Department of English | News

Creative Writing Program director Joyelle McSweeney wins Guggenheim Fellowship

2022-04-14T11:00:00-04:00

Joyelle McSweeney

Notre Dame Creative Writing Program director and poet Joyelle McSweeney has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her creative ability in the arts and potential in future endeavors.

McSweeney, who is also a playwright, novelist, translator, critic, and English professor, was selected as a fellow with 179 other scientists, scholars, and artists from nearly 2,500 applicants. John and Olga Simon Guggenheim created the fellowships in 1925 to “add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country."

“I’m still taking it in, to be honest,” said McSweeney shortly after she learned about the fellowship. “It’s a spectacular show of confidence from the universe.”

Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation and a 1985 poetry fellow, said the foundation supports the collective effort “to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.”

McSweeney is in extremely good company: Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Ken Burns, Rachel Carson, and Zora Neale Hurston are previous fellows. So, too, is Pamela Wojcik, a professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, who was tapped in 2020.

McSweeney is the 19th faculty member in the College of Arts and Letters selected for a Guggenheim fellowship in the last 22 years.

“I’m thrilled that Joyelle has received one of the world’s most prestigious and competitive fellowships, continuing our tradition of excellence with these awards. It is a strong endorsement of the quality of her work and another signal of the growing stature of our creative writing program.”

“I’m thrilled that Joyelle has received one of the world’s most prestigious and competitive fellowships, continuing our tradition of excellence with these awards. It is a strong endorsement of the quality of her work and another signal of the growing stature of our creative writing program.”

— Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O'Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters

The Guggenheim is the latest significant honor this year for McSweeney, who has also recently won a Modern Language Association translation prize and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and had a poem published in The New York Times Magazine.

Yi Sang: Selected Works, was translated from Korean and Japanese into English by Joyelle McSweeney and three collaborators.

In January, the MLA — which promotes the study and teaching of languages and literatures — presented the English professor and three of her collaborators with an award for their translation of Yi Sang: Selected Works from Korean and Japanese into English.

The MLA’s 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work was its first for a work of Korean literature. Avant-garde poet Kim Hye-kyŏng, who used the pen name Yi Sang, was fluent in Korean and Japanese. He wrote in the 1930s in Korea during the Japanese occupation and died in 1937 at age 27 after being imprisoned in Tokyo for thought crimes.

McSweeney worked with Jack Jung, visiting assistant professor of English at Davidson College; Sawako Nakayasu, assistant professor of literary arts at Brown University; and Don Mee Choi of Seattle, Washington, to translate poems, essays, and short novels first published in Korean and Japanese, then “subjected to the hazards of war and neglect.”

McSweeney said it’s gratifying that through the translated book, Yi Sang’s “force is alive and moving around the planet and reaching people when they need it.”

“It feels right to be part of a collaborative multinational team that worked on this; it points to the flexibility and invention of his works,” she said. “It took four of us, a supergroup of poets and translators. We needed all these minds and brains and artists to get at his playful and subversive work.”

The selection committee said Yi Sang’s writing, which combines fable, fantasy, satire, parody, Dadaism, concrete poetry, and quasi-translation, “presents a steep challenge to translation.” But each member of the translation team has “re-created in English Yi Sang’s terse, polyglot, self-undermining, dreamlike parables and essays. The elegant format and plural translating voices make this book a suitable monument to this intriguing figure.”

McSweeney said the endeavor reminded her that literature is not exclusively about "the finished text as an unchanging object that sits in its place in the official timeline."

“It’s a whole process,” she said. “The world of art moves outward and moves through time periods. It’s thrilling to be part of the chain of reception.”

In March, the American Academy of Arts and Letters — an honors society that administers prizes, donates art to museums, funds musical theater performances, and hosts talks — named McSweeney as the recipient of its Arts and Letters Award in Literature for exceptional accomplishment in any genre. She said she appreciates the Academy's “encouragement to keep going” with her writing and its recognition of her distinctive work.

Depending on how you count, McSweeney said, her body of work includes eight or nine books of poetry, short stories, novels, essays, translations, verse plays, and a book of criticism.

Toxicon and Arachne

Her previous honors include being named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for her double poetry collection, Toxicon and Arachne. McSweeney wrote the first part during the years leading up to the birth of her third daughter, Arachne, and wrote the second part in the spring following Arachne’s brief life and death. In February, the NYT Magazine featured McSweeney’s poem Kingdom from the collection.

Also in 2021, her poem, “Post-NICU Villanelle,” winner of a 2021 Pushcart Prize, was published in the Iowa Review. She currently co-runs the translation press Action Books and is writing poems and a book of essays about poetry.

In 2021 and in 2014, McSweeney earned Notre Dame’s Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching “for her profound influence on undergraduate students through sustained exemplary teaching.” Peer and student nominations are part of the selection process.

She said it’s rewarding to help bring students into empowerment and see them unlock what they love about language. McSweeney structures class like a party.

“I’ll bring something, the students bring something, and we make something substantive together,” she said.

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on April 14, 2022.

Essaka Joshua, recently elected to prestigious learned society, evolves perspectives on British Romantic literature through disability studies

2022-04-04T15:00:00-04:00

Essaka Joshua

Essaka Joshua has been elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, an international educational organization that promotes understanding of the human past.

Founded in 1707 and issued a royal charter by King George II in 1751, the society supports conservation, research, and communication to advance understanding of history. Joshua was one of 13 people worldwide to receive the distinction; the group of new inductees also included Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence — Princess Anne’s husband and chairman of a trust that creates inspiring experiences for visitors to England.

“Everybody needs some good news right now. It feels like I passed an exam I didn't know I was sitting,” said Joshua, an associate professor in the Department of English and a faculty fellow in the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, about being elected to one of the world’s oldest learned societies that connects her with 3,000 international scholars.

It comes with professional benefits, too — she can now use the post-nominal FSA (Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries), and she has access to considerable library and museum treasures. She’s already connected with several scholars and though she hasn’t yet visited the society’s headquarters at Burlington House in London, she’s attended online talks.

Joshua earned the accolade because of her expertise in myth and folklore, as demonstrated in her books, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature and The Romantics and the May Day Tradition, which was shortlisted for the Folklore Society’s 2008 Katharine Briggs Award.

Her understanding of and appreciation for the human past has transformed and significantly deepened since her introduction to disability studies, which she’s researched for the past 20 years.

“I began re-reading texts and realizing that many of the historical terms used to describe disability — madness, idiocy, cripple, and even disability as a collective term — were culturally determined,” she said. “This perspective encourages us to ask why we assign these labels. This perspective means decentering able-bodiedness and able-mindedness.”

The evolving discipline of disability studies centers the experiences of people with physical, psychological and/or psychiatric differences who, like other oppressed groups, are marginalized because of exclusionary social structures and prejudices.

Disabilities, she said, are part of the human experience, not the exception.

“While disability may not be something you experience now, it is something that you or a family member or friend could experience at any time through accident, illness, or aging,” she said. “It’s imperative that we all think about the barriers to inclusion, whether that be physical, temporal, or prejudicial.”

“While disability may not be something you experience now, it is something that you or a family member or friend could experience at any time through accident, illness, or aging. It’s imperative that we all think about the barriers to inclusion, whether that be physical, temporal, or prejudicial.”

Dropping cultural filters

Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature (Cambridge, 2020)

In her 2020 book, Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature, Joshua examined the understanding of equality and the evolution of ability/disability terminology at the end of the 18th century, when the modern concept of disability didn’t exist.

For the book’s cover, she chose a compelling self-portrait of Sarah Biffin, a celebrated 19th-century artist born without arms or legs who is referenced often in literature, including by Dickens.

“I wanted an image by a disabled artist of a disabled subject,” Joshua said. “As an artist without arms, she is unusual, and to paint on such a small scale a miniature of herself with her disability visible was remarkable.”

Joshua examines the intersection of disability studies and her other areas of expertise — Romantic-era and Victorian British literature, myth, and folklore — in a variety of engaging ways.

She’s a consultant on London-based Philip Mould Gallery’s exhibition of Biffin’s works, opening on Pall Mall in November. In addition to still lifes, self-portraits, and letters written by Biffin, the exhibition includes posters from a traveling circus in which Biffin used her mouth, teeth, and shoulders to sew and paint for the public. Joshua is also writing an essay for the exhibition catalog.

Joshua recently presented a paper at a conference on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, analyzing whether Ebenezer Scrooge is neurodiverse, and she’s been invited to introduce curators at the Historic Royal Palaces to disability theory and history. She’s also contributing to a book that explores the relationship between the royal family and Shakespeare — her chapter is about disabled writer Mary Robinson, who acted in The Winter's Tale and was a reported mistress of George IV. She is also working on a chapter on disability, race and romanticism for another essay collection.

Joshua first became fascinated with the field of disability studies when she read Lennard Davis’ Enforcing Normalcy, which details prejudicial assumptions about what is “normal.” His description of the Venus de Milo, a statue without arms that’s held to be a symbol of beauty, resonated with her.

“Were we to see a real woman without arms, we might have a different reaction. We, in some sense, view the statue through a cultural filter,” she said. “It forced me to ask the question: ‘If I can look at a statue without arms and not see it as a woman without arms, then what else am I filtering?’”

A recognition of dignity

Joshua also creates opportunities for undergraduates to examine literature and life through a disability studies lens in her English literature course, Romantic & Victorian Disability, and in her College Seminar on Disability, which centers on a theory-into-practice approach.

“Teaching disability studies is important for establishing and confirming in students a recognition of the dignity of all human beings and is an important part of social justice and inclusive approaches to learning,” she said.

Joshua conceived a 2011 stage production of Samson Agonistes, a play John Milton wrote when he was blind in 1671, that was performed in Chicago and at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

Joshua's College Seminar students learn to “audio transcribe” — using words to describe a movie or TV show’s key visual elements, including action, settings, facial expressions, and costumes — making them accessible for people who are blind or sight-impaired.

It’s challenging and enlightening for them to describe a comedy scene without giving away the punchline, or narrate the experience of the tango dance in Scent of a Woman in a way that doesn’t just list body parts. Plus, the American Council of the Blind’s audio-description guidelines insist on description rather than the interpretation, so students must also grapple with the problem of neutrality.

“They learn concision and the value and effect of word selection, think deeply about cultural translation, and about the relationship between image and text,” she said.

During the past two decades, Joshua founded the Disability Studies Forum, which supports disability awareness and encourages research on disability. She also won the Tyler Rigg Award for Disability Studies Scholarship in Literature and Literary Analysis, and conceived a stage production of Samson Agonistes, a play John Milton wrote when he was blind in 1671.

Joshua also recently joined the editorial boards of the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism book series and the journal PMLA. She is currently working on a book on disability in Romantic era theatre, and intends to combine her two fields of expertise with a book on disability and folklore.

While disability studies is Joshua’s latest academic interest area, folklore and poetry have captured her fascination since childhood. Joshua vividly recalls being spellbound at age 6 during a school assembly in Wales, in the United Kingdom, listening to the alliterative Old English poem Beowulf read aloud.

“I’ve never forgotten it,” she said. “Myth and folklore capture the imagination like nothing else.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on April 04, 2022.

Xavier Navarro Aquino’s debut novel spotlights devastation of Hurricane Maria

2022-02-09T08:00:00-05:00

After she hit.

It’s been five years since Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico.

The grief, trauma, and political ramifications of this seismic event in the island’s history are skillfully rendered in Xavier Navarro Aquino’s new novel, Velorio.

It’s a powerful debut for Navarro Aquino, an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Latino Studies.

Author Xavier Aquino Navarro

On Wednesday, the Institute for Latino Studies, in partnership with the Creative Writing Program, will be hosting a book launch and reading in room 232 of Decio Hall. A conversation with Professor Marisel Moreno of Romance Languages will follow.

"Velorio" translates to funeral wake, a vigil for the dead. Many of the novel’s characters labor under a sense of personal and collective bereavement. The varied cast includes fish mongers, university students, street peddlers, a grieving sister, and others trying to put together their lives after Hurricane Maria.

Meanwhile, from the mountains of central Puerto Rico, a shadowy leader promises a utopia to replace the “old government” — a new community called Memoria.

With his army of “reds” — orphaned children and teens playing the part of henchmen — self-anointed prophet Urayoán spreads the word to a population fed up with the corruption and ineptitude of their political leaders.

As a native of Puerto Rico, Navarro Aquino’s first-hand experiences on the island imbues his novel with intimate knowledge. His dive into the aftermath of Hurricane Maria through the eyes of a variety of local characters places readers directly in the mindset of survivors.

One way the novel presents Hurricane Maria is as “a sort of genesis, that instead of life, you're given death,” the author explains in a recent interview. The memory of Maria will never fully fade from the collective psyche. Instead, “everything moving forward for Puerto Rico will be marked by that natural disaster, hence a genesis.” As such, the island that both Navarro Aquino and his characters once called home is much changed compared to what it it is now.

One character, Camila, arrives in Memoria carrying the decaying body of her older sister Marisol, who was killed by a mudslide. The novel begins and ends by telling their story, a sustaining motif for how survivors must carry on the memory of their loved ones. The official death toll was around 3,000 people, though there continues to be controversy surrounding the count.

Undoubtedly, the novel serves as a political indictment of the ruling class of Puerto Rico and the United States, which has exercised control over the island since the Spanish-American War of 1898.

The novel positions the government’s response to Hurricane Maria as the latest example of colonialism dating back to the coming of Christopher Columbus five hundred years ago. It struggles with this inheritance and the way forward, particularly around the idea of nationhood and the use of public land for private gain.

Characters wait an eternity for basic food items and clean water at local Walmarts and grocery stores. Others survey seemingly endless lines at local gas stations they know will run out of fuel before their turn.

Barbs fly at “la Junta”, the fiscal control board set up during the Obama administration to address the billions of dollars in pension liabilities and other debt owed by Puerto Rico to outside lenders. Whitefish, a Montana-based government contractor awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild the electrical grid despite limited experience, is alluded to as an example of malfeasance.

“We got to mind that it was the fault of our leaders,” Moriviví, a university student, says in the novel. “As they yelled en el Capitolio and fed us the usual spin every four years, we wanted them to fall. How they tried concealing years of waste and corruption by paving roads with new asphalt during election years…We felt strong in adopting no colors; no red, blue, or green. We loved because there is no greater love than that for your home.”

The author explains that “home [his emphasis] means accepting nostalgia as a bias." And "trying to understand reality or new realities” is paramount throughout his novel and the struggles his characters face.

They “seek a home that no longer exists and can never be reclaimed.” However, this desire for what has been lost is not a wasted effort. Navarro Aquino views the attempted act of recreation by his characters as “part of an imperative to reconcile and move forward.”

Originally published by Oliver Ortega & Brittany Blagburn at latinostudies.nd.edu on February 08, 2022.

Ernest Morrell, English professor and literacy scholar, elected to the National Academy of Education

2022-01-28T16:00:00-05:00

Ernest Morrell, the associate dean for the humanities and equity in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and the director of the Center for Literacy Education, has been elected to the National Academy of Education.

The Academy advances high-quality research that improves education quality and practice. Members are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship related to education.

“It is the highest honor bestowed in our field, and I am absolutely humbled by it,” Morrell said. “To be included amongst the membership of the National Academy represents both a recognition and a challenge. With all that schools and students face these days, we need to make certain that we are forming the next generation of scholars and educators and that we bring the best of educational research to policy and practice. This has been my life's work, and I am ready to take it to the next level through my work in the Academy.”

Morrell is also the Coyle Professor in Literacy Education at Notre Dame, a professor in the departments of English and Africana Studies, a fellow in the Institute for Educational Initiatives and Kellogg Institute for International Studies and a faculty affiliate of the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience.

“Ernest’s innovative research and practice have shown how we can impact the lives of students around the country,” said Mark Berends, the Hackett Family Director of IEI. “He is well-deserving of this honor.”

Morrell’s research focuses on how the use of popular culture in the classroom can successfully engage urban youth and communities and on translanguaging — the idea that students can maximize their learning by using the many different languages they use in their everyday lives.

He also co-designed the first AP seminar on the African diaspora, and his work was featured in Notre Dame’s award-winning “What Would You Fight For” series last fall.

Since 2015, Morrell has been annually ranked among the top university-based education scholars in the RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings published by EdWeek. He is the director of the National Council of Teachers of English James R. Squire Office for Policy Research in the English Language Arts, an elected fellow of the American Educational Research Association, a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a co-convener of the African Diaspora International Research Network.

He has written 90 articles, research briefs and book chapters and 10 scholarly monographs, including Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (Columbia, 2020).

Morrell is one of 17 newly elected members who will be inducted Nov. 6 in Washington, D.C. Academy members are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship related to education. Nominations are submitted by individual Academy members once a year for review and election by the organization’s membership.

Originally published by Theo Helm at al.nd.edu on January 28, 2022.

Notre Dame Faculty and Students featured in Massachusetts Review issue on Climate Crisis

2021-12-21T16:45:00-05:00

The December 21 special issue of Massachusetts Review on climate crisis centrally features work by Notre Dame faculty, students, and alumni. The issue was co-edited and introduced by Roy Scranton, and includes contributions from Laura Walls, Johannes G öransson, and Xavier Navarro Aquino, as well as from MFA student Austyn Wohlers, and MFA alumnus Joseph Thomas. Other contributors include Amitav Ghosh, Rob Nixon, Sarah Vaughn, and Shailja Patel. Many pieces in this issue are works of witness, a key mode in the literature of ecological crisis, while others are hybrids—fiction, poetry, and prose—an adaptive response to the threats posed to our planet’s cultural and biological diversity. The issue is dedicated to the memory of one of the last great “nature writers,” Barry Lopez.

Dr. Ernest Morrell Featured on Notre Dame's "What Would You Fight For?" Series

2021-11-29T12:00:00-05:00

The University of Notre Dame’s award-winning “What Would You Fight For?” series showcases the work, scholarly achievements, and global impact of Notre Dame faculty, students, and alumni. These two-minute segments, each originally aired during a home football game broadcast on NBC, highlight the University’s proud moniker, the Fighting Irish, and tell the stories of the members of the Notre Dame family who fight to bring solutions to a world in need.

Dr. Ernest Morrell, director of the Notre Dame Center for Literacy Education and a faculty member for ACE Teaching Fellows, was featured in a segment "Fighting For Literacy Across America" during the weekend of the Notre Dame-Georgia Tech football game.

Read the Story

ESS Office Hours: English Majors

2021-11-29T12:00:00-05:00

Education, Schooling, and Society Professor Mike Macaluso sits down with senior English majors Lauren Connelly and Luke Sisung to discuss their experiences with ESS, why they chose ESS, and how their ESS experiences will help them in their future endeavors.

Visit the ESS website…

Author Lauren Groff to give public lecture at Notre Dame

2021-11-16T10:00:00-05:00

Katie Bugyis

Lauren Groff’s bestselling historical novel “Matrix” captures a medieval world that University of Notre Dame Program of Liberal Studies assistant professor Katie Bugyis has always imagined.

“It’s an extraordinary gift,” said Bugyis, a historian of Christian theology and liturgical practice who reconstructs the lived experiences of religious women in the Middle Ages. “She saw what has been in my mind and that I always hoped other people might see.”

Bugyis’ research on routines and rituals of medieval nuns might not seem like an obvious storyline for a National Book Award finalist, but it immediately garnered Groff’s attention.

It started two years ago, when Bugyis gave a lecture about Benedictine nuns in the Central Middle Ages as part of her fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Groff, also a fellow, was attending the lecture.

Groff’s two previous books — 2016’s “Fates and Furies” and 2018’s “Florida,” which were also National Book Award finalists — were modern stories set in America. But Bugyis’ descriptions of Benedictine nuns inspired Groff to envision an English abbey in the 12th and 13th centuries; it would be an ideal setting for a space nearly exclusively populated by women where they had agency and could thrive.

“My brain exploded into rainbows,” Groff said in a tweet last year, describing her moment of inspiration. It was there, she told the Harvard Gazette, that she thought “Oh my God, this is the next book.”

Inspiration and consultation

Lauren Groff

Groff met with Bugyis after the lecture, took notes at a seminar Bugyis held the next day for Radcliffe fellows, and invited her to dinner to ask more questions. Bugyis served as Groff’s historical consultant, offering a wealth of information about the topic and era and later reviewing a draft of the novel and providing feedback.

The end result is a 272-page tale of a historical figure, but one about whom little is known — 17-year-old orphan Marie de France, exiled by Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1158 to be a prioress at a frigid English abbey riddled with disease and hunger. On the novel’s acknowledgements page, Groff thanked Bugyis for her immense contributions to the work.

When Groff asked Bugyis what she’d like in return for her consultations, all Bugyis asked was for her to come to Notre Dame to give a public talk and work with students.

Groff is slated to do just that.

A day after the 72nd National Book Awards ceremony, she will deliver the Sister Kathleen Cannon, O.P., Distinguished Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 18 (Thursday) in the Patricia George Decio Theatre of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

In addition to the public lecture and book reading, Groff will also spend significant time with Notre Dame students. She’ll give a workshop in the Creative Writing Program and offer a seminar for 15 Program of Liberal Studies students on her novel and two of Marie de France's lais, “Laüstic” and “Chevrefoil.”

“It is my great hope that these events will allow students to talk with Lauren about her educational experiences at the undergraduate and graduate levels that formed her as a writer, her fascination with Marie de France and other great medieval women writers, her desire to create a fictional space in which women could exercise considerable agency and power together and largely separate from men, and so much more,” Bugyis said.

“Lauren possesses an extraordinarily capacious and generous intellect, and I know that she will encourage the talents and dreams of our students in countless ways.”

Groff said she’s utterly delighted to visit Notre Dame and that it will be the highlight of her autumn.

“I look forward to encountering all of the bright and thoughtful students in creative writing, medieval studies and the Program of Liberal Studies,” Groff said in an email, “and to speaking once more with your own Dr. Katie Bugyis, whose brilliance and love for medieval nuns was the spark that made my love of Marie de France catch on fire and become a novel.”

‘An academic’s dream’

Lauren Groff's “Matrix” debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times bestsellers list in September and is a finalist for the National Book Award.

As a historian of medieval religious women, Bugyis’ work challenges prevailing narratives that nuns relied exclusively on priests for their sacramental care. She examines the rituals they created and orchestrated, how they heard confessions and pronounced absolution, and the levels of literacy they attained as readers, copyists, and composers of prayers and plays.

Her 2019 book, “The Care of Nuns: Benedictine Women’s Ministries in England during the Central Middle Ages,” won the American Society of Church History’s 2020 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize, which honors outstanding scholarship in the history of Christianity by a first-time author.

In the book, Bugyis reconstructs Benedictine nuns’ roles on the basis of the books they both produced and used. Bugyis’ talk at the Radcliffe Institute, for example, opened with the recent discovery of the remains of a nun who lived in the 11th or 12th century. Traces of precious blue pigment were discovered in the tartar on her teeth, which likely indicates that this nun placed paintbrushes in her mouth to wet the bristles when she was illuminating manuscripts for her community.

Details like this helped set the scene for “Matrix,” in which Marie de France defies patriarchal structures and seeks to transform the abbey and chart a bold course for the women whom she loves, leads and protects.

Groff explores ways that people could be human during that period, Bugyis said, including not following rules to the letter of the law.

“She doesn’t shy away from depicting a community that’s not perfect,” she said, “and that’s part of what it means to be human.”

Then and now, Bugyis said, society expects women to be agreeable and compliant, and she appreciates that Groff’s female characters may not be “likable.”

Bugyis said Groff’s gracious curiosity and ability to ask insightful questions made her feel truly seen as a scholar.

“It was an academic’s dream to have someone that interested,” said Bugyis, who also is a concurrent assistant professor of theology, affiliated faculty with the Gender Studies Program, and a faculty fellow in the Medieval Institute and Nanovic Institute for European Studies. “I’m a huge fan of her novels.”

So, too, is Barack Obama. The 44th president of the United States picked Groff’s “Fates and Furies” — a two-perspective portrait of a 24-year marriage — as his favorite book of 2015.

Reviewers also are lauding “Matrix.” USA Today described the novel as a “relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent.” The Guardian said it “is a highly distinctive novel of great vigour and boldness … about leadership, ambition and enterprise, and about the communal life of individuals.”

The title of the novel, “Matrix,” which comes from the Latin “mater,” or mother, represents the foundational structure that gives rise to everything that was, is and will be, said Bugyis.

And that includes imagining a better future.

“Daring to imagine things differently feels liberating,” she said. “Lauren gives us permission to keep imagining.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on Nov. 9.

English Department Welcomes New Faculty: Fall 2021

2021-07-28T18:00:00-04:00

The Department of English is delighted to welcome five new faculty to our ranks in fall 2021. These appointments represent groundbreaking partnerships with the Initiative on Race and Resilience and with Notre Dame’s Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society. The new faculty will complement our existing strengths and help us to build in new areas of research, writing, and teaching. We are excited to expand our offerings in postcolonial and transnational literature, African American literature and culture, Caribbean studies, science fiction, the digital humanities, and the history of science and technology. We warmly welcome our new colleagues to South Bend and Notre Dame.

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal recently completed his PhD in English Literature, with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies, at the University of California, Davis. He had previously been a visiting fellow at the research Cluster “Media of Cooperation” in University of Siegen, Germany. Dhaliwal’s research, which traces the aesthetic and political entanglements of our technological cultures, lies at the intersections of science fiction studies, critical media theory, and histories of science and technology. He is the winner of the 2020 Edwin Bruns Prize from the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the winner of the 2021 best paper award from the Media, Science and Technology SIG at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. His research has been supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Linda Hall Library, and the Hagley Museum, among other institutions. He is currently working on a book project titled Rendering: A Political Diagrammatology of Computation.

Dionne Irving Bremyer is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Irving Bremyer writes both fiction and nonfiction that investigate and question received notions concerning the complex interplay of the social, personal, cultural, and national hybridity emergent in a postcolonial world. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. She earned her Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University. Her novel Quint will be published by 7.13 Books in August 2021 and her short story collection Islands is forthcoming from Catapult Books in 2022. Her edited collection, Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representations (Demeter Press), explores how cultural attitudes about mothering and female sexuality inform the way people understand, embrace, reject, and talk about breastfeeding. Irving Bremyer has been awarded two Tennessee Williams scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a scholarship and residency from the Voices of Our Nation Writers Conference.

Matthew Kilbane was the 2020-2021 Joseph F. Martino ’53 Lecturer at Cornell University, where he completed his PhD in the Department of Literatures in English. He works at the intersection of literary studies, media archaeology, and the digital humanities, with a special focus on modern and contemporary poetry in the U.S., and the relation of literature to music. His current book project, The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media, shows how literary scholars can look to media history to understand transformations in the social life of poetry, and how media archaeologists can read lyric forms for insight into the cultural history of technology. Kilbane’s work has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Beinecke Library, and his essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Journal of Modern Literature, College Literature, Post45:Contemporaries, and Jacket2.

Chanté Mouton Kinyon was the 2019-2021 Moreau Postdoctoral Fellow at Notre Dame, following her 2018-2019 tenure as NEH Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Her graduate work at University of Ireland, Galway was supported by a four-year Galway Research Fellowship for doctoral studies. Kinyon’s primary research explores transnational African American literature and culture, with a particular interest in the way in which African American culture and literature intersects with Irish culture and literature. Her book project studies the influence that Irish and African American artists have had on each other while theorizing the ways in which these artists signify and conceptualize race and marginality. Kinyon’s forthcoming publications include her article, “Foregrounding (Lost) Rituals and The Transatlantic Gesture: The Keen, The Cakewalk, and Disappearing Cultural Practices,” in Modern Drama and her Introduction to Black Matters: African American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories (Cornell University Press).

Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Recently named one of the writers to watch for fall 2021 by Publishers Weekly, Navarro Aquino holds an M.A. in English Caribbean Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of the forthcoming novel, Velorio from HarperVia/HarperCollins and HarperCollins Español in January 2022. His fiction has appeared in Tin House magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Guernica. His poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and is anthologized in Thicker Than Water: New writing from the Caribbean by Peekash Press. Navarro Aquino has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College.

Ph.D. alumnus Jay David Miller awarded ACLS fellowship to explore how Quaker rhetoric addressed injustice in early America

2021-06-08T13:00:00-04:00

Jay David Miller

Jay David Miller, who received his Ph.D. in English from Notre Dame in spring 2020, has been awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for his project, Quaker Jeremiad.

As an ACLS Carl and Betty Pforzheimer Fellow in English and American Literature, Miller will spend a year at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia. There, he will convert his dissertation to a manuscript by incorporating new archival research from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College’s Quaker collection, and other area libraries to better represent Quaker literary history.

Miller, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, focuses his research on early American literature. His dissertation traces the development of Quaker rhetoric on agrarian labor and justice, examining the ways that rhetoric shifts from the beginnings of the Quaker movement in 17th-century England as it moves across the Atlantic and confronts agrarian issues like enslavement and indigenous dispossession.

“I explore how Quakers addressed those forms of injustice in early America, in part, by attending to their theological background and the religious ideas that inform that rhetoric over time,” Miller said. “I see the Quaker jeremiad as an alternative to the Jeffersonian agrarian tradition that’s associated with the United States, and I show that this Quaker tradition goes on to influence many writers in the 19th and even the 20th century.”

Because of its association with the Jeffersonian tradition, agrarianism is often seen as an idealized vision of agriculture that hides a problematic background of labor exploitation and injustice, Miller said. He seeks to offer a more complex view that explores how environmental justice can be achieved through agrarianism.

Miller is also exploring why theological writers tend to have a more holistic vision of the economy, by considering it in a broader moral context.

“One of the arguments in my book is how that theological context is able to inspire a form of agrarianism that is more attuned to questions of environmental justice,” he said. “In light of that, Notre Dame has provided a great context for working on this project because of the resources for the study of religion and theology here.”

“One of the arguments in my book is how that theological context is able to inspire a form of agrarianism that is more attuned to questions of environmental justice. In light of that, Notre Dame has provided a great context for working on this project because of the resources for the study of religion and theology here.”

Miller appreciated the support he received from his dissertation advisor, professor Sandra Gustafson — as well as the international opportunities he had as a Ph.D. student at Notre Dame.

Through the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures, he received a Summer Language Abroad program grant to study German at the Goethe Institute in Germany so that he could better explore early American literature in the language.

And he participated in the Global Dome Exchange Program, cofounded by Patrick Griffin, the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History and director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies; and Elliott Visconsi, an associate professor of English, associate provost, and chief academic digital officer.

The program allows Ph.D. students from various disciplines to gather at Oxford University, the University of Edinburgh, and Notre Dame to workshop their dissertations and receive feedback from scholars.

“Elliott and Patrick did a great job of creating a stimulating academic community in these really amazing places in the United Kingdom,” Miller said. “I got to workshop my first chapter there, and it was invaluable to have that experience with other doctoral students and to hear from more experienced academics.”

Prior to the pandemic, Miller had secured a postdoctoral position at Heidelberg University, near Frankfurt, Germany for the 2020-21 academic year. When travel restrictions precluded him from assuming that role, the College of Arts & Letters was instrumental in helping him find his current position in ISLA through the 5+1 Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

That role not only gave him a broader view of academic research, but also gave him valuable insight when he was preparing his own ACLS fellowship application.

“Especially in the context of the pandemic, it was great to have the support of the 5+1 program and to have several options for what I could do,” he said. “I’m really happy I was able to spend a year with ISLA. It was a great opportunity to get a lot of hands-on experience with research administration — and it certainly helped prepare me to write stronger grant proposals, too.”

“Especially in the context of the pandemic, it was great to have the support of the 5+1 program and to have several options for what I could do. I’m really happy I was able to spend a year with ISLA. It was a great opportunity to get a lot of hands-on experience with research administration — and it certainly helped prepare me to write stronger grant proposals, too.”

Originally published by Carrie Gates at al.nd.edu on June 08, 2021.

Senior Tribute Video 2021

2021-05-21T13:00:00-04:00

Congratulations to our 2021 English Graduates!

Please watch the following Senior Tribute video for words from our Department Chair, Jesse Lander and the Director of Undergraduate Studies, Laura Betz. The video shares all the names of our graduates with awards and special designations noted, as well as clips from a few of our amazing seniors, and a picture of some of our graduates on one of their final days together on campus!

English Department Class of 2021, we salute you on a job well done!

The Creative Writing Program Welcomes Dionne Irving Bremyer and Xavier Navarro Aquino

2021-04-23T10:20:00-04:00

The MFA Program in Creative Writing is pleased to welcome two new writers to our faculty: Dionne Irving Bremyer, author of the forthcoming novel, QUINT, and Xavier Navarro Aquino, author of the forthcoming novel, VELORIO, adding to the program’s strengths in postcolonial and transnational literature, environmental humanities, global contemporary writing, and translation theory and practice. We are proud to announce that Dionne Irving Bremyer and Xavier Navarro Aquino are liaison hires with the Initiative on Race and Resilience, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. This model of hiring represents a historic and groundbreaking partnership for the MFA Program in Creative Writing because it has allowed us to recruit writers whose lived experiences and artistic practices speak to issues of race, racialization, and racism, deeping our program's commitment to structural anti-racism and to the celebration and amplification of American writers of color with enormous talent. We are looking forward to welcoming Dionne Irving Breymer and Xavier Navarro Aquino with enthusiasm in the Fall of 2021.

Dionne Irving Bremyer is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. She earned her Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University. Her novel Quint will be published by 7.13 Books in August, 2021 and her short story collection Islands is forthcoming from Catapult Books in 2022.

Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the author of the forthcoming novel, Velorio from HarperVia/HarperCollins and HarperCollins Español in January 2022. His fiction has appeared in Tin House magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Guernica. His poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and is anthologized in Thicker Than Water: New writing from the Caribbean by Peekash Press. He has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College. He holds an M.A. in English Caribbean Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

- Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Director, MFA Program in Creative Writing

Combining his passions for English, history, and teaching, Julian Bonds ’21 plans for a career in education

2021-04-10T09:00:00-04:00

Julian Bonds

Julian Bonds loves helping young people.

In his first year at Notre Dame, he tutored students at the Robinson Community Learning Center. The summer after sophomore year, he coached a middle school basketball team. He joined Matriculate, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping low-income, high-achieving high school students through the college admissions process, and he is currently an RA in Stanford Hall.

So it’s only natural that the English and history major would seek a career in education.

Growing up as a triplet in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bonds learned from his experiences as the son of a former principal and a current first-grade teacher, as well as his own schooling.

“I had great English teachers in high school,” said Bonds, a Mary M. and Patrick T. Mulva endowed scholarship recipient. “I felt like I could be a good English teacher, and I added history because it’s something I really enjoy. And I wanted to have a little bit more diversity as I entered into the profession. I wanted to have multiple things I could teach.”

“Three things have been embedded in almost all of my Arts and Letters classes — creativity, passion, and a relentless drive to learn more about a subject. Regardless of the career path I ultimately choose, I hope to always remain willing to be creative, eager to engage with things I am passionate about, and relentless in learning more about everything in order to better help the young people I work with.”

Through his interdisciplinary Arts & Letters courses, research, and interests outside of the classroom, Bonds has developed his knowledge of the education system, its benefits and flaws, and his potential role in it.

“You start to see how some of the issues in education stem from history and stem from things that I’m learning about that are not education-centric,” said Bonds, who is also minoring in education, schooling, and society. “I’m in a Civil War class, and you can see how the roots of slavery are still permeating through the educational issues we examine in ESS.”

Bonds (back row, blue shirt) with students, instructors, and guests at the Apni Shala Youth Project in Mumbai, India.

Through his work as a head advising fellow with Matriculate, Bonds sees this intersection between education and social justice first-hand. As part of the Notre Dame chapter, he is matched with high school students from a variety of schools and backgrounds and works with each individually.

“It’s those students that I've become passionate about through ESS,” he said, “in terms of learning about how schooling operates in the United States and how we got to the point where there are students in schools that are very disadvantaged.”

Bonds has found that advising students on the essay-writing portion of the process is the most fulfilling. He also enjoys the entire search, application, and decision cycle as a way to connect with students as they open up and talk about their passions.

“The ability to study things that you’re passionate about is really important,” he said. “It’s something I’m always telling kids in Matriculate — to study things they’re passionate about and to tell me what they’re passionate about. And I think Arts & Letters uniquely allows you to combine different passions.”

Indulging his passion for education, Bonds took a seminar, Education on the Margins, with Maria McKenna, senior associate director of the ESS minor, during his sophomore year. After his final exam, McKenna invited him to accompany her, another professor, and several other students to India over spring break to learn about educational practices there.

Bonds saw differences between the countries — in India, students all know multiple languages — but he also saw a diversity of teaching styles and a shared humanity that are found in the United States as well.

Bonds collecting his thoughts before a discussion at the Apni Shala Youth Project in Mumbai.

“Kids are just kids wherever you go,” he said. “I remember we were sitting outside the school and there was a lot across the street where kids were playing cricket. And they invited us to go play cricket with them, just complete strangers. That’s exactly what a kid does — sees someone who might be a friend and wants to play a game with them.”

Some of Bonds’ favorite teachers from high school acted as those children did — inviting every student into a relationship and getting to know each one. He aspires to emulate both their welcoming actions and diverse curriculum.

Following his graduation in May, Bonds will join the Alliance for Catholic Education and spend two years teaching at Cristo Rey Atlanta Jesuit High School. Whether he ends up teaching for a few years or for his entire career, his liberal arts education has laid the foundation for his future.

“Three things have been embedded in almost all of my Arts and Letters classes — creativity, passion, and a relentless drive to learn more about a subject,” he said. “Regardless of the career path I ultimately choose, I hope to always remain willing to be creative, eager to engage with things I am passionate about, and relentless in learning more about everything in order to better help the young people I work with.”

“The ability to study things that you’re passionate about is really important. It’s something I’m always telling kids — to study things they’re passionate about and to tell me what they’re passionate about. And I think Arts & Letters uniquely allows you to combine different passions.”

Originally published by Kate Flanagan at al.nd.edu on April 08, 2021.

Notre Dame poet Joyelle McSweeney named finalist for prestigious Kingsley Tufts Award

2021-04-02T09:20:00-04:00

Joyelle McSweeney

Joyelle McSweeney, a Notre Dame professor of English and Creative Writing Program faculty member, has been named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, a prominent prize honoring work by a mid-career poet.

The honor comes in recognition of McSweeney’s double poetry collection Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020) — the first part written in the years leading up to the birth of her third daughter, Arachne; and the second part written in the spring following Arachne’s brief life and death.

“This double-book is like a double-self-portrait of my mind at its most exuberant and most dismayed, most centrifugal and most collapsed,” McSweeney said. “It reflects everything I've ever learned — though ‘everything I ever learned’ didn't help me when I needed it. It makes an engine from opposites, like all true poetry, and like the universe itself.”

Established in 1992 and based at Claremont Graduate University, the Kingsley Tufts Award both honors poets and aims to provide resources that allow them to continue working toward the pinnacle of their craft. Other finalists this year are Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, T’ai Freedom Ford, John Murillo, and Tommy Pico.

Toxicon engages with Plato’s notion that writing must be distrusted because it is a poison and a cure. Containing McSweeney’s most formally ambitious poems, she said she wrote “works of such lyric intensity that they would feel almost like toxins, and to formally hone them like poison arrows.”

In the wake of her daughter’s death from an unexpected birth defect, McSweeney reflected on her poems’ thematic concerns with plagues, contaminants, mutations, and unintended effects. She wrote the poems of Arachne over the span of a few weeks, as she took walks along the St Joseph River in South Bend, filled with anger and grief.

“Springtime returned to South Bend, but Arachne did not return with it,” McSweeney said. “It seemed that Toxicon prophesized Arachne, but it's also true that Arachne rewrites Toxicon by rendering it a work of prophecy. That's ultimately why the publisher and I decided to publish the two books together — because they co-author or almost co-gestate each other, bring each other to (dark) light.”

The author of six books of poetry and prose, many of which also contain plays, McSweeney won the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights for her 2013 play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks. With Johannes Göransson, she founded and edits Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation focused on modern and contemporary works from Latin America, Asia, the United States, and Europe.

“The Kingsley Tufts prize is a major award that is designed to recognize and support a poet who is no longer at the outset of her career and yet still has many years of writing ahead,” said Jesse Lander, chair of the Department of English. “This makes the Kingsley Tufts prize truly distinctive, and the English Department is very proud that Joyelle McSweeney is a finalist for this award.”

Originally published by Josh Weinhold at al.nd.edu on April 01, 2021.

ND Creative Writing Statement on Anti-Asian Violence

2021-03-23T11:00:00-04:00

The Notre Dame Creative Writing Program strongly condemns the mass shooting in Atlanta, Georgia on March 16, 2021, which took the lives of eight people, including six Asian American women. This event follows a reported rise in violence against Asian Americans since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We support the statement of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies and stand in solidarity with those people and communities targeted by such violence and with those working to challenge and dismantle white supremacy as it affects Asians, Asian Americans, and all people of color.

Video: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi on Call Me Zebra, Savage Tongues, and how patterns of migration shape literature

2021-03-17T09:15:00-04:00

“In my writing, I'm often asking questions about how patterns of migration have shaped literature from antiquity to the present day.”

— Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an associate professor in the Department of English, director of the Creative Writing Program, concurrent faculty in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and a faculty fellow in the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. She is the author of the novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. More information can be found on her faculty page.

Video Transcript

In my writing, I'm often asking questions about how patterns of migration have shaped literature from antiquity to the present day, and how exile, state-sanctioned violence, gross human rights violations can have an impact on the human psyche and on our emotional landscapes. And I'm also thinking about how history imprints itself on actual physical landscapes.

Call Me Zebra is my second novel and it took me many many years to conceive of it and then to, to actually write it, and the thing that inspired me the most was this question of, can we really retrace our footsteps as migrants and access a space and time and a self that existed in a previous iteration in a different cultural and linguistic landscape?

My third novel is called Savage Tongues and it looks at questions of nationhood and identity and memory, and it's also looking at questions of gender and gender-based violence.

I think Notre Dame is THE place for asking these questions. It's, it's an institution that has always been devoted to social justice. It's an institution that really thinks very carefully about the intersections of theology and literature, artistic production, technology, and human progress. It's also an incredible place to be as a writer because you have so much support around your writing time and also funds to conduct research internationally. Every single book that I've worked on ISLA has stepped in and stepped up to help me do the research abroad into the spaces that I've been writing about, not just to do archival research, but to just have a fully sensorial experience of the space so that I could render it on the page.

I absolutely love being in the classroom. I think that the classroom is really for me an extension of my work as a writer and an artist in the world. It's the space where I get to ask these questions alongside other curious minds and explore them collectively, right, because we're dealing with questions of collective memory, collective forms of violence.

Teaching here at Notre Dame has been actually a remarkable experience. I think our students are honestly among the most genuine and intelligent and engaged students. They don't take their education for granted. They're incredibly serious and dedicated, so it's a genuine pleasure to teach them.

Originally published by Todd Boruff at al.nd.edu on March 15, 2021.

For Veronica Mansour ’21, creating and staging an original musical was the perfect blend of her English and music majors

2021-03-16T16:00:00-04:00

English and music major Veronica Mansour spent last semester workshopping her original musical, An Old Family Recipe, which will be filmed over the course of a few weeks and released to the public in a live-streamed opening night this spring.

When Veronica Mansour landed her first role in musical theater as Marcie in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown at age 8, she never imagined she would one day write a musical of her own.

Veronica Mansour

She still has trouble believing it now.

“I just have to pinch myself sometimes to say this is real life and this show is going to happen in one way or another, even if COVID is putting speed bumps in our path,” Mansour said.

Mansour, a senior English and music major with a minor in musical theatre, spent last semester workshopping her original musical, An Old Family Recipe, which will be filmed over the course of a few weeks and released to the public in a live-streamed opening night this spring.

The process of writing the music, lyrics, and book for the show has been quite the challenge — one that draws from all of her academic pursuits.

“I feel like English has really helped me to articulate myself as a writer in a more concise way,” she said, “but also to push myself creatively with some of the creative writing classes I’ve taken.”

“An Arts and Letters education allows students like me, who maybe aren’t exactly sure what they want to do in the future, to pursue everything that they want to — and I didn’t come across any other school that was really supportive of that. I can do whatever I want and be whoever I want at Notre Dame.”

‘A new family’

Mansour’s passion for music began at age 2 when she started playing piano — and continued at age 4, when she picked up cello.

Mansour started playing piano at age 2 and picked up cello at age 4.

By high school, Mansour was considering attending a conservatory to focus on cello, but decided she wanted a college experience that would allow her to pursue her wide range of musical talents, including singing, songwriting, and arranging music.

She found just that when visiting Notre Dame.

“An Arts and Letters education allows students like me, who maybe aren’t exactly sure what they want to do in the future, to pursue everything that they want to — and I didn’t come across any other school that was really supportive of that,” Mansour said. “I can do whatever I want and be whoever I want at Notre Dame. Arts and Letters doesn’t want students to limit themselves, but instead challenge themselves by studying anything that sparks their interest.”

Mansour has embraced this philosophy fully, while still excelling at cello performance, her concentration for her music major. She is the principal cellist of the Notre Dame Symphony Orchestra, with which she soloed during the spring of her sophomore year.

“Even though cello is not necessarily the thing I want to pursue professionally, it’s just been a constant for me throughout my life,” Mansour said. “It helped me so much within my classical training, which helped me in writing songs and in the musical theater realm — they just kind of blended together.”

And it is in this musical theater realm that Mansour has found her home at Notre Dame. She was the musical director for PEMCo’s production Guys and Dolls her sophomore year, and has performed in Department of Film, Television, and Theatre productions of Spring Awakening and a student production of Heathers. She also composed and arranged music for FTT’s adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid.

“Being in a cast allows you to bond with people on a really intimate level and share your gifts with people while they’re sharing their gifts with you,” she said. “It becomes this really positive community. When a show is over, you just leave with a new family.”

‘Growth as a writer’

Mansour’s greatest FTT undertaking by far has been An Old Family Recipe, which tells the story of Toni, a young woman struggling with depression and anxiety as she navigates relationships and tries to create a life for herself.

Mansour performing with her brother, Alex, an FTT and music major who graduated from Notre Dame in 2019.

The process began in a summer songwriting program at New York University and a fiction-writing program at Skidmore College during the summer after her first year. Those experiences challenged her as a writer and an artist, Mansour said, and encouraged her to consider how to blend her two core interests.

After hearing some of Mansour’s songs from that summer, Notre Dame musical theatre director Matt Hawkins encouraged her to develop a larger project, and her thoughts immediately went to creating a musical.

Mansour began talking with classmate and friend Gabe Krut, and a story started to develop, influenced by their plans to study abroad in Rome the coming year.

But once Mansour began writing, she became overwhelmed by the scale of the task in front of her. So she wrote the plot as a short story first, then adapted it into a play, then added songs.

When she arrived in Rome, she immersed herself in Italian culture — a centerpiece of An Old Family Recipe.

“It’s all about Italian food, so I was eating a lot and calling that research,” Mansour said with a laugh.

The coronavirus pandemic cut short her abroad experience, but she used her extra time at home to continue working on the musical and preparing it for the lab class that workshopped the show twice a week with Hawkins last fall.

“It’s been really humbling to hear all the criticism and all the praise as well,” Mansour said. “Implementing the thoughts of all the people in my class and recognizing that people often do know better than me has been such an experience of growth as a writer.”

‘Music brings people together’

The class has also been working with Jennifer Hames, an assistant clinical professor of psychology, to ensure that the musical appropriately represents mental health in a way that’s beneficial to the audience.

Mansour on stage at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center with rock star Todd Rundgren, a Notre Dame artist-in-residence in 2018.

Mental health has been something Mansour has struggled with for years, and she’s found talking about it with others to be a challenge.

“Using the arts to help me broach conversations about mental illness has been a really special opportunity,” she said. “Really that’s what I want to do in life — use music and theater and the arts to have these important conversations that are generally stigmatized.”

After graduation, Mansour hopes to remain in the field of music and is applying to various graduate programs in musical theater writing and commercial music.

“Music brings people together — it has united me with my family and my closest friends, and it has made me feel the most comfortable in my own skin,” she said. “I think people feel the happiest when they’re doing the thing they love the most with the people they love the most, and music provides me with the opportunity to do just that.”

Originally published at al.nd.edu.

Economics and English major turns her interest in comedy into a research project — including a trip to Stephen Colbert’s show

2021-01-29T09:00:00-05:00

Economics major Ella Wisniewski added a second major in English after she took a Glynn Family Honors Program seminar where she read reading everything from The Odyssey to young adult novels.

What do Stephen Colbert and an ancient Greek political satirist have in common?

After taking the advice of a professor to pursue any topic that interested her, junior Ella Wisniewski decided to answer that question in a research project on political comedy.

That simple suggestion from Collin Meissner, an assistant dean for undergraduate studies, during a Glynn Family Honors Program seminar set her on a path that included a trip to New York, adding a second major, and embracing learning for the sake of learning.

“In class one day, he said that if you’re trying to find a research project, just think about something that’s interesting or an experience that you want to have, and then turn that into research that you can do,” Wisniewski said.

“Every day at Notre Dame, I grow in my ability to analyze and interpret and think of things from perspectives that I might not necessarily have — and that’s definitely a skill I used when I was conducting my research.”

Timeless topics

So Wisniewski turned to comedy, something she watches frequently for fun, and developed an academic project that compares an early use of political satire to current political comedy.

After deciding on Aristophanes, a playwright of ancient Athens, she looked for someone close to him in content or structure, eventually settling on Stephen Colbert.

With funding from the Glynn program, Wisniewski traveled to New York City in 2019 to attend a taping of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and take a tour of NBC Studios.

“I narrowed it down to one specific person from the past and one specific person from the present, and I started looking at not only historical parallels but the way that themes were reflecting across millennia,” she said.

With funding from the Glynn program, Wisniewski traveled to New York City in 2019 to attend a taping of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and take a tour of NBC Studios.

“I can’t go back to ancient Greece to watch a play, so I read a lot of primary sources, but it was really nice to have those hands-on experiences to look at the modern political comedy aspect,” Wisniewski said.

The final product of her research, a paper titled “Aristophanes and Colbert: A Case Study in Comparative Political Comedy,” highlights two timeless topics she found in the work of both political satirists — bathroom humor and critiquing politicians.

“It was a challenge at first to draw the two together because it’s hard to separate the time period from the work, but after you strip down material for a while, you get to its base elements,” she said. “I found that people — throughout history and now — love bathroom humor and that there’s also this big focus on getting politicians to acknowledge you because once they do that, you’ve already won.”

Research relevance

Passionate about math, Wisniewski entered Notre Dame as an honors mathematics student but was drawn to the real world application of economics and changed her major a few weeks into her first year.

Later that year, Wisniewski added a second major in English, largely inspired by the Glynn seminar she took with Meissner. Wisniewski loved the structure of the class, reading everything from The Odyssey to young adult novels.

Wisniewski at a rehearsal for Late Night with Seth Meyers.

“It made me realize how much I enjoy reading, writing, and engaging in discussing in class as opposed to just being in lecture rooms,” Wisniewski said. “My majors in English and economics are a really good combination of bigger classes where you’re learning more facts and methods and smaller classes which are more discussion and opinion- or argumentation-based.”

Wisniewski will eventually write a senior thesis but, for now, is exploring fields and topics of interest, including her renewed passion for creative writing. She joined the Creative Writing Club as a first-year, will serve as its president in the spring semester, and is now considering how her pursuits there could influence her research.

“With doing more creative writing, I've definitely thought about adding that element to my thesis,” Wisniewski said. “I think it would be really cool to come up with an idea that weaves together satire and some sort of narrative.”

Pursuing research early in her academic career was an incredibly worthwhile endeavor, she said, that taught her a lot about her personal process and perseverance.

“Every day at Notre Dame, I grow in my ability to analyze and interpret and think of things from perspectives that I might not necessarily have — and that’s definitely a skill I used when I was conducting my research,” she said. “The experience just reaffirmed how much I like the research process and finding knowledge for the sake of knowledge and for the sake of creating new things that are interesting.”

Originally published by Sophia Lauber at al.nd.edu on January 28, 2021.

Notre Dame launches interdisciplinary Initiative on Race and Resilience

2021-01-18T10:00:00-05:00

Mark A. Sanders

The University of Notre Dame has launched the Initiative on Race and Resilience, a new interdisciplinary program focused on the redress of systemic racism and the support of communities of color both within and beyond the Notre Dame campus.

Led by the College of Arts and Letters with additional support from the Office of the Provost, the initiative will bring together scholars and students in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and other disciplines to challenge systemic racism and promote racial equity through research, education, and community empowerment.

“Our University mission calls on us 'to assist the world to create justice grounded in love,' and so we have a unique responsibility to support the study of race and to amplify the voices, gifts, and talents of people of color,” said Mark A. Sanders, the inaugural director of the initiative and a professor of English and Africana studies at Notre Dame.

“This initiative marks the creation of a think tank on race — an intellectual and physical space at Notre Dame where people will come together to address issues of race and racism, both systemic and interpersonal.”

Sarah A. Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, said addressing issues of race in an academic and community context is closely tied to Notre Dame’s Catholic mission — which calls for respecting the dignity of every person and standing in solidarity for the pursuit of peace and justice.

Dean Sarah A. Mustillo

“This is an opportunity for Notre Dame to be a significant voice in the challenging, ongoing conversation about racism and the role it currently plays and has historically played in our society,” said Mustillo, who made creating the Initiative on Race and Resilience one her top priorities when she became dean in 2018. “The College of Arts and Letters is determined to fight inequality through research, education, and outreach, and this new initiative is an essential component of that goal.”

The initiative’s research endeavors will include annual internal grants for race-centered research, a scholar-in-residence position, post-doctoral and dissertation fellowships, a visiting scholars program, lectures, and a biannual conference with rotating themes.

In the 2021-2022 academic year, the initiative will host its first fellow, in partnership with the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study — Scott Alves Barton, a food scholar from New York University named by Ebony magazine as one of the top 25 African American/Diaspora chefs.

“This is an opportunity for Notre Dame to be a significant voice in the challenging, ongoing conversation about racism and the role it currently plays and has historically played in our society. The College of Arts and Letters is determined to fight inequality through research, education, and outreach, and this new initiative is an essential component of that goal.”

Academic programs developed through the initiative will emphasize interdisciplinarity and comparative study of race and ethnicity. It will offer course development grants, pedagogy workshops with the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the Center on Literacy Education, a faculty-student mentorship program for students of color, and educational outreach efforts.

The initiative also seeks to empower African American communities and other communities of color through engagement opportunities, especially through the arts. It will sponsor a community book club and host or co-sponsor anti-racist programming such as art exhibits, theatrical productions, and film festivals.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, director of the MFA program in creative writing, serves on the initiative's advisory council, and English faculty members Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, Ernest Morell, Sarah Quesada, and Francisco Robles are affiliated faculty.

Sanders said the initiative plans to create campus-community dialogue events, develop programming for K-12 classrooms, and host a summer program for potential first-generation college students. An artist-in-residence and practitioner fellow program will bring creators, policymakers, and community organizers to campus for collaborative sessions with scholars and students.

“Our approach will be to celebrate communities of color and all they have to offer — and the arts are a means by which those communities assert a recuperative sense of identity,” Sanders said.

Research and education pursuits will be organized around a series of rotating themes, with topics changing every two to three years. A theme on race and the environment, for example, would include hosting a visiting scholar conducting research in that area, a practitioner fellow addressing environmental racism, undergraduate courses covering global warming’s economic impact on communities of color or the water crisis in Flint, Mich., and arts exhibits or events that address those themes.

“In every facet of the initiative, we will attend to the critical tension at the heart of the concept of race — race as a tool of colonization and race as a site of resistance and resilience,” Sanders said. “Through all of our work, we will strive to cultivate an atmosphere of inclusiveness and scholarly excellence.”

Originally published by Josh Weinhold at al.nd.edu on January 18, 2021.

Notre Dame London Global Gateway, campus partners, launch new program exploring London through song

2020-12-18T14:00:00-05:00

The Notre Dame London Global Gateway, along with six partners from across the University of Notre Dame campus, has launched the next in the London Book Club series, an interactive, educational enrichment program featuring Notre Dame’s expert faculty.

The program, entitled “London in Song,” is led by Ian Newman, Assistant Professor of English and Fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.

“As one of the central nodes of the global entertainment industry, London has a long and complex relationship to song, and much can be learned about the cultural life of the city through its song cultures,” said Newman. “‘London In Song’ explores the history of London by examining the popular music that it inspired.”

“London in song” includes songs, explainer videos from Newman, short essays, a LinkedIn discussion group and weekly interactive Zoom sessions, starting in January. The program is free and open to all, and it is hosted exclusively on ThinkND, Notre Dame’s open, online learning community brought to you by the Alumni Association.

In addition to offering the opportunity to learn from and interact with Notre Dame’s expert faculty, the program allows participants to engage more deeply with United Kingdom culture through the London Global Gateway and offers unique insight into the University’s presence abroad.

“Music is a universal language, beyond time and space. It invites us into a deeper understanding of persons and places, also in times of virtual encounters. The opportunity to discover more about London through song with the guidance of Nanovic faculty fellow Ian Newman is an invitation to enter the global city of London through the door of art. This event will kindle further the anticipation of future explorations when travel resumes,” shared Clemens Sedmak, interim director of the Nanovic Institute and Professor of Social Ethics. “The program designed by Ian Newman exemplifies the Nanovic Institute’s aspirations to bring Notre Dame to Europe and Europe to Notre Dame in unusual and deep ways, through intentional engagement with culture and creativity, art and history. The Nanovic Institute enthusiastically supports this initiative.”

The first week of “London in Song” explores Jack Hall (aka Sam Hall), a traditional British folk song dating back to 1707, with the initial Zoom discussion on Tuesday, January 12 at 11:30am (EST). In the remaining weeks, participants will look at songs, “The London Waterman,” “Jerusalem” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” While the Book Club is presented as a four-week experience, participants are invited to join for any session.

“It is with great delight that we welcome Ian Newman as the next presenter in the London Book Club. Ian brings further evidence of the diversity and expansiveness of the kind of research and scholarship that the Notre Dame faculty is doing in London and all over the world. On this occasion, Ian will give focus to the history of London through the songs that it inspired over time.” said Fr. Jim Lies C.S.C., interim senior director for academic initiatives and partnerships at the London Global Gateway. “The London Global Gateway is honored to host Ian for the LBC, and to welcome all who might wish to travel with us on this musical history tour!”

Partners for the London Book Club include the College of Arts & Letters, ND International, the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, the Nanovic Institute, the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, ND Learning and the Notre Dame Alumni Association.

Originally published by Joanna Byrne at london.nd.edu on December 10, 2020.