Updated April 18, 2009.
New Undergraduate English Society to meet Friday, April 24
The newly-formed Undergraduate English Society will hold its first meeting on Friday, April 24, in Humanities 104, from 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Designed to foster community and professional development among all English majors and minors, the Society will provide a forum for discussion of any and all issues that are of concern or interest to undergraduate students in English, including how the department can best support students, how students can develop strong social networks, and how students can prepare for various English-related careers.
All English majors and minors are invited to attend the meeting and provide input into the group’s future plans. Bring your questions, concerns, and ideas; and the UES will provide food, drinks, and a few ideas of our own.
For more information, contact Professor Gretchen Woertendyke at woertend@mailbox.sc.edu or 777-2115. Please click the image above to view the event flyer.
Professor Elise Blackwell wins 2009 Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award
Assistant Professor of English Elise Blackwell has been named a recipient of the 2009/2010 Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award. The Mungo Awards are among the university’s highest faculty honors and are designed to recognize outstanding teaching, advising, and mentoring of undergraduate students.
Blackwell, who teaches creative writing at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, joined the department in 2005. She is the author of three novels, Grub, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, and Hunger, as well as numerous short stories. Her fourth novel, tentatively titled “The Conductor’s Wife,” will be published in the spring of 2010.
“I’m honored,” Blackwell says, “to work with USC students and to be part of a department in which scholarly and creative work go hand in hand with excellent teaching, where faculty passion for scholarship and writing engenders student enthusiasm."
Blackwell is the fifth member of the English faculty to win the Mungo Award for Undergraduate Teaching in the last decade. Professors Dan Smith, Greg Forter, Patrick Scott, and Nina Levine are recent past recipients; and Professor Christy Friend received the Mungo Award for Graduate Teaching in 2002/2003.
Graduate students receive high honors for teaching, research
Grace Wetzel, a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature, was selected from among all graduate instructors campus-wide as the 2009 recipient of the Graduate School’s Education Foundation Teaching Award. She joins past graduate students from the department Carl Jenkinson (2007), Corinna McLeod (2003), and Chris Fosen (2001) as recent EFTA honorees.
“This award is a major achievement for Grace and the department,” said English Department Chair William Rivers.
Ph.D. candidate Marcia Nichols has been named the inaugural recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in the Material Texts Initiative at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The prestigious and highly selective nationwide award will provide Nichols with a 13-month residency at the McNeil Center, allowing her to complete work on her transatlantic study of the literature of midwifery during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Two other Ph.D. candidates have also been awarded major research fellowships. Abigail Lundelius has won a Winterhur research fellowship from the Winterhur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, which is the greatest center for scholarship in pre-1879 American material culture; and Stephen Spratt has been awarded a summer research grant by the CGR Foundation. Lundelius’s work focuses on the literary and cultural significance of the table in the 19th-century United States, while Spratt will be researching agricultural journals for information on crop rotation and the experimental farming of grains.
University hosts 'Robert Burns at 250: Contemporaries, Contexts & Cultural Forms'
To celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (1759-1796), the University of South Carolina hosted “Robert Burns at 250: Contemporaries, Contexts & Cultural Forms,” a multi-disciplinary international conference, Thursday, April 2 through Saturday, April 4, 2009.
The conference, which brought together Burnsians and Burns scholars of different generations, from North America, Scotland, and elsewhere, was the only major university-based event in the U.S. for the Burns 250th Anniversary. Its aim was to provide fresh perspectives on Burns’s work and that of his contemporaries, and fresh appreciation of his achievement and influence.
Burns and Burns-related manuscripts from the university’s extensive G. Ross Roy Collection of Robert Burns & Scottish Poetry were on display at Thomas Cooper Library during the conference. Conference highlights also included a keynote lecture by Professor Edward J. Cowan of the University of Glasgow, and a concert on Friday evening in which legendary Burns singer Jean Redpath performed Burns’s songs.
Professor Thorne Compton receives MLK Social Justice Award
Dr. Thorne Compton, professor of English language and literature and former associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences, was recently awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Social Justice Award. The award, given by the University of South Carolina Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, recognizes outstanding accomplishments in teaching, research or creative work, and service and outreach.
Dr. Compton has spent his career serving the University as a faculty member, departmental chair, institute director, assistant dean, and senior associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences. As part of the USC Bicentennial, he was commissioned and produced a new play, The White Problem, about Richard Greener, the first African American to graduate from Harvard and the first African American faculty member at USC during The Reconstruction. Additionally, he developed the University of South Carolina’s first seminar in African American Theatre History as well as the first course in African American Drama which is now cross listed with Theatre, African American Studies and English.
Dr. Compton’s leadership in professional service extends beyond contributions to teaching. As Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, he brought the first African American faculty member to the department to teach and mentor in the acting program. He served on the Martin Luther King, Jr. committee for ten years as a committee member and was host and co-host of the University MLK Day Gospel Fest for three years. He also continues to work individually and in groups with people from the community and with University Presidents to insure a continuing commitment to maintaining the important legacy of historical buildings such as the Booker T. Washington Building.
Through these and other ongoing acts of community service, social justice and racial reconciliation, Dr. Compton exemplifies the philosophies of Dr. King.
Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Janette Turner Hospital nominated for literary honor
Janette Turner Hospital, Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, was one of five finalists a major new international literary prize.
Hospital’s latest novel, “Orpheus Lost,” was nominated for the inaugural, 2008 Asia-Australia Literary Prize. Other finalists included Michelle De Krester, Mohsin Hamid, David Malouf, and Ceridwen Dovey.
Hospital has written nine novels and four collections of short stories. “Orpheus Lost” has been named to Booklist’s Top 30 novels of the year and the American Library Association’s Best 25 Books of the Year. It is the re-telling of the Orpheus legend in an age of international terrorism.
Hospital grew up in Queensland, Australia, and taught at universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States before joining the University of South Carolina’s faculty and filling a post previously held by James Dickey. She is well known in South Carolina for her enormously popular community course, “Caught in the Creative Act."
Robert Brinkmeyer's 'Fourth Ghost' wins 2008 Warren-Brooks Award
The following is a press release issued on April 1, 2009 by Western Kentucky University, Office of Media Relations, concerning the recent recognition of Dr. Robert Brinkmeyer:
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – A book by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., professor of English and southern studies, is the 2008 winner of the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism.
The award, presented by the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University, is given in honor of Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Winning it puts Brinkmeyer in impressive company, as past recipients include a number of scholars of international repute, including Lawrence Buell, Sir Frank Kermode, Marjorie Perloff and Lewis P. Simpson.
Brinkmeyer is being honored for his book “The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950.”
In announcing the award jury’s choice, Charlotte H. Beck wrote, “Among the 23 books submitted for this year’s contest, Brinkmeyer’s book, nominated by LSU Press, is clearly superior in scholarship, breadth of content and authoritative style.”
Beck calls “The Fourth Ghost” a necessary book. “He has courageously and competently engaged a topic that experts on Southern literature have no doubt noted but chosen to avoid,” she wrote. “We feel confident that “The Fourth Ghost” will contribute mightily to the already auspicious canon of Southern literary scholarship.”
Brinkmeyer will speak on his award-winning scholarship at the Robert Penn Warren conference, on the campus of Western Kentucky University, on April 17.
Established in 1994 by the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies, the Warren-Brooks Award is given each year to an outstanding work of literary scholarship or criticism that exemplifies in the broadest sense the spirit, scope and standards represented by the critical tradition established by Warren and Brooks. It is intended to recognize and honor work that employs in a significant way the methods associated with a close reading of texts.
Dawes to be inducted into SC Academy of Authors
Kwame Dawes, Louise Fry Scudder Professor of English and Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at USC, has been chosen for induction into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. The induction ceremony will occur at an awards dinner sponsored by the Academy, the USC University Libraries, the Institute for African American Research, and Winthrop University the evening of Saturday, April 25.
Founded at Anderson College in 1986, the South Carolina Academy of Authors identifies and recognizes the state’s distinguished writers, living and deceased. Other writers honored by the Academy include James Dickey, Pat Conroy, Josephine Humphreys, and John Jakes.
Dawes is the author of 13 books of poetry, as well as books of fiction, nonfiction and drama. Among his awards are the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize by the Ohio University Press, and a Pushcart Prize. He also is an actor, producer, storyteller, and broadcaster and was lead singer in a reggae band. His collection “Hope’s Hospice” will be published by Peepal Tree Press in Spring 2009. Dawes directs the S.C. Poetry Initiative and the USC Arts Institute. Born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica, Dawes also is the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place each May in Jamaica. Recently, he was commissioned by The State newspaper to write a poem commemorating the inauguration of Barack Obama. The poem can be read here.
Along with Dawes, poets Susan Ludvigson and Carrie Allen McCray Nickens will also be inducted into the Academy of Authors. The ceremony will be held in Capstone House’s Campus Room on the University of South Carolina campus in Columbia. Doors will open at 7 p.m. The ceremony will start at 8 p.m. Beer, wine and appetizers will be served. Tickets cost $35. Winthrop University and USC’s Institute for African American Research are also sponsors of the event. Those interested in attending should contact Nicholas Meriwether at meriwetn@mailbox.sc.edu.
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.
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Last Update: October 13, 2008
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