Toby Altman (PhD 2017) received a research fellowship from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for his next book of poems, “Prairie School.”
Katy Chiles (PhD 2008) has become co-editor (with Professor Cassander Smith) of the journal Early American Literature. She was also named the Kenneth Curry Professor of English at the University of Tennessee.
Jayme Collins (PhD 2022) was chosen as one of the recipients of the English Department’s 2023 Hagstrum Prize for her dissertation, “Composing in the Field.” A new publication, a collaborative essay with Sheryda Warrener, Claire Battershill, and Amy Elkins entitled “Sequences of Touch: Dried Flowers; Linen Rags; Rotten Potatoes; Wool Roving,” appeared in Inscription Journal in November, and a public essay titled “Art, Protest, and Climate Change in the Gallery” came out in early December in Edge Effects. In Winter 2024, the first season of her new public humanities audio storytelling project called “Archival Ecologies” is airing. The first season tells the story of Lytton, British Columbia, which was severely damaged during a 2021 heatwave-fueled wildfire. The communities in the town centre and the surrounding First Nations reserves lost 4 significant cultural collections during the fire, from museums and archives to informal community collections. Jayme spent 10 days this past summer interviewing community members and collection stewards, and this audio story delves into both the role of these collections in the communities and how they are approaching recovery when most of the objects and documents from the collections have burned.
Vanessa I. Corredera (PhD 2012) published a co-edited volume with L. Monique Pittman Geoffrey Way, entitled Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation (Routledge, 2023). This collection moves beyond the binary impasse of Shakespearean appropriation as gift or theft by investigating cultural appropriation as a theoretical framework that affords a spectrum of possibilities for more rigorously thinking about Shakespeare’s socio-political use in modern global appropriations. She also published “Decommissioning the Bard: Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights as Anticolonial Edutainment” in Comparative Drama. In spring of 2023, she had the privilege of becoming a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Becky Fall (PhD 2016), with Noémie Ndiaye, Lia Markey, Christopher Fletcher, and Yasmine Hachimi, co-curated a public exhibition at the Newberry Library called Seeing Race Before Race, part of a collaborative project with the RaceB4Race collective. The exhibition opened in early September and runs through December 29, 2023. Throughout the autumn, the curatorial team have been running a series of complementary public and academic programs featuring Broadway actors, international filmmakers, and pathbreaking scholars. Becky also contributed catalog entries to an associated publication entitled Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World, edited by Ndiaye and Markey (ACMRS Press, 2023; freely accessible online here), and helped create the digital teaching tool Seeing Race Before Race: A Closer Look (accessible here).
Menglu Gao’s (PhD 2022, CLS) dissertation, “The Lacquered Chinese Box: Opium, Addiction, and the Fantasy of Empire in Nineteenth-Century British Literature,” was selected as the 2023 Outstanding PhD Thesis by the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies Awards Committee.
Johana Godfrey (PhD 2023) was the 2022-23 recipient of our Department’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
Carissa Harris (PhD 2012) got to give a Medieval Colloquium talk in the Hagstrum Room in May 2023, the fulfillment of one of her wildest grad school dreams. With Fiona Somerset, she edited the colloquium “Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, Desires” in the 2022 issue of Studies in the Age of Chaucer and, in response to the bombshell new archival discovery regarding Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne, she published an essay titled “On Servant Women, Rape Culture, and Endurance” in The Chaucer Review (October 2022).
Paul M. Hedeen (PhD 1990) published his seventh book, a history coauthored with his wife Maryna. Ukrainians in Michigan traces the history of Ukrainian immigration from 1870 to the present day. The book is published by Michigan State University Press as part of the Discovering the Peoples of Michigan series.
This past year, Jackie Hendricks (PhD 2013) was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Santa Clara University’s English Department, where she’s currently leading a faculty team in a project intended to develop materials for first-year college-level writing courses. OER for Social Justice awarded the project a $40,000 grant as part of a larger endeavor, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, to adapt or create free, open textbooks that further goals of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism to be used in high-enrollment courses at grant partner institutions Loyola Marymount University, Saint Mary’s College of California, Santa Clara University, and the University of San Francisco. Jackie also has an article entitled “A ‘ful vicious’ author: Examining J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia through her Framing of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale” forthcoming in 2024 in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.
Carolina Hotchandani’s (PhD 2013) debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, won this year’s Perugia Press Prize for first and second books.
In her first year as Teaching Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures at the University of Warwick, Nancy Jiang (PhD 2023) won the English department’s 2022-23 Faculty Teaching Award. Her book chapter, “From Audits to Confessionals: The Influence of Accounting Technology on Medieval Penitential Pedagogy,” was published in Media Technology and Digital Humanities in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and she was invited to give a talk in December at the University of Oxford’s Medieval English Research Seminar.
Nancy was also selected as one of the recipients of our Department’s Hagstrum Prize for her dissertation, “The Trade of Penance: Commercial Practice and Penitential Piety in Late Medieval Literature.”
Janaka Lewis (PhD 2009) is serving as Interim Chair of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies (WRDS) at UNC Charlotte, and her new book, Light and Legacies: Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation, was published earlier in 2023 by University of South Carolina Press.
Chris Lombardo’s (MFA+MA 2023) short story, Forever War, won 1st Place in Oxford Magazine’s Golden Ox Prose Contest, and was published in Issue 50 of the magazine. He also received a Stories Matter Foundation Masters Award from StoryStudio Chicago.
John Edward Martin (PhD 2006) is Director of Scholarly Communication at the University of North Texas Libraries. This October he curated an exhibit on “Poe in Comics” for the 2023 International Edgar Allan Poe Festival in Baltimore, MD and participated in this year’s Festival of Monsters Symposium at UC-Santa Cruz with a paper on “A Beautiful Monster: Race and Monstrosity in Two Werewolf Tales”. He continues his work as Book Review Editor for the Edgar Allan Poe Review and will be hosting a series of virtual forums for the Poe Studies Association over the coming year. In the Spring of 2024, he will begin a semester of leave to work on a book-length monograph on Poe and comics. He would be happy to find a cabin in the woods, a bungalow on the beach, or even an empty apartment in the city in which to write, provided it has good wifi and room for a possessive ragdoll feline research assistant.
Ben Pauley’s (PhD 2004) chapter on authorship and print publication appeared in the 2023 Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, and one on early eighteenth-century education was published in Daniel Defoe in Context (Cambridge UP) This semester, he also moved out of chairing the English Department at Eastern Connecticut State University in order to take on an interim role as Associate Provost.
Wendy Roberts (PhD 2012) was awarded the 2023 Early American Literature Book Prize for her first book, Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism. She was awarded an NEH Fellowship for 2023-24 for her second book project on the manuscript presence of Phillis Wheatley (Peters).
Suzanne Scanlon (MFA+MA 2023) received the Goldfarb Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, which gave her the opportunity to attend the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA in January 2023.
Josh Smith’s (PhD 2011) article, “The Legend of Saint Brendan in Cotton Vespasian A.xiv.” was published in Seintiau Cymru, Sancti Cambrenses: Astudiaethau ar Seintiau Cymru/Studies in the Saints of Wales (University of Wales Press, 2022) and “Madog of Edeirnion’s Strenua cunctorum: A Welsh-Latin Poem in Praise of Geoffrey of Monmouth” in The North American Journal of Celtic Studies 6: 1-14 (2022). Along with Claire M. Waters (PhD 1998, CLS) and Steven Rozenski (BA 2002), Josh also edited Mystics, Goddesses, Lovers, and Teachers – Medieval Visions and their Legacies: Studies in Honour of Barbara Newman (Brepols, 2023). Josh was also awarded a Scholarly Editions and Translations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, enabling him to spend two years translating a group of Middle Welsh texts known as Brut y Brenhinedd.
Kira Tucker (MFA+MA 2023) took part in the 2023 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, held in July at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.
Abram Van Engen (PhD 2010) has been promoted to an endowed chair at Washington University in St. Louis, and is now the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities.
In Spring 2023, Jade Werner (PhD 2014) was awarded an endowed chair, and is now the proud holder of the Jane E. Ruby Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. The Ruby Chair is awarded in recognition of outstanding teaching and research that has had a demonstrable impact on scholarship and on student learning. Jade also won a Marion & Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship to support the development of teaching resources focused on the global nineteenth century. She was able to carry out research and interviews in Malaysia and Singapore this summer thanks to the fellowship. Finally, her essay, co-written with Mimi Warnick, entitled “How to See Global Religion,” came out in a special issue of MLQ devoted to “Talking About Religion in 18th- and 19th-Century Literature.”
In July, Sarah Wilson (PhD 2020) took on the position at the University of Chicago of Assistant Director of Engagement, Leadership & Society Initiative.