Posts

Posted on

Department News

News from the Chair

Dear All, 

As we approach the end of the semester and this year, let us take stock of the lives and doings of those among us, this newsletter being a way of sharing the warmth of other bodies and minds in the department. As I write this, we are all absorbing the news that we will soon lose our Academic Department Administrator Tanesha Fluker Floyd. We wish her well in the next chapter of her career at Emory. We give thanks for her tireless service, and acknowledge the service and labor of all our staff members with gratitude. 

In other news, Professor Geraldine Higgins, Director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, has announced the return of the series, founded in 1988 by Emeritus faculty, Professor Ron Schuchard. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of books on W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, including Eliot’s Dark Angel (1999), which received the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award, and The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (2008), which received the Robert Rhodes Prize. He is the editor of Eliot’s unpublished Clark and Turnbull Lectures, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1993). With John Kelly, he is the co-editor of three volumes of Yeats’s letters, one of which received the Modern Language Association’s Morton N. Cohen Award. Schuchard is general editor of the major eight-volume online and print editions of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, volume 2 of which won the Modernist Studies Association Edition Prize, volumes 5 and 6 of which won jointly the MLA Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition. 

In honor of the tenth anniversary of Irish Nobel prize winner, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) who delivered the first Ellmann lectures, the series will be relaunched on March 3th, 4th, and 5th by twodistinguishedspeakers, Fintan O’Toole and poet laureate Natasha Trethewey, who was our colleague in the English department for 15 years till her departure in 2017.

Former Ellmann Lecturers: Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, Helen Vendler, Henry Louis Gates, A.S. Byatt, David Lodge, (our former colleague) Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, Margaret Atwood, Paul Simon, Colm Toibin, and Claudia Rankine.

The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, now among the most prominent in North America, were established in honor of Richard Ellmann (1918–1987), biographer of James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde, and Robert W. Woodruff Professor in our department from 1980 to 1987.

News of the accompliments of our collegues, students, and alumni follows below.

New Course take Students to the Sea Islands to learn about Gullah Geechee culture.

As part of a one million-dollar Mellon Foundation grant running from 2020-2025 for which she was co-PI, Professor Valerie Babb originated a new study-away course, “Archiving Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and Sea Island Culture.” Students were introduced to the “on-the-ground” history of Reconstruction and Civil Rights movement strategy through classwork, research in the Rose Library archives, and a study away collaboration with the Penn Center National Historic Landmark where they joined students from other area universities: Morehouse, Spelman, University of Georgia, and University of North Carolina, among others on St. Helena Island, South Carolina at the Penn Center. They learned about Gullah Geechee history and culture, and explored Penn Center archives relating to the strategizing meetings held by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Students participated in an indigo-dyeing workshop while learning about this heritage crop’s importance to black culture. They also made excursions to the Barnwell Tabby Archaeological Research and Excavation Project, Mitchelville Freedom Park (located on the site of what was once a self-governed community of the formerly enslaved), and learned about common concerns in Gullah Geechee communities: legal land theft, heirs’ property rights, ownership of cultural production, and sustaining heritage.

Student comments:

“We got to walk down to the dock and see the house the Center built for MLK, but he was never able to stay there because he was assassinated before he was able to return.”

“The first day was filled simply with gratitude, for me, to be amongst such majestic giants, both the trees and the spirits of those who had come before me on the island.”

“As a class, we sat out on the dock, and the water made me feel like I could fully breathe for the first time. There’s something so perfect about being in such loud and active nature. Me and my classmates vowed to go to this dock whenever we could. There’s so much history here, and it’s told to us in stories. First, through the diaries and books we read in preparation, and today through this tour guide, stopping us and telling us to look, to listen.”

Faculty Accomplishments

Daniel Bosch’s poems “Nullius in Verba,” “Swimming at Night,” and “Under the Stalactite the Stalagmite Grows” will appear in the November and December 2023 issues of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Aaron Colton had an article, “From Suspicion to Sincerity in Composition Pedagogy,” published in Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Language, Literature, Composition, and Culture 23.3. The article can be found at the following link by searching  for the journal through the library website: https://read.dukeupress.edu/pedagogy/article-abstract/23/3/529/382569/From-Suspicion-to-Sincerity-in-Composition?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Geraldine Higgins published an article on “Seamus Heaney’s Desks: Stages of Writing” in ÉIRE-IRELAND (Spring/Summer 2023) and gave a keynote lecture on the same topic at the Boston College Seamus Heaney Afterlives conference in November. She also gave an online lecture at the National Library of Ireland on “Yeats our Contemporary” examining the global reach of W.B. Yeats one hundred years on from his Nobel prize award. 

Irish Studies’ Nathan Suhr-Sytsma hosted Peter Miller for a wonderful lecture on “Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and the Limits of Lyric” in October.  In November we welcomed Belfast’s Kabosh Theatre for two nights performing their award-winning play, Green and Blue at Emory’s Performing Arts Studio.

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma has also recently had a chapter on postcolonial poetry published in Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, edited by Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee (Cambridge University Press), which is fully access.

Marina Magloire’s book We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism (UNC Press 2023) explores the influence of African diasporic spiritualities on the work of Black American feminists.

Dan Sinykin’s book  Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed Book Publishing and American Fiction, was officially published on October 24. The same day, an excerpt from the book on Toni Morisson was published in Lit Hub. Dr. Sinykin published two essays related in the book earlier in October: one on the creation of the “fantasy” genre, in Slate; and another on the surprisingly short history of “literary fiction” in The Nation.

Emil’ Keme participated in the following events:

(Virtual) Helped co-organize the II International Conference: Indigenous Peoples Against Racism, and moderated the panel: “Migration, Racism, and Violence Against Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples. Guatemala city, August, 16-18, 2023.

Presented the paper, “‘We Are Also Here’. Maya Migrant Stories From TurtleIsland” at the 2023 Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Symposium. Amherst College, MA October 12-14, 2023.

Presented work on, “Indigenous Literatures from Abiayala” at the Festa Literária das Periferias / Literary Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP, ), Rio do Janeiro, Brazil, October 20-22, 2023.

(Virtual) Presented work on “Abiayala: Filosofia e expansão dos territórios mentais/ Abiayala: Philosophy and expansion of mental territories” at the Semana de Politização Indígena Urbanizada / Urbanized Indigenous Politicization Week, São Paolo, Brazil, October 27, 2023.

Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows

Postdoctoral Fellow Steven Huy Thanh Duong’s debut poetry collection, AT THE END OF THE WORLD THERE IS A POND, was just picked up last week by W. W. Norton and will be published with them in 2025. 

LGS doctoral scholar, Alexis Mayfield, was presented the Kharen Fulton Graduate Diversity Award at the EDGE Annual Diversity Reception for her personal and professional efforts towards diversity, inclusion, and community engagement in the Laney Graduate School at Emory University. The Kharen Fulton Award is given annually and has been created to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Kharen Fulton and her dedication to diversity in graduate education.

Sixth-year PhD candidate Ra’Niqua Lee’s book of fiction, For What Ails You, has just been published! https://bookshop.org/p/books/for-what-ails-you-ra-niqua-lee/20798034?ean=9781942004639

Undergraduates

Oli Turner’s article “Notes from Underground Atlanta’s DIY arts scene” was published in the September 2023 Issue of Atlanta Magazine. It is also available online here.

Easton Lane, Creative Writing and Environmental Science double major, was published for the first time as a poet in two different publications! Easton’s first published poem, “I open,” was published in Impostor: A Poetry Journal’s Issue 3.1, and a second published poem, “Bearbaiting,” was published in the Quarter Press’s Weirder Still Issue! Here are the links:

https://www.impostorlit.com/vol-3-issue-1

https://quarterpress.com/shop-qp/p/preorder-the-quarterly-vol-vii-weirder-still

Alumni News

Maggie Greaves, who received her PhD in English in 2015, has published Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2023 – 30% with promotion code AAFLYG6).

Molly Slavin, who received her PhD in English in 2018, has published Criminal Cities: The Postcolonial Novel and Cathartic Crime (University of Virginia Press, 2023).

Former student, Celine Chauviere, just published a piece with Atlanta Studies.  Her work, “Redistricting in Atlanta: The impact of Race, Class, and Community Involvement in the Face of School Closures,” began as an essay in one of the new Writing Program courses, “Writing Atlanta.”  In the wake of recent student protests against public school redistricting in Atlanta, Celine’s piece asks what we can learn about prior successful and unsuccessful protests in Peoplestown and Vine City, and from prior scholarship on community power.  After going through blind peer review, it is now available at https://atlantastudies.org/2023/11/22/redistricting-in-atlanta-the-impact-of-race-class-and-community-involvement-in-the-face-of-school-closures/. Celine is the second undergraduate from the spring 2023 Writing Atlanta course to have work published that began in that course.  The other student, Oli Turner, who also took Hank’s class last spring where most of the writing took place, had her piece, “Notes from Underground Atlanta’s DIY Arts Scene,” published in Atlanta Magazine in September.  Her article is available at https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/notes-from-underground-atlantas-diy-arts-scene/.

And congratulations to Francis Ittenbach, Anmol Sahni, and Palak Taneja on their weddings this December!


Keep us informed of your good news. If we missed something important, please send us your news for inclusion in the next newsletter.

Parting Words from Maya Angelou for the upcoming break: “Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”

— Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Posted on

Emma Davenport wins Victorian Poetry essay prize!

Emma Davenport has been named the inaugural winner of Victorian Poetry’s new early career prize for exemplary essays by untenured colleagues.  The journal editor praised Emma’s work, saying “In this first year we received a number of very strong submissions, which were anonymized and then judged by a prize committee consisting of preeminent colleagues in the field (all full professors at top-tier institutions). Emma’s essay was chosen as the winner by unanimous and enthusiastic decision.”

Victorian Poetry is thrilled to announce that Emma Davenport (Emory University) is the inaugural winner of the journal’s new early career prize! Davenport’s forthcoming essay, “Crediting Women’s Poetic Labor: Paradise Lost and Toru Dutt’s ‘Our Casuarina Tree’,” offers a startling, skillful, and persuasive new reading of Dutt as an astute and critical reader of Paradise Lost. Building on evidence that Dutt knew Paradise Lost intimately, the essay shows us how Milton’s association of the Indian banyan tree with sin provides a rich intertext for Dutt to engage, answer, and revise. In a bravura close reading of the text, the author shifts our attention from the tree to the vine that is wrapped around it. Where most readers have read the vine as a figure for the snake—and Satan—in this account we see how Dutt associates the vine with Eve. Furthermore, through the association of Dutt’s name with an Indian vine (the Torulota or Tarulatta), the essay brilliantly demonstrates how Dutt reclaims India and the woman poet from Milton, by way of Milton’s own text. This poetic analysis complicates the binary logic in postcolonial scholarship on Dutt and makes a powerful argument about decolonizing our own analytic frames for reading colonial poetry. Richly researched, beautifully written, and highly original, this essay makes a dazzling new contribution to the project of undisciplining Victorian studies. Keep an eye out for its appearance in print very soon! Founded in 1962 to further the aesthetic study of the poetry of the Victorian period in Britain, Victorian Poetry today publishes articles from a broad range of conceptual angles and methodological approaches

Posted on

Marina Magloire wins NWSA book prize!

Marina Magloire has been awarded the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2024 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize for her book, We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism!  The prize includes $1,000 and recognition for groundbreaking monographs in women’s studies that makes significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship.

Drawing on the collected archives of distinguished twentieth-century Black woman writers such as Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, Marina Magloire traces a new history of Black feminist thought in relation to Afro-diasporic religion. Beginning in the 1930s with the pathbreaking ethnographic work of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and ending with the present-day popularity of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices among Black women, she offers an alternative genealogy of Black feminism, characterized by its desire to reconnect with ancestrally centered religions like Vodou.

Magloire reveals the tension, discomfort, and doubt at the heart of each woman’s efforts to connect with ancestral spiritual practices. These revered writers are often regarded as unchanging monuments to Black womanhood, but Magloire argues that their feminism is rooted less in self-empowerment than in a fluid pursuit of community despite the inevitable conflicts wrought by racial capitalism. The subjects of this book all model a nuanced Black feminist praxis grounded in the difficult work of community building between Black women across barriers of class, culture, and time.

The prize is named in honor of Gloria Anzaldúa, an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory.

Posted on

Kimberly Belflower: Her play “John Proctor is the Villain” will premiere on Broadway in April 2025!

Congratulations to Emory Professor Kimberly Belflower, whose play “John Proctor is the Villain” is going to Broadway! The story is set in a rural high school in Georgia, where a group of students is studying The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials. As they explore the character of John Proctor, the students start questioning the moral and ethical implications of his actions in the play.

Posted on

Jericho Brown awarded MacArthur Genius Grant

Jericho Brown, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing, has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship!  Also known as the “Genius Grants,” these Fellowships honor those who have dedicated themselves to their creative pursuits and are recognized for their originality.  The Foundation’s website lists the three criteria for selection as:  exceptional creativity; promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.  Prof. Brown joins 21 other luminaries this year, including filmmakers, activists, and scientists, and historians.

Posted on

English Alum featured in Vanity Fair profile

Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar, the 48th Solicitor General of the United States is featured in the October Issue of Vanity Fair.  Prelogar attended Emory University and majoring in English and Russian, and studied as a Fulbright Scholar.  She graduated summa cum laude in 2002.

Prelogar earned a master’s degree in creative writing as a Bobby Jones Scholar at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and went on to receive an M.Litt. with distinction, also from the University of St. Andrews.  She proceeded to Harvard Law School, where she graduated with her J.D., magna cum laude in 2008.

Since October 2021, she has led the office that represents the federal government’s interests before the Supreme Court. Often referred to as the “10th Justice,” the solicitor general of the United States is the most frequent advocate in the Supreme Court, serving as counsel in approximately three-quarters of all cases that are decided on the merits each year.

Posted on

Professor Tiphanie Yanique to read at deCOLonial feelin

On September 20th, at 10:15 a.m., Professor of English and Creative Writing Tiphanie Yanique will give a reading of “Beach,” a new short story, influenced by feminist literary traditions, Decolonial forms, and the importance of water in Caribbean societies. The story is set on a composite island of the Virgin Islands during the Carnival season.

The reading is part of dECOlonial feelin project, an interdisciplinary and international symposium organized by the Virgin Islands Studies Collective, and focused on America’s colonies, starting with the Virgin Islands, using the methods of art, creative writing, archiving, philosophy, storytelling, and spiritual practice.  Other presenters at the event will include Dr. Hadiya Sewer, La Vaughn Belle, and Dr. Tami Navarro.

The symposium is open to the public, but RSVPs are required and seating is limited.  For more information, please contact vistudiescollective [at] gmail [dot] com.

Posted on

Native American and Indigenous Studies Field Trip

English faculty member Mandy Suhr-Sytsma organized a September 14th field trip to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park’s Indigenous Celebration and the Mercer University McEachern Art Center’s  “Ocmulgee to Okmulgee” exhibit featuring work by three Muscogee artists: Johnnie Diacon, Kenneth Johnson, and Jamie Bennett. More than fifty Emory students and faculty members participated in the trip, including English faculty members Vani Kannan and Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, English graduate student Amelia Ali, and 28 undergraduate students from several English classes: Dr. Suhr-Sytsma’s courses on Native American Women’s literature and First-Year Writing: Native American Voices, Dr. Kannan’s First-Year Writing course on Cultural Rhetorics, and Dr. Keme’s courses on Muscogee Literature and Indigenous Literatures before 1850. The trip was supported by Emory’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies and two CFDE Community-Engaged Learnings Grants. Learn more about Indigenous Studies at Emory at https://native.emory.edu/. And be sure to come out for Emory’s third annual Muscogee Teach-In on Friday, November 8th.

Posted on

Dan Sinykin Awarded NEH grant!

Congratulations to Dan Sinykin, Associate Professor of English, who has been has been awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant of $149,000. The funds will be used to continue work on the digital infrastructure for the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data after 1945. This stage will support the development of a comprehensive data style guide and set of protocols for interoperability with complementary datasets. The Post45 Data Collective is on a mission to make literary and cultural data free, open, and interoperable.

Posted on

Meet the 2024 Graduate Student Cohort!

Meet the incoming class of graduate students for 2024!

Ebenezer (Eezer) Agu–African literature, poetry

Mara McDaniel–mimeograph poetry, archival research on 20th- and 21st-century American poetry

Aaron Obedkoff–the adjunct novel, academia, economics, and social justice

Alex Ramirez Amaya–20th- and 21st-century American literature, public humanities

Sarah Richman–early modern literature, environmental humanities

Brittany Whelan–18th-Century British literature; digital humanities

Posted on

Welcome, Dr. Geovani Ramírez

Welcome Dr. Geovani Ramírez to the English Department!

Dr. Geovani Ramírez (Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is our new assistant professor of Chicanx/Latinx literary criticism and cultural studies.

As a literary critic, Ramírez looks to literary portrayals of laboring sites to consider the matrix of colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism that informs “Latinx Environmentalisms.” Drawing from ecocritical, ecofeminist, and disability studies frameworks, his interdisciplinary and public-facing research places Chicanx/Latinx Studies in conversation with the environmental and medical/health humanities. Ramírez’s first book, The Burning Question of Labor, traces how poor working regulations, anti-immigrant legislation, and lax environmental policies harm and/or disable Latinx people.

Dr. Ramírez’s work has been featured in such journals as Ethnic Studies Review, Literature and Medicine, and Latinx Talk. His research has been supported by UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South and the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective. In 2023, he was awarded a Juneteenth research award from Virginia Tech University’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, where he was previously an assistant professor of Latinx Studies.

Ramírez has been recognized for his public-facing work and enduring commitment and service to diverse populations. He has been inducted into the Frank Porter Graham Honor Society and the Order of the Golden Fleece and has also been the recipient of UNC’s University Diversity award and the Carolina Latinx Center’s Orgullo Award for Service, Scholarship, Leadership, and Advocacy.

Dr. Ramírez teaches various courses in Latinx cultural expressions that include a focus on major authors, environmentalisms, illness and healing narratives, and growing up Latinx.