Category: Featured

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.

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.

Our colleague Tayari Jones’s novel, An American Marriage, made the NYT list of the 100 best books of the century! Woohoo!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html