A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of English Maya Mathur
Maya Mathur, Professor of English in the Department of English and Linguistics, published a book chapter entitled “Identities” in the volume, A Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age. The volume was published by Bloomsbury Academic. The chapter examines the literary origins of early modern comic characters and considers how their portrayal is informed by the sexual, economic, and religious mores of their time.
Anand Rao, professor of communications and director of the Speaking Intensive program and Speaking Center
Professor of Communication Anand Rao was recently added to the Virginia Education Work Group to help guide processes for safe, equitable reopening of schools. He is serving as the representative for the Faculty Senate of Virginia. You can find the Governor’s announcement here: https://www.governor.virginia.gov/newsroom/all-releases/2020/may/headline-856846-en.html?fbclid=IwAR1VlsMzzuPSkST9uDp9_K10RppUvbdEiV-KNuyu4DKD5xkHW0ZFroaM5Yg
Assistant Professor Elizabeth Johnson-Young
Elizabeth Johnson-Young, Assistant Professor of Communication, recently had her co-authored manuscript “Understanding Pediatric Residents’ Communication Decisions Regarding Anticipatory Guidance About Firearms” published in Journal of Health Communication. It is now available on their website and will appear in the next print version. The study was co-authored with emergency pediatricians and investigates decisions of pediatricians to counsel on firearm safety during well-child visits, as recommended by organizations, such as the AAP. Using concepts from the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Health Belief Model, ordinary least squares regression testing and a path analysis demonstrated the impact of several variables on the prioritization of firearm counseling, including pediatrician sex, perceptions of parental viewpoints on, self-efficacy, perceptions of training, and comfort discussing firearms. Future plans include further study, as well as training material for residential programs. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10810730.2020.1745961.
Assistant Professor of English Brenta Blevins
Brenta Blevins, Assistant Professor of English, recently presented at the 2019 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference her project “Composing New Public Rhetorical Possibilities Using Augmented and Mixed Reality.” Blevins analyzed installations of traditional epideictic rhetoric, such as memorial statues and artwork, at institutions that began as schools for women, and, after examining other Augmented Reality (AR) projects, contended that AR compositions, such as class assignments, could offer additional means for expanding campus historical interpretation.
Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon
Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented a paper, “A Survey of Reduplication Types in Blin” at the 2019 Georgetown University Round Table in Washington, DC, on March 31, 2019. This paper examined the various types of word formation involving the copying of all or part of a word root in both nouns and verbs in the Blin language of Eritrea.
Associate Professor of English Kate Haffey
Kate Haffey, Associate Professor of English, has just had her book, Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality: Eddies in Time, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Per the summary on the back of the book, “This book explores the intersection between the recent work on queer temporality and the experiments of literary modernism. Kate Haffey argues that queer theory’s recent work on time owes a debt to modernist authors who developed new ways of representing temporality in their texts. By reading a series of early twentieth-century literary texts from modernists like Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner, and Stein alongside contemporary authors, this book examines the way in which modernist writers challenged narrative conventions of time in ways that both illuminate and foreshadow current scholarship on queer temporality. In her analyses of contemporary novelists and critics Michael Cunningham, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Eve Sedgwick, Haffey also shows that these modernist temporalities have been reconfigured by contemporary authors to develop new approaches to futurity.” Details are available at https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030173005.
Professor of English Chris Foss
Professor of English Chris Foss presented a paper entitled “My Favorite Comic Is Monster Girl: Helene Fischer’s Crip Re-appropriation of Monstrosity” as part of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference at the Wardham Park Marriott in Washington, DC. In his paper, Foss argued that for all the well-deserved accolades that have greeted Marjorie Liu’s Monstress and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Helene Fischer’s humble and unheralded Monster Girl most fully realizes the transformative potential of a crip re-appropriation of monstrosity. Monster Girl features an autistic artist’s rendering of an autistic protagonist. It not only is explicitly engaged in illuminating the lived experience of disability, but it further constitutes a generative starting point for the further exploration of the metaphorical assumptions about disability and monstrosity while reaffirming the crucial role of the genre’s own hybridity in foregrounding such considerations. Even though it is only a short four-page comic, Monster Girl offers a complex tapestry of the nexus of disability and monstrosity, suggesting various enabling possibilities for a crip re-visioning of disabled monstrosity. Embodying the particularly promising potential such a hybrid genre holds for the deconstruction of traditional templates and the (re)construction of empowering alternatives to said monstrosity, it speaks to the wonderful extent to which such a comics text may productively produce excitement and empathy instead of hatred and horror.
Gary Richards, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication
Gary Richards, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, recently facilitated the discussion of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces at the Books and Beignets program of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival held March 27-31 in New Orleans, LA. This program has become a tradition at the festival, and Richards has been leading it now for over a decade, since 2007.
Maya Mathur, Associate Professor of English
Maya Mathur, Associate Professor of English, presented the paper “Twelfth Night in Tragic and Comic Registers” for a panel on “Shakespeare and South Asian Cinema” at the 50th Annual Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference in Washington, DC. Her paper examined two cinematic adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601), Tim Supple’s Twelfth Night (2003) and Atul Kumar’s Piya Behrupiya (2012), that are set partially or wholly on the Indian subcontinent. In the paper, she considers the changes that both directors make to Shakespeare’s play in order to address local contexts and concerns.