Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, recently presented “All-American Literature” within an experimental “Ideas of the Decade” panel at ACL(x)/E(x)amine, a conference of the American Comparative Literature Association. Hosted by Penn State University, the conference ran September 27-28, 2013.
Gary Richards Contributes to Southern Literature Collection
Gary Richards, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, recently contributed the chapter “Southern Drama” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South. Edited by Sharon Monteith and published by Cambridge University Press in September, the collection features 14 essays analyzing southern literature from the rise of sectional literatures in the early 19th century to the contemporary moment. Richards’ essay surveys southern drama from antebellum manifestations through the masterworks of Tennessee Williams to 21st-century Broadway musicals.
Barrenechea Contributes to Multimedia Encyclopedia
Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, recently published two film studies articles, one on John Boorman’s Deliverance (1974) and the other on Michael Cimino’s The Deerhunter (1978), in Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia (SAGE, 2013).
Barrenechea Co-Edits Journal Issue, Presents at Conference
Over the summer, Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, co-edited and co-wrote the introduction for “Hemispheric Indigenous Studies, ” a special issue of Comparative American Studies: An International Journal. In August, he attended the Sixth World Congress of the International American Studies Association (IASA) in Szczecin, Poland, where he presented “Thomas Pynchon’s Poetics of Atrocity: Making Words Matter in Gravity’s Rainbow.” At that conference, he was also elected to a two-year term as a member of the Executive Council of the IASA.
Rafferty Publishes Creative Essay on McKinley Assassination
Colin Rafferty, Assistant Professor of English, recently published the essay “Assassin’s Bullet (#25)” in the latest issue of Shadowbox Magazine: http://www.shadowboxmagazine.org/issue7/Bottle12.swf.
Author Reading Coming to Art Museum (The East Carolinian)
Gary Richards Facilitates Event at Literary Festival
Gary Richards
Gary Richards, associate professor and chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, was a participant at the 27th Annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival in New Orleans. He was the facilitator of the Breakfast Book Club, one of the Festival’s special events. This year, the focus was on the short stories of Southern writer Eudora Welty.
Gary Richards Featured on Radio Show
University of Mary Washington Associate Professor of English Gary Richards will discuss images of the U. S. South in Broadway musicals during an interview scheduled to air on the “With Good Reason” public radio program. The show, “The Gospel Roots of Rock and Roll,” will air beginning Saturday, Feb. 16.
During the program, Richards will argue that despite the popularity of musicals like Porgy and Bess and Showboat, musicals with southern themes tend to have a negative view of the region and don’t reflect its diversity today. As part of the program, Longwood University professor Chris Kjorness will discuss the legacy of gospel musician and singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Richards, who serves as chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, is an expert on southern literature and culture, American fiction, contemporary drama and sexuality studies. His book Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936-1961 was named Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2005. He has written several book chapters, including most recently “Everybody’s Graphic Protest Novel: Stuck Rubber Baby and the Anxieties of Racial Difference” in Comics and the U.S. South. His articles and essays have been published in Journal of American Studies, North Carolina Literary Review and Mississippi Quarterly, among other publications.
Richards earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. from Vanderbilt University and a bachelor’s degree from Trinity University (San Antonio). His understanding of various southern cultures draws in part on his years of residence in several major southern cities, including Dallas (1969-1987), San Antonio (1987-1991), Nashville (1991-1997), New Orleans (1997-2008), and now Fredericksburg.
“With Good Reason” airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. To listen from outside of the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen/.
“With Good Reason” is the only statewide public radio program in Virginia. It hosts scholars from Virginia’s public colleges and universities who discuss the latest in research, pressing social issues and the curious and whimsical. “With Good Reason” is produced for the Virginia Higher Education Broadcasting Consortium by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and is broadcast in partnership with public radio stations in Virginia and Washington, D.C.
English Faculty Present at MLA Conference
Gary Richards
Two professors and one recent alumnus of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication presented at the Modern Language Association Conference that met Jan. 3 through 6 in Boston, Mass. Assistant Professor Zach Whalen presented the paper “OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and the Vestigial Aesthetics of Machine Vision” on the panel Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media. Associate Professor Gary Richards presented the paper “Tennessee Williams and the Burden of Southern Sexuality Studies” on the panel The South and Sexuality. Alumnus Tyler Babbie, ’08, presented the paper “Another Term: Richard Aldington and Imagism(e)” on the panel From Imagism to “Amygism” to Vorticism.
Zach Whalen
Gary Richards Led Talk at Louisiana Book Festival
Gary Richards, associate professor of English, led the book talk “One Book One Festival: ‘A Confederacy of Dunces'” at the Ninth Annual Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, La., on Saturday, Oct. 27. At the same event, he was part of a panel discussion by contributors to “Comics and the U.S. South” (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), edited by Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted. Richards contributed the essay “Everybody’s Graphic Protest Novel: ‘Stuck Rubber Baby’ and the Anxieties of Racial Difference” to that collection.