Category: Featured

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.