A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Associate Professor of English Colin Rafferty
Associate Professor of English Colin Rafferty recently had two excerpts from his forthcoming book “Execute the Office: Essays with Presidents” appeared on The Rumpus. The first, “Preamble,” is the first essay of the book, while the second, “Dissolve To,” considers the Reagan presidency through the lenses of film scripts and John Wayne movies.
Associate Professor of Linguistics Janie Lee
Associate Professor of Linguistics Janie Lee led a teach-in in the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. The teach-in was part of the workshop “Room at the Table: Locating Asian Identity in Linguistics and the LSA.” In it, Lee gave a short presentation on teaching Asian American linguistics and facilitated an informal discussion. The conference was held virtually from January 7 through January 10, 2021.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea recently contributed to “Poetics of Persistence in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead: Perspectives on the Thirtieth Anniversary,” a special session of the virtual Modern Language Association conference in January 2021. The MLA is the flagship organization for literary studies in the United States.
Associate Professor of English Colin Rafferty’s forthcoming essay collection, Execute the Office: Essays with Presidents, will be released by Baobab Press in Reno, Nevada.
Execute the Office uses lyric prose and formal invention to explore the humanity, or lack thereof, in each of the forty-five American presidents. Whether these powerful individuals have been remembered for infamous deeds or heroism, or they have been forgotten as placeholders in the annals of America, too often presidents are commemorated by the sterility of simple fact. Execute the Office builds upon factual accuracy with essays that are equally invested in lyrical writing and experimental forms. To balance these factions, Execute the Office uses constraint, metaphor, allusion, and epiphany to explore not just the facts and artifacts of history, but describe the connections between those facts and human nature in thought-provoking and inventive ways. These essays discuss the modes in which we remember. Through screenplays, death songs, footnotes, infinite rooms, evacuation routes, and nomenclatures, to name a few examples, these diverse essays engage with history from fresh perspectives. Execute the Office contains histories in and of unusual objects. While unfamiliar at first, they soon become distinct, unforgettable, profound, human.
October 20th is National Day On Writing. Around UMW and all over the globe people will share their love for writing through the #WhyIWrite campaign sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English. Join others on Simpson’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages and tell us why you write. You can also go to add your thoughts and comments to Simpson’s Call to Contribute page and document your experiences during COVID-19. https://libraries.umw.edu/call-to-contribute-submission-form/
#WhyIWrite #NDoW109
Sponsored by UMW Libraries, UMW English and Linguistics, UMW Honors Council and the UMW Creative Writing Club.
Cover of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability
Professor of English Chris Foss has published a book chapter entitled “‘Here There Be Monsters’: Mapping Novel Representations of the Relationship between Disability and Monstrosity in Recent Graphic Narratives and Comic Books” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, a significant new collection of essays edited by Alice Hall that according to the press “brings together some of the most influential and important contemporary perspectives in this growing field” of disability studies. Notable names among the contributors include Elizabeth Donaldson, Chris Gabbard, Leon Hilton, Petra Kuppers, David Mitchell, Michael Northen, Sami Schalk, and Jess Waggoner.
Foss’s chapter argues that three recent comics texts each present an instructive range of ambiguous, disabling, but above all enabling possibilities where the nexus of disability and monstrosity is concerned: the highly praised comics collections Monstress [Volumes 1 and 2] by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (2016-17), the much ballyhooed debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters [Book One] by Emil Ferris (2017), and the unheralded four-page Monster Girl comic by Helene Fischer (2017). These texts offer an illuminating starting point for the further exploration of the metaphorical assumptions about disability and monstrosity with which they engage, all the while reaffirming the crucial role of the genre’s own hybridity in foregrounding such considerations. That is, the location of the monstrous body in this particular textual format offers a range of diverse possibilities for both reinforcing and exploding the normative borders that have been constructed to define what is monstrous as dangerous/deformed/diseased. What is more, these texts encourage an intersectional approach to how multiple other facets of the monstrous (such as class-based/socioeconomic, ethnic/racial, and gendered/sexual aspects) overlap with disabled monstrosity and together blur, cross, deconstruct, and/or erase numerous lines along their various borders around the human.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “Dracula as Inter-American Film Icon: Universal Pictures and Cinematográfica ABSA” in Review of International American Studies, the flagship journal of the International American Studies Association: https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/article/view/8908/7558
