August 25, 2019

Whalen Publishes Essay of Media Archaeology in Digital Studies

May 22, 2019 by
Associate Professor of English, Linguistics, and Communications Zach Whalen

Associate Professor of English, Linguistics, and Communications Zach Whalen

Zach Whalen, Associate Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communications, recently had his article “Teaching with Objects: Individuating Media Archaeology in Digital Studies” published in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/teaching-with-objects-individuating-media-archaeology-in-digital-studies/.

Abstract: “Media archaeology presents a framework for understanding the foundations of digital culture in the social histories of technological media. This essay argues that a pedagogy focused on individual, physical artifacts of technological media involves students in constructing a constellation of insights around technology’s mineral, global, and human history as well as its ecological future. By describing and reflecting on a series of assignments and exercises developed for my “Introduction to Digital Studies” class, I show how the intimacy of specific devices can connect to the exigencies of technological media through the lens of media archaeology. The core of this experience is a group project where students take apart an artifact like an old smartphone or game console, attempt to locate the origins of each component in that artifact, and present those origins in a map and timeline. The risks and rewards of this assignment sequence actively engage students in designing their own learning and encourage them to think critically and ethically about the media they consume, the devices that provide the foundation for that consumption, and the global economy of human labor that makes it all possible. In a step-by-step consideration, I consider how the practical and logistical challenges of this assignment sequence support the learning goals I identify as crucial to Digital Studies.”

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Haffey Publishes Book on Literary Modernism and Queer Temporality

May 8, 2019 by
Associate Professor of English Kate Haffey

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.

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Barrenechea Interviewed for MEAWW Articles

May 8, 2019 by
Associate Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea

Associate Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea

Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, was recently interviewed for two articles published in the web magazine MEAWW. The first was on the relationship between summer and romantic comedies. The second probed the link between intelligence and dark humor.

https://meaww.com/the-last-summer-romantic-comedies-netflix-romcom-kj-apa-summer-of-love-tyler-posey

https://meaww.com/dark-comedy-dark-humor-21st-century-dead-to-me-intelligence-black-comedy-movies-tv-shows.

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LaBreche Coedits Special Issue of Marvell Studies

April 11, 2019 by
Ben LaBreche, Associate Professor of English

Ben LaBreche, Associate Professor of English

Ben LaBreche, Associate Professor of English, along with Ryan Netzley of Southern Illinois University, recently coedited a special issue of Marvell Studies, which publishes the leading edge of research on Andrew Marvell, his texts and readers, words and worlds. This most recent issue is on theoretical approaches to Marvell’s poetry and contains essays by John Garrison (on object-oriented erotics in Marvell’s verse), Jason Kerr (on vulnerability as an ontological feature of humans), and Brendan Prawdzik (on the limits of eco-criticism for Marvell studies and the concept of ‘greenwashing’). In addition, this issue contains reviews of Brendan Prawdzik’s Theatrical Milton: Politics and Poetics of the Staged Body and Alex Garganigo’s Samson’s Cords: Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler.

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Richards Presents at Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival

April 11, 2019 by
Professor Gary Richards, chair of the Department of English, Linguistics and Communication

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.

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Hartman Publishes Article on Interdisciplinary Work and the Arts

April 4, 2019 by
Danielle Hartman, Adjunct Instructor of Communication

Danielle Hartman, Adjunct Instructor of Communication

Danielle Hartman, Adjunct Instructor of Communication, recently co-authored a piece on the arts as a great hub for interdisciplinary work and studies, entitled “Promoting Interdisciplinarity: Its Purpose and Practice in Arts Programming,” that was published in Journal of Performing Arts Leadership in Higher Education. Read more.

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Lorentzen Presents on Wordsworth and Dickens at MLA Conference

March 28, 2019 by
Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English, gave the talk “‘Spots of Time’: Wordsworthian Spirits and Dickensian Hauntings” for the special Dickens Society panel at the 50th Annual Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference in Washington, D.C. Lorentzen examined this Romantic influence in Dickens’ work as a part of the panel “Dickens and the Influences of the Past.” In his paper, Lorentzen traced the ways in which Dickens’ incorporation of the Wordsworthian philosophies of time, memory, and continuity transformed over the length of the Victorian novelist’s career.  He detailed the many echoes of “We Are Seven” (Dickens’ favorite Wordsworth poem) in the early novels, and the darker cooptation of the poet’s ideas in moments of traumatic memory in the latter novels, as Dickens transformed Wordsworth from the poet of Nature, to a much more haunting figure that informs some of the more deeply psychological “spots of time” in Victorian fiction.

 

 

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Subramanian Publishes Story in Hakai Magazine

March 27, 2019 by

Assistant Professor Sushma Subramanian, Department of English

Sushma Subramanian, Assistant Professor of English teaching journalism, has published a story in Hakai Magazine about the Bajau, a people of Indonesia known for their special swimming and diving abilities, and how they might reveal something about our evolutionary past. The story is available at https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/born-to-swim/​.

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Richards Presents on Eudora Welty in Multiple Venues

February 28, 2019 by

Professor of English Gary Richards

Gary Richards, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, presented the paper “Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams” at the latest conference of the Eudora Welty Society, “The Continuous Thread of Revelation: Eudora Welty Reconsidered,” held at the College of Charleston, Charleston, S.C. February 21-24, 2019. The conference also featured a staged reading of “Moon Lake,” adapted from the Welty short story of the same title and directed by Brenda Currin. Fourteen Welty scholars made up the cast, including Richards as the narrator.

Earlier in the month, he was a member of a panel discussion of contributors to the collection of essays Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Mae Miller Claxton and Julia Eichelberger, held at the Eudora Welty House and Gardens in Jackson, Mississipi, on February 7. His essay in the collection is “Queering Welty’s Male Bodies in the Undergraduate Classroom.”

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LaBreche Co-Edits Special Issue of Journal Devoted to Political Theology

February 28, 2019 by

Associate Professor of English Ben LaBreche

Ben LaBreche, Associate Professor of English, along with Jason Kerr of Brigham Young University, recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on “The Varieties of Political Theology,” and that issue has now been released.

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