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Brian Bouldrey gave the plenary presentation at the fall conference for the Institute for Pilgrimage Studies at William & Mary, “The Accidental Highway: US Highway 20 and The Pilgrimage to Main Street, USA.”
Katharine Breen delivered a plenary lecture at the 8th International Piers Plowman Society Conference in London in July – her first in-person conference presentation since the pandemic. A version of her talk, entitled “Degrees of Embodiment, or the Personifications’ New Clothes,” will be published in the 2024 volume of the Society’s journal. Her recent Speculum essay, “Personification and Gender Fluidity in the Psychomachia and its Early Reception,” was featured on the website of Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index as its September 2024 article of the month. She is also the author of a great many long emails in her capacity as department chair.
Tracy C. Davis published Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform with Cambridge University Press. Her co-edited collection, The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies will appear in early 2024. Along with Ivy Wilson (English) and Jesse Rosenberg (Music) she is leading the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “On Decolonizing Theatre” in 2023-2024; events can be found here.
Kasey Evans published a chapter in New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare, part of the Routledge Studies in Shakespeare series, entitled “The Time Is Out of Joint: Hamlet Speaks with the Dead.” In February 2024, she will travel to the annual conference of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York, where she will participate in a panel discussion about psychoanalysis and literary criticism. The Hamlet piece derives from her practically-perpetual book project Renaissance Resurrections.
Harris Feinsod recently published an essay on David Berman in Post45. For the centennial of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, he was interviewed on the podcast Close Readings with Kamran Javadizadeh. His essay “Canal Zone Modernism” was reprinted in Bloomsbury’s Central American Literature as World Literature. In addition to delivering papers at ACLA, MSA, the Louisville Conference, and MLA (where he was elected to the Executive Committee for Poetry and Poetics), he was a keynote speaker at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa conference “Transatlantic Women’s Networks,” and he spoke at a Princeton University event honoring Susan Stewart. At the ACLA, he co-organized a series of plenary sessions on academic unionization that brought together scholars and organizers who participated in recent higher education labor victories. In 2023–24, he is on research leave writing a book on modernism and the sea, co-editing an anthology on anticolonial thought, and serving enthusiastically on fifteen dissertation committees.
Christine Froula’s “Torvald’s Question: Italo Svevo and James Joyce Stage Modern Masculinity” is forthcoming in Comparative Drama (Spring 2024). It draws on her translation of Svevo’s play Un Marito and her (remote) talk on Svevo, Joyce, and the Quintessence of Post-Ibsenism at the 2023 Comparative Drama Conference.
Two books of poems by Reginald Gibbons are forthcoming—Three Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and Young Woman With a Cane, which will also includes several of RG’s small etchings (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). Gibbons has completed and will soon submit a third book of new poems, Say All of It, to publishers, while he and Ilya Kutik are now submitting two translation projects to publishers—co-translations of Ilya Kutik’s selected poems, and co-translations of selected poems of Boris Pasternak. At the June 2023 Printers Row Lit Fest, Gibbons gave a joint reading with Ana Castillo from the new fourth edition (paperback) of his novel Sweetbitter (which in its first edition won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award). Leaving his office in University Hall, he donated 2200 volumes of poetry to the Poetry Foundation, and another 800 books elsewhere. He is now working on a collection of essays both autobiographical and about writing poetry, and is returning simultaneously to a book of translations of Hellenistic poems.
Daisy Hernández’s next nonfiction book is under contract with Hogarth Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The new book interrogates citizenship and the American psyche, braiding memoir, history, and cultural criticism to reframe understandings of how we define a citizen and how that affects our personal and national identities.
Over the last few months, Lauren M. Jackson has contributed essays to The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and BOMB magazine, including an essay on Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and reviews of Maya Binyam’s debut novel Hangman and Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman In Me. She completed the manuscript for her second book of essays, “Back,” and has been grateful for the opportunity to read excerpts of this work as a part of Urbana’s Pygmalion Festival and the Critical Speaker Series at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has also helped welcome two newly published books in conversations with their authors hosted by the Seminary Co-op—Madonna’s Erotica by Michael Dango and Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us by Karen Tongson—and made her return to the Switched On Pop podcast to discourse on Taylor Swift (again), with more podding to come.