December 6, 2025

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Foss Gives Wilde Presentation in Charlotte

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Professor of English Chris Foss, wearing an Oscar Wilde T-shirt.

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

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.

Mathur Presents Paper at World Shakespeare Congress

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Professor of English Maya Mathur

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.

 

Dasgupta Presents on the Indian Partition at Two Conferences

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Associate Professor of English Shumona Dasgupta

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.

Lorentzen Presents a Paper at Dickens Society Symposium

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Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

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.

Richards Presents at Faulkner and Yoknaptawpha Conference

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Professor of English Gary Richards

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.

UMW Linguistics Alum Sylvia Sierra ’09 to Release ‘Millennials Talking Media’

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From Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Linguistics Gary Richards:

2009 UMW alumna Sylvia Sierra is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University

2009 UMW alumna Sylvia Sierra is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University

Congratulations to alumna Sylvia Sierra ’09! She has written the book Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation, scheduled for release from Oxford University Press in September 2021.

Sierra is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University in 2016. Previously, she received a B.A. in Linguistics and Spanish from the University of Mary Washington where she graduated summa cum laude, and worked as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the Instituto Tecnológico de Jiquilpan in Michoacán, Mexico and then as a Prince William County Spanish teacher in Virginia. She also holds a Master of Education (M.Ed.) in Teaching English as a Second Language from UMW and an M.S. in linguistics from Georgetown.
In the new book, Sierra analyzes how millennial friends make intertextual media references (to film, TV shows, books, songs, video games, and internet memes) in their everyday talk for specific interactional functions.
Millennials Talking Media Book Cover“This book examines how a group of U.S. Millennial friends in their late twenties embed both old media (books, songs, films, TV shows) and new media (YouTube videos, video games, and internet memes) in their everyday talk for particular interactional purposes. Multiple case studies are presented featuring the recorded talk of Millennial friends to demonstrate how and why these speakers make media references in their conversations. These recorded conversations are supplemented with participant playback interviews, along with ethnographic field notes. The analysis demonstrates how the speakers phonetically signal media references in the speech stream, how they demonstrate appreciation of the references in their listening behaviors, and how they ultimately use media references for epistemic, framing, and identity construction purposes, often (but not always) when faced with epistemic, or knowledge, imbalances as well as interactional dilemmas, or awkward moments in interaction. The analysis shows how such references contribute to epistemic management and frame shifts in conversation, which is ultimately conducive to different forms of Millennial identity construction. Additionally, this book explores the stereotypes embedded in the media that these Millennials quote, and examines the effects of reproducing those stereotypes in everyday social life. This book explores how the boundaries between screens, online and offline life, language, and identity are porous for Millennials, and weaves together the most current linguistic theories regarding knowledge, framing, and identity work in everyday interaction, illuminating the interplay between these processes.”
For more on the book and Sierra, see https://www.facebook.com/millennialstalkingmedia and sylviasierra.com as well as: instagram @millennialstalkingmedia, twitter @milltalkmedia, and tiktok @millennialstalkingmedia.

Richards Presents at Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival

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Professor and Chair of English Gary Richards

Professor and Chair of English Gary Richards

Gary Richards, Professor of English, recently led the Books and Beignets discussion of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, held virtually March 24-28, 2021. The discussion marked the seventieth anniversary of The Rose Tattoo‘s Broadway opening as well as Richards’s fifteenth year of leading this annual event.

McAllister Publishes Article, Book Review

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Professor of English Marie McAllister

Professor of English Marie McAllister

Marie McAllister, Professor of English, recently published “Rhetoric, the Pox, and the Grand Tour,” which appeared as the lead article in the April 2021 issue of Eighteenth-Century Life.

McAllister also recently published a review of Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination, by Noelle Gallagher, in Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Barrenechea Presents at American Comparative Literature Association

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Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea

Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea

Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently presented the paper “A Hemispheric World of Differences: Luis Alberto Sánchez and Stanley T. Williams” at the meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, which took place virtually this year.