Faculty Profiles

"Scholastically Impeccable and Immensely Readable": Dennis Moore's Fresh, New Edition of Letters from an American Farmer

The recently released Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays (Harvard UP, 2013) provides more depth and insight to French-born writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and his reflections on early America, thanks to Dennis Moore's twenty-plus years of research. This updated reader's edition fits squarely in what Moore calls "a wonderful renaissance of scholarly interest in early America's history as well as its culture."→ read more

 

David Ikard Puts Obama and Post-Racial Politics Under the Microscope in Nation of Cowards

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008 as the nation's first African American president, David Ikard and his friend and academic colleague Martell Lee Teasley—who are co-authors of the recently published book Nation of Cowards (Indiana UP)—talked about the historic occasion from ambivalent points of view. → read more

 

Jim O'Rourke Recovers a 'Fresh and Subversive' Shakespeare in New Book

The title of Jim O'Rourke's new book, Retheorizing Shakespeare Through Presentist Readings, created a bit of a stir in July 2011 when a right wing radio talk show host (who calls himself a "defender of Judeo-Christian values") cited it as an example of "the foolishness of the University."   → read more

 

Robert Olen Butler Unravels an "Emotional Mystery Story" in His New Book, A Small Hotel

Robert Olen Butler has been to Hell, and now he is back with a story about the lingering emotions present when a couple is facing the end of their twenty-year marriage. Following the success of his 2009 novel that was set in the underworld, Butler takes readers to New Orleans in his recent publication, A Small Hotel (Grove/Atlantic, 2011). Once there, however, Butler does not let his three main characters sit still in the Big Easy. He blends passages in the present with memories that attempt to explain the dissolution of Michael and Kelly Hays's union, while Laurie Pruitt, Michael's new girlfriend, comes along for the time-shifting tale.   → read more

 

Ned Stuckey-French's The American Essay in the American Century is a "Smart, Artful Discussion" of a Neglected Art Form

In his new book, The American Essay in the American Century (U of Missouri P, 2011), Ned Stuckey-French offers not only a cultural history of the personal essay but also a defense of that oft-neglected art form.   → read more

 

Elizabeth Spiller's Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance Called "Dazzling in Scope and Approach"

When it comes to her writing, Elizabeth Spiller relies on writing's companion act, reading, as inspiration.   → read more

 

Barry Faulk Explores Music-Literature Continuum in British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977

In the summer of 1967, The Beatles released "All You Need is Love," a song with a simple message of peace and unity. A little less than 10 years later, in the spring of 1977, the Sex Pistols thrashed the airwaves with their most-acclaimed single, "God Save the Queen," with lyrics that include the repeated ending, "No future / no future for you / No future for me."   → read more

 

Elizabeth Stuckey-French Takes Readers on a 'Wild Ride' with Radioactive Lady

While Stuckey-French is looking forward to rest and relaxation, she has advice for those who pick up and dive into her latest novel: "Fasten your seatbelts, readers. It's going be a wild ride," she says about The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady.   → read more

 

Maxine Montgomery, Gloria Naylor, and 'Writerly’ Reenactments of Home

Maxine Montgomery first met author and educator Gloria Naylor during her editorial work on Conversations With Gloria Naylor (UP Mississippi, 2004), a collection of fourteen personal and professional interviews that Naylor gave to various sources. The interviews range from 1983, which was soon after the publication of Naylor's first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, to 2000, following the publication of Naylor's The Men of Brewster Place. The two became friends, with Montgomery visiting Naylor at her home in Brooklyn in 2003 and Naylor visiting Florida State University at Montgomery's request in 2005.   → read more

 

Michael Neal's New Book Addresses Writing Assessment and Technology in 21st-Century Teaching

Digital technologies and new media literacy are opening up creative ways for writers at all levels to compose and distribute their work. When classroom assignments result in digital projects that combine writing, visuals, and audio texts, educators might struggle with how to assess these new texts fairly and accurately.   → read more

 

Robin Goodman's New Book Realigns Feminist Theory in Relation to the Public Sphere

The first line of Robin Goodman's new book, Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public: Women and the "Re-privatization" of Labor (Palgrave, 2010), succinctly states her argument: "feminism needs to devise a theory of the public." Goodman's elaboration of that starting point has reviewers praising her for "a theoretically rich and ambitious effort" and stating that Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public is "a stunning achievement."   → read more

 

Jerrilyn McGregory Returns to Wiregrass Country to Explore Sacred Music, African-American History, and Culture

In her new book, Downhome Gospel:African American Spiritual Activism in Wiregrass Country (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Jerrilyn McGregory returns to a Southern region and a Southern culture that she explored in her first book, Wiregrass Country (1997). Wiregrass country—which encompasses parts of southern Georgia, southeastern Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle—is a little-known region, with a history that "challenges long-standing assumptions about African-American life, history, and culture," McGregory writes in the introduction to her most recent publication. "Its inhabitants owe much of their love of sacred music to a dynamic historical past."   → read more

 

Bruce Boehrer's Book Studies Relationship Between Nonhuman Animals and Notions of Literary Character

In the introduction to his recent publication, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (U of Pennsylvania P, 2010), Bruce Boehrer recounts the story of George Orwell sending his manuscript of Animal Farm to Dial Press in New York City for consideration to be published. Dial turned down Orwell because, according to a letter the English author later sent to his agent, and which Boehrer cites, "it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA." Acknowledging that a mistake had been made, the publishing house soon after made an offer on the book, to which Orwell commented on in the letter, "I rather gather they had at first taken it for a bona fide animal story."   → read more

 

Deborah Coxwell-Teague's Book Helps Students Analyze and Critique Diverse Forms of Texts

For Deborah Coxwell-Teague an answer to the question "What is a text?" can be found in the title of her new book: Everything's a Text. Following four years of research, writing, and collaborating with Dan Melzer—who was a doctoral student in the department nearly 10 years ago—Coxwell-Teague's goal with the book is to help students "learn how to read, analyze, respond to, and write about the texts that bombard them each day."   → read more

 

Bob Shacochis's Immaculate Invasion is Back in Print

Bob Shacochis knows better than most the struggles that Haiti and its people face to recover and to rebuild from the devastating earthquake that hit the Caribbean country in January. Shacochis spent 18 months covering Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, where he bunked with a team of Special Forces during the 1994 American-led U.N. invasion. Viking Press originally published his book chronicling the experience, The Immaculate Invasion, in 1999; his current publisher, Grove/Atlantic, reissued the book in June.   → read more

 

Barbara Hamby Wins A Guggenheim Fellowship

After winning her Guggenheim Fellowship award in April 2010, the next step for Barbara Hamby has arrived: she must now do the work on two projects that she hopes to have ready for publication in the next year.   → read more

 

Stan Gontarski's Beckett Book Project Brings High Praise

Stan Gontarski's most recent book project, A Companion To Samuel Beckett (Wiley/Blackwell, March 2010), joins his extensive library of works focused on Irish author Samuel Beckett, and it immediately generated excitement and praise among scholars and readers.   → read more

 

Meegan Kennedy's Revising the Clinic Focuses on Victorian Novelists and Physicians

Meegan Kennedy was still taking in the news that she had been awarded tenure and a promotion to associate professor—delivered in a letter that she had just finished reading—when she sat and talked in her office about her other recent significant career accomplishment, the Jan. 2010 publication of her first book, Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel (Ohio State UP). "It's a wonderful feeling to see my argument in print, and to know that my research can now be useful to other scholars instead of just sitting in notes in my files," she says. Combining her study of the novel and of medical narratives; relying on hundreds of primary sources; building on current scholarship on the Victorian novel and medicine, Kennedy focuses on the similar ways Victorian novelists and physicians debate methods of "seeing and stating"—on how to observe the world and how to record those observations.
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Anne Coldiron wins NEH research fellowship

Anne Coldiron's fall term ended in a whirlwind with the news of her National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) award that during 2010 will send her to Paris, London, Oxford, New York, Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas. This prestigious yearlong $50,400 research fellowship is supporting the research and writing of Coldiron's third book, tentatively titled Printers Without Borders: Translation, Transnationalism, and Early English Print.
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