Gary Richards, Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, recently led the breakfast book club discussion of Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) at the 2017 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. In the 11 years that Richards has annually led this group, it has covered a range of Southern writers, including George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Ellen Gilchrist and, of course, Tennessee Williams.
Lorentzen Presents Paper at NeMLA Conference
Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English, presented a paper titled “Reading the World, Reading the Word: Alternative Literacies in the Victorian Novel” at the annual Northeastern Modern Language Association conference in Baltimore, which took place March 23-26. Dr. Lorentzen’s talk focused on resistant methodologies and strategies for reading Victorian social institutions, and their treatment by various novelists of the period, which often involved subversive literacies and epistemologies designed to offer re-visions of dominant ideologies.
Konieczny Publishes in Journal of Algebra and Its Applications
Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, published a research article, A new definition of conjugacy for semigroups, in the Journal of Algebra and Its Applications. This research has been supported by a 2015-17 Waple Professorship.
Lee Presents Research at Conference
Janie Lee, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, presented a paper titled “Ideologies of Language Competence and Citizenship in South Korean Television” at the 40th Annual Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Portland, Oregon (March 18-21). The presentation examined evaluative remarks made on foreign-born men’s Korean fluency in a popular TV show and argued that these men’s race and gender play a role in their exclusion from Korean nationhood.
Farnsworth Published in Washington Post
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, is co-author of an opinion column on early news coverage of President Trump that appeared on the “Monkey Cage” blog of the Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/02/28/news-coverage-of-trump-is-really-really-negative-even-on-fox-news/?utm_term=.3fab424e8551
Foss Lectures in Liverpool
On Wednesday, March 1, Professor of English Chris Foss presented a 45-minute lecture as part of the Disability and the Emotions Seminar Series hosted by the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University.
His talk, “‘For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts’: Dis/enabling Narratives and the Affect of Pity in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Birthday of the Infanta,’” Foss argued that Wilde’s fairy tale about the death of a performing dwarf at the Spanish court may appear mired in damaging stereotype and maudlin melodrama, but it nonetheless suggests more progressive emotionally based possibilities for sympathy, acceptance and even identification rather than paternalistic pity. Wilde’s text invites readers to recognize its seemingly simultaneous manipulation of the narrative toward a reliance upon and a critique of the consumption of pain necessary to the workings of the affect of pity. It further forces readers to acknowledge their own complicity in this pity and pain, ultimately revealing crucial complexities inherent in such emotional responses to disability.
Kraus Presents to Rappahannock Music Society
On Monday, April 3, at 11 a.m., Andrew Kraus, Adjunct Professor of Piano at the University of Mary Washington, will present “An Introduction to Peter Feuchtwanger’s Piano Exercises for Curing Playing-Related Disorders in Pianists as Well as for Learning a Functionally Natural Behaviour in Piano Playing” for the Rappahannock Music Society(http://www.rappahannockmusicsociety.org/) in the theater of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library.
Mr. Kraus has performed as a soloist across the U.S., Europe and Asia in recitals. Elke Walter, writing in the Frankische Landeszeiting on April 25, 2014, wrote about Kraus’ premiere performance of his Henselt in Context concert in Bavaria: “Kraus proved to be like a sensitive ‘piano whisperer’ …nimbly acrobatic with his fingers at the keyboard…the pieces…were equally played out with the same radiant vitality. With his highly sensitive interpretive art, Kraus succeeded in presenting a touching tribute to the Schwabacher piano virtuoso, Adolph von Henselt – and simultaneously piano music of the Romantic. First class.”
Follow him on Facebook at Andrew Kraus, Pianist where he blogs, post links to current and upcoming performances. His recordings are available through CDBaby and Amazon.com. He can be reached by email at akraus@umw.edu.
Hirshberg Presents New Research at UVA
Dan Hirshberg, assistant professor of religion, presented a paper titled “Himalayan Syncretism and the Emergence of Padmasambhava as Rdo rje gro lod” for the Tibet Center, East Asia Center, and Buddhist Studies Group at the University of Virginia (March 15, 2017). Relying primarily on comparative analysis of 12th-14th century Tibetan hagiographies and liturgies, as well as iconographical analysis of painting and statuary, this paper extends beyond the initial apotheosis of Padmasambhava (8th ce.), the subject of Hirshberg’s recent book, to his subsequent elaboration and widespread popularization as the Second Buddha in Tibet.
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=e1d532c76223880f1bed40fb4&id=681e4c42cb&e=b04e3f7a48
Larochelle Publishes Chapter of Amazonian Poetry
Jeremy Larochelle, Associate Professor of Spanish, published a book chapter titled “The ‘Brevity of the Planet’: Environmental Loss in Recent Poetry by Contemporary Amazonian Writers,” in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, film, and Literature (Lexington Books). In addition he also recently published translations of two poems by poets from the Peruvian Amazon, Ana Varela Tafur and Percy Vílchez Vela, in the new edition of the Ayahuasca reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine (Synergetic Press).
Farnsworth Presents Research on Presidential Politics, Humor
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, recently presented a co-authored research paper titled “Late Night TV Humor and the Culture of Ridicule” at the Conference on Character Assassination in Theory and Practice at George Mason University.