A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “Literature of the Americas” in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980-2020. Ed. Leslie Larkin, Stephen Burn, and Patrick O’Donnell. London and New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022: 835-44.
Assistant Professor of English Brenta Blevins
Assistant Professor of English Brenta Blevins recently presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication 2022 Virtual Conference. Blevins presented as part of the cross-institutional panel “Informal Reading Groups as Inclusionary Practice for Facilitating Graduate Students’ Disciplinary Access and Professionalization.” Analyzing an informal, multi-year reading group, the panel identified how professional reading groups produce multiple disciplinary preparation benefits and provided suggestions for implementing reading groups.
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 “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.
Assistant Professor of English Ray Levy
Ray Levy, Assistant Professor of English, recently published the short story “Autobiographical Animal” in Anomaly (https://anmly.org/ap33/ray-levy-2/) and the short story “The Use of Pleasure” in Territory (http://themapisnot.com/issue-13-ray-levy). In addition, they released Issue Twenty-Two of their literary magazine, Dreginald, this week (http://dreginald.com/index.php/issues/issue-twenty-two).
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.
Assistant Professor of English Laura Bylenok
Laura Bylenok, assistant professor of English and current coordinator of the creative writing program, has just been announced by the University of Nebraska Press as the winner of the Backwaters Press Prize in Poetry for 2021. The book based on her manuscript Living Room will be published in the fall of 2022. For details, see: https://unpblog.com/…/announcing-the-backwaters-prize…/
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.
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.
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
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.
“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.”