shields.pdf)
David S. Shields, co-author. Liberty! Égalité! Independencia!: Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas, 1776-1838. Newcastle: Oak Knoll Press for the American Antiquarian Society, 2007.
http://www.oakknoll.com/results.php?s_ShowPics=1&search_val=David+S.+Shields&search_fld=All
ARTICLES:
Posted Before June 10, 2008
Robert Brinkmeyer
“Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools: From Novel to Film.” Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen. Ed. Barton Palmer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 65-77.
Holly Crocker
“Affective Politics in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale: ‘Cherl’ Masculinity after 1381.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 225-58.
“Playing Household.” The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, DC, Guide to the Season’s Plays. 2007-2008. 16-24.
Brian Glavey
"Frank O'Hara Nude with Books: Queer Ekphrasis and the Statuesque Poet."
American Literature 79, no. 4 (December 2007): 781-806.
Janette Turner Hospital
"Orpheus Transcendent," Australian Literary Review, May 2007.
Ed Madden
“The Anus of Tiresias: Sodomy, Alchemy, Metamorphosis.” French Literature Series 34 (2007): 113-127.
Patrick Scott
"Audubon's Birds of America." Celebrating Research: Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries. Ed. Philip N. Cronenwett, Kevin Osborn, and Samuel A. Streit. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2007. 218-219 and 298.
David Shields
"Civilization." Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Ed. Bruce Burgett & Glenn Hendler. New York: NYU Press, 2007.
Article in On-Line Journal:
"The Search for the Cure: The Quest for the Superlative American Ham." Common-Place
http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-01/shields/
STORIES:
Posted Before June 10, 2008
Elise Blackwell
Professor Blackwell’s short story “Closed World” appeared in Coal City Review, and an excerpt of her second novel, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, was published by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in Cultural Vistas.
POEMS:
Posted Before June 10, 2008
Ed Madden
“Dust,” Asheville Poetry Review 14.1 (#17, 2007): 84.
“Light,” “Story,” and “Cabin, Near Caesar’s Head,” The Southern Poetry Anthology, vol. 1, South Carolina. Ed. Stephen Gardner and William Wright. Huntsville TX: Texas Review Press, 2007. 143-146.
“Sacrifice.” Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers. Ed. Natasha Trethewey. Charlottesville, VA: Samovar Press with Meridian, 2007. 89.
“Sexual history, with action figures.” White Crane no. 75 (winter 2007/2008): 10.
“Sunday morning, Wadmalaw” The Seagull Reader: Poems, 2nd Edition. Ed. Joseph Kelly. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. 217-219.
EDITED WORKS:
Posted Before June 10, 2008
Debra Rae Cohen
“Modernist Authenticities.” Special editorial cluster co-edited with Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Modernism/Modernity 14.3 (2007): 477-541.
David Shields
Edited the autumn 2007 Rice-Paper, the newsletter of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation
http://www.carolinagoldricefoundation.org/page7/page7.html
BOOK REVIEWS:
Posted Before June 10, 2008
Debra Rae Cohen
Review of Santanu Das’s Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Clio 36.3 (2007): 457-62.
Review of Todd Avery’s Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics and the BBC, 1922-1938. Modernism/Modernity 14.3 (2007): 581-82.
Review of Patrick Collier’s Modernism on Fleet Street. Twentieth-Century Literature 53.1 (2007): 74-78.
Review of Jane Potter’s Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print. Clio 36.2(2007): 281-85.
CONFERENCE PAPERS, READINGS:
Posted Before June 10, 2008
Elise Blackwell
Professor Blackwell was a featured author at the Louisiana Book Festival on November 3, 2007. Since May, she has given more than a dozen readings at venues in the southeast, northeast, and California.
Robert Brinkmeyer
Professor Brinkmeyer spoke on teaching Southern Studies in the Twenty-First Century at a conference celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. November 2007.
Elaine Chun
“’Oh my god!': Stereotypical words at the intersection of sound, practice, and social meaning,” New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 36, Philadelphia, PA, October 2007.
“On indeterminacy in the social meaning of variation,”with Robert Podesva (Georgetown University), UK Language Variation and Change (UKLVC) 6, Lancaster, United Kingdom, September 2007.
Debra Rae Cohen
“The New Meaning of Tourism: Rebecca West and the Praxis of Genre,” “Travel Literature,” Peer Seminar, Modernist Studies Association, Long Beach, CA, November 2007.
“Camp West,” Roundtable presentation, International Rebecca West Society, New York, NY, September 2007.
“Rebecca West, H. G. Wells, and the Maternalist Dilemma,” The Space Between, Annapolis, MD, June 2007.
Holly Crocker
“Conductive Subjects: Engendering Virtue in Late Medieval Devotional Literature,” Women’s Studies Lecture Series, USC, November 2007.
Erik Doxtader
In June, Professor Erik Doxtader hosted the biennial meeting of the Association for Rhetoric and Communication in Southern Africa. Convened in Cape Town, the conference was addressed to the theme of “The Development of Rhetoric” and featured scholars from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States.
Brian Glavey
"Poets in the Library of Babel: Proceduralism and Translation in Postwar American Poetry," Modernist Studies Association, Long Beach, CA, November 2007.
Janette Turner Hospital
Book Tour in support of Orpheus Lost:
May-June: Readings and media interviews in every Australian capital city, including at the Australian National Library in Canberra and the Sydney International Literary Festival
October 18-21, 07: Harborfront International Authors' Festival in Toronto
Oct 25-28, 07: Salt Lake City Literary Festival and University of Utah MFA program
Nov 2, 2007: New York University MFA Reading Series
Nov 8, 2007: SUNY Oneonta, NY
Nov 9, 2007: Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
Nov 16-18: Faulkner Words and Music Festival, New Orleans (with Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post literary critic, and Marie Arana, literary editor of Washington Post Book World)
Nov 29-30: College of Charleston
Leon Jackson
‘“Bid the Vassal Roar”: George Moses Horton and the Aesthetics of Colonization,” American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, May 2007.
“Rethinking Artisanal Authorship in Early National America,” Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing Conference, Minneapolis, MN, June 2007.
Ed Madden
“Family Photos: Reflections on American Families,” Columbia Museum of Art, for the exhibit Seeing Ourselves: Masterpieces of American Photography,” October 2007.
Joel Myerson
“Emerson Family Lives” (with Ronald A. Bosco), Massachusetts Historical Society, May 2007.
“Opening the Book on the Emerson Brothers: From Selected Edition to Intellectual
Biography”(with Ronald A. Bosco), Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and
Publishing Conference, Minneapolis, MN, July 2007.
“Louisa, Me, and Daniel Makes Three: Reflections of Editing Alcott,” Orchard House
Summer Conversational Series and Teacher Institute, Concord, MA, June 2007.
Participant, Panel on “Transcendentalism: The State of the Field,” University of
California at Los Angeles, CA, November 2007.
“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Using Reference Works in the Digital Age,” XXVII Annual Charleston Conference, Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition, Charleston, SC, November 2007.
Patrick Scott
“Robert Burns and America,” St. Andrew’s Society of Greater Atlanta, Stone Mountain, GA, September 2007.
"John Milton, Rare Books, and Cultural History: Some Research Opportunities in the Robert J. Wickenheiser Collection at the IUniversity of South Carolina," Ninth Biennial
Conference on John Milton, Murfreesboro, TN, October 2007.
with G. Ross Roy, “Likenesses (and Unlikenesses) of Robert Burns,” Robert Burns Society of the Midlands, Columbia, SC, November 2007.
“Secrecy and Reserve from Keble to Clough,” Victorians Institute, Tuscaloosa, AL, November 2007.
David Shields
"Selfhood and Sociability at the Center of England's Culture of Print," " Spaces of the Self in Early Modern Culture, Part 1: Circles of Sociability, " Clark Library, UCLA, October 2007.
"The Promise of Maryland, 17th-century Promotion Fantasy," Symposium: Rediscovering Maryland in the Atlantic World, Historic St. Mary's City & St. Mary's College, MD, November 2007.
Shevaun Watson
“Emancipated Rhetorics and the Limits of Freedom: African American Women’s Petitions,” Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference for the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, Little Rock, AR, October 2007.
Special Collections Exhibits
Professor Patrick Scott, Director of Special Collections, Thomas Cooper Library, hosted the following exhibits:
“The Speiser & Easterling-Hallman Collection of Ernest Hemingway,” USC Beaufort, June 16, 2007
“Voices of the Great War, from the Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection, the Joseph Cohen Collection of World War I Poetry, and related other collections,” Mezzanine Exhibition Gallery, Thomas Cooper Library, August-October, 2007.
“The Great Gatsby, from the Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Spartanburg Public Library, October 2007.
“Fitzgerald and Hollywood, an exhibit from The Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment F. Scott Fitzgerald Screenplay Archive,” Mezzanine Exhibition Gallery, Thomas Cooper Library, October-December, 2007.
Fall Festival of Writers
Professor Fred Dings coordinated this year’s Fall Festival of Authors (September 25-November 6), which featured writers Bobby Ann Mason, Galway Kinnell, James Barilla, and a night of readings by our talented MFA students.
Sierra Carter, class of 2008, wins Fulbright and Algernon Sydney Sullivan Awards
English major Sierra Carter, who graduated in May, 2008, is the recipient of both a Fulbright grant and the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award, which is the highest honor the University of South Carolina bestows upon undergraduate students.
A native of Britton’s Neck, S.C., Carter is one of a record eight Carolina students to be awarded the Fulbright this year. As a Fulbright scholar, she will spend the '08-'09 school year teaching in Indonesia.
Carter received the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award in recognition of both her high academic achievements and her many contributions to campus life. Sullivan awards are given each year to one male and one female graduating senior for their outstanding achievements, campus leadership, exemplary character and service to the community. The award is named for the 19th-century New York lawyer and philanthropist.
Carter is a Gates Millennium Scholar, a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, a Jane E. Hunter Scholar and a recipient of the George Rogers Foundations of the Carolinas Inc. Scholarship and William Way Scholarship. She was a 2006 finalist for the Harry S. Truman Scholar fellowship and has been on the President's Honor List since 2003.
Active in student life, Carter has been been a member of the Opportunity Scholars Program, the Empowerment Institute, the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Alpha Lambda Delta, Women's Mentoring Network, Association of African-American Students, SAVVY and the Britton's Neck Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee. She was vice president of the Golden Key International Honor Society, a writer for the Garnet & Black, a site leader for the university's MLK Service Day, a member of the Bethel A.M.E. Inspirational Choir and a student educator for the Earth Festival.
Instrumental in the development of the Minority Honors Student Union, Carter was named the TRIO Spotlight Student in 2005, a finalist for the 2006 USC Woman of the Year award, and a recipient of the TRIO Academic Award of Excellence (2003 - 2007). She received the University 101 Essay Award in 2003 and was elected a peer leader for University 101 in 2007.
Carter has participated in national conferences and conventions as a Carolina student and was a student/volunteer with the Council for Opportunity in Education Study Abroad Tour, in cooperation with the University of Liverpool.
Of her experience as an English major at Carolina, Carter says, “The major opens up a lot of opportunities. The professors honestly do care about the students, and with the strong training I’ve received in core skills like critical thinking and effective communication, I can spread my wings and fly any way I want to.”
Barbara Bolt
" 'Sin is Behovely': Julian and Norich and the Case of the Missing Seven Deadly Sins." SEMA, October 2007.
" 'Full of Briars and Thorns': Adventure and Interiority in the Forest." SAMLA, November 2007.
Melissa Crofton
“Enclosing Margery Kempe in a ‘Hous of Ston’: The Effects of Early Modern Censorship.” SEMA, October 2007; SAMLA November 2007
“Margery Kempe and the Politics of Transgression: Subversive Medieval Manuscripts in the Age of Early Modern Print History.” The Medieval and Early Modern Institute’s Graduate Colloquium: Holy Women, Holy Places: Gender, Publics, and religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. December 2007.
Carolina Rhetoric Conference, sponsored by RSA@USC
Graduate students including Monika Shehi, Paul G. Cook, Melissa Pearson, Brian Ray, David Wright, Lisa Bailey, and Mark Brantner read papers at the Carolina Rhetoric Conference on Febrary 22nd and 23rd. The conference also featured a keynote lecture by Professor John Muckelbauer. Other graduate students helped plan and host this event, which also included papers by several Clemson graduate students.
Fall Festival of Authors to feature Bajo, Gluck, Baldacci
This year’s Fall Festival of Authors features readings from novelist David Bajo, poet Louise Gluck, and novelist David Baldacci. All events will take place in the Law School Auditorium.
Bajo, author of the recently-released The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, will read from his work on Thursday, November 13 at 6:00 p.m. Praised by critics as a writer whose work is “mystical, sensual and finally haunting,” Bajo is an assistant professor of creative writing in the English department at Carolina.
Pulizer-Prize-winning poet Gluck will read from her work on Tuesday, November 18 at 6:00 p.m. The author of eight books of poetry and a volume of essays, Gluck is one of America’s most acclaimed poets and was named Poet Laureate in 1994.
Widely known as one of the best-selling authors in America today, Baldacci has a long list of nail-biting and thought-provoking political thrillers to his credit, including Divine Justice, The Whole Truth, The Camel Club, and The Winner. He will read from his latest work at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 20, with a book signing to follow.
The Fall Festival of Authors is jointly sponsored by the English Department and the Thomas Cooper Library, and is supported by a generous anonymous donor.
Please send news, congratulations, and corrections to: webmaster@mailbox.sc.edu
Last Update: October 13, 2008
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