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Notre Dame Among Top Producers of Fulbrights

2011-12-13T16:00:00-05:00

University of Notre Dame students were awarded 13 Fulbright grants for the 2011-12 academic year, placing the University among the top universities in the nation. Eleven of the 13 are from the College of Arts and Letters.

The U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program, Fulbright recently announced the complete list of colleges and universities that produced the most 2011-2012 U.S. Fulbright students. The success of the top-producing institutions was highlighted in the Oct. 24 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Our students are well-equipped to shape their professions and disciplines internationally,” says Deb Rotman, director of Notre Dame’s Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE), the office that administers the Fulbright competition. “Our Fulbright scholars illustrate one of the many ways in which the University is cultivating global citizens and world leaders who will successfully address the significant challenges of the 21st century.”

The Class of 2011 undergraduates who received Fulbrights include:

Jaime Cordes—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Russia (anthropology/Russian)
John Greil—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Germany (German/Program of Liberal Studies)
Amanda Johnson—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Poland (American studies)
Cherrica Li—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Taiwan (political science/economics)
Andre Mrugala—Fulbright research and study grant to Poland (mechanical engineering)
Claire Reising—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Belgium (French/English)
Virginia Varraveto—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Peru (English/Spanish)
Ann Weber—Fulbright research and study grant to Austria (history/theology)

Five Notre Dame graduate students also received Fulbrights in 2011:

Max Deardorff—Fulbright Scholar to Russia (history Ph.D. candidate)
Nathan Gerth—Fulbright Scholar to Spain (history Ph.D. candidate)
John Moscatiello—Fulbright Scholar to Spain (history Ph.D. candidate)
Beth Palkovic—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Indonesia (2011 master’s graduate from ACE Program)
Laura Wilczek—Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to South Korea (2011 master’s graduate from ACE Program, ‘09 B.A. in English)

Almost 1,700 American students, artists and young professionals in more than 100 different fields of study received Fulbright Program grants to study, teach English, and conduct research in over 140 countries throughout the world beginning in fall 2011. Students receiving awards for this academic year applied through 600 colleges or universities. Lists of Fulbright recipients are available here.

Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 310,000 participants—chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential—with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. In the past 65 years, more than 44,000 students from the United States have benefited from the Fulbright experience.

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Part of this story was originally published by Susan Guibert at newsinfo.nd.edu on October 28, 2011.

Margaret Doody Lectures on the Novel in China

2011-12-13T15:00:00-05:00

October brought with it the experience of a lifetime for Margaret Doody, the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature and the first Director of the Ph.D. in Literature Program, who spent the better part of the month in Singapore and China delivering lectures about the novel, women novelists, and the Enlightenment. Her trip began with a week long visit at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore followed by two weeks in China where she lectured at Beihang University and Peking University in Beijing. Professor Doody is best known in China for her monograph The True Story of the Novel in which she refers to Chinese as well as Western fiction. Her lectures were based on some of her previous and current work on the Novel, and also the mystery novels she herself writes. Topics included “The True Story of the Novel Revisited” and “Characters in Novels.” Her Beijing itinerary entailed a total of six lectures along with several roundtables and meetings at which, she says, “They really worked me quite hard,” keeping a video camera running the whole time to document her entire trip. Professor Doody is pleased that she was able to introduce Jonathan Noble, head of Notre Dame’s Asia Center in Beijing, to Dr. Xiang, Dean of the School of Foreign Languages, a college of Beihang.

The most challenging part of the lectures and roundtables, Doody says, was the language barrier because some of the students she interacted with did not know English well, but they were all eager to practice and learn. Her main concern in communicating her ideas with them was that some would lose the meaning of what she was saying. Otherwise, she found that the university setting there is similar to that in the States with only a few cultural differences. Chinese professors and students are interested in Western methods of teaching. Professor Doody told them that we too once took for granted the traditional lecture format in which the instructor stands before rows of seated students, but that we now desire the flexible classroom allowing for group discussions, film reports, and dramatic readings. Academic vocabulary differs in interesting ways as well; they seem to be inventing a new vocabulary to deal with new times and ideas. Instead of words such as “debate” and “argument,” they prefer “sharing,” a word they feel is more “democratic” and less combative. Overall, she found the students there to be determined, bright, and forward looking; they have hope for the future and could contribute a great deal to the world.

In addition to her activities at the universities, Doody was able to visit a number of sites and immerse herself in the culture in a way that made a big impression on her. She ate the most wonderful Chinese, Japanese, and Korean food; saw the set for the television film version of The Dream of the Red Chamber, one of her favorite Chinese novels; attended the Peking Opera to hear traditional performances (pictured below); and walked upon the Great Wall. The Wall was the most memorable of these places, and she describes it as startling in real life. The Wall is “a giant structure going on like a great white worm” over hills and mountains as far as the eye can see. What film cannot capture, she remarks, is the “soaring space” and the view through “layers of mountains.” She was lucky enough to be there on a clear, sunny day. Beijing has much more smog than Los Angeles –a serious problem. The huge city lacks the kind of city center found in New York, Paris, and London. Beijing is driven by industrial progress, much like Victorian London, and while it is not pretty, it is full of life. Doody’s experiences inside and outside of the university left her with a real sense of China and an affection for it so that she is still beaming with excitement when talking about it. In fact, the trip had such a deep impact on her that she wants to encourage everyone to learn some Chinese and go to China because of its importance in the world and because of its vast and beautiful territory.

Now that Professor Doody has returned home from the trip, there is talk about publishing her lectures in Chinese translations, and some of the research she produced for these talks will play a role in a book she is writing about characters in novels. This book examines how different cultures view characters and what these characters can tell readers about a particular nation or group. The main character in The Dream of the Red Chamber, Dai-yu, for example, has a temperamental, witty, and creative character, one that does not give in to Confucian obedience and reflects a culture that has a great deal going for it. A culture’s anxieties, likewise, tend to manifest in characterizations, and Doody’s book will explore how this phenomenon occurs. Doody looks forward to finishing another book as well on the names of characters and places in Jane Austen’s novels, and it will be fascinating to see how the lasting effects of a Chinese tour make their way into her work on Western literature.

Notre Dame Theater Performance Explores Disability

2011-12-05T14:00:00-05:00

Electronic music roars and pulsates throughout the theatre. On stage, a blind man paces, struggling to escape the ring of steel bars that confine him. Meanwhile, a stern figure in a sleek suit and sunglasses stands guard. When the lights dim and dialogue begins to flash above the stage from an overhead projector, one thing is clear:

This production of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes is far from ordinary.

Students and faculty from the College of Arts and Letters staged the show through a new partnership between the University of Notre Dame Disability Studies Forum and the Crip Slam series at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater. The Crip Slam series explores disability culture through performances, readings, and arts events—all of which are made accessible to people with disabilities through sign language interpreters, captioning, and other methods. The partnership project was conceived and led by Essaka Joshua, a teaching professor in Notre Dame’s Department of English.

The November 17 performance at Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center also included a pre-show screening of the film Code of the Freaks: Hollywood Images of Disability by Carrie Sandahl, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and head of its Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities. Joshua led a post-show panel discussion which featured Sandahl; Chicago playwright Todd Bauer, who directed the production; Mike Ervin, coordinator for Victory Gardens’ Crip Slam Access Project; and renowned Milton scholar Stephen Fallon, Reverend John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., professor of the humanities. A second performance took place at The Biograph Theatre, Victory Gardens on November 20.

Joshua says she founded the Disability Studies Forum in 2008 to seek “a new understanding of disability as a product of social, environmental, and personal forces.” The forum’s Samson Agonistes project was supported by a grant she obtained from the College’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

Joshua, who also serves as the Joseph Morahan Director of the College Seminar, incorporated the production into two of her classes: a college seminar called Disability and an English course titled Beauty, Disability, and the Novel.

“I wanted my students to go through the process of understanding how the stage affects an interpretation of a text,” she says. “Putting it on the stage gets people very much involved. They absorb it; they live it.”

Joshua and Bauer, who is blind, say they chose Milton’s rarely seen closet drama Samson Agonistes because it offered a very personal perspective on disability. By the time he composed the play, Milton had lost his vision.

“We examined Samson Agonistes as a work that … dealt with the rawness of acquiring a disability,” Joshua says. “There’s an adjustment period with acquired disability, which includes rage, anger—it’s a difficult journey for many people.”

Led by Bauer and two student directors, Carolyn Demanelis and Ryan Belock, Joshua’s classes worked with staff at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center to coordinate every aspect of the production, from set design to casting to marketing.

“There was a lot of problem solving,” Joshua says. “I found the students working in creative and unique ways—ways that a more traditional class just doesn’t demand of them.”

The student production team also took on the challenge of ensuring that the show was accessible to individuals with disabilities. One of the most noticeable ways was a slideshow of the original text, which played above the stage.

“For novices of 17th century poetry, having that text, in the original spelling, can help you with something that’s missed,” Joshua says. “It’s also there as a political statement: this is an accessible play. The able-bodied audience is not the most important part of our audience.”

Joshua, who is writing a research paper about the production, says it was one of only 15 times Samson Agonistes had ever been staged, and she believes it was the first by a blind director. It was rewarding, she says, to see what an impact the historic project had—both on her students and those in the audience.

As just one example, she says, an eminent Milton scholar who attended the Chicago performance told the discussion panel that he had been reading Samson Agonistes for 40 years and had never realized it was a play about disability.

“For me, that was a heart-stopping moment because if you bring to something a disability studies perspective, you bring a new understanding.”

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Originally published by Chris Milazzo at al.nd.edu on December 01, 2011.

English Doctoral Candidate Receives Dissertation Fellowship

2011-11-09T14:00:00-05:00

Lauren Rich, a Ph.D. candidate in Notre Dame’s Department of English, has been awarded a 2011–12 American Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women for her research on food in early 20th century British and colonial fiction. Fewer than 10 percent of the more than 900 applicants were given fellowships.

Rich says she was particularly honored because the award “is designed not only to recognize intellectually rigorous and promising scholarly projects but also to support women who are contributing to their academic and local communities by mentoring and helping other women.”

Rich’s dissertation, “Food for Thought: Eating, Reading, and Being Modern in Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature, 1904–1954,” seeks to examine and enrich the understanding of the complex relationships between food, community, and literature.

Consumption and Culture

“Virginia Woolf famously wrote that most ‘novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten,’” says Rich.

“I’m amazed at just how wrong she was. Food is everywhere in early 20th century literature—it’s just that literary critics and scholars are only now starting to really pay attention to it.”

This scholarly interest comes at a time when food is also becoming a hot topic of cultural conversation, Rich says, pointing to the growing awareness of obesity, environmental issues related to agribusiness, and the locavore and slow food movements.

In her dissertation, co-directed by Associate Professor of English Barbara Green and Maud Ellmann (now at the University of Chicago), Rich takes an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating material from fields such as history, anthropology, and sociology.

“I also get to read a lot of old cookbooks,” she says, “which can be very interesting. It wasn’t until I started looking at period recipes for Bouef-en-Daube, a dish featured in a key scene in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, that I realized it was meant to be anachronistic—a signifier for a way of life that is rapidly passing away in the novel.”

Food and Fiction

In conjunction with her research, Rich has also developed and taught a literature course for non-English majors called Voracious Reading: Four Centuries of Food and Fiction.

“While the course explored a much wider variety of literary and non-literary texts than my dissertation,” she says, “it, too, centered around food-studies readings. I find students—especially non-majors—are really attracted by this approach.”

Students who wouldn’t normally take an English class did so because they like to cook or like watching food-related television programs, Rich says. But by the end of the semester, these same students found they’d become more careful readers and were eager to explore additional authors and genres.

At the request of her students, Rich even led an informal reading group the semester after her course ended. Called Food for Thought, the group continued the kinds of conversations she began in the classroom with students.

“Among many other things,” she says, “we read Irish novelist Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy together, scheduled a screening of the film adaptation, and invited the author to join one of our meetings while he was visiting at Notre Dame. He very graciously answered our questions, talked about his writing process, and even autographed our books.”

Interdisciplinary Approach

In another project related to her dissertation, Rich is helping to organize a January 2012 conference at Notre Dame called Food Networks: Gender and Foodways.

Sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters’ Gender Studies Program, the interdisciplinary event will focus on gender issues within the context of food and food culture, including food spaces, representations of food, dieting, and individuals associated with the food industry, among others.

“I’m really fortunate in that my scholarly work allows me to combine two of my greatest passions: food and literature,” she says. “Eating and reading—both forms of consumption—can be some of life’s greatest pleasures, though both have become problematic for many people for various reasons.

“I see my work as a scholar and teacher as, among other things, a way of helping people recover a sense of pleasure and enjoyment in these activities.”

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Originally published by Joanna Basile at al.nd.edu on October 12, 2011.

Stephen Fredman Awarded $125,000 for Acquisition of Robert Creeley Library

2011-11-09T13:00:00-05:00

Shortly after co-editing a book titled Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work, the English department’s Stephen Fredman has been awarded a $125,000 Library Acquisition Grant from the Office of the Provost to support the library’s purchase of the late poet Robert Creeley’s library. This grant will contribute to the $684,000 cost of the collection, $80,000 of which Creeley’s widow donated to aid the acquisition and restoration of Creeley’s library.

The collection includes some two hundred volumes of Creeley’s own works, many in special editions not widely available to the public. Creeley habitually stuffed letters, articles, reviews, newspaper articles, and the like into the pages of these volumes, and the library plans to keep careful track of these for anyone interested in how he kept them. An additional eleven artist books that Creeley collaborated on will join the collection. Most of these are museum quality collectibles, including a few large, unbound ones on unique materials such as plastic. Several multimedia materials––tapes, records, and other miscellaneous media––come with the purchase along with over six thousand books by writers in Creeley’s cohort from his own generation and subsequent ones. Many of these books contain dedications to him and also have a variety of letters, brochures, and reviews placed in them.

Creeley’s library will allow scholars to perform critical and biographical work and will help solidify our understanding of the poet’s literary relations, especially since the majority of these materials have never been publicly available before. Fredman believes that further study of the collection will change perceptions of Creeley as a hermetic poet writing in Dickinsonian isolation to that of a writer actively participating in circles of writers, artists, publishers, editors, and musicians, working, in fact, in the center of these groups in a catalytic capacity. The papers will benefit Notre Dame students as well because they will have the opportunity to compare their reading experiences in the classroom with actual visits to look at the original books from which their readings are taken.

Adding such a large and important collection to Notre Dame’s holdings will impact the reputation of the library and the university significantly. According to Fredman, “this will really help put us on the map as a holder of a major poet’s materials. People will come from around the world to look at it.” Creeley’s library will be the centerpiece of an expanding collection of modern poetry, building on the library’s smaller holdings of small press poetry from the 1960s to the present, its Samuel Hazo collection of modern poetry, and its foreign language acquisitions. The library hopes to make fellowships available for people to use the Creeley collection and eventually to organize a conference around the it. In the meantime, the collection is available for viewing, although it is not yet fully catalogued. Anyone wishing to consult the papers should contact Special Collections directly.

Fredman is now turning his attention to another book he has in progress, tentatively titled Prose/Poetry: American Writing at the Crossroads, a sequel to his 1983 Poets’ Prose that looks at writings of the last thirty years and opens up new territory between poetry and prose. He also hopes to produce the memoirs of his early meetings with modern poets such as Creeley, Robert Duncan, and David Antin.

Declan Kiberd Appointed as the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English

2011-09-29T13:00:00-04:00

The commencement of the 2011-2012 school year brought with it the joint appointment of world-leading scholar Declan Kiberd to the department of English and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Professor Kiberd, who will teach at Notre Dame during the fall semesters and in the Irish Institute’s Dublin center during the spring and summer, specializes in modern Irish literature and culture with an emphasis on postcolonial theory. He is known for his many books on the subject, including Inventing Ireland: Literature of the Modern Nation and The Irish Writer and the World in which he considers English and Irish literature as “a single discursive unit” whereby he re-imagines Irish identity. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, his most recent book, takes readers through James Joyce’s famously difficult novel episode by episode, helping everyday readers to reconnect with this literary monument.

This semester Professor Kiberd is teaching a graduate seminar on Joyce and an undergraduate course on Synge and Wilde with plans to offer a survey of modern Irish writers and genres at the Irish Institute in Dublin this spring. He looks forward as well to working with graduate students from Notre Dame and elsewhere at the Irish seminar in Dublin this summer on contemporary Irish theater. For Kiberd, teaching at Notre Dame’s Irish Institute means working in an interdisciplinary setting where scholars and students from a range of fields––English, Sociology, History, and more––converge and open new windows of opportunity for employing comparative approaches to Irish literature. It also means he will work with American students who bring a different set of questions, perspectives, and assumptions to the classroom than what he is accustomed to in Ireland. He hopes to both learn from these questions and challenge students’ thinking by introducing to them the kinds of questions often asked in Irish classrooms, enriching and varying the kinds of discussions available to Notre Dame students.

The interdisciplinary approaches taking place in Kiberd’s classes go hand in hand with his research. His dual post in English and Irish studies supports his interest in combining both areas of study in ways not as accessible in the Irish university. Kiberd says, “I’ve always been interested in working in Irish and English and it’s almost impossible to do that in Ireland,” following up with the statement, ”it’s easier to be amphibious here.” Because Ireland does not have departments such as comparative literature, and they tend to adopt an ideology that resists comparison, Irish scholars often cling to strict disciplinary boundaries. However, Irish studies in the States continues to move favorably towards multi-disciplinarity due to its melting pot of cultures ripe with possibilities for comparative research. This attitude strikes Kiberd as useful because “comparisons are necessary to define what makes your own culture distinct.”

Kiberd finds this interdisciplinary setting exciting as it promotes new ways of reading and situating Irish literature in a global context. He describes the “ability to configure the discipline in somewhat new ways” by examining, for instance, how Walt Whitman, America’s national bard, influenced W.B. Yeats in Ireland, who, in turn, made possible the emergence of Pablo Neruda in South America. As a postcolonial critic, Kiberd would like see scholars of Irish studies make comparisons with countries such as Mexico, Africa, and even postcolonial America, places with the kind of mentality that influences Irish writers.

While at Notre Dame, Kiberd plans to continue working on two books he has underway. The first concerns Irish writers of the last fifty years within a postcolonial frame, a topic of particular interest for him since many contemporary Irish writers live outside of Ireland and write about places like New York without reference to their home country. His second work in progress is about Samuel Beckett’s religious beliefs, which he envisions as a response to the overrepresentation of Beckett as a skeptic. Beckett’s work often verges on religious meditations, and Notre Dame has particularly good resources for performing research on this type of project.

For related news on Declan Kiberd’s appointment click here.

Special Issue of Disability Studies Quarterly Co-edited by John Duffy

2011-09-21T13:20:00-04:00

John Duffy, associate professor in the English department and the Francis O’Malley Director of the University Writing Program, has recently co-edited the latest issue of Disability Studies Quarterly with Melanie Yergeau of the University of Michigan. This special issue entitled “Disability and Rhetoric” promotes new methodological possibilities for applying rhetorical approaches to the burgeoning study of disability. The issue’s goal––to raise questions about the relationship between rhetoric and disability––emphasizes how our conceptions of disability emerge out of a culturally and socially constructed set of symbols and narratives.

In designing their conceptual framework, Duffy and Yergeau aim to expand rather than restrict the definitions of rhetoric employed by scholars in this special issue and in the field at large. They do, however, outline a general theory of disability and rhetoric based on Kenneth Burke’s famous study A Rhetoric of Motives, adapting his dictum, “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is ‘meaning’ there is persuasion.” Their version states, “wherever there is disability, there are meanings. And wherever there are disability meanings, there is rhetoric and persuasion.”

With this focus in mind, Duffy and Yergeau present a truly interdisciplinary collection of essays, ranging from literary and psychological studies to archival research. Essaka Joshua, for instance, explores the “complex symbolic relationship between architecture and the disabled body in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Joshua Diehl, Julie Wolf, Lauren Herlihy, and Arlen C. Moller take a psychological approach in their study of the negative effects colors have in shaping popular views on autism. From another perspective altogether, Zosha Stuckey employs historical and archival methodologies in her investigation of nineteenth-century letters sent to and from the New York State Asylum of Idiots.

This journal issue comes at a time that sees disability studies moving more and more towards the center of the humanities. Duffy believes disability studies will continue heading in this direction because it functions as a medium for asking questions about what it means to be a human being. Since disability studies explores “how we respond to difference, whether physical or cognitive,” says Duffy, it allows us to ask “what is the place of a disabled person in society and what does that tell us about who we are?” He adds to this reasoning the changing demographics caused by the aging baby boomer generation, who are likely to become disabled as they grow older, making disability a more prominent social issue in the years ahead.

In relation to his work on disability studies, Duffy recently published an article he co-authored with Rebecca Dorner called “The Pathos of ‘Mindblindness’: Autism, Science, and Sadness in ‘Theory of Mind’ Narratives” in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies of Disability. His current endeavor, a book length project, deals with ethics in teaching and writing and addresses an audience of people who administer and teach in university writing programs.

The “Disability and Rhetoric” issue of Disability Studies Quarterly can be accessed at http://www.dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/.

Creative Writing Program Alumna Wins Poetry Prize

2011-09-12T10:00:00-04:00

Susan Blackwell Ramsey, a 2008 graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program, is the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for 2011. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication of her manuscript, A Mind Like This, by the University of Nebraska Press.

Ramsey, who received her bachelor’s degree from Kalamazoo College, came to Notre Dame with a wealth of life experience. She had worked as a high school teacher, gardener, and horticultural transparencies librarian. Her primary occupation, though, was bookseller. While raising three children, she worked at the Athena Book Shop, an independent bookstore in Kalamazoo, Mich.

She also wrote poetry—beginning in grade school—with publications in Poetry Northwest, The Indiana Review, and New Voices from the Third Coast: An Anthology of Michigan Poets even before entering Notre Dame. Ramsey recalls her first acceptance: “Two poems in The Muse Strikes Back: A Poetic Response by Women to Men. I was showing the letter to strangers on the street.”

In 2002, she received an Irving S. Gilmore Emerging Artist Grant for her poetry.

When the Athena Book Shop closed in 2006, Ramsey was admitted into Notre Dame’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program—and received the program’s William Mitchell Award in 2008. While a student, her work appeared in Wayne State University’s New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry. In 2006, she won the Marjorie J. Wilson Award from Margie: The Journal of American Poetry, and David Wagoner chose her “Pickled Heads, St. Petersburg” for the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry.

In addition to her work as a poet, Ramsey teaches spinning, knitting, and creative writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

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Originally published at graduateschool.nd.edu/news.

Originally published by Mary Hendriksen at al.nd.edu on August 31, 2011.

Newest Book by Prof. Gerald Bruns

2011-09-09T11:00:00-04:00

Gerald L. Bruns, William P. & Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English, taught at Notre Dame from 1984 to 2008. In “retirement” he has recently published several studies, including, On Ceasing to Be Human (Stanford University Press, 2011), of which Professor Steve Tomasula writes:

The genius of Gerald L. Bruns has always been his ability to ask exactly right questions about exactly right subjects to reveal why people write literature, how we read, and what the literature of the past can tell us about the world outside the book at our contemporary moment. When the very idea of meaning was under question, Bruns gave us Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History, an analysis of literature from ancient to modern that was as breathtaking in its scope as it was for his insight about writing and meaning making as a social practice. As it became increasingly commonplace to think of poetry as irrelevant, marginalized by the uses to which it is put, Bruns taught in The Material of Poetry how the most aesthetically extreme poems reveal poetry to permeate the most fundamental questions, as well as the most common of places.

And so it is with On Ceasing to Be Human, which can be seen as an extension of the lifelong conversation Bruns has been having with philosophers, poets, and other thinkers. In this book, he takes as a starting point the position of Maurice Blanchot: an author for whom “writing is neither the expression nor construction of anything, nor transport to a higher (or nether) world; instead it is a kind of limit-experience in which the one who writes is…evacuated, becoming something entirely other, without identity.” In characteristic Bruns fashion, he draws on an astonishing breadth of reading (he seems to have distilled everything ever written on his subjects) not so much to answer questions as to raise them: what could it mean to no longer be able to say “I”? That is, to recognize ourselves as beings who are “singular-plural”: entities from which nothing can be excluded, not animals, not machines, not each other? Has “the human” become a poetic concept, like “the divine,” in need of constant revision? What does it mean to feel compelled to ask these questions? To be more than human (or is it less)? To be more (or is it less) free? Ranging from the metamorphoses of Ovid to those of Kafka to Derrida’s musing on his cat, he observes, “clearly, being human, at least as it is imagined in art and literature, has never been a given.”

In the chapters that follow—on being other than human, human recognition (e.g., Jane Goodall being accepted by the sign-language-using chimpanzee, Lucy), and other chapters—Bruns explores the sense of our selves at the close of the human age and the opening of that of the posthuman: a time when our science, social history, and changing perspectives make pervasive (and literal) the fluid nature of the individual that has always been a given in literature. The translation into law, and life, of the philosophical questions posed in this slender volume will be profound, and as with Bruns’s other books, readers will turn to On Ceasing to Be Human as yet another instance of Bruns’s attunement to the context in which his questions are asked, as well as for insight into how they are experienced at our moment.

Stuart Greene Honored for Civic Engagement

2011-09-05T08:00:00-04:00

Campus Compact, a coalition of more than 1,100 college and university presidents, has named Stuart Greene, an Institute for Educational Initiatives fellow and director of the Education, Schooling, and Society (ESS) program at the University of Notre Dame, one of four finalists for the 2011 Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award.

The award is bestowed annually to recognize senior faculty for exemplary leadership in advancing students’ civic learning, community engagement, and contributions to the public good. Recipients’ careers exhibit true dedication to service, to community, and to the integrity of higher education.

Greene, an associate professor of English, incorporates community-based research into the ESS undergraduate minor, a program he initiated in the College of Arts and Letters.

Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns has given Greene the Ganey Faculty Community-Based Research Award for his scholarly contributions to the local community, and he played a key role in Notre Dame obtaining the Carnegie Foundation’s Community Engagement classification.

“Stuart is a faculty member who represents the full integration of community engagement into one’s professional life,” says Mary Beckman, associate director of the Center for Social Concerns. She notes Greene’s creation of the ESS program with its focus on community-based learning, as well as his support for community engagement during his service as associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters.

“He has consistently, over the years, played a role in the development of students’ sense of social responsibility,” she says. His work has contributed to documented improvements in the community.”

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Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

Stephen Fredman Publishes Two Books

2011-08-03T15:54:00-04:00

Stephen Fredman had a year worth celebrating in 2010. He published two books: a cultural history of mid-twentieth century American poetry and the arts entitled Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art (Stanford University Press); and a collection on the poet Robert Creeley, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work (University of Iowa Press), which he edited with Steve McCaffery. Fredman also was instrumental in the purchase by Notre Dame’s Special Collections of Creeley’s working library, filled with beautiful artist’s books on which he collaborated and other editions of his own work and that of his extensive cohort.

Fredman has devoted his career as a scholar and teacher of modern American poetry to answering one central question: What makes American poetry different from other world poetries? A longtime member of the English faculty at Notre Dame, Fredman has written four books and edited two collections on American poetry that address this question in a variety of ways. While poets read and react to poetry from all over, they may find their own nation asking persistent questions to which they need to respond. American poets face particular challenges that arise from the distinctive history and cultural diversity of the United States.

America, it has often been noted, is above all an idea. People came here often as an act of self-exile, leaving behind long traditions that had sustained them in their countries of origin, in order to realize their desire for freedom. What consequences for poetry flow, Fredman asks, from this abandonment of tradition? Another factor to consider is that the arts in America achieved cultural maturity relatively recently and lack a clear place and stable role in American society. These two factors – the lack of an established tradition and the uncertain value attached to the arts – create a sense of instability and even crisis that leads poets to consider some fundamental questions: How can I address the shifting, heterogeneous cultural situation? Are the previous generation’s solutions to this problem usable? And even, is there value in being a poet in America?

Fredman lays out the problem of groundlessness in American poetry most fully in his second book, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (1993), where he shows how five twentieth-century American poets looked to Transcendentalist precursors to negotiate the paradox of grounding their work in groundlessness. Like the Founding Fathers, they sought precedents for their experiments even as they made something utterly new. Ralph Waldo Emerson looms large in Fredman’s work as a thinker who took the central political concepts of the American founding and translated them into the literary terms that enable American poetry.

Contextual Practice takes a somewhat different approach while extending the themes animating Fredman’s earlier work. Here he focuses on the dark period following the Second World War, when poets looked to their everyday contexts for inspiration, assembling new realities out of fragments of a broken world. Fredman highlights the role of the body and describes the relationship between this creative moment and the emerging counterculture. Already his new book is receiving warm reviews that praise its inventiveness and explanatory power.

He is currently at work on a new project that he conceives as a second volume to his first book on Poets Prose (1983). Tentatively titled Prose/Poetry: American Writing at the Crossroads, the book will focus on the last thirty years of American poetry and the merging of poetry with prose. Fredman notes that generic distinctions have become less salient as gender, ethnicity, and new media have become increasingly important to the literary scene.

For more information about his publications, see Fredman’s web page at: http://english.nd.edu/faculty/profiles/fredman/

New Faculty Strengthen American Literary Studies at Notre Dame

2011-04-05T14:18:00-04:00

Laura Dassow Walls, a distinguished scholar of 19th century American literature and culture, will join the Notre Dame faculty in fall 2011 as the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English.

Her arrival, notes Professor John Sitter, chair of the Department of English, is the latest in a series of recent hires that have been critical to the growth of the department.

“The appointments of Walls and José Limón to distinguished professorships—as well as the appointment of Kate Marshall as an assistant professor and the hiring of two more junior professors of U.S. literature—greatly strengthen and transform American literary studies at Notre Dame,” he says.

Transcending Disciplines

Walls’ latest book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press), recently won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for the best book in American intellectual history, and the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

“This unprecedented conjunction of awards speaks to both the excellence of Laura Walls’s work and its profound interdisciplinarity,” Sitter says.

Currently the John H. Bennett, Jr., Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina, Walls specializes in American Transcendentalism—especially Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, transatlantic Romanticism, literature and science, and environmental literature and ecocriticism.

She has written two other books—Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science and Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth—and edited three, including The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. In addition, she edits the annual journal The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies.

Walls is currently working on a biography, Writing the Cosmos: The Life of Henry D. Thoreau, for which she was awarded a 2010–11 Guggenheim Fellowship, and doing research for an essay on Louisa May Alcott, who was one of Thoreau’s pupils.

As a scholar, Walls has taken a special interest in the scientific writings of Thoreau and his contemporaries, many of which had previously been ignored, and she explores texts written by scientists during the same time period.

“The separation of literature from science hobbles our understanding of both by buying into modernist ideologies that write science out of culture and nature out of literature,” she says.

Literature and Culture

Limón, whom Sitter calls “a towering figure in Latino/Latina literary studies,” became Notre Dame Professor of American Literature in January 2011. Previously, he was the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of English and director of the Center for Mexican-American Studies at the University of Texas.

“I am honored to be joining such a stimulating and forward-looking English department and the excellent Institute for Latino Studies at such a distinguished institution,” he says.

Although English is Limón’s home department, he will also have close ties to the Department of American Studies and the Department of Anthropology. His research and teaching interests include cultural studies, Chicano literature, anthropology and literature, Mexicans in the United States, U.S.-Mexico cultural relations, critical theory, and folklore and popular culture.

Limón is the author of three major books in the field of Latino studies—American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States and the Erotics of Culture, Dancing With the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas, and Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry.

He also recently completed a book on the founding figure of Mexican-American studies, Américo Paredes, and has several other research projects underway.

New Perspectives

Assistant Professor Kate Marshall joined the faculty in fall 2009. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American literature, media and technology, and critical theory.

“My present and future research is devoted to projects that have developed out of my concern for the role of form in articulating the dynamic relationship between media, literature, and modernity,” she says.

Marshall has published articles on modern American fiction, science and literature, contemporary fiction, and teaching with technology. She is on the steering committee of Notre Dame’s new Global Modernisms Initiative and coordinates events for the Text-Media Studies working group.

The Department of English has also hired Matthew Wilkens, a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University’s American culture studies program who specializes in American literature after 1900. He will begin teaching at Notre Dame this fall.

Wilkens’ teaching and research interests include contemporary fiction, world Anglophone literature, modernism, digital humanities, new media studies, literature and science, and literary theory. He is currently working on a book called Revolution: The Event in Modern Fiction.

Also joining the faculty is Kinohi Nishikawa, who will come to Notre Dame in fall 2012 after his two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Northwestern University’s Department of African American Studies.

Nishikawa’s scholarly interests include American literature and print culture since 1865, African American literature, critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of the book. He won the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Duke University, where he completed his dissertation on “Reading the Street: Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, and the Rise of Black Pulp Fiction.”

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Irish Scholar Declan Kiberd Appointed Keough Professor of Irish Studies

2011-04-05T13:22:00-04:00

Declan Kiberd, one of Ireland’s most prominent intellectuals, has been appointed Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Kiberd, whose appointment took effect in 2011, was previously chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin (UCD). At Notre Dame, he teaches fall semesters in Ireland and spring semesters on the South Bend campus.

“Declan Kiberd is the major figure in the field of Irish studies, whose research commands international acclaim,” says Christopher Fox, director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. “As former graduate students of Declan’s and Notre Dame students who studied with him in the Dublin program at UCD attest, he also is an extraordinary teacher. His arrival strengthens an already thriving research and teaching center in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. It is not an overstatement to say that his presence on the Notre Dame faculty reinforces our position as the world leader in Irish Studies for years to come.”

According to Donald Keough, chairman emeritus of Notre Dame’s board of trustees and co-chair of the University’s Ireland Council, “Declan Kiberd’s appointment will take the Irish studies program at Notre Dame to a new level in years to come.”

“In addition to his unique expertise in Irish literature, Declan Kiberd brings to Notre Dame students his deep knowledge of modern literature generally,” says John Sitter, English department chairman. “He also brings to the study of fiction an engaging ethical commitment. The subtitle of the book he published recently on Joyce’s Ulysses—The Art of Everyday Living—is earned on every page. It is a brilliantly accessible model of how to read complex fiction in relation to daily experience.”

A Dublin native who counted the novelist John McGahern among his earliest schoolteachers, Kiberd studied at Trinity College Dublin before earning a doctoral degree at Oxford, under the direction of Richard Ellmann, the biographer of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Oscar Wilde.

A member of the UCD faculty since 1979, Kiberd had taught previously at the University of Kent and Trinity College. An Irish language speaker and a scholar of ancient Celtic culture and Irish literature and history, he has lectured in over 30 countries worldwide and contributes essays and reviews to the Irish Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times.

Kiberd’s study of Irish literature, Inventing Ireland, was praised by the late Edward Said as “a highly readable, joyfully contentious book whose enormous learning and superb understanding of the literary text will introduce readers for the first time to a remarkably lively panorama of Irish culture during the last century.”

Books Kiberd has written include Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism in Irish Literature, Irish Classics, The Irish Writer and the World, and Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living.

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English Majors Thrive in Diverse Careers

2011-04-05T13:21:00-04:00

You can find Notre Dame graduates with degrees in English almost everywhere—and not just working in the classroom as teachers or professors. Indeed, according to a survey of alumni, they are thriving in a broad range of professions.

“Our graduates are in just about anything you can imagine,” says English Professor Chris Vanden Bossche, who serves as the department’s director of undergraduate studies and recently surveyed alumni on their career choices. While the most common post-graduation path is law, he reports, that is followed closely by education, business, and a variety of communications professions.

“English students learn critical thinking, writing, and speaking skills, of course—and that can be an important edge in any career,” says Vanden Bossche. “But through reading and analyzing great literature they also learn to think deeply about human life in all its variety.”

And that, he says, builds the kind of knowledge and skill base that makes studying English a great preparation for just about any career.

Consider, as just one sample of alumni success, the members of a virtual departmental dynasty: brothers Greg ’87, Jeff ’89, and Mark Miller ’05. All three Danville, Pa., natives received English degrees before moving into careers that include finance, medicine, publishing, and higher education.

Banking on the Humanities

Initially considering science, the oldest Miller sibling, Greg, says a love of literature drew him instead into the Department of English and into activities such as chairing a Sophomore Literary Festival headlined by author John Irving, who had just published The Cider House Rules.

As he approached graduation, Greg was unsure about his future career course, so he applied to law schools and graduate programs in English. He also attended a recruitment visit from an investment banking firm. Then, despite never having taken a finance or accounting class, he got—and accepted—an offer from the firm, First Boston Corp.

During his eight-week training there, Greg realized just how relevant his background in English was. The financial skills needed on the job, he says, followed naturally if candidates “had good judgment and communication skills, and were willing to work non-stop for a couple of years.”

Next, after three years at First Boston, Greg left to pursue a J.D. from Yale Law School before returning to investment banking, where he now specializes in the media sector at Greenhill & Co.

“Notre Dame and Yale Law School were fundamental to my sense of self and my future career path,” Greg says. “The intellectual vibrancy and tangible fostering of independent thinking define those cultures.”

They have also defined his career and volunteer choices, through which he has continued to nurture his passion for contemporary literature and art. Greg is currently president of White Columns, New York’s oldest nonprofit alternative art space; serves as a member of the Painting and Sculpture committee of the Whitney Museum; and is active with several other art institutions in New York and London. An avid art collector, he even founded his own art book publishing company called Gregory R. Miller & Co. in 2004.

He attributes his successes to the values, analytical skills, and curiosity that were fostered as a student. And now, he says, as a publisher, he can work “not only to enhance understanding and appreciation of art but also to make a contribution to the broader cultural dialogue.”

Reading for Life

Following his brother Greg into Notre Dame was an inspiring, not intimidating, challenge, says Jeff Miller, who also found his undergraduate home in the English Department.

“I grew up surrounded by physicians and knew I was going to become one—but I took my dad’s advice and went another way with my undergraduate degree,” Jeff says. “I wanted to gain a different perspective and appreciate a different area of education.”

Once he graduated with his English degree, Jeff went on to medical school to become a dermatologist. He later returned to school to complete an M.B.A. as well.

“In no way does a background in the humanities mean you can’t be successful in the medical field,” Jeff says. “In fact, I think the analytical, critical thinking, and communications skills I picked up as an English major really enhanced my ability to work across disciplines. I know that will also hold true for many of my students.”

Today, Jeff works as a professor of dermatology at Penn State’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center—and credits his success as a teacher to the time and passion he invested as a student himself.

He has continued to be a broad, eclectic reader and brings what he discovers to his medical students. A recent find includes a piece from The New Yorker on the social and monetary costs associated with the poorest 1 percent of hospital patients in Camden, N.J.

“It ties right into what I enjoyed so much in English—studying the human condition,” Jeff says, adding that, “I’m immediately going to make it required reading for my students.”

The Illuminating Edge

Mark, the youngest Miller, studied both English and art history before he entered investment banking.

“Three months after I was born, Greg started at Notre Dame,” he says. “We were always traveling to Notre Dame or welcoming a sibling who was coming home—I couldn’t wait to get there.”

Mark says his English coursework, starting with a British literature survey class he took as a sophomore, “brought literature alive for me.”

By senior year, he says, his English studies had also transformed his critical thinking skills. “Whether you were evaluating post-modern theories or a major work of literature, you had to be able to break down detailed material and ultimately form an opinion on complicated issues.”

English degree in hand, Mark accepted his first position after graduation at J.P. Morgan, working ininvestment banking. Now at Glencoe Capital, a Chicago-based private equity firm, Mark plans to start an M.B.A. program this summer at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“The ability to communicate is critical in business, from preparing a document to discussing topics with colleagues to selling the services of your firm,” he says. “And while my undergraduate coursework did not apply in any way to the ‘nuts and bolts’ of finance, it prepared me to synthesize and evaluate large amounts of material and communicate my views—and my firm’s views—on challenging topics.

“More important,” Mark says, “I developed a deeper understanding of the world around me. Both literature and art illuminate and explore the many forces that shape who we are.”

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Image courtesy of the Miller Family: from left to right—Chris (Theology, '96), Jeff (English, '89), Cathy Bernasek (History, '94), Greg (English, '87), and Mark (English, '05).

Love of Appalachian Literature Inspires Student Research

2011-04-05T13:20:00-04:00

Pride in his cultural heritage and a love of literature prompted senior English major Matthew Coyne to delve into the origins of the Appalachian literary journal Cold Mountain Review last summer—a research project he then expanded into a senior thesis on influential regional writers.

“My professors encouraged me to study what I love,” says Coyne, who was raised in Parkersburg, W.Va., a small town located in the heart of Appalachia. “So I did, and I haven’t looked back since.”

Coyne says his roots in the region inspire him to focus on “what I consider to be important questions about how residents of Appalachia relate to the region, how they shape their identities, and what that means for the future of the area.”

Chronicling a Literary Community

Coyne’s initial research took him to Appalachian State University (ASU) in Boone, N.C., where three students founded Cold Mountain Review in the early 1970s. The trip was funded by an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) grant from Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

Although each of Cold Mountain Review’s founding authors has received some academic attention, the influence they had on each other and literary society has never been adequately investigated, says Coyne.

“It was an exciting experience to know my work was filling in a gap in the field of Appalachian literary studies, a subject that means so much to me,” he says.

After weeks of work in ASU’s archives, Coyne conducted an extensive interview with two of the Cold Mountain Review founders. To help future scholars, he then donated his recordings and more than 40 pages of transcripts to the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection archives at ASU’s Carol G. Belk Library. Coyne also created an edited version of his interview, which he submitted to Appalachian Journal, a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal published at ASU.

“I learned a lot about the relationship between higher education and literary production in the Appalachian south,” he says. “I also was very interested to find that the literary community in Appalachian State’s graduate school in the 1970s more closely resembled the community of the Fugitive poets at Vanderbilt in the 1920s than it did the emerging culture of creative writing programs springing up across the country.”

Researching Regional Authors

Coyne says his experience at ASU was the basis for his senior thesis on West Virginia short story writer Breece D’J Pancake, who “shares many similarities” with the founders of Cold Mountain Review. He attributes a great deal of the smooth and successful progression of his thesis on the “invaluable preparation” his summer UROP project afforded him.

“It has been a huge help … in better familiarizing me with the region in general and with the region’s complexities, literary history, and contemporary literature,” Coyne says. “My work with the Appalachian Journal has also been useful in that it continues to be one of my most important critical resources.”

Kate Marshall, an assistant professor in the Department of English, serves as Coyne’s senior thesis and summer research adviser.

“His work at the Appalachian State archives and the author interviews he conducted while in residence put him in contact with materials and thinkers that have helped shape his current work,” Marshall says. “It gave him access to a mode of literary scholarship that undergraduates rarely have a chance to encounter with such thoroughness.”

She says Coyne’s senior thesis builds on that foundation. “His research on American regional authors Breece D’J Pancake and Willa Cather in relation to critical conversations on the idea of ‘deep time’ in literature is fascinating, sophisticated, and original,” Marshall says. “Matt has already been preparing his work for publication and conference venues, and it’s exciting to work with him on developing a project with this larger scope.”

Next year, Coyne will start a job as a technical writer for a software company and hopes to, one day, pursue a career in publishing.

“But regardless of what I end up doing and where I end up doing it, I am committed to encouraging conversation in and about Appalachia,” Coyne says. “I hope my research will contribute to this purpose.”

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Author Steve Tomasula Explores Art’s Frontier

2011-04-05T13:19:00-04:00

To Steve Tomasula, literature is the “wild west” of the arts today.

“As an artistic medium, the revolution that’s gone through music and the visual arts is now happening in books,” said Tomasula, an associate professor in the Notre Dame Department of English and director of its Creative Writing Program.

Consider trailblazing painter Robert Rauschenberg, who once sold one of his abstract paintings for a now unthinkable $16. “Nobody knew what art was becoming,” Tomasula says. “There was a time when they knew it could no longer take on traditional forms like portrait or landscape painting, but they weren’t sure what else it could become.

“Right now, publishing is in similar turmoil, which I think is really good for literature. Recently, multinational corporations dominated publishing, but the marketplace is becoming a lot more fragmented—the way it also has with, say, music—and that makes it interesting to think what literature can be.”

Tomasula’s own writing has been called a “re-invention” of the novel that crosses visual as well as written genres, drawing from science and the arts, and exploring how people represent each other. He won the 2010 Mary Shelley Award for Excellence in Fiction for a “new-media” novel titled TOC, which he describes as “a meditation on time” that the reader alternately reads and watches. Published on DVD, the novel is a hybrid of text, sound, animation, and art.

He has also published literary criticism, and more than 50 short stories in magazines such as McSweeney’s, Bomb, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, and Western Humanities Review.

Tomasula says he encourages his creative writing students to think expansively. “Most people think of fiction as story telling where the content is more important than how the story is told,” he says. “But what distinguishes literature from other kinds of writing is how it’s written. So one of the things I do in a class is get students to think of text as a medium—such as clay to a sculptor or sound to a composer—and ask, ‘How are you going to work this material?’”

Such questions will continue to be at the center of Tomasula’s own creative work as he embarks on a one-year Howard Fellowship to finish a new novel called Ascension.

“The book follows different ways we have represented nature,” he says, “ranging from early naturalist sketchbooks up through today when it’s all digital and genetic.”

Tomasula says he drew his inspiration for the work from an entomologist who studied fleas. “He was able, from the anatomy of fleas, to deduce that they were all on one land mass at one time. And this was well before Pangaea was accepted as fact.

“I don’t make up much of anything of my books, really,” he says. “I try to draw on actual things so my books are this kind of hybrid between fact and fiction—a collage.”

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English Faculty Win Prestigious Honors

2011-04-05T13:17:00-04:00

Three English professors at the University of Notre Dame—Stephen M. Fallon, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, and Peter Holland—have been singled out for their outstanding scholarship.

“Any of the three major honors accorded to these professors would alone be welcome news for Notre Dame—together they signal the highest distinction,” says Professor John Sitter, chair of the Department of English.

“Outside observers have known for years that Notre Dame is home to outstanding scholars of medieval literature and culture,” he says. “Now it is becoming increasingly evident that we boast preeminent Renaissance scholars as well.”

Milton Expert

Fallon, a professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and the Department of English, was named the 2011 Honored Scholar by the Milton Society of America. The honor is the association’s lifetime achievement award, whose past winners include C.S. Lewis, William Empson, and Stanley Fish.

“Milton scholarship is an important—and crowded—field in literary scholarship. To be recognized as being at the top of that field is a very high honor,” Sitter says. “If there were a Nobel Prize for Miltonists, Steve Fallon would be on his way to Stockholm.”

Fallon, the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor of the Humanities, says the award was a surprise. “To teach a writer as complex and beautiful as Milton is its own reward; to be named among some of the scholars whose work I most admire is humbling.”

Fallon specializes in Milton and early modern literature and intellectual history. He has written two award-winning books on Milton—Milton Among the Philosophers and Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority. He also co-edited Milton’s Complete Poetry and Essential Prose for Modern Library and is working on a book that examines areas of convergence between Milton and Isaac Newton.

Celebrated Author

Kerby-Fulton, Notre Dame Professor of English, received the 2010 Haskins Gold Medal from the Medieval Academy of America for her work, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. The award is given annually to a book, published in the previous six years, that is judged to be distinguished in the field of medieval studies.

“Kerby-Fulton’s magnum opus presents a fresh panorama of theology, literature, and history in the age of Chaucer with an originality that promises to have an impact across numerous disciplines within and beyond medieval studies for years to come,” the committee announced in presenting the award.

Books Under Suspicion, published by University of Notre Dame Press, explores censorship and tolerance of controversial revelatory theology in England from 1329 to 1437. The book was also awarded the American Conference on British Studies’ 2007 John Ben Snow Prize.

“The Haskins Medal is an extraordinary recognition of the achievement of a scholar who has in just a few years become absolutely central to Notre Dame’s high place in the world of medieval studies and to our doctoral program,” Sitter notes.

Shakespeare Scholar

Holland, McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies, was elected an honorary fellow at Trinity Hall, his alma mater and one of the 31 colleges that comprise the University of Cambridge.

An internationally regarded Shakespearean scholar, Holland describes this accolade from Trinity Hall as “the greatest honor I’ve ever received.

“Part of why it’s so thrilling to be elected an honorary fellow,” he says, “is that you’re elected not by people within your discipline but by a group of people who from any position, any academic background, can see that you have achieved a standing in your discipline that warrants this honor. That’s quite something.”

It’s also a rare achievement. Since Holland enrolled there as a student in 1969, Trinity Hall has only recognized approximately 20 honorary fellows—Stephen Hawking among them.

Holland’s resume includes tenures as director of The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford–upon–Avon and as president of the Shakespeare Association of America, and he is just the fourth editor in the history of the prestigious annual journal Shakespeare Survey. In 2010, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre also selected Holland to give its annual Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture.

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ACLS Honors Three Notre Dame English Scholars

2011-04-05T13:08:00-04:00

Women in the Department of English accounted for three of the four American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowships the University of Notre Dame received in 2010. The recipients include John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Associate Professor of English Susannah Monta, Assistant Professor Katherine Zieman and Ph.D. candidate Hilary Fox.

The ACLS, a private, nonprofit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations, is dedicated to “the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences.”

The goal of the ACLS Fellowship program is to help scholars devote six to 12 continuous months to full-time research and writing so that they can produce a major piece of scholarly work. The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships provides graduate students a year of supported research and writing in the final stage of a Ph.D. program.

Prayer as Poetry

ACLS Fellow Monta’s current book project, Sacred Echoes: Repetitive Prayer in Reformation-Era Poetics, examines the devotional and aesthetic uses of repetition in early modern prayer, poetry, and rhetoric. With her research, she argues that contestations over repetitive devotions illuminate early modern understandings of the nature of authentic prayer, the boundaries and character of Catholicism, the recuperation or rejection of the religious past, and literary creativity itself.

“One of the things that reformers attacked about Catholic prayer was what they called ‘mindless repetition,’ such as saying the rosary,” she says. “But there are a number of figures, both Catholic and Protestant, who use resources such as rhetorical handbooks, defenses of prescribed liturgies, and formulaic prayers to craft poetry in which repetition is not deadening but instead may indicate, for example, intensity of emotion or even, paradoxically enough, spiritual progress.”

In addition to the ACLS Fellowship, Monta received a sabbatical fellowship from the American Philosophical Association to continue work on the project during the 2011-2012 academic year.

Monta specializes in the relationships between Reformation-era religious changes and literary culture. She edits the journal Religion and Literature and was recently elected to a five-year term on the executive committee of the Modern Language Association Literature and Religion Division.

She also leads the literature working group for Religion Across the Disciplines, a four-year, international project housed at Notre Dame that is studying the influence of religious knowledge in history, international relations, literature, music, and sociology—and the influence those fields have on religion itself.

Religious Writings

Zieman’s ACLS Fellowship supports her scholarship on the works of Richard Rolle, a 14th century Yorkshire hermit who wrote devotional treatises and biblical commentary in both Latin and English. She is using her research to write a book called Richard Rolle and His Readers: Defining the Literary in the Fifteenth Century.

“My examination of the late medieval popularity of Rolle’s writings seeks to place the proliferation of religious writing in the 15th century in dialogue with the canonization of Geoffrey Chaucer as a writer of imaginative fiction,” Zieman says. “I am exploring what we count as ‘literature’ and what function writing serves in different cultures.”

Zieman’s research on Rolle is also supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where she is spending the 2010-2011 academic year.

A specialist in late medieval English literature and culture, she is the author of a 2008 book, Singing the New Song: Literacy, Liturgy, and Literature in Late Medieval England, which explores the intersections of these issues in the late 14th century.

Studying Selfhood

Fox was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for “Mind, Body, Soul and Self in the Alfredian Translations,” in which she explores issues of identity in Old English translations of works such as Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule, Augustine’s Soliloquies, and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy—a Latin text that was extremely influential in medieval thought.

“The Old English translation is not really a translation in the modern sense of the word,” Fox says. “In some places, it matches word for word. But in others, it differs from the original entirely in terms of content and form. So the ideas the Old English translation has and the way it thinks about the individual, agency, free will, fate, and so on is quite different than its Latin source.”

Her research examines what these differences reveal about how Anglo-Saxons thought about the practice of translation as well as the sorts of concepts that concerned them.

“Very early writing, like the materials I’m looking at, tends to be ignored when scholars think about questions of identity, individuality, and selfhood,” she says. “So I am very interested in getting these Old English texts inserted into that conversation.”

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Recent Books From Our Faculty

2011-04-05T09:50:00-04:00

Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic

Sandra Gustafson

Associate Professor

Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. In this book, Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic.

University of Chicago Press, forthcoming May 2011

The Open Light: Poets From Notre Dame, 1991–2008

Orlando Menes, editor

Associate Professor

This anthology celebrates the distinction and diversity of poets associated with the University over a period of nearly two decades. In the preface, Menes presents a brief historical account of poetry at Notre Dame since 1991, emphasizing the remarkable range of talent and the establishment of both The Notre Dame Review and the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize. The plethora of voices included in this collection and the poems themselves provide a rich and vibrant legacy of poetry at Notre Dame.

University of Notre Dame Press, 2011

Aristotele e i delitti d’Egitto (Aristotle and the Egyptian Murders)

Margaret Doody

John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature

translated by Rosalia Coci

A historical detective story translated into Italian by Rosalia Coci, Aristotele e i delitti d’Egitto is the eighth book in the Aristotle Detective series. There is a famine in Athens in 328 B.C., and Stephanos, Aristotle’s Watson, is sent to Egypt—newly under the rule of Alexander—to purchase a cargo of wheat in exchange for gold. Theft, imprisonment, and international intrigue challenge Stephanos’ courage and, also, the logic of Aristotle at work behind the scenes.

Sellerio editore in Palermo, 2010

Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art

Stephen Fredman

Professor

Contextual practice informed all branches of New American poetry; the work of the Beats; happenings, events, and dance theater; the underground film movement; and currents of assemblage, collage, junk art, and pop art. Fredman illuminates the theoretical and practical stakes involved and takes the reader back to the first stirrings of a countercultural ethos that was to have a profound effect on society at large.

Stanford University Press, 2010

Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work

Stephen Fredman, editor

Professor

with Steve McCaffery

The essays in this collection have been gathered into three parts: form, power, and person. “Form” considers a variety of characteristic formal qualities that differentiate Creeley from his contemporaries. “Power” reflects on the pressure exerted by emotions, gender issues, and politics in Creeley’s life and work. In “Person,” Creeley’s unique artistic and psychological project of constructing a person is excavated. While engaging these three major topics, the authors remain, as Creeley does, intent upon the ways such issues appear in language, for Creeley’s nakedness is most conspicuously displayed in his intimate relationship with words.

University of Iowa Press, 2010

Great Shakespeareans, Set I

Peter Holland, editor

McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies

with Adrian Poole

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding, and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. This project offers a scholarly analysis of the contribution made by the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors, and directors, as well as novelists, poets, composers, and thinkers from the 17th to 20th centuries. This collection includes the first four volumes of an eventual 18-volume series.

Continuum Books, 2010

Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in the United States Before 1900

Sandra Gustafson, editor

Associate Professor

with Caroline F. Sloat

These essays examine debates on how written, printed, visual, and performed works produced meaning in American culture before 1900. The contributors argue that America has been a multimedia culture since the 18th century. According to Gustafson, the verbal arts before 1900 manifest a strikingly rich pattern of development and change. From the wide variety of indigenous traditions, through the initial productions of settler communities, to the elaborations of colonial, postcolonial, and national expressive forms, the shifting dynamics of performed, manuscript-based, and printed verbal art capture critical elements of rapidly changing societies.

University of Notre Dame Press, 2010

Teaching Early Modern English Prose

Susannah Monta, editor

John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., and Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor

with Margaret Ferguson

Aiming to make early modern prose more visible to teachers, this volume approaches it as a genre that requires as much analysis and attention as the drama and poetry of the time. The essays consider the broad cultural questions raised by prose and explore prose style, showing teachers how to hone students’ writing skills in the process. The introduction considers the practical and historical reasons prose has been taught less often than poetry and drama.

Modern Language Association, 2010

Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 63: Shakespeare’s English Histories and Their Afterlives

Peter Holland, editor

McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English, and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, play, or group of plays and contains a section of reviews of that year’s textual and critical studies and major British performances.

Cambridge University Press, 2010

On Ceasing to Be Human

Gerald Bruns

William P. and Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus

Philosopher Stanley Cavell once asked, “Can a human being be free of human nature?” This book examines philosophical and literary texts and contexts in which various senses of Cavell’s question might be explored and developed. During the past 30 years or so, the very concept of “being human” has been called into question within such fields as cybernetics, animal-rights theory, and analytic philosophy. This book examines these issues, but its main concern is the link between freedom and nonidentity that Cavell’s question implies—and that turns out to be a major concern among the thinkers Bruns takes up.

Stanford University Press, 2010

The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk

Henry Weinfield

Professor

From his careful readings of Oppen’s and Bronk’s poetry to his fascinating examination of the letters they exchanged, Weinfield provides important aesthetic, epistemological, and historical insights into their poetry and poetic careers. In bringing together for the first time the work of two of the most important poets of the postwar generation, The Music of Thought not only illuminates their poetry but also raises important questions about American literary history and the categories in terms of which it has generally been interpreted.

University of Iowa Press, 2010

Laura Dassow Walls new White Chair Professor of English

2011-03-09T16:29:00-05:00

Distinguished scholar of 19^th-century American literature and culture Laura Dassow Walls will join the faculty this fall as the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English. Walls’s latest book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press), recently won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians, and the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize awarded by the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts.

“This unprecedented conjunction of awards,” said English chair John Sitter, “speaks to both the excellence of Laura Walls’s work and its profound interdisciplinarity. More broadly, the appointments of Walls and José Limón to distinguished professorships, the appointment two years ago of Kate Marshall as an assistant professor, and the recent appointments of Kinohi Nishikawa in African American literature and Matthew Wilkens in modern and contemporary U.S. literature mark the beginning of a new era of American literary studies at Notre Dame.”

Others on campus expect Walls’s presence to yield benefits beyond the English Department. “With Laura Walls’s decision to move to Notre Dame, we find ourselves now with the greatest concentration of expertise in literature and science of any university in North America,” according to Don Howard, professor of philosophy and director of the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science. “This new area of excellence nicely complements Notre Dame’s existing strengths, and we look forward to exploring innovative ways to turn this to advantage programmatically. For those of us in HPS, the appointment of Walls is like manna from heaven.”

Currently the John H. Bennett, Jr., Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina, Walls has written three books, edited four others, and published approximately thirty articles. She is now on a Guggenheim Fellowship working on what is likely to become the definitive biography of Henry David Thoreau.

Walls succeeds Gerald Bruns, the inaugural William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English, who joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1984 and retired in 2008. Retired from teaching, that is. Now living in California, Bruns continues to write and publish. His most recent book, On Ceasing to be Human, appeared in late 2010 from Stanford University Press.

March 31interview article from College of Arts & Letters