ENGLISH, 40 YEARS AGO 5 Notes

002/ Fall 2015 Number 002 english.utoronto.ca ENGLISH, 40 YEARS AGO 5 Notes restrained, even, at times, self-effacing; a MEMORIAL TRIBUTE sympathetic intelligence that sought NEW FACULTY FOR CHELVA openings for dialogue, not a self-serving AUDREY WALTON KANAGANAYAKAM intelligence that had no patience for the DECEMBER 1, 2014 other’s point of view. Since coming to the University of Toronto ten years ago, Written by I’ve had the great pleasure of working Professor Victor Li closely with Chelva in the English Department’s graduate program. In the course of many dissertation committee meetings, Ph.D. special field exams, and doctoral defences, my admiration for him grew steadily as I witnessed the skill with which he would gently pose questions to students, questions that would go straight to a problem in their writing but without putting them on the spot, questions that were designed not to intimidate but to tease out a more productive line of thought or argument. Chelva was a superb teacher and his loss will be felt deeply by all his students. If my first meeting with Chelva was in 02. Singapore 19 years ago, my last meet- Audrey Walton is honoured and ing was with him on this campus, at a excited to be joining the University reception for new FRSC’s, 6 days before of Toronto faculty this fall. She is 01. his untimely death. We chatted about coming from Columbia University, I first met Chelva in Singapore in 1995. a special issue on South Asian writing where she recently completed a I was there as a Visiting Fellow at that he was planning to edit for the Ph.D. in English and Comparative Nanyang Technological University University of Toronto Quarterly. In Literature and served as an instructor and Chelva was there to interview a the days following, we exchanged in the English and the Core Curricu- Singaporean writer. The writer intro- emails about the issue’s scope and the lum Departments. Before beginning duced me to him as a fellow Canadian timeline for manuscript submission and her Ph.D., she taught English as a academic. Over a long lunch we spoke publication. He was very enthusiastic second language for several years, about postcolonial theory and literature, about the project and said that he an experience that shaped her interest about diasporic writing, about problems would soon line up potential contributors in multilingualism and globalization. that can complicate cross-cultural for the issue. His last email to me was on Her current book project, New Wine encounters and exchanges, topics of Thursday, November 20th. He signed in Old Skins: Vernacular Typology interest to both of us. What struck me off with the word “warmly.” This is the in Medieval English Poetry, 590-1390, most at that time was Chelva’s relaxed last word I will ever receive from him. examines the significance of sacred courtesy and warmth, his unfailing It is a word that sums up the man. If I poetry in English to the political and ability to acknowledge the importance could send him an email now I would social identity of the English Church, of the other’s presence. He clearly say: “Farewell dear Chelva. I’ll miss from England’s conversion at the end had a vast knowledge of postcolonial your presence at future dissertation of the sixth century to the flourishing literatures, especially the literature of meetings and defences. I’ll miss our of England’s vernacular theology in South Asia. But he wore that knowledge conversations. I’ll miss your radiant the fourteenth. This book participates lightly, unostentatiously. He was excited smile. Warmly, Victor.” in ongoing scholarly conversations to share his knowledge, but was just as about sacred language, vernacularity, eager to listen to what you had to say. 01. 02. and world religions. A second project Professor Chelva Professor explores the deep and extensive Over the years, we ran into each other Kanaganayakam Audrey Walton. structural similarities in two important at conferences and in 2004 he acted as receiving the Photography by early English anthologies—one in Latin, an external examiner for a doctoral dis- Fellow Royal Ashifa Rajwani the other in Old English—in order to sertation on Salman Rushdie, Michael Society of shed new light on England’s bilingual Ondaatje, and Bharati Mukherjee that I Canada. literary culture. Both projects explore supervised at Dalhousie University. At Photography the potential networks, points of all those meetings I observed the same courtesy of The contact, and paths of information that responsiveness and patient attention Royal Society of enable ideas to cross linguistic divides. to the other that I had noticed when Canada’s 2014 we were first introduced in Singapore. Annual General Chelva was possessed of an intelligence meeting © 2014 that was never aggressive or showy. Cosmos Image, All It was an intelligence that was always Rights Reserved. 5 Notes NEW FACULTY THOM DANCER two book projects in this field. The first argues that settler colonialism—the pro- cess through which colonizers from an “old” world seek to inhabit a “new” one already inhabited by others—manifests itself as a temporal and formal problem, not only as a geographic or spatial problem, in a range of nineteenth- century American texts. The second project explores how and where the Pacific appears “at home” in nineteenth- century America. Building on recent work that demonstrates how ideas about distant places like New Zealand circulated in the nineteenth-century U.S., this project contributes to the growing awareness of the place of the Pacific in American literature and culture. Melissa’s research often situates Ameri- 03. can literature in relation to geographies Thom Dancer joins the Department as nonhuman forces. The book puts this beyond U.S. borders or to issues, like an Assistant Professor of Contemporary mode of inquiry into practice in its settler colonialism, that impact many Literature. He comes to Toronto from readings of novels by Ian McEwan, national histories. She often brings these Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. His J.M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith, and David interests into her teaching as well. She scholarship and teaching centre on the Mitchell, who themselves advocate also likes to teach fairly non-canonical 21st century novel as it intersects with modest responses to the pressing texts, like antebellum sensation fiction, the multiple intellectual and scientific challenges of 21st century life. alongside better-known American texts developments from the last decades and to teach literature alongside histo- of the twentieth century, that offer new ries of print and visual culture. approaches to the human and social NEW FACULTY sciences: actor-network theory, affect MELISSA GNIADEK The questions that motivate both theory, assemblage theory, cognitive Melissa’s teaching and research have sciences, new materialism, new media been shaped by the various places she theory, speculative realism, and systems has lived, studied, and taught. Melissa theory. In particular, his research asks grew up in Massachusetts and attended how the novel provides new resources college there. Then she moved to New for thinking, reading, and acting in Zealand, where she earned a master’s the contemporary world. His work degree from the Department of English has appeared in journals such as at the University of Auckland. Melissa NOVEL, minnesota review, and moved back to the U.S. to complete her Contemporary Literature. doctorate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. After completing her Ph.D., Thom’s book project Critical Modesty: Melissa remained in the U.S. but moved Contemporary Fiction after Critique to a very different city: Houston, Texas, intervenes in current debates about where she taught at Rice University. literary interpretation by arguing that Melissa knows that the move from a literary theory must develop better region at the southern border of the U.S. means of recognizing, respecting, and to Toronto, just north of U.S. national responding to the agency of texts. This space, will productively reorient her entails seeing literature not as an object perspectives on U.S. literature once to be known by masterful critics but again and she looks forward to conver- as a thinking and affecting object in its sations about this (and more)! own right. Drawing on thinkers such as 04. 03. 04. Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Isabella Melissa Gniadek is thrilled to be Professor Thom Professor Stengers, and Jacques Rancière, the joining the Department of English Dancer. Melissa Gniadek. book theorizes a mode of inquiry— at the University of Toronto this fall. Photography Photography critical modesty—that attends to the Her teaching and research centres courtesy of Profes- courtesy of Profes- ways texts act against and in concert on nineteenth-century American sor Thom Dancer sor Melissa Gniadek with a surprising array of human and literature. 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