Month: August 2024

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.

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

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.

Prof. Sheila Cavanagh curates ‘Gratifications of the Palate’: Cuisine in the Age of Samuel Johnson Curated by Prof Sheila Cavanagh and Dr. Johnson’s House

‘People have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat; for my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully, and I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.’ — Samuel Johnson

On view now in Dr. Johnson’s House in London, an exhibit on 18th-century food and drink curated by Sheila Cavanagh and Dr. Johnson’s House, where visitors can learn more about 18th century dining. You can also listen to the presentation Prof. Cavanagh recently gave at Johnson’s House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mThBOvWee8.

Additional support provided by the Emory Fund for Public Scholarship, the Guildhall Library in the City of London, and the London Metropolitan Archives.