A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul Fallon
Paul Fallon, Associate Professor of Linguistics, presented a poster on “Proto-Agaw in relation to Bender’s Proto-Cushitic” on January 8, 2022 at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, held in Washington, D.C.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “Fear and Loathing in São Paulo: Slum Metaphysics in the ‘Coffin Joe’ Triptych (1964-2008)” in a special issue of Telos on “The Modern City in World Cinema.”
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “A Hemispheric World of Differences: Literature of the Americas, 1982-2000,” the lead essay in the collection Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora: From the Americas to the World, edited by Monika Kaup and John Ochoa and issued from Lexington Books.
Professor of English Chris Foss, wearing an Oscar Wilde T-shirt.
On October 22, Professor of English Chris Foss presented a paper entitled “Reflection and Refraction in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Selfish Giant’ and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant” at the annual conference of the Victorians Institute in Charlotte, NC.
Foss first examined Wilde’s literary endorsement of fantasy over realism as a valuable entry point for considering Victorian reflections on disability and freakery, in particular where the nexus of poverty and disability-aligned difference is concerned. Seeing the Giant’s peculiar body as aligned with other nonnormative ones, especially freakish bodies, opens a new appreciation for how the story stands out relative to many other Victorian literary representations of disability.
Victorians Institute Program Cover
Wilde’s prison literature testifies to the extent to which Wilde’s own enfreakment and enfoolment in jail provided profound personal experiences of physical and psychological illness/disability that led him to refract but ultimately retain the tenor of his fairy tale. In the second half of the paper, Foss suggested how Barnard’s 2013 film both builds upon and departs from its Victorian predecessor’s approach. While employing a decidedly darker and unrelentingly realistic lens, Barnard’s film reinforces Wilde’s exposure of the ill treatment of and the damage done to disability-aligned bodies/minds, as well as his emphasis upon love and responsiveness in the face of suffering and loss.
Bringing together the reflection and refraction of Victorian ways of seeing disability-aligned difference through the pairing of these two texts compellingly supports the value of continuing the conversations around disability that Wilde’s Victorian fairy tales prompted over 125 years ago.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “The Jungle and the Whale: Vortices of Nation in Moby-Dick and La vorágine” in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, the flagship Melville journal.
Professor of English Maya Mathur
Professor of English Maya Mathur presented the paper, “Eat the Rich: Race, Class, and Caste in Bornila Chatterjee’s The Hungry,” at the World Shakespeare Congress, which was held virtually from July 19-24, 2021. Her paper examined the connection between racial difference in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and class and caste tension in Bornila Chatterjee’s The Hungry, a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.
Associate Professor of English Shumona Dasgupta
Associate Professor of English Shumona Dasgupta recently presented on representations of the Indian partition at two professional conferences.
She presented “Subaltern Pasts: Other Archives of the Indian Partition (1947)” at the thirtieth annual British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies conference (BCPSC) hosted by the Georgia Southern University, GA (February 15-19, 2021) and held as a virtual conference.
She also presented “A Geography of Crisis: Memorializing the Partition (1947) in Indian Cinema” at the fifth annual Memory Studies Conference (MSA) hosted by the University of Warsaw, Poland (July 5-9, 2021), rescheduled from 2020, and held as a virtual conference.
Eric Lorentzen, Professor of English
Eric G Lorentzen, Professor of English, presented a paper as part of the “Dickens and Education” panel of the annual Dickens Society Symposium this week. His talk, “Happy Shepherd-Boys and Closing Prison-Houses: The Importance of Connection in Wordsworth, Dickens, and Tolstoy,” originated in a UMW Faculty Development Summer Grant, and detailed, in part, the creation of a new course that he is planning to offer at UMW during the 2022-2023 academic year. The course will examine a philosophical genealogy of the “continuity of the self” that begins with Wordsworth and other Romantic poets, continues through Dickens and other Victorian novelists, later spreads globally to writers like Tolstoy, extends to contemporary short stories of the late 20th and early 21st century, and finally permeates many forms of popular American culture, from Disney films to teen dramas. The course will also include aspects of popular culture in the form of literary tourism, a component about which Professor Lorentzen plans to continue to research, and about which he will present in a subsequent paper, in England during the summer of 2022.
Professor of English Gary Richards
Gary Richards, Professor of English, presented the paper “Circling New Orleans: Faulkner’s Mosquitoes and Welty’s ‘No Place for You, My Love'” on the “Remapping Southern Geographies” panel at the 47th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held digitally July 18-21, 2021. This year’s conference, titled “Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence,” put writer William Faulkner in dialogue with fellow twentieth-century Mississippi writers Eudora Welty and Richard Wright.