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Audio rights were acquired for Juan Martinez’s 2023 novel Extended Stay, and the audiobook was released in November. The novel was recently selected as the New York Public Library’s Book of the Day and has been shortlisted for the Chicago Review of Books Prize. A Polish translation of his story “Esther (1855)” is due out from Nowa Fantastyka. New short stories are forthcoming in The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Sunday Morning Transport, and elsewhere in early 2024.
Jeffrey Masten spoke in March at “The Canon of Shakespeare at 400” conference, at the Marco Institute (U Tennessee), on the topic “Marlowe’s First Folio.” He gave a lecture and graduate seminar in the series “Queer and Trans Case Studies in Early Modern Literature” in Comparative Lit at Yale University this fall. Forthcoming publications include two book chapters: “Frolic,” in Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World (Edinburgh UP); and “Marlowe’s Queer Futures: Edward and Richard, the Second,” in Histories of the Future, c. 1600: On Shakespeare and Thinking Ahead (U Penn Press).
Back in the day, Barbara Newman spent nine years as a “Brepols slave,” working on the highly labor-intensive editorial board of their series on “Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts.” Now, much to her delight, that same series has published a festschrift in her honor: Mystics, Goddesses, Lovers, and Teachers: Medieval Visions and Their Legacies. The volume came out in October, edited by her former students Steven Rozenski, Joshua Byron Smith, and Claire Waters. Cordial thanks to all of them and all 18 contributors!
Sarah Schulman has been active in a number of realms. Her musical, SHIMMER, with music by Anthony Davis and lyrics by Michael Korie, and directed by Northwestern alum Jess McLeod, will be workshopped at Northwestern with public performances on January 25 in the evening and January 28 in the afternoon. Also forthcoming are “Alice Neel: Ahead of the Diminshing World,” in Alice Neel’s Queer Portraiture (David Zwirner Books, March 2024); Conversations with Sarah Schulman, edited by Will Brantly (University Press of Mississippi, February 2024), liner notes for All The Beauty and The Bloodshed directed by Laura Poitras for the Criterion Collection (January 2024). Sarah’s work as a journalist, activist, and novelist is extensively discussed in “Queer Kinship in Sarah Schulman’s AIDS Novels” (Routledge 2024), a research monograph juxtaposing the works about the AIDS epidemic which were well-received by mainstream America with Schulman’s own output as a “bard of AIDS burnout,” in the words of Edmund White.
Regina Schwartz’s “Poetics of the Holy: On Michael Lieb,” will be published in Milton Quarterly, ed. David Loewenstein in 2024. The tribute to Lieb was given at the Newberry Milton Seminar in May, 2023. Her article “The Letter and the Spirit” will appear in Knowing Judgements: Literature and the Legal Imaginary. ed. Subha Mukherji, Palgrave Press, also in 2024.
Charif Shanahan’s second book, Trace Evidence: poems, was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award. Poems from the collection appear in The Nation, The New Yorker, and On Being, among other publications, along with feature reviews and interviews in LARB, The Paris Review, Poets.org, and elsewhere. In support of the collection, Shanahan has appeared at universities, cultural centers, and book festivals across the country and in the UK, in conversation with Claudia Rankine, A. Van Jordan, Pádraig Ó Tuama, and others. His work in the collection has also been recognized by the Grammys, the CHIRBy Awards, and the Hawthornden Foundation. In Fall 2022, Shanahan was invited to serve as the Guest Editor of Poetry, a post he held until July 2023.
Laurie Shannon organized the Second Anne Lister Society Meeting, held in Halifax, West Yorkshire in April 2023; nineteen speakers presented new research on the Regency diarist and queer polymath. In collaboration with the Calderdale Council and the West Yorkshire Archive Service, she also announced there that advanced discussions are underway with Oxford University Press to edit a scholarly edition of Lister’s five-million-word diary—a monumental emerging text in the history of English writing. She published “A Regular Oddity: Natural History and Anne Lister’s Queer Theory of Tradition” in a Cambridge University Press collection, Decoding Anne Lister: From the Archive to Gentleman Jack. On the Shakespeare front, Shannon presented a lecture, entitled “Frailty’s Name,” as a plenary session at the annual Boston University Colloquium on Literature, Philosophy, and Ethics (2023).
After ten years spent leading the Weinberg College Advising team, first as Director and then as Assistant Dean, Liz Trubey has picked up the mantle of Associate Dean for Undergraduate Academic Affairs. While daunted by the prospect of following in Mary Finn’s footsteps, Liz is excited by the opportunity to help shape the experience of undergraduates and faculty and to lead the fantastic team in the Office of Undergraduate Studies and Advising.
Wendy Wall was the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar last year, which meant that she visited five (mostly liberal arts) colleges to energize undergraduate intellectual engagement and to share research on subjects such as: early modern recipes and science; how newly discovered female poets can force us to rethink what we think we know of the past; queer Shakespeare; and Shakespeare and race. She gave papers at the Renaissance Society of America (on Feminist Digital Practice; and on Hester Pulter’s weird atomism) and at the Shakespeare Association of America (on early modern philosophies of shared common matter and racial difference). In the summer, she travelled to Cottered, England to walk in Hester Pulter’s footsteps, at her church and on her estate. This year, she returned to Stateville Correctional Center to teach a fall 2023 literature course entitled “Far From Home: Journeys, Odysseys, and Refugees.”
Will West spent three weeks in March at Cill Rialaig, Ballinskelligs, where he experimented with translating the sixteenth-century poetry of English-language poet Edmund Spenser and Irish-language poets like Tadhg Óg Ó Huiginn and Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird linguistically, formally, materially, and geographically into the landscape of the west coast of Ireland. In May he presented some of this work as “Spenser’s GPS” at the “Creating Renaissance Criticism” conference at Oxford University. Over the summer he also presented work on the Negro Renaissance and the Italian Renaissance at “The Concept of the Renaissance” in Rome and on the quantum sublime of seventeenth-century continental drama in Verona.
In the spring of 2023, Tristram Wolff spent a month as a visiting scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, where he gave three talks, worked on two new writing projects, and ate at one of the strangest great restaurants in France. The first writing project was a translation of the recently published novella Background for Love, written in German in 1932 by editor and publisher Helen Wolff (his grandmother) when she was in her 20s, which will appear in English in June 2024 with Pushkin Press. The second was an article for a special issue of the Yearbook in Comparative Literature on “languages of critique,” called “Not Feeling It: Hazlitt, Affect, and Critique,” which comes out at the end of the year. He’s now working on an article for a Routledge collection on global romanticism, reading the deployment of romantic tropes in nineteenth-century Haitian poet Oswald Durand.