English News - Fall 2009

Richard Louis Levin, Professor Emeritus of English at Stony Brook, died on October 30 at the age of 87.

Professor Levin was a founding member of the original faculty of the SUNY College on Long Island at Oyster Bay, which in 1962 became SUNY at Stony Brook. There he was the first chairman of the English Department.

An eminent Shakespearian, Levin received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an appointment as a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at Tel Aviv University. He published scores of articles and three scholarly books, the first of which, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama, won the Explicator Award for "the best book published in 1971 in the field of English or American Literature." His New Readings Vs. Old Plays appeared in 1982. His third book, Looking for an Argument, which was published in 2003, reflects Levin's wit and his rigorous interest in scholarly debate, which continued through his productive retirement. He is survived by his wife, Muriel, his sons, David and Daniel, and his granddaughter, Isabella.

Details of a memorial service to be held at the University will be announced at a later date.

Patricia A. Dunn presented a paper, "Exposing Judgments about Morality in Public Discourse on Grammar," at the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), March 13, 2009, in San Francisco.

Heidi Hutner gave an invited lecture on "Ecofeminism and Environmentalism" at Pratt Institute for Greenweek in Spring 2009. She will give the keynote address, "The Toxic Womb: Ecofeminist Interpretations of Mothering and the Environment," at the upcoming ARM conference on Mothering and Environmentalism in Toronto. Professor Hutner and Nicole Garret, a second-year PhD student, are co-editing two books: The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph  and The Conclusion to the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph to be published by Broadview Literary Texts, in 2010. 

E. Ann Kaplan presented an invited paper, "Can Trauma be Represented? Aesthetic Strategies and Ethical Issues," at a conference,  "Aftermath," organized by the Nieman Foundation, Harvard University, on February 27, 2009. Kaplan presented another paper, "Trauma Future Tense: Cuaron's The Children of Men," at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, also at Harvard University, on March 28, 2009. Her article.  "Women, Trauma and Late Modernity: Sontag, Duras and Silence in Cinema 1960-1980" appeared in the journal Framework, No. 50 (Spring 2009): 158-173. In May 2009, she was given the honorary Distinguished Career Award by The Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Peter Manning served as speaker/respondent at the inaugural meeting of the NYC Area Romantics group, "Romanticism's Cultures of Performance," at Fordham University in April 2009. He delivered a paper,  "Poetry from the North: William Wordsworth and Tony Harrison," at the meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism at Duke University in  May 2009; in May he also served on the Planning Committee for the upcoming "Romanticism and the City" Conference of the International Conference on Romanticism, to be held in November 2009 at CUNY. In summer 2009 he led an interdisciplinary doctoral seminar funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and hosted by HISB.  His article, "Cobbett's Chopstick Festival: Event, Representation, Context," appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 31 (2009), 99-112, and an earlier essay, "Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and its Epigraphs," was reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism vol. 206, ed. Kathy D. Darrow (Detroit: Gale/Cengage Learning, 2009), 266-74.
 
Celia Marshik presented a paper, "'Definite, rather bad, taste?':  Ottoline Morrell In and Out of the Eyes of Bloomsbury," at the Nineteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf on June 6, 2009, in New York.

Joaquin Martinez Pizarro presented a paper, "Doomed Window-Shopping in Late-Antique Gaul: Thoughts on the Literary Study of Historiography," at the International Medieval Conference held at the University of Leeds (UK) on July 13, 2009.

Adrienne Munich has received a contract from Indiana University Press for an edited collection entitled Fashion in Film.  She has received a publication grant from the Columbia Seminars to defray some publication costs of the volume.

Andrew Newmanpresented a paper, "'Tatamy’s Place': Communal Identity and Individual Aspirations in the Delaware Valley," in March 2009 at the Society of Early Americanists Sixth Biennial Conference in Hamilton, Bermuda, where he also chaired a panel on "Triangulations" and spoke about the transition from graduate school to faculty at the Graduate Student Breakfast. With Ned Landsman from the History Department, Professor Newman co-organized an inter-disciplinary conference held March 20-21 at Stony Brook on "The Worlds of Lion Gardiner, c. 1599-1663: Crossings and Boundaries."

Ayesha Ramachandran presented three papers this spring: an invited lecture, "A War of Worlds: Becoming Early Modern and the Challenge of Comparison" at the Comparative Early Modernities conference on 18 April 2009 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and two conference papers entitled "Scythians in the New World" (at the Society for Early Americanists in Bermuda, March 2009) and "Worldmaking and Its Discontents: Mercator's Atlas and Hexameral Cartography" (at the Society for Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Geneva, May 2009).

Jeffrey Santa Ana received the Faculty Diversity Program Award from the Office of Diversity and Educational Equity, State University of New York In February 2009. He published an essay: "Commodity, Race and Emotion: The Racial Commercialization of Human Feeling in Corporate Consumerism," in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 33, edited by Norman K. Denzin (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2009), 109-128. He also presented three papers: "The Anxiety of Neoliberal Capital: Asian Migrants and the Global City in Recent Hollywood Film," at Acts of Elaboration: A Symposium on Asian American Studies in the Northeast in May 2009 at Boston College; "Immigrants in a Time of Neoliberalism: The Anxiety of Asian Migration in Paul Haggis's Crash," at the Association for Asian American Studies in April 2009, in Honolulu, Hawaii; and "A Political Economy of Anger: Theorizing the Rage of Racialized Subjection in the Capitalist Commodity Structure," at the Comparative Literature Association Conference in March 2009 at Harvard University.

Stephen Spector's Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism won the  2008 London Book Festival Prize for the Best General Non-Fiction Book.  He published "Five Questions for Sarah Palin," Jerusalem Post, October 27, 2008; "Feeding Crocodiles," Oxford University Press Blog, April 8, 2009; "What Every Jew Needs to Know about Evangelicals," Jewish Week, May 6, 2009; "Evangelical Support for Israel: Promise, Prophecy, Gratitude, Love and Remorse," Jerusalem Post Christian Edition Magazine, May 2009; "What Every Jew Needs to Know about Evangelicals," reprinted in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, May 22, 2009; and "I Will Bless Those Who Bless You," Midstream magazine, Summer 2009, 13-17.  He also gave two talks: "Evangelicals and Israel" at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and the Program for Jewish Civilization, February 18, 2009, and "Christian Zionism" as the Fourth Annual Margolis Lecture on the Jewish Experience in the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, February 23, 2009.  He was appointed Senior Fellow, Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook.

Jesse Curran presented a paper, "Elegy and Ecology in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," at the 19th Century Studies Conference on March 26, 2009, in Milwaukee.

Meghan Fox presented a paper, "'London Lies Before Me under Mist': The Role of the City in Navigating Subjectivity in The Waves," at The 19th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf on June 6, 2009, in New York City.

Nicole Garret presented a paper, "Aphra Behn's Religious Politics: Oroonoko and 'The Golden Age'" at the Institute for English Studies Conference on Region, Religion, and Early Modern England on April 2, 2009, in London. With Heidi Hutner (see above), she is co-editing two forthcoming books for Broadview Press: The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph  and The Conclusion to the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, for which she is writing the introduction.

Kathryn Klein presented a paper, "Sapphism in the Country: Lesbians in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse," at the International Virginia Woolf Society (IVWS) Conference on June 7, 2009 in New York.

Les Hunter's play "Biggest Break" was produced by Artistic New Directions in New York City in March, 2009. He had a play published, "Cyrano de Bergen County, New Jersey" with Playscripts, Inc. (NY, NY) in August. He has written an article, "Queen's Court: Community Engagement in Queens Theater" for September's edition of American Theatre Magazine. He was interviewed about producing off-off-Broadway theater in the August/September edition of the magazine The Dramatist.

Ula Lukszo presented a paper, "Bringing a Suppressed World to Light: Alterations to the Postcolonial Travel Narrative in Mariusz Wilk's Woloka," at the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference on April 4, 2009, in New York City. The paper went on to win the top award for graduate papers presented at the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference this year. She also presented a paper, "Self-Fashioning Identity: Clothing and Subjectivity in Orlando: A Biography," at the Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference on June 5, 2009, also in New York City.

Lauren Neefe presented two papers" "'Rook' Errant: Aural Sophistication and Lyric Poiesis in Sylvia Plath's 'Black Rook in Rainy Weather,'" at the Society for Textual Scholarship International Conference, on March 18, 2009, in New York City; and  "The Apostrophic Relay: Purloining the Lyric Heart of Coleridge's Dejection Ode," at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, on May 23, 2009, in Durham, North Carolina. She attended the seminar, "Voice, Representation, Ideology," led by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg and Michael Steinberg, at the 33rd summer session of the School for Criticism & Theory, June 14–July 23, 2009, at Cornell. She also attended the American Antiquarian Society's Summer Book History Seminar, "Book History and Media History," led by Lisa Gitelman and Meredith McGill, June 22–26, 2009, in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Nicole Sears presented a workshop entitled, "All Night in a Day" at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Conference on November 19, 2008, in San Antonio.

Craig Stormont published an article, "Charles Olson and the Nature of Destructive Humanism," in Big Bridge: A Webzine of Poetry, Vol. 4, No. 2, in August 2009. He also published a poem, "Ceremony," in the spring 2009 edition of the literary journal Process: The Basement Tapes, printed in Gloucester, Ma.

Rachel Walsh published entries on Valerie Martin's Property and Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, in The Encyclopedia of Slavery and Freedom in American Literature (2010).  She presented "Reading for the Shadows:  Repetition and the Uncanny in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses" at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in July of 2009.  She was also awarded a scholarship by the John W. Hunt and Faulkner Journal, in support of her research. In the Summer of 2009, she participated in the "Framing the Object" Dissertation Seminar, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and directed by Professor Manning.