The most recent translation by Jim Gaines (Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures) has been published in the April edition of the online journal Eerie Digest. The short story “Locusts!” takes place in colonial Algeria in the late 19th century and concerns the descent of a plague of locusts on a farmstead. The reaction of the local inhabitants and the gut-wrenching devastation that follows are vividly described. The story forms part of Daudet’s collection, Letters From My Mill, that Gaines has been translating over the past couple of years, especially some of the sections that deal with the interactions of French settlers and travelers in the larger Mediterranean world.
Levin Publishes Essay on Robert Frost
Provost Jonathan Levin’s essay “Robert Frost and Pragmatism” appears in Robert Frost in Context, edited by Mark Richardson (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The essay focuses especially on Frost’s relationship with Harvard psychologist, philosopher, and public intellectual William James, whose influence on American literary modernism Levin addresses more generally in his 1999 book The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism. This new critical volume, part of the Literature in Context series from Cambridge, offers a fresh, multifaceted assessment of Robert Frost’s life and works. Nearly every aspect of the poet’s career is treated: his interest in poetics and style; his role as a public figure; his deep fascination with science, psychology, and education; his peculiar and difficult relation to religion; his investments, as thinker and writer, in politics and war; the way he dealt with problems of mental illness that beset his sister and two of his children; and, finally, the complex geo-political contexts that inform some of his best poetry.
McClurken to Serve as Special Assistant to the Provost
Jeffrey McClurken has agreed to serve as Special Assistant to the Provost for Technology, Teaching, and Innovation. A graduate of Mary Washington College (BA) and Johns Hopkins University (MA, PhD), McClurken will complete his service as Chair of the Department of History & American Studies in May, 2014. In this half-time administrative appointment, Jeff will sit on Academic Affairs Council and the President’s Technology Advisory Council and will oversee the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies.
Jeff McClurken
He will also oversee coordination of academic programming in the Convergence Center, due to open in summer 2014. Jeff is a recent recipient of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award, with particular recognition for Teaching with Technology. He has a very strong record of regional and national participation in conversations about the digital humanities and the use of technology in teaching and learning, including his contributions to the ProfHacker blog in the Chronicle of Higher Education and articles published by the Journal of the Association of History and Computing, the New School/MacArthur Foundation, the Society of American Archivists, and Hacking the Academy. He serves as the Digital History Review Editor for the Journal of American History. He is also frequently invited to other colleges and universities to talk about these issues.
Working with faculty and staff colleagues here at UMW, Jeff has been deeply engaged with the various initiatives that have made UMW a leader among liberal arts colleges in embracing the transformational potential of new technologies.
Clayton Publishes Handbook Chapter
Courtney Clayton, Assistant Professor of Education, has published a chapter in the SAGE Research Methods Cases handbook. Her chapter focuses on how to use Constructivist Grounded Theory in Qualitative Research. SAGE Research Methods Cases is a collection of case studies of real social research, specially commissioned and designed to help students and researchers understand abstract methodological concepts in practice.
Sellers Presents at MCEAS Conference
Jason Sellers, assistant professor of History and American Studies, presented a paper at “From Conquest to Identity: New Jersey and the Middle Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” a conference held in Trenton, N.J. March 27-28, sponsored by the New Jersey Council on the Humanities and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Sellers’s paper, “Creating Histories and Recovering Autonomy in the Hudson Valley,” was part of a panel considering the memories and legacies of England’s 1664 conquest of New Netherlands.
Rafferty Publishes Essay, Moderates Panel
Colin Rafferty, Assistant Professor of English, recently published an essay “This Day in History,” which appears in the newest issue of the literary journal Sou’wester.
He also moderated the panel “Organizing the Truth: Building the Nonfiction Canon” on Friday, February 28, 2014, at the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Seattle, Washington. The largest literary conference in North America, AWP celebrates the authors, teachers, students, writing programs, literary centers, and publishers of that region and saw more than 13,000 writers and readers in attendance this year.
C-SPAN College Classroom
Several students in Professor Stephen Farnsworth’s political science classes and UMW honors students participated in the C-SPAN college classroom program and met with recent UMW political science graduates during a day-long program in Washington, D.C., on March 31. The C-SPAN program, which included a conversation about presidents and the mass media with UMW students and those at other universities, is scheduled to air on CSPAN3 at 5 p.m. on Friday, April 4.
Smith Speaks at Preservation Symposium
Andréa Livi Smith, assistant professor and director of the Center for Historic Preservation, gave an invited talk at the Directions in Twenty-First Century Preservation Symposium. The symposium was organized by Historic New England and hosted by Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI on March 29. The national audience included students from over a dozen institutions was well as professionals and researchers. Smith’s talk, entitled “Don’t be That Guy,” discussed the importance of garnering and maintaining allies in the process of preservation.
Barrenechea Contributes to Decennial “State of the Discipline” Report
Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, recently published a peer-reviewed entry that forms part of the decennial “state of the discipline” report of the Comparative American Literature Association. His contribution on “American Literature” as a hemispheric (rather than nation-centered) object of study is part of the online section on the “Ideas of the Decade”: http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/american-literature.
Richards Presents at Southern Literary Festival, Conference
Gary Richards, Associate Professor of English, was the scholar facilitator of the Breakfast Book Club’s discussion of The Glass Menagerie at the 28th Annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival held in New Orleans March 19-23. He also presented the paper “It’s Gonna Cost You More than Supper: Mapping Gay Desire in Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carre” at “Other Souths: Approaches, Allainces, Antagonisms,” the Society for the Study of Southern Literature biennial conference held in Arlington March 27-29.