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Chair's and Directors' Updates 2007 Fall Faculty Lecture Departmental News Faculty News Graduate Program News Undergraduate Program News Creative Writing Alumni Bulletin Retirements Friends of English UC Davis home > English / Newsletters Welcome to the new electronic format of the UC Davis English Department Newsletter! We hope you Quick links will find this site informative and up-to-date. Please let us know if you would like to share your news Home with the English Department community by emailing us at: [email protected] English University Writing Program Tomales Bay Workshops Davis Humanities Institute

English Department Newsletters Voorhies Hall University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 Printable version of Newsletter

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/[3/29/2011 1:07:45 PM] ordering so many sandwiches for so many of these events (I owe Mary for other things too, but the list is long and space, even in an elec- Chair’s Update: Margie Ferguson tronic newsletter, is short).

As I look back over my second year of chair- This year has been an extraordinarily full one. ing, I think with particular pleasure about the I am thrilled to be presiding over our move to many festive events that have punctuated the an electronic newsletter and I want to thank time. Among these, in rough chronological the editor, Barbara Zimbalist, for helping us Contents order, were: a trip in October to our writers’ move toward a less paper-filled universe (or at workshops at beautiful Tomales Bay in Marin least university). Many warm thanks are also County, where I heard our second-year CW due to the staff members who’ve generously students read and also had the pleasure of given help, information and invaluable tech- hearing readings by Pam Houston, Lucy Co- nical support to our new project: Tara Porter, Chair’s & Directors’ Updates...1-2 rin, and John Lescroart, who has funded a fic- Lynda Jones, Ron Ottman, Mark Wong, and tion prize (the Maurice Prize) in honor of his Janie Guhin. I also want to thank our de- Fall Faculty Lecture...... 3 father. The 2007 Maurice Price winner, Eliza- partmental managing officer, Terry Antonelli, beth Chamberlin, was announced after John’s early and often, for so many things—too many Creative Writing Update...... 4 reading. John and his wife Lisa also generous- to list here. But helping us change to an elec- ly funded a reception at the end of the Tomales tronic newsletter and overseeing our efforts PhD Program Update...... 5 Bay workshops. to improve our Web pages (new ones will be up and running later this fall!) were two of Alumni Bulletin...... 6 Also in October, I enjoyed meeting our new Terry’s many contributions to the department faculty and others from around the Humani- last year. In June, she retired; she is, however, ties, Arts, and Cultural Studies at an evening still displaying her characteristic generosity to Student Awards...... 6 party hosted by our Dean, Jessie Ann Owens. the department by meeting with me and our And I attended a number of search commit- new MSO Darla Tafoya to help us with knotty Faculty News...... 7 tee meetings in preparation for our next ma- questions. jor event, the Modern Language Association Retirements...... 8-9 Convention in Chicago. This occurs, as it has I feel extremely fortunate that we were able for decades, during the week between Christ- to persuade Darla to join us from the History Staff Retirements...... 10 mas and New Year. Some might not describe Department; like Terry, Darla is blessed with it as festive, but it has a certain frenetically gay energy, intelligence, curiosity, superior ac- quality at times. For me, it was hectic, since I counting skills, and a great sense of humor. Friends of English...... 11 was scheduled to present two academic papers Darla and I are both very happy that Vita Si- as well as attend an extraordinary number of monsen, who officially retired with Terry last New Faculty Introductions..11 interviews of candidates for three jobs that June has come back to work part time for turned eventually (and after many interest- English; thanks to Vita, everyone got regular ing campus visits and girth-expanding din- paychecks all summer long, and thanks to ners) into six positions accepted by six stel- Vita as well, our six new faculty members have lar young professors. Back in late December, been securely entered into the many Systems however, the chairs and the members of the that make them benefit-receiving employees three search committees shared some good of the University of California. Working with laughs and some passable sandwiches with staff and recruiting new faculty are two of the each other along with much too much coffee most pleasurable parts of the Chair’s job as I’ve and Diet Pepsi. An easier occasion (for me, experienced it. Volume 11, 2008 because I wasn’t required to be in several places at once) was the weekend in April when I Last year also saw a major reform of our un- UC Davis ENGLISH is published once a year and is first met many of the graduate students admit- dergraduate curriculum. Thanks to the hard sent to graduate students, faculty, Friends of English, and alumni. Please send correspondence to bezimbal- ted to our literature and creative writing pro- work of Fran Dolan, our Director of Under- [email protected] grams; Claire Waters, Pam Houston, Levada graduate Studies, Lynda Jones, the Un- McDowell, Janie Guhin, and Tara Porter were dergraduate Advisor, and members of Editor: Barbara Zimbalist gracious hosts for that event, along with the the Undergraduate Studies Committee, Layout and Design: The Printer many faculty who met with students interested we have a new and I believe improved Photos: Janie Guhin, Ron Ottman in particular areas of study. Faculty work-in- curriculum at both the lower and the Margie Ferguson, chair progress seminars throughout the year were upper divisions. (See Fran Dolan’s Up- Darla Tafoya, MSO pleasurable breaks from the daily routine; I date below). Claire Waters, graduate advisor owe my assistant Mary White a large debt for (continued on pg. 2) Pam Houston, creative writing director Fran Dolan, undergraduate advisor 2

Chair’s Update: Continued from page 1

The graduate programs are thriving, and we successfully completed (should I say survived?) one of the intensive Program Reviews that occurs every decade or so. The external reviewer, Kevin Dettmar (a professor of English who now teaches at Pomona College), praised both our Ph.D. program (in literary study) and our M.A. program (in Creative Writing), though he, like the members of the internal review committee, had some recommendations for us to consider. In particular, we need more funds for graduate students in both the Ph.D. and the M.A. programs. One of my ambitions as Chair is to help our department become more competitive than we are currently with sister graduate programs, such as the ones at Irvine and UCSB, which both allow doctoral students two years free of teaching duties: first at the beginning of their programs and then again at the dissertation stage. Alumni gifts, even small ones, make a big difference in the quality of our creative writing and doctoral students’ lives. Although few of our graduate students receive as much financial support as I believe they merit, many of them are doing very well on the job market (see the graduate student news page for details). The students themselves are the main architects of our strong placement record, but our wonderful Director of Graduate Studies, Claire Waters, the many faculty who advise dissertations and who write careful letters for students, and the hard-working co-chairs of our placement committee--Colin Milburn and Tim Morton, last year, with John Marx joining them this summer—have all contributed substantially to our efforts to crown the six or seven years it takes to earn a Ph.D. in English with the kind of job that brings professional and personal satisfaction.

Finally, there are the retirement parties to mention as the festive capstones to the academic year: one for Marijane Osborn, Terry Antonelli, and Vita Simonsen in May, and one for Karl Zender in June. It was a delight to be Mistress of Ceremonies at these events; but they were of course also bittersweet. They underscored a lesson that, as Chair, I seem always to be relearning: the job involves intricately varied yet recurring experiences of saying hello, welcome, thank you, and goodbye.

Update from the Graduate Advisor: Claire Waters

This past year was a busy and productive one for the Graduate Program. We welcomed an outstanding new class in Fall 2007 and watched those already enrolled make great progress, winning awards along the way for their teaching, research, and service to the university and beyond. And in the course of the winter and spring we admitted the new Ph.D. and Creative Writing students we look forward to welcoming as Fall 2008 begins. Our annual “prospectives’ visit” in April was enjoyable and effective, thanks to the participation of current students and faculty and to the organizational genius of the Graduate Office staff, and contributed to a very successful recruiting year. We are particularly delighted that two of our admitted students received highly competitive campus fellowships (after deciding to attend Davis rather than other programs that had already offered them better funding). We also had the pleasure of seeing a number of our graduates get the recognition, and reward, that their labors have deserved, as they moved on to new jobs in California and across the country; see the Placement news for more information on their successes.

In addition to all our usual activities, we had the salutary experience this year of undergoing a Graduate Program Review, which again benefited from participation across all areas of the department. The review team gave us a very positive assessment overall, as well as some helpful suggestions for improving the program. Their highest recommendation, which we of course warmly endorse, was that our program’s funding should be increased to match the quality of the applicants we are able to attract, as well as to make us appropriately competitive, in financial terms, with our peer programs across the country.

As I enter my second year as graduate director, I’m excited to work with all our students and faculty to continue to make the program work as well as it can for everyone involved, and give my heartfelt thanks to Levada McDowell, Tara Porter, and Janie Guhin for their indispensable help, as well as to my predecessor Scott Simmon for his generosity as an adviser, well beyond his term of duty.

Update from the Undergraduate Advisor: Fran Dolan

The Department of English is in the process of revising the Undergraduate English major, a collaborative, gradual process we hope will continue as the curriculum grows and changes with our faculty, our students, and our discipline. This year, we are launching an new sequence of courses at the lower division, Literatures in English, although we are allowing enrolled majors to complete the old lower division requirements if they choose to do so. We are also launching new “advanced” studies courses for those specializing in Creative Writing or in Literature, Criticism, and Theory. We’ve redesigned our upper division requirements in order to make room for exciting new areas of study. The Undergraduate Studies committee is making other changes designed to support faculty and to enhance our students’ experience. The committee now meets with job candidates visiting the department, emphasizing that teaching is an important consideration in recruitment. We find that we also get lots of great ideas in the process! Last year we held the first brunch for graduating seniors and their families on graduation day. This was a huge success and we plan to make it an annual tradition. We’re always looking for ways to bring faculty and students together and to tap into the expertise and passion they bring to the study of literature. Fall Faculty Lecture 2007 3 original they are This material lies dormant in the uncon- supposed to be scious, reappearing later as symptoms: imitating. Many other scholars drew on repetitive “actings out” that are incompre- Butler’s work to theorize racial and sexual hensible to the subject, who is neverthe- passing, the theatricality of sadomasoch- less compelled to perform them. In this ism, and so on, so that the figure of the model, the past wasn’t ever really past, for stage became more and more explicit. the subject could be said to actually “expe- As important as all this work was, its domi- rience” these traumas for the first time only nant paradigms assumed that power and as they “re”-appear in distorted form in the Associate Professor Elizabeth Freeman knowledge traveled along purely spatial present. Similarly, the present was always was the featured speaker for the 2007 Fall vectors ignoring or leaving tacit the role of punctured by the past, revising that past, and allowing the past to finally arrive. Faculty Lecture. Dr. Freeman specializes in time. So my own project began with the American literature and gender/sexuality/ somewhat simpleminded question, what queer studies if I rethought some of this queer theory Reviewing all this, we might say that sub- through time rather than space? I began by jectivity as a whole is always already queer going back to drag performance, retheo- – bent or deviating not only toward an ar- I want to begin by situating my book Time rizing it as an embodied, minor practice ray of possible erotic objects, but also to- Binds: Queer Temporality, Queer History in of historiography that preserved and rede- ward moments that by the logic of progres- terms of recent queer theory, for those au- ployed fading cultural icons in what I called sive time ought to have either vanished into dience members who are not fully familiar “temporal drag.” But as it turned out, of the mists or become fully integrated into with this field. I’ll say at the outset, too, course, the “thought experiment” I thought memory. that one important distinction between I was launching was always already present It’s this temporal sense of “queer” that I queer theory and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and in sexuality studies – the 19th century sex- have been exploring in the book project I transgender studies is that “queer” can en- ologists and the early 20th century Freud have brought to fruition this past year. I’m compass aspects of sexuality that cannot be were theorizing queer time, or theorizing interested in the ways that “queer” subjec- reduced to individual or group identity, and time in queer ways. tivity, social life, and aesthetics are recur- so allows for a broader analysis of dissident sive, anastrophic and sometimes willfully sexualities across cultures and historical As a field of knowledge, sexuality exhibits anachronistic. At the same time, I have moments. from its first instances a tension between maintained a certain stubborn—and per- Early queer activism and theory were pre- two temporal modes: linear time and the haps itself rearguard—commitment to the dominantly organized by spatial metaphors. recursive, looping-back time of repetition idea that “queer” has something to do with The logic of space dominated the activist and return. Nineteenth-century sexolo- erotic life, with the pleasures and travails of front in names like “Queer Nation,” actions gists, following the Enlightenment Scottish the corporeal; that queer isn’t just a tartier like kiss-ins in straight bars, and slogans model of “stadialism” or uneven develop- way to say “postmodern” or “deconstruc- like “Out of the closet and into the streets!” ment, generally invested in progressive tive,” because it describes a lived engage- U.S. academic queer theory also emerged time (the development of the human race, ment with bodily risk and experimentation. within a spatial rubric, arguably beginning recapitulated in the human body). Time was with Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. This an arrow pointing two ways; bodies and so- work saw human subjectivities and even hu- cieties could move forward toward racial I don’t mean to universalize or essentialize man bodies as nodal points in a network or “perfection” or slide backward toward earli- “the body.” Rather, I mean to suggest that grid of power relations. Gloria Anzaldúa er phasesThe concept of “atavism” described inhabiting a stigmatized sexuality, or being and Cherríe Moraga’s 1983 anthology This the sudden reappearance of a preserved what my colleague Jose Munoz calls a “vul- Bridge Called My Back was perhaps the first “primitive” trait in a “civilized” person or gar homosexual,” has in most historical mo- book-length work of American queer theo- society. But even this idea of “throwback” ments and places involved the management ry even though it did not travel under that didn’t question the original assignment of of a body seen to be fundamentally differ- name---and it provides other examples of phenomena to past or present. Freud fol- ent than so-called normal ones, and/or the spatial thinking. In these essays and works lowed sexology’s linear logic in some re- creative use of body parts for pleasures in- of literature, feminist women of color theo- spects in his theories of psychosocial devel- assimilable to reproduction. Interestingly, rize their position at the intersection of opment into proper heterosexuality Those too, the repetitions and returns that disturb categories like race, class, and sexuality, who are familiar with Freud’s descriptions the Freudian subject appear not as pictorial or described their movement across geo- of the movement from oral to anal to genital or narrative memories per se, but in forms graphical, linguistic, and political borders. stages, for instance, will recognize how in- that are at once metaphorical and visceral: a Sexuality studies then turned toward de- debted he was to the ideal of progress. “slip of the tongue,” repetitive bodily acts, construction in the 1990s. Eve Sedgwick’s lingering symptoms with no apparent physi- The Epistemology of the Closet, published in cal etiology. So the Freudian body is the 1990 and considered inaugural to the field But from early on, Freud also saw human scene of and catalyst for encountering and of queer theory, rethought the spatial meta- subjectivity as constituted through a tem- redistributing the past. This Freudian leg- phor of the closet as a dialectic of knowl- poral splitting. He replaced the concept of acy and the history of queer bodily stigma edge and ignorance. Finally, the 1990s also atavism with Nachträglichkeit, or deferred and creativity has meant, for me, risking trafficked in the metaphor of the stage with action. This term describes the way that thought about the body as, itself, a tool for queer theory’s other landmark work, Judith the mind processes traumatic and pleasur- registering, measuring, encountering, ex- Butler’s Gender Trouble. Using drag queens able experiences or even fantasies, before it periencing, and redrawing time. as her example, Butler described gender has the linguistic and conceptual capacity to identity as “performative,” or consisting of understand them. a set of acts that retroactively construct the 4 Undergraduate Program News & Creative Writing Update 2008 Department of English Citation Winners Including Honors Thesis/Creative Project titles for those students who participated in the Honors Program

Elizabeth Allen: Practice Makes Perfect Possible: A Bloomian Community Brian Ang: Poems Daniel Bracco: Growing Sideways Susan Calvillo: The Other Side of the Wall Elizabeth Campbell: Inscribed Signs: Dickens’ Commentary on Existence Whitney Carpenter Jacob Chilton (2 honors projects) Problems of Reproduction “Delivery”: Deconstruction, Androgyny and Obstetrics in Milton’s Late Poems Toni Chisamore: Mustang Blood Creative Writing Contest Winners Ashley Clarke Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize Katie Conway Finalists for the state & campus wide competition Taylor Cox James Wooden Stephanie Doeing Haley Davis Linnea Edmeier Young Woman and Fire: Transcending the Dilemna of Difference as Woman and Firefighter Kristen Judd Daniel Fritz John Steinbeck, Edward Ricketts, and the Environment: The Relationship and Philosophy Behind Cannery Row Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing Elizabeth Frost: A Bit of Earth First Place Fiction: Koji Frahm Gregory Gaye Second Place Fiction: Susan Calvillo Danielle Hanosh: Rhetorical Seduction. The Alluring Fiend and Sexualization of Language in John Milton’s Paradise Lost First Place Tied for Poetry Paul Hobbs Michelle Jackson: Unbound Texts, Unbound Women: Female Brian Ang & James Wooden Disorderliness and Ballad Culture in Early Modern England Melody Jue: Navigating With Metaphor: At Home in the Cybernetic Diana Lynn Bogart Prize Theater of Consciousness First Place: Kristen Judd Alexandra Kagstrom Second Place: Qinger Kitty Liang Svetlana Karaslavova Third Place: Michelle Tang Jackson Shannon Kemena Honorable Mention Zoe Kemmerling Hailey Yager Dara Khan: A Common Household Demon Bo Hee Kim Elizabeth Knox: Make Believe Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize Antonina Mandrussow First Place: Austin Smith Gabriella Martelino Second Place: henry 7 reneau jr. Caitlin McCarthy Alissa McGowan 2008 Maurice Prize in Fiction Garrett McGrath This year’s winner of the Maurice prize will be announced on Nicole Nguyen: “A Machine of Words”: locating William Carlos Williams’ October 26th negotiation of the linguistic and pictorial sign in modernity Beth Noyes Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Honors Creative Work Amanda Olson Trina Peng: Billboard Train Frames Dara Khan, “A Common Household Demon” Andrew Porter: Acting Authority: Cross-Dressing of Technology and & Religion in Vonnegut and Twain Alana Washington, “The Aroma of the Citizen” Katharine Rosen Molina Matthew Slagle Graduate Student Winners of the Elliot Gilbert Prize Contest for Manmeet Toor Fiction and Poetry: Steven Tyra: The Saracen as Muslim and Heretic: A Historical Context for the Treatment of Sir Palomydes in Le Morte D’Arthur Erica Scheidt for Fiction short-story, “Something More” Alana Washington: The Aroma of the Citizen Masin Persina for his poem, “Behead “ Natalie Williams-Munger: Bringing a New Dawn to Women’s Frontier Literature: The Recovery of Dell H. Munger’s Writing Jessica Wilson 5 Graduate Student Publications & Achievements

Alysia Garrison’s article, “Ill Seen, Ill ny Ecology of David Lynch’s Mulholland at the American Literature Association: Said: Trauma and Testimony in Beckett’s Drive” in the June ‘08 issue of the online “First Encounter: Richard Henry Dana, The Unnamable,” is forthcoming in the journal Scope, and a chapter entitled “The Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast and the collection Samuel Beckett: History, Mem- Cinematic Confluence of Ecological Aes- Rise of American Literature of the Pa- ory, Archive. Alysia presented a paper ti- thetics in Suzhou River” in the forthcom- cific.” tled “Beckett’s (Im)postures” at the Ninth ing collection Chinese Ecocinema. Annual Modernist Studies Association Conference in Long Beach in November. Poonam Sachdev filed her dissertation in She was awarded an Office of Graduate Jessica Howell received the UCD Humani- March 2008. Her field of study is Twen- Studies and a Consortium for Women and ties and Research Award for 2007-2008, tieth Century British and Post-colonial Research Travel Award to present a pa- which she used to develop and run the Studies with a DE in Critical Theory. In per at the University of the West Indies in “Literature and Pathology” conference, April 2007 she attended the annual Amer- Kingston, Jamaica this summer. She was Feb 29- March 2nd. She recently filed her ican Comparative Literature Association also awarded a Dissertation Research Fel- dissertation, and has been chosen as a conference in Puebla, Mexico. She also re- lowship from the Department of English 2008-2009 Professors for the Future Fel- ceived a “small grant” from the English for summer 2008. She is serving as Vice low. department last year, which she used to- President of the MLA Graduate Student ward research for her dissertation. Caucus this academic year. Jessica Hope Jordan received a dissertation fellowship for the 2008 spring quar- Lisa Sperber received a $500 grant from John Garrison’s essay, “Echoes of Influ- ter and received her Ph.D. June 2008; the UC Davis Consortium for Women and ence: Music, Social Power and the Law in she has accepted a position at University Research, and the $1500 summer research Speculative Fiction,” appeared in Journal of the Pacific, as an Assistant Professor grant from the department. of the Fantastic in the Arts Volume 18, Issue of Nineteenth-Century American Litera- 1. He presented a paper entitled “Imagin- ture. ing the Multitude in ‘The Culture’ of Iain M. Banks” at the MLA conference, and a Tony R. Magagna completed his disser- paper entitled “Hamlet and the Business tation in spring 2008 and has accepted a 2007-2008 Ph.D.s AWARDED of Being Seen” at the annual gathering of position as a postdoc in English and UWP the Popular Culture Association. Shellie Banga: A Banquet of Silhouettes: here at Davis for the 2008-09 year. He re- William Least Heat-Moon’s Travel Trilogy in cently had an article accepted at Western Context Maura Grady accepted a three-year po- American Literature entitled “Erased sition at the University of Nevada, Reno. by Space, Ignored by History: Place and Beginning Fall 2008, she will serve as As- Gender in Marilynne Robinson’s West.” Seth Forrest: “Thus far the transmission is sistant Director of Core Writing and Lec- oral”: Orality and Aurality in Poetry by the turer in English. Maura presented a paper Katie Rodger’s article, “A Shared Po- Black Mountain School in the Women’s Studies area of the PCA/ etic: The Influence of Ricketts’s Literary ACA Annual Conference in San Francisco Philosophy on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of in March ‘08, and welcomed her second Wrath,” is forthcoming in Dialogue: The Maura Grady: “I’m telling you she’s your child, Ada, in August ‘07. Grapes of Wrath, edited by Michael J. man”: The Female Organization Man in Twen- Meyer, Amsterdam and New York: Rodo- tieth Century Fiction and Film Andrew Hageman published “The Uncan- pi Press, 2009. In May, she gave a paper Jessica Howell: Under the Weather: Disease, 2007-2008 PLACEMENT NEWS June 200 Creative Writing M.A.s Race and Climate in Victorian Tales of Travel Steven Blevins: Florida International Univer Crystal Lee Anderson. Strange Language sity Crystal Cheney, Feeder Rabbits Jessica Hope Jordan Allison Hack, A Small Wake Maura Grady: University of Nevada, Reno Samantha Hudson, Reprieve and Other Andrea Lawson: Reading Farewell Gifts in Stories Renaissance Drama and Poetry Patricia Killelea, Counterglow: Poems Janice Hawes: South Carolina State University Jason Morphew, Shame Tony R. Magagna: Placing the West: Land- Gabrielle Myers, Feeding, City & Memory Jessica Hope Jordan: University of the Pacific scape, Literature, and Identity in the Ameri- Masin Persina, Suction can West Jeanine Peters Webb, Pirates vs. Ninjas Samaine Lockwood: George Mason Univer- Erica Scheidt, Uses for boys: A Novel and sity Stories Poonam Sachdev: The “Gypsy” as Muse Monica Lita Storss, Women’s Work and Metaphor: Modernity, Mobility and a Candace Taylor: Westmont College Marc Wise, The Other Mark Wise or American People’s Struggle for Subjectivity Studies, Selected Writings of Dennis Herlofski 6 Alumni Bulletin UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT UCD & DEPARTMENTAL AWARDS

Julie Dalrymple (BA 1998) has been trying out different career paths including Friends of English Outstanding Graduating Senior public relations, graphic design and marketing. She is currently the Marketing Director at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek and use the skills Award learned from her undergrad studies (and years at the California Aggie as a re- Two people received this award this year: porter and editor) daily. She is currently finishing an MA at St. Mary’s College in Jacob Chilton Moraga, focusing on the early Northern California writers who first inspired her during her undergrad days at UC Davis. Melody Jue

Melody Jue (BA 2008) is currently abroad on a Fulbright Scholarship, working as English Department Essay Prize an English Teaching Assistant at the Open University of Hong Kong and blogging about the experience on her webpage. She won department awards at 1st Place, Jacob Chilton, “Hearse Verses Sickle: Kill- the end of the school year for best critical thesis/ outstanding senior, and had a ing Death With a Timeless Tomb or Sonnet 86: The winning entry in prized writing 2 years ago and a winning entry in Explorations Entombing Womb Rehearsed in Verse.” Essay written last year. in ENL 188 with Professor Richard Levin 2nd Place, Kevin Peterson, “Damnable Desire in the Maria Kochis (MA) had her first short story, “Coral,” published in the Pisgah Re- Aging Queen.” Essay written in ENL 117B with Judith view (Winter 2008). Rose

Gail Lockhart (MA 1973) recently retired from state service after over 32 years in emergency management, including 20 years wit the California Army National Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Honors Critical Guard. In January 2008, she will become a subject matter expert (SME) at the Essay Center for Collaborative Policy (CCP) at California State University, Sacramento. Melody Jue, “Navigating With Metaphor: At Home in She is curently writing a book of short stories about Shiba Inus, a small spitz- the Cybernetic Theater of Consciousness” type hunting dog from Japan.

Susan Edwards Richmond (MA 1987) published a new poetry collection, Pur- Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Honors Creative gatory Chasm, with Adastra Press in fall 2007. She recently served as poet-in- Work residence for the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA and continues to consult Two people awarded this year: with the museum on poetry activities and events. Dara Khan, “A Common Household Demon” & Michael Shapiro (MA 1992) received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Brandeis University. After teaching in Hawaii for ten years, he is now the editor of Hana Alana Washington, “The Aroma of the Citizen” Hou! the Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines. Last year, he was awarded Travel Writer of the Year by the Hawaii Tourism Authority. He continues to write and publish poetry, and is currently at work on a novel. GRADUATE STUDENT UCD & DEPARTMENTAL AWARDS

Cora Stryker (MA 2007) has been awarded the 2008-2009 Steinbeck Fellowship FRIENDS OF ENGLISH RESEARCH AWARDS at San Jose State University to write her novel. Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award (Ph.D.): Melissa Strong Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award (Creative John Vernon (Ph.D.1969) is a Distinguished Professor at Binghamton University Writing): Ben Jahn (SUNY). In 2001, he went on half time teaching, and how teaches at Binghamton DISSERTATION QUARTER FELLOWSHIPS during the spring semester of each year and lives in the mountains of north- Sean Allan, Maura Grady, Jennifer Jones, Jung-kook Paik, ern Colorado for the rest of the year. Houghton Mifflin will publish his sixth Karma Waltonen novel (and eleventh book), Lucky Billy, in 2009. His previous novel from Hough- ton Mifflin, The Last Canyon, was about John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition SUMMER FELLOWSHIPS down the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon. Steven Blevins, Jason Dunn, Karen Embry, Seth Forrest, Jessica Howell, Tony Magagna, Mindi McMann, Colleen Pauza, Tara Pederson, Ryan Poll, Anna Pruitt, Chris Alvin Ka Hin Wong (BA 2006) just published a book review of Lisa Rofel’s new Schaberg, Kendra Smith, Jessica Staheli, Melissa Strong, book Desiring China. The review, “Queering Chineseness, Unthinking Neoliber- Daniel Thomas-Glass, Kara Thompson, Nicholas Valvo, alism,” was published in the 2008 issue of GLQ. Barbara Zimbalist 2005 DAVID NOEL MILLER SCHOLARSHIP ESSAY PRIZE Christopher Schaberg, “Air Force One: Sovereignty at the Edge” Please share your good news with fellow graduates! The annual newsletter traces the 2005-2006 PROFESSORS FOR THE FUTURE PROGRAM professional lives of English department alumni, so tell us of your recent career accom- Jennifer Jones plishments, promotions, professional awards, and publications. Email your news to bezim- [email protected] and include your name, UC Davis degree, and year graduated. Please 2006-2007 CHANCELLOR’S TEACHING FELLOWSHIP make the subject heading “Alumni News.” We look forward to hearing from you! Tony Magagna OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT TEACHING AWARD Jessica Jordan, Tony Magagna, Karen Walker Faculty News 7 Gina Bloom’s book, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping ing from Harvard University Press. His essay “Of Matter and Sound in Early Modern England, has been published by the Uni- Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge’s ‘Effusion 35’ and versity of Pennsylvania Press. ‘The Eolian Harp’,” was published in the e-journal Literature Compass in January, 2008. Dr Morton gave the keynote speech for the Association for the Study of Literature and the En- Seeta Chaganti’s book, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: vironment via video link to the UK, to save on carbon; and Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance, was published this spoke at Cambridge University in the spring quarter of 2008. September in Palgrave Macmillan’s New Middle Ages series. Marijane Osborn has contributed a memorial tribute, “Re- Lucy Corin’s collection of short stories, The Entire Predica- membering Celeste Turner Wright,” to the UC Davis Cen- ment, was released from Tin House Books in Oct, 2007; she tennial’s “One Hundred Stories” Program. Dr. Wright was was a Breadloaf fellow at Middlebury College for the summer a founding professor and the first Department Chair of the of 2008. UCD English Department.

Fran Dolan’s book, Marriage and Violence: the Early Modern Catherine Robson was asked to select three papers from the Legacy, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press North American Victorian Studies Association 2007 annual in 2008. The book was glowingly reviewed in the August 2008 conference for publication in the Winter 2008 edition of Vic- issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. She has also ed- torian Studies; her essay, “The Presence of Poetry,” which will ited a collection of essays, Catholic Culture in Early Modern be published with them, forms the response to this cluster of England, with Ron Corthell, Christopher Highley, and Arthur recent work in the field of Victorian poetry. She has accepted Marotti (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for 2008-09. 2007). Her article, “Why Are Nuns Funny?” was published in She presented a piece entitled “ ‘Three Cheers for Mute Inglo- the Huntington Library Quarterly 70.4; and her article “Learn- riousness!’: Gray’s Elegy, Cultural Capital, and the Scholar- ing to Listen: Shakespeare and Contexts,” was published in ship Boy” to the Nineteenth-Century Studies Working Group Blackwell Press’ 2008 volume Teaching Shakespeare: Passing at the University of California,Berkeley in March, and deliv- It On. This year, she received a Faculty Development Award, ered invited lectures on different aspects of the topic of the which acknowledges extraordinary service contributions to memorized poem at Harvard and Brandeis this spring. She the department and the university. presented a paper on similar themes at the NAVSA conference in Victoria, British Columbia in the fall. She gave a talk entitled “Why It’s Grim Up North: A Brief Primer on York- Margie Ferguson has won an Outstanding Mentor Award shire, Lancashire, and All Things Northern” at the Dickens from the Consortium for Women and Research at UC Davis. Universe at UC Santa Cruz this summer. In addition, she was This year she served on the MLA Elections Committee, and pleased to host the annual University of California Dickens completed an article on “The Epistemology of the Hymen,” Project Graduate Student Winter Conference at Davis in the forthcoming this year. winter 2008.

Lynn Freed received an invitation for a residency from the In the Winter quarter, Winfried Schleiner was a teaching International Writers’ and Translators’ Centre of Rhodes fellow at the UC campus in Washington, DC. In March 08, (Greece) and also from the Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), he gave a paper on “Two Early Modern Diseases of Women: both for the Fall (2008). Green Sickness and Hysteria” at a UCLA conference on Nos- talgia, Melancholy, and Love Sickness; in April ‘08, a paper on “Early Modern Medical Humor” at a Hofstra University Pam Houston has received an “outstanding service” award conference on Humor in Romance Language Literatures. from the UC Davis Extension. Scott Simmon has been interviewed on Elvis Mitchell’s radio Alessa Johns received a 2008-2009 UC President’s Research show The Treatment, broadcast on Los Angeles’ KCRW. The Fellowship in the Humanities to complete her book, Alterna- interview focused on the new DVD set, “Treasures III: Social tive Enlightenments, Cultural Translation, and Anglo-Ger- Issues in American Film, 1900-1934,” which Dr. Simmon cu- man Exchange, 1750-1837. Her article, “Gender, Disaster, and rated. Dr. Simmon was also interviewed about the new DVD the Grand Tour: Visits to Vesuvius, 1770-1825,” will be ap- set for NPR’s “Morning Edition” in October of 2007; the in- pearing soon in Das Erdbeben von Lissabon und der Katastro- terview is archived on NPR’s website. phendiskurs im 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Gerhard Lauer and Thorsten Unger (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2008). She will continue her work as Reviews Editor for the journal Eighteenth- David Simpson received the Needham Endowed Chair for the Century Studies when she returns from her year on leave; Mike 2008-2009 academic year; his review of Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts Ziser will fill the position in her absence. of War in Vietnam appeared in the London Review of Books this August. Dr. Simpson’s latest book, Wordsworth, Commodi- fication and Social Concern, is forthcoming from Cambridge Sandra McPherson’s Expectation Days (University of Illinois University Press in 2009. Press) has been nominated on behalf of the Northern Cali- fornia Book Reviewers (NCBR), for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry as one of the best works by a northern Claire Waters’s edition Virgins and Scholars: A Fifteenth-Cen- California author published in 2007. tury Compilation of the Lives of John the Baptist, John the Evan- gelist, Jerome, and Katherine of Alexandria will be coming out from Brepols in fall of 2008. She presented a paper, “Getting Colin Milburn won a UCHRI Residential Fellowship for the Riffraff into Heaven: Popular Eschatology in the Thir- the 2008-09 year; he has also been awarded a 2008 fellow- teenth Century,” to the Medieval Colloquium at Northwestern ship from the newly established Hellman Family Founda- University, December 6, 2007. tion Awards for his research project “Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter.” This year, Dr. Milburn was the recipient of a 2007-2008 Faculty Development Award. Joe Wenderoth has an essay in the forthcoming Best American Dr Milburn’s book, Nanovision: Engineering the Future, will be Essays 2008 and he also had a poem in Best American Poetry published by Duke University Press this October. 2007.

Timothy Morton’s book Ecology without Nature is being trans- Alan Williamson interviewed Gary Snyder, recipient of the lated into Chinese by Beijing University Press, forthcoming Lilly Prize, for the Poetry Foundation; the interview focused in 2009; his next book, The Ecological Thought, is forthcom- on Buddhism and the Far East. 8 A Tribute to KARL ZENDER on the Occasion of his Retirement An Excerpt from Michael Hoffman’s This is a good description of Karl’s impact Remarks on Karl Zender’s Retirement— on how writing is taught at Davis. But I Tuesday, June 3, 2008 can speak of one accomplishment there more easily than others, and that is the I’ve been looking forward to this day for hiring of David Simpson and Margie seven years, to welcome Karl Zender into Ferguson, two appointments that have had the delicious irresponsibility of retirement. an immense influence on the department I want to organize my remarks around our and on its future. While doing his admin- long friendship and to offer some insights istrative work, Karl published steadily, into Karl that might surprise you, includ- including a number of first-rate articles ing a few silly moments that he and I have on Faulkner (one of which appeared in Laura Maestrelli (MA ‘02) reflects on her shared. (Jack Hicks once referred to us— PMLA), and he was able to move to a Advisor and Mentor Karl Zender lovingly, of course—as the odd couple.) In regular academic senate appointment. “Although Karl never taught any graduate the process, I want to stress Karl’s accom- Some of these essays formed the basis of seminars, those of us grad students lucky plishments as a teacher and scholar and, his first book on Faulkner, which Rutgers enough to have encountered his teach- especially, his contributions to the campus published in 1989: The Crossing of the ing in other forums – in my case, as the and to the English department. Let’s start Ways: William Faulkner, the South, and T.A. for his undergraduate Shakespeare at the beginning. Karl comes from a work- the Modern World. Focusing mostly survey – knew all too well what our fellow ing-class family in Southern Ohio, and on novels that Faulkner wrote late in graduate students were missing. His im- he’s proud of his origins...After complet- his career, such as Intruder in the Dust, peccably organized lectures. His prolific ing his physics major at Case Tech, Karl Requiem for a Nun, The Town, and The and varied publications on everyone from changed his mind about becoming a scien- Mansion, Karl showed how Faulkner re- Shakespeare to Faulkner. His tremendous tist and turned to literature. He took his acted in his fiction to the disappearance of respect for his students and the craft of masters degree at Western Reserve and the traditional South and to an emerging, teaching. his doctorate at Iowa, where he special- de-regionalized America. The book was But maybe most significantly, I pitied my ized in Renaissance literature and wrote well received by reviewers and established fellow graduate students for missing out a thesis on revenge tragedies. His first him as a writer of genuine merit. If you on Karl’s unbridled, even boyish, enthu- teaching job was at Washington University haven’t read any of his work, you should siasm for the language and literature he in Saint Louis. Like a lot of us from that know that Karl’s prose is thoughtful, had been teaching and writing about most generation, Karl didn’t get tenure at his elegant, and absolutely clear. It’s a model of his life. As I listened to his lectures first position, and he came to California in of academic writing. ... and watched him lead class discussions, 1973 to find a fresh port in the storm and I remember thinking to myself with a create a new career. After all, you can’t I’ll conclude with two brief observations. mixture of admiration and incredulity, knock the climate. What makes Karl’s First of all, Karl is ending his career on “Here’s a man who still clearly loves his coming to Davis unusual is that he was a high note, with a book coming out this job.” Though he had been teaching many appointed as a lecturer to run the Subject year on Shakespeare, again with LSU, the of those same plays and novels for years, A Program, which was then administered fruits of teaching Shakespeare courses his enthusiasm for their artistry and power out of the English department. From the yearly. It’s a personal book, the kind an clearly hadn’t diminished – and it was start he was a good administrator, and established scholar can write at the end nearly impossible not to be affected by when the director of Composition retired of a career, in which reflections on age- his infectious zeal for them. Karl some- a few years later, Karl succeeded him. Karl ing mix with shrewd observations about how managed to elegantly illuminate and was an excellent director of composition; such matters in the plays. The readings explain the complexities of the books and by the time he’d been here less than a of works like Macbeth and Antony and plays he was teaching while simultaneously convincing his students how much fun decade he’d had a major impact on two Cleopatra are splendid. There are many they were to read. important writing programs that served things for which I admire Karl; but this the campus. Then, in 1980, he and Linda is one thing for which I envy him. What With all of those fond memories in mind, Morris—who had taken over Subject A timing! The other observation takes us I am left here pondering Karl’s retirement. from Karl—proposed a program to foster back to the beginning of my talk. And I must confess that I wasn’t sure this day writing across the curriculum. This was that is my welcoming Karl to the delicious would ever come. He always seemed to the Campus Writing Center. I have a irresponsibility of retirement. Well, not have some kind of excuse for putting off special affection for that unit because I quite. After seven years of our going to his retirement another quarter – a defer- was then an administrator in what is now upscale lunches every month, of basketball ral which, admittedly, was a boon to his the Provost’s Office, and we were able to games and baseball games, of reading students and colleagues alike. And while fund it within the English department. If books together that we have chosen simply I’m happy that Karl will now be able to I’m not mistaken, we are one of only two because we want to read them, I figured put the “briars of this working day world” behind him, I can’t help but feel sorry for UC campuses with an upper-division writ- that Karl was ready for the good life. He the future undergraduates who will never ing requirement, and the Campus Writing once told me that the reason I enjoy retire- get to listen to one of his illuminating Center was instrumental in implementing ment so much is that I have no superego. lectures on Hamlet… or struggle to deci- it. More important, in my view, was that I thanked him for the compliment. But pher his nearly illegible but always astute the Center established writing across the what have we heard? It seems that Karl marginal essay comments… or listen to curriculum as being essential to under- has been recalled to work in the dean’s one of his stories about growing up in the graduate education at Davis. Along with office, drafting personnel letters. Can you hills of southern Ohio. I was lucky enough the Composition Program it has evolved imagine? He finds drafting personnel let- to have benefited from a variety of the dif- into the University Writing Program. ters more delicious than experiencing the ferent hats Karl has worn throughout his As Emerson says in “Self-Reliance,” “an good life with me. I ask you, “What can career – teacher, scholar, mentor, and in institution is the lengthened shadow of you do with such a man?” the 5 years since I completed my Masters one man.” degree, good friend. For all of those, I am tremendously grateful.” 9 Reflecting on Marijane Osborn’s Beowulf and of Old English has been retirement, Brad Busbee wrote: transformed, and seeing the Anglo-Saxon world through her eyes has been a transformative experience. “ I was a little caught off guard when I got the invitation and email announcing Mari- jane’s retirement, probably because I have As a student at the other end of Marijane’s trouble thinking about UC Davis without career, I have had a similar inspiring and thinking about Marijane. And so, it has transformative experience. In the fall of taken me almost the entire month since to 2000, Alessa Johns asked me to invite figure out what I might possibly say about a professor to our graduate profession- such a wonderful scholar, teacher, men- alization class, so I called Marijane and tor and friend in only a paragraph or two. requested a meeting. Like my fellow class- After all, this a lady who not too long ago mates, I was pleasantly surprised when boasted that she could swim the length of she arrived equipped with show-and-tell the Davis Community pool while wearing items, such as her astrolabe, some pictures chain mail armor—we are still waiting for of rune stones and Nordic landscapes, you to do that, Marijane. This is some- and an image of the Beowulf manuscript. one who once commissioned a recon- I knew then that, to her, literature and structed Viking ship to follow Beowulf’s language and life were inseparable, and sea journeys across the dangerous waters that she was right: words are living things. between Sweden and Denmark, a trip she She continually reminded me and others completed and wrote a book about. This of this point as we studied Old English is someone who kept an astrolabe on her and wrote dissertations under her guid- office desk to show students and to con- ance. And today, I realize that her impact sider while conducting research—she wrote on me continues: as I write these words, a book about the astrolabe, too. And this I am sitting in the waiting room of the is someone who has taught and researched manuscript collection at Royal Library of in places as far flung as Alaska, Belfast, Denmark, where in an hour or so I’ll be California, Edinburgh, Hawaii, Lancaster, sitting in front of a particular medieval New York, Oxford and Reykjavik. Mari- manuscript I’ve only had a chance to read jane Osborn has an active, eclectic mind: about before. It is for moments like these, she’s a scholar of medieval texts, a poet, ones of discovery that we study and train a translator, and a screenplay writer. And and hope for, that I would like to thank she is a teacher. Marijane Osborn. Marijane, you have been an inspiration to us. Thank you for that. I hope you enjoy retirement! And Those of us who have had the good I’m looking forward to your making that fortune to be in her classes know first- armor-clad swim, the next time I’m in hand know how Marijane gathers together Davis.” knowledge and enthusiasm in order to bring language and literature to life. Gil- lian Overing (currently Professor of Eng- Mark Bradshaw Busbee recieved his lish at Wake Forrest and one of Marijane’s Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from UC first students) sent the following account of Davis in 2005; his dissertation, completed her first encounter with Marijane: under Marijane Osborn’s advisement, is titled “N.F.S. Grundtvig’s Interpretation of Beowulf as a Living Heroic Poem for Four British undergraduates look on, the People.” He is now an assistant profes- slightly bemused, skeptical, nonetheless sor at Florida Gulf Coast University. interested, as the American Professor, Marijane Osborn, takes over the Beowulf class to fill in for a professor on leave. She is unusually enthusiastic, full of a sense of discovery; she has brought to class a collection of pictures and prints, some quite rare, of artistic renderings of the Grendel- kin. “Isn’t this Swedish one fascinating?” she questions, unrhetorically, looking directly at the student she is addressing. Well, yes, it is, the student replies. And so, under her tutelage, the cultural world of the poem unfolded throughout the rest of that Spring term . . .

For those four students, of whom I was one, and for many of Marijane Osborn’s students before and since, the study of A Tribute to MARIJANE OSBORN on the Occasion of her Retirement 10 Staff Retirements

Terry Antonelli knows UC Davis from many different perspectives; she studied Psychology here at UC Davis and soon thereafter (in 1971) started work as a clerk in the Biochemistry department. Later, she worked in Sproul Hall, where she met Vita Simonsen, and after a few years, was runnning 25 programs, including Comparative Literature and Religious Studies. Professor Seth Schein wrote that Terry was his guide into UCD culture--”she took the scales off my eyes,” he wrote in a message sent at the time Terry Antonelli of Terry’s retirement in June 2007. The image of Terry as a demystifier is a resonant one for the many teachers of reading and writing who have worked with her over the years. I’d like to add, however, that Terry not only demystifies; she also remystifies when it’s necessary. She never holds grudges, which is one of her many virtues as an administrator. Quick to forgive, quick and deft with accounts, a master problem solver, Terry might be described as an ironical Polyanna; she sees everyone and everything in the best possible light even when she knows better. She was and is my friend, and she was the best possible guide I could have had into the job of a department chair. Terry came to the English department as our MSO in 1994; more recently, and with her typical grace and pizazz, she took on the tasks of administering other units in Voorhies including the University Writing Program, Nature and Culture, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Davis Humanities Institute. Carolyn de la Peña, the Director of the DHI, wrote the following about Terry: she has been “amazingly supportive of the DHI. She knows the answer, apparently, to every question I can think up. She answers the phone with cheer. She finds answers for me--pronto--and is right back on with the followup. . . She helps because she wants to, because she enjoys people and likes solving problems. . . She makes everyone feel valued (and she really likes my hair)!” I’d like to relay some of the comments that the Voorhies Staff made about Terry as their MSO. “When she comes in at 9 a.m., usually with a big cup of coffee in her hand,” says Lynda Jones, “Terry is already thinking and talking a mile a minute. She greets everyone by name and there is never a morning when there is any doubt about the different energy level on the hall after Terry arrives! She will stop and talk to you about what you’re doing no matter what is on her mind; she never makes you feel that you are interrupting her even though she must sometimes feel irritated by the hundred interrupations she deals with daily.” “How Terry gets as much done as she does with her incredible open-door policy is a kind of a mystery, one we’ll all be remembering for a long time. “ Moreover, as another member of the staff remarks, “Terry doesn’t know the word ‘no.’ If you come to her with a request, she will always and with a certain glee set to work to see how your request might be fulfilled.” Karl Zender, one of the many chairs who worked with Terry, said in his remarks at her retirement party that she DID “know no,” and sometimes said it to him; but most of us would say, as her staff does, that she always starts by seeing how she can say yes to requests that have a shred of rationality to them. I’ll give the last word to a staff member who wants to remain anonymous with a story that illustrates the fact that Terry isn’t perfect even though she is almost so. We called Terry requesting an interview with the Davis Enterprise. The caller wanted to know how she treated her staff. Little did she know, until the caller dissolved in laughter, that it was one of her staff members on the line. Terry was so easy to fool!” But she of course has the last laugh, playing with her husband Tony on the golf course instead of answering the phone at all.

“The idea for a three-in-one retirement party, honoring Vita Simonsen, Terry Antonelli, and Marijane Osborn, is not an idea drearily dictated by impending budget cuts, but is rather a Vita Simonsen typically Terry Antonelli idea of how we can have fun, mixing staff and faculty colleagues and bringing everyone together for a big party that will end in time to let people go out to dinner with their families. I’m delighted to be celebrating three amazing women colleagues. Each has been at Davis a long time. Vita came to work in the Chancellor’s Office in 1967, Terry came as a clerk in Biochemistry in 1971 and Marijane came as a faculty member in 1981. Vita wasn’t initially very keen on having a public celebration because, as she says, she is not exactly retiring but is rather “moving on in her life,” expecting--as has indeed transpired--to work part time in Voorhies. We are delighted that she ‘s not REALLY retiring because this gives us a chance to continue to benefit from the grace and competence she displays everyday as the Personnel Officer for English and the University Writing Program. She has been on the Voorhies’ units’ staff since 1990 as our “gateway” person, the person who helps all of our new hires--faculty, staff, graduate teachers, exchange students, visiting lecturers--enter smoothly enough into the vast electronic and paperwork systems of this university so that they can get paid in a timely way. Vita welcomes people into the Voorhies community with truly amazing efficiency and kindness. She does critical tasks in a quiet, unflappable way that Terry, Chris Thaiss, I, and now Darla rely on--and for which we’re truly grateful.” Friends of English 11 The English Department at the University of California, Davis The Friends of English encourages alumni and community members to stay connected to the English Department and to the reading and study of literature. “Friends” will be invited to attend scholarly talks and readings by our own sterling creative writers, and receive our annual departmental newsletter. In return, “Friends” will be helping the department continue to achieve distinction by supporting graduate and undergraduate fellowships and awards, supporting faculty and student research, and sponsoring public lectures and readings. For more information on how to become a member, visit the Friends of English website. We are sincerely grateful to the following individuals for their contributions to Friends of English (including gifts to the department) during the 2007- 2008 academic year: Nora Ann McGuinness, Peter Horton, Donald Thomas, Jane Reed, Sue Walther Jones, Timothy Flynn, Stephanie Spanja, Emily Artiano, and Poonam Sachdev. New Faculty Introductions 2007-2008 Academic Year

Gina Bloom joined the department in 2007. Before coming to Davis, she taught in much colder places: the University of Iowa and Lawrence University. Her areas of interest include early modern English literature, especially Shakespeare and drama, gender and feminist theory, theater history and performance, and sound studies. Her first book is entitled Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and she’s currently writing a book on games and masculinity in the early modern English theater. She’s an avid theater fan and also enjoys hiking and African dance.

Chris Loar joined the department in 2007 after completing his doctorate at UCLA. His research centers on the British eighteenth-century, with particular interests in studies of the early British empire; early American literature and the Atlantic world; histories of the novel; literature and histories of technology; and political theory. He is at work on a book manuscript that examines technology and violence in eighteenth-century fictions of cultural contact.

John Marx joined the English Department in 2007 and taught courses on contemporary British fiction and the notion of literary comparison in his first year at Davis. This year, one of his courses will be a seminar that addresses the question, “What do we mean when we say ‘Twentieth-Century British Fiction’?” Like this seminar, his current research considers the changing shape of the canon that encompasses modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary British fiction. He is completing a book with the working title “The Postcolonial Mainstream,” which features chapters proposing alternate rubrics for grouping twentieth-century works including “Failed State Fiction” and “The Historical Novel of Globalization.” His previous book is The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2005).

2008-2009 Academic Year

Nathan Brown just completed his Ph.D. at UCLA, where his research focussed on connections between contemporary materialist poetics and materials science, both considered as branches of “fabrication.” He is at work expanding his dissertation into a book project tentatively titled The Materials: Technoscience and Poetry at the Limits of Fabrication, and his current side projects include an article on Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux and an edited collection of visual/conceptual poetry by modernist poet Bob Brown.

Kathleen Frederickson comes to UC Davis from Chicago, Illinois. Her research focuses on the scientific and socio-political cultures that produced sexuality in late- Victorian Britain, drawing on work in Victorian studies, queer and feminist scholarship, and critical theory. Born and raised in Vancouver, BC, she is glad to be back in the west. She enjoys training martial arts and doing social justice activism.

Hsuan L. Hsu comes to UC Davis from UC Berkeley. He is interested in U.S. literature, Asian American literature, geography, and cultural studies. He is completing a book manuscript on geographical scale in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sui Sin Far, and Henry James. He is also writing essays on biopolitics and media representations of global health. In his free time, he enjoys biking and capoeira.

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Guardian First Book Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and many other publications. She was chosen by Granta as one of the Best Young American Novelists, and won a Whitings Award. Her novel, The Vagrants, will come out in February 2009.

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has joined the UCD English Department as an Assistant Professor specializing in Victorian literature. Liz’s research focuses on late- Victorian literature and culture, with particular interests in gender and feminist studies, print culture, visuality, early cinema, popular and working-class culture, and radical politics. Her first book, entitled Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle, will be published this November, and she is currently at work on a new project entitled Print Culture and Late-Victorian Literary Radicalism. Since earning her Ph.D. in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Liz has taught at Ohio University, University of Michigan, and University of Oklahoma. Liz is delighted to move to California where she can indulge year-round in some of her favorite activities: running, hiking, and cooking with local ingredients.

Matthew Stratton spent his infancy in Sacramento and is pleased to return to the Central Valley after such a long absence. His work focuses on the political aesthetics of irony in 20th-century American literary culture, with particular emphasis on the novel, visual culture, and radical politics from WWI through the Cold War. He has been known to fret over stringed intstruments, brew British-style ale, and make passable Piedemontese cuisine involving salted anchovies. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM TheTomales Bay Workshops October 22-27, 2008

For more information, call (800) 752-0881 ext 2112, or visit: www.extension.ucdavis.edu/arts The Tomales Bay Workshops, directed by Pam Houston, brings developing writers from across the country together with the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, top published writers from around the nation and publishing industry professionals. Participants enjoy five days of writing, readings, conversation and contemplation--all atop a hill overlooking Tomales Bay, in gorgeous Point Reyes National Seashore. Highlights include intimate evening receptions with faculty authors and publishing professionals, as well as readings by fellowship winners, conference participants and UC Davis Creative Writing Program graduate students; the conference closes with the announcement of the year’s Maurice Prize winner and a sunset patio reception with local wine and oysters straight from the bay. A collaboration between the UC Davis English Department, the UC Davis Creative Writing Program and UC Davis Extension, The Tomales Bay Workshops are directed by Pam Houston, who hand-picks each year’s faculty and presenters. The Workshops welcomes published and unpublished particpants in the areas of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction/personal essay. Fellowships are available each year, and information about these is available at the UCD Extension website. Alumni Experience

“Going to Tomales Bay was such a gift. The experience felt so balanced and complete: I enjoyed the camaraderie with other writers, but also got to spend time alone; I got helpful feedback on existing work but also wrote new stuff. Then there’s the beautiful setting, simultaneously grand and intimate. The place just nourished me as a writer and as a person -- and has the best food I’ve eaten at any conference.” --Naomi Williams, Tomales Bay ‘06

“Aside from the serene beauty of Tomales Bay, its bright weather and all the fine food, I was most enthralled by my workshop. Listening to a week’s worth of Heather McHugh’s insights on poems, ranging from ones written by Nobel Prize winners to ones by my fellow students, was beyond instructive. It was as though I had been given a higher vantage point from which to take in poetry’s landscape. I was high off that refined writing air for a month.” --Masin Persina, Tomales Bay ‘07

“I didn’t go to Tomales Bay to read...workshops and conferences are good for giving other, more experienced eyes a chance to read you. Pam Houston has set up as perfect a situation for that process as you’re going to find anywhere. She seems to know every writer now typing in America, so she gets the best workshop leaders. And it’s very extremely beautiful out there in Tomales Bay. If you can get the dough together, I wouldn’t think twice about signing on up. I’ve got poems and stories and essays to write. Don’t you?” --Jason Morphew, Tomales Bay ‘07 Chair's Letter

Chair's and Directors' Updates

Chair's Update: Margie Ferguson

As I look back over my second year of chairing, I think with particular pleasure about the many festive events that have punctuated the time. Among these, in rough chronological order, were: a trip in October to our writers’ workshops at beautiful Tomales Bay in Marin County, where I heard our second-year CW students read and also had the pleasure of hearing readings by Pam Houston, Lucy Corin, and John Lescroart, who has funded a fiction prize (the Maurice Prize) in honor of his father. The 2007 Maurice Price winner, Elizabeth Chamberlin, was announced after John’s reading. John and his wife Lisa also generously funded a reception at the end of the Tomales Bay workshops.

Also in October, I enjoyed meeting our new faculty and others from around the Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at an evening party hosted by our Dean, Jessie Ann Owens. And I attended a number of search committee meetings in preparation for our next major event, the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago. This occurs, as it has for decades, during the week between Christmas and New Year. Some might not describe it as festive, but it has a certain frenetically gay quality at times. For me, it was hectic, since I was scheduled to present two academic papers as well as attend an extraordinary number of interviews of candidates for three jobs that turned eventually (and after many interesting campus visits and girth-expanding dinners) into six positions accepted by six stellar young professors. Back in late December, however, the chairs and the members of the three search committees shared some good laughs and some passable sandwiches with each other along with much too much coffee and Diet Pepsi. An easier occasion (for me, because I wasn’t required to be in several places at once) was the weekend in April when I first met many of the graduate students admitted to our literature and creative writing programs; Claire Waters, Pam Houston, Levada McDowell, Janie Guhin, and Tara Porter were gracious hosts for that event, along with the many faculty who met with students interested in particular areas of study. Faculty work-in-progress seminars throughout the year were pleasurable breaks from the daily routine; I owe my assistant Mary White a large debt for ordering so many sandwiches for so many of these events (I owe Mary for other things too, but the list is long and space, even in an electronic newsletter, is short).

This year has been an extraordinarily full one. I am thrilled to be presiding over our move to an electronic newsletter and I want to thank the editor, Barbara Zimbalist, for helping us move toward a less paper-filled universe (or at least university). Many warm thanks are also due to the staff members who've generously given help, information and invaluable technical support to our new project: Tara Porter, Lynda Jones, Ron Ottman, Mark Wong, and Janie Guhin. I also want to thank our departmental managing officer, Terry Antonelli, early and often, for so many things—too many to list here. But helping us change to an electronic newsletter and overseeing our efforts to improve our Web

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pages (new ones will be up and running later this fall!) were two of Terry’s many contributions to the department last year. In June, she retired; she is, however, still displaying her characteristic generosity to the department by meeting with me and our new MSO Darla Tafoya to help us with knotty questions.

I feel extremely fortunate that we were able to persuade Darla to join us from the History Department; like Terry, Darla is blessed with energy, intelligence, curiosity, superior accounting skills, and a great sense of humor. Darla and I are both very happy that Vita Simonsen, who officially retired with Terry last June (see Retirements) has come back to work part time for English; thanks to Vita, everyone got regular paychecks all summer long, and thanks to Vita as well, our six new faculty members have been securely entered into the many Systems that make them benefit-receiving employees of the University of California. Working with staff and recruiting new faculty are two of the most pleasurable parts of the Chair’s job as I’ve experienced it. (For our new faculty, see the "Department News" page).

Last year also saw a major reform of our undergraduate curriculum. Thanks to the hard work of Fran Dolan, our Director of Undergraduate Studies, Lynda Jones, the Undergraduate Advisor, and members of the Undergraduate Studies Committee, we have a new and I believe improved curriculum at both the lower and the upper divisions. (See Fran Dolan's Update below).

The graduate programs are thriving, and we successfully completed (should I say survived?) one of the intensive Program Reviews that occurs every decade or so. The external reviewer, Kevin Dettmar (a professor of English who now teaches at Pomona College), praised both our Ph.D. program (in literary study) and our M.A. program (in Creative Writing), though he, like the members of the internal review committee, had some recommendations for us to consider. In particular, we need more funds for graduate students in both the Ph.D. and the M.A. programs. One of my ambitions as Chair is to help our department become more competitive than we are currently with sister graduate programs, such as the ones at Irvine and UCSB, which both allow doctoral students two years free of teaching duties: first at the beginning of their programs and then again at the dissertation stage. Alumni gifts, even small ones, make a big difference in the quality of our creative writing and doctoral students’ lives. Although few of our graduate students receive as much financial support as I believe they merit, many of them are doing very well on the job market (see the graduate student news page for details). The students themselves are the main architects of our strong placement record, but our wonderful Director of Graduate Studies, Claire Waters, the many faculty who advise dissertations and who write careful letters for students, and the hard-working co-chairs of our placement committee-- Colin Milburn and Tim Morton, last year, with John Marx joining them this summer—have all contributed substantially to our efforts to crown the six or seven years it takes to earn a Ph.D. in English with the kind of job that brings professional and personal satisfaction.

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Chair'sLetter.html[3/29/2011 1:07:52 PM] Chair's Letter

Update from the Graduate Advisor: Claire Waters

This past year was a busy and productive one for the Graduate Program. We welcomed an outstanding new class in Fall 2007 and watched those already enrolled make great progress, winning awards along the way for their teaching, research, and service to the university and beyond. And in the course of the winter and spring we admitted the new Ph.D. and Creative Writing students we look forward to welcoming as Fall 2008 begins. Our annual "prospectives' visit" in April was enjoyable and effective, thanks to the participation of current students and faculty and to the organizational genius of the Graduate Office staff, and contributed to a very successful recruiting year. We are particularly delighted that two of our admitted students received highly competitive campus fellowships (after deciding to attend Davis rather than other programs that had already offered them better funding). We also had the pleasure of seeing a number of our graduates get the recognition, and reward, that their labors have deserved, as they moved on to new jobs in California and across the country; see the Placement news for more information on their successes.

In addition to all our usual activities, we had the salutary experience this year of undergoing a Graduate Program Review, which again benefited from participation across all areas of the department. The review team gave us a very positive assessment overall, as well as some helpful suggestions for improving the program. Their highest recommendation, which we of course warmly endorse, was that our program's funding should be increased to match the quality of the applicants we are able to attract, as well as to make us appropriately competitive, in financial terms, with our peer programs across the country.

As I enter my second year as graduate director, I'm excited to work with all our students and faculty to continue to make the program work as well as it can for everyone involved, and give my heartfelt thanks to Levada McDowell, Tara Porter, and Janie Guhin for their indispensable help, as well as to my predecessor Scott Simmon for his generosity as an adviser, well beyond his term of duty. Update from the Undergraduate Advisor: Fran Dolan

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Chair'sLetter.html[3/29/2011 1:07:52 PM] Chair's Letter

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Chair'sLetter.html[3/29/2011 1:07:52 PM] Fall Faculty Lecture 2007

Excerpt from the English Department Fall Faculty Lecture, October 2007

I want to begin by situating my book Time Binds: Queer Temporality, Queer History in terms of recent queer theory, for those audience members who are not fully familiar with this field. I’ll say at the outset, too, that one important distinction between queer theory and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies is that “queer” can encompass aspects of sexuality that cannot be reduced to individual or group identity, and so allows for a broader analysis of dissident sexualities across cultures and historical moments.

Early queer activism and theory were predominantly organized by spatial Elizabeth Freeman is an metaphors. The logic of space dominated the activist front in names like Associate Professor of “Queer Nation,” actions like kiss-ins in straight bars, and slogans like “Out of the closet and into the streets!” U.S. academic queer theory also English at UC Davis. emerged within a spatial rubric, arguably beginning with Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. This work saw human subjectivities and even human Her Fall 2007 Faculty bodies as nodal points in a network or grid of power relations. Gloria Lecture is taken from Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s 1983 anthology This Bridge Called My her forthcoming book, Back was perhaps the first book-length work of American queer theory even though it did not travel under that name---and it provides other Time Binds: Queer examples of spatial thinking. In these essays and works of literature, Temporality, Queer feminist women of color theorize their position at the intersection of History categories like race, class, and sexuality, or described their movement across geographical, linguistic, and political borders. Sexuality studies then turned toward deconstruction in the 1990s. Eve Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet, published in 1990 and considered inaugural to the field of queer theory, rethought the spatial metaphor of the closet as a dialectic of knowledge and ignorance. Finally, the 1990s also trafficked in the metaphor of the stage with queer theory’s other landmark work, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Using drag queens as her example, Butler described gender identity as “performative,” or consisting of a set of acts that retroactively construct the original they are supposed to be imitating. Many other scholars drew on Butler’s work to theorize racial and sexual passing, the theatricality of sadomasochism, and so on, so that the figure of the stage became more and more explicit.

As important as all this work was, its dominant paradigms assumed that power and knowledge traveled along purely spatial vectors ignoring or leaving tacit the role of time. So my own project began with the somewhat simpleminded question, what if I rethought some of this queer theory through time rather than space? I began by going back to drag performance, retheorizing it as an embodied, minor practice of historiography that preserved and redeployed fading cultural icons in what I called “temporal drag.” But as it turned out, of course, the “thought experiment” I thought I was launching was always already present in sexuality studies – the 19th century sexologists and the early 20th century

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Freud were theorizing queer time, or theorizing time in queer ways.

As a field of knowledge, sexuality exhibits from its first instances a tension between two temporal modes: linear time and the recursive, looping-back time of repetition and return. Nineteenth-century sexologists, following the Enlightenment Scottish model of “stadialism” or uneven development, generally invested in progressive time (the development of the human race, recapitulated in the human body). Time was an arrow pointing two ways; bodies and societies could move forward toward racial “perfection” or slide backward toward earlier phasesThe concept of “atavism” described the sudden reappearance of a preserved “primitive” trait in a “civilized” person or society. But even this idea of “throwback” didn’t question the original assignment of phenomena to past or present. Freud followed sexology’s linear logic in some respects in his theories of psychosocial development into proper heterosexuality Those who are familiar with Freud’s descriptions of the movement from oral to anal to genital stages, for instance, will recognize how indebted he was to the ideal of progress.

But from early on, Freud also saw human subjectivity as constituted through a temporal splitting. He replaced the concept of atavism with Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action. This term describes the way that the mind processes traumatic and pleasurable experiences or even fantasies, before it has the linguistic and conceptual capacity to understand them. This material lies dormant in the unconscious, reappearing later as symptoms: repetitive “actings out” that are incomprehensible to the subject, who is nevertheless compelled to perform them. In this model, the past wasn’t ever really past, for the subject could be said to actually “experience” these traumas for the first time only as they “re”-appear in distorted form in the present. Similarly, the present was always punctured by the past, revising that past, and allowing the past to finally arrive.

Reviewing all this, we might say that subjectivity as a whole is always already queer – bent or deviating not only toward an array of possible erotic objects, but also toward moments that by the logic of progressive time ought to have either vanished into the mists or become fully integrated into memory. It’s this temporal sense of “queer” that I have been exploring in the book project I have brought to fruition this past year. I’m interested in the ways that “queer” subjectivity, social life, and aesthetics are recursive, anastrophic and sometimes willfully anachronistic. At the same time, I have maintained a certain stubborn—and perhaps itself rearguard— commitment to the idea that “queer” has something to do with erotic life, with the pleasures and travails of the corporeal; that queer isn’t just a tartier way to say “postmodern” or “deconstructive,” because it describes a lived engagement with bodily risk and experimentation.

I don’t mean to universalize or essentialize “the body.” Rather, I mean to suggest that inhabiting a stigmatized sexuality, or being what my colleague Jose Munoz calls a “vulgar homosexual,” has in most historical moments and places involved the management of a body seen to be fundamentally different than so-called normal ones, and/or the creative use of body parts for pleasures inassimilable to reproduction. Interestingly, too, the repetitions and returns that disturb the Freudian subject appear not as pictorial or narrative memories per se, but in forms that are at once

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/FFL07.html[3/29/2011 1:07:53 PM] Fall Faculty Lecture 2007

metaphorical and visceral: a “slip of the tongue,” repetitive bodily acts, lingering symptoms with no apparent physical etiology. So the Freudian body is the scene of and catalyst for encountering and redistributing the past. This Freudian legacy and the history of queer bodily stigma and creativity has meant, for me, risking thought about the body as, itself, a tool for registering, measuring, encountering, experiencing, and redrawing time.

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/FFL07.html[3/29/2011 1:07:53 PM] Departmental News

New Faculty Introductions!

2007-2008 Academic Year

Gina Bloom joined the department in 2007. Before coming to Davis, she taught in much colder places: the University of Iowa and Lawrence University. Her areas of interest include early modern English literature, especially Shakespeare and drama, gender and feminist theory, theater history and performance, and sound studies. Her first book is entitled Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and she's currently writing a book on games and masculinity in the early modern English theater. She's an avid theater fan and also enjoys hiking and African dance.

Chris Loar joined the department in 2007 after completing his doctorate at UCLA. His research centers on the British eighteenth- century, with particular interests in studies of the early British empire; early American literature and the Atlantic world; histories of the novel; literature and histories of technology; and political theory. He is at work on a book manuscript that examines technology and violence in eighteenth-century fictions of cultural contact.

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mean when we say ‘Twentieth-Century British Fiction’?” Like this seminar, his current research considers the changing shape of the canon that encompasses modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary British fiction. He is completing a book with the working title “The Postcolonial Mainstream,” which features chapters proposing alternate rubrics for grouping twentieth-century works including “Failed State Fiction” and “The Historical Novel of Globalization.” His previous book is The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2005).

2008-2009 Academic Year

Nathan Brown just completed his Ph.D. at UCLA, where his research focussed on connections between contemporary materialist poetics and materials science, both considered as branches of "fabrication." He is at work expanding his dissertation into a book project tentatively titled The Materials: Technoscience and Poetry at the Limits of Fabrication, and his current side projects include an article on Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux and an edited collection of visual/conceptual poetry by modernist poet Bob Brown.

Kathleen Frederickson comes to UC Davis from Chicago, Illinois. Her research focuses on the scientific and socio-political cultures that produced sexuality in late-Victorian Britain, drawing on work in Victorian studies, queer and feminist scholarship, and critical theory. Born and raised in Vancouver, BC, she is glad to be back in the west. She enjoys training martial arts and doing social justice activism.

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Department News.html[3/29/2011 1:07:54 PM] Departmental News

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and Guardian First Book Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and many other publications. She was chosen by Granta as one of the Best Young American Novelists, and won a Whitings Award. Her novel, The Vagrants, will come out in February 2009.

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Department News.html[3/29/2011 1:07:54 PM] Departmental News

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has joined the UCD English Department as an Assistant Professor specializing in Victorian literature. Liz's research focuses on late- Victorian literature and culture, with particular interests in gender and feminist studies, print culture, visuality, early cinema, popular and working-class culture, and radical politics. Her first book, entitled Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle, will be published this November, and she is currently at work on a new project entitled Print Culture and Late-Victorian Literary Radicalism. Since earning her Ph.D. in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Liz has taught at Ohio University, University of Michigan, and University of Oklahoma. Liz is delighted to move to California where she can indulge year-round in some of her favorite activities: running, hiking, and cooking with local ingredients.

The Department of English is pleased to welcome our newest faculty members! For more information and a full listing of our entire faculty, please visit the UC Davis English Department website faculty page.

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Department News.html[3/29/2011 1:07:54 PM] Faculty News Faculty News

Gina Bloom’s book, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, has been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Seeta Chaganti’s book, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance, was published this September in Palgrave Macmillan’s New Middle Ages series.

Lucy Corin’s collection of short stories, The Entire Predicament, was released from Tin House Books in Oct, 2007; she was a Breadloaf fellow at Middlebury College for the summer of 2008.

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Fran Dolan's book, Marriage and Violence: the Early Modern Legacy, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2008. The book was glowingly reviewed in the August 2008 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. She has also edited a collection of essays, Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, with Ron Corthell, Christopher Highley, and Arthur Marotti (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Her article, “Why Are Nuns Funny?” was published in the Huntington Library Quarterly 70.4; and her article “Learning to Listen: Shakespeare and Contexts,” was published in Blackwell Press' 2008 volume Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On. This year, she received a Faculty Development Award, which acknowledges extraordinary service contributions to the department and the university

Margie Ferguson has won an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Consortium for Women and Research at UC Davis. This year she served on the MLA Elections Committee, and completed an article on "The Epistemology of the Hymen," forthcoming this year.

Lynn Freed received an invitation for a residency from the International Writers' and Translators' Centre of Rhodes (Greece) and also from the Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), both for the Fall (2008).

Pam Houston has received an "outstanding service" award from the UC Davis Extension.

Alessa Johns received a 2008-2009 UC President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities to complete her book, Alternative Enlightenments, Cultural Translation, and Anglo-German Exchange, 1750-1837. Her article, "Gender, Disaster, and the Grand Tour: Visits to Vesuvius, 1770-1825," will be appearing soon in Das Erdbeben von Lissabon und der Katastrophendiskurs im 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Gerhard Lauer and Thorsten Unger (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2008). She will continue her work as Reviews Editor for the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies when she returns from her year on leave; Mike Ziser will fill the position in her absence.

Sandra McPherson’s Expectation Days (University of Illinois Press) has been nominated on behalf of the Northern California Book Reviewers (NCBR), for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry as one of the best works by a northern California author published in 2007. http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/FacultyNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:56 PM] Faculty News

Colin Milburn won a UCHRI Residential Fellowship for the 2008-09 year; he has also been awarded a 2008 fellowship from the newly established Hellman Family Foundation Awards for his research project "Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter." This year, Dr. Milburn was the recipient of a 2007-2008 Faculty Development Award. Dr Milburn's book, Nanovision: Engineering the Future, will be published by Duke University Press this October.

Timothy Morton’s book Ecology without Nature is being translated into Chinese by Beijing University Press, forthcoming in 2009; his next book, The Ecological Thought, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. His essay “Of Matter and Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge's ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’,” was

published in the e-journal Literature Compass in January, 2008. Dr Morton gave the keynote speech for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment via video link to the UK, to save on carbon; and spoke at Cambridge University in the spring quarter of 2008.

Marijane Osborn has contributed a memorial tribute, "Remembering Celeste Turner Wright," to the UC Davis Centennial's "One Hundred Stories" Program. Dr. Wright was a founding professor and the first Department Chair of the UCD English Department. You can read the tribute here.

Catherine Robson was asked to select three papers from the North American Victorian Studies Association 2007 annual conference for publication in the Winter 2008 edition of Victorian Studies; her essay, "The Presence of Poetry," which will be published with them, forms the response to this cluster of

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/FacultyNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:56 PM] Faculty News

recent work in the field of Victorian poetry. She has accepted a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for 2008-09. She presented a piece entitled " 'Three Cheers for Mute Ingloriousness!': Gray's Elegy, Cultural Capital, and the Scholarship Boy" to the Nineteenth-Century Studies Working Group at the University of California, Berkeley in March, and delivered invited lectures on different aspects of the topic of the memorized poem at Harvard and Brandeis this spring. She presented a paper on similar themes at the NAVSA conference in Victoria, British Columbia in the fall. She gave a talk entitled "Why It's Grim Up North: A Brief Primer on Yorkshire, Lancashire, and All Things Northern" at the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz this summer. In addition, she was pleased to host the annual University of California Dickens Project Graduate Student Winter Conference at Davis in the winter quarter of 2008.

In the Winter quarter, Winfried Schleiner was a teaching fellow at the UC campus in Washington, DC. In March 08, he gave a paper on "Two Early Modern Diseases of Women: Green Sickness and Hysteria" at a UCLA conference on Nostalgia, Melancholy, and Love Sickness; in April '08, a paper on "Early Modern Medical Humor" at a Hofstra University conference on Humor in Romance Language Literatures.

Scott Simmon has been interviewed on Elvis Mitchell's radio show The Treatment, broadcast on Los Angeles' KCRW. The interview focused on the new DVD set, "Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934," which Dr. Simmon curated; you can listen to the interview here. Dr. Simmon was also interviewed about the new DVD set for NPR's "Morning Edition" in October of 2007; the interview is archived on NPR's website.

David Simpson received the Needham Endowed Chair at a ceremony in April; his review of Heonik Kwon's Ghosts of War in Vietnam appeared in the London Review of Books this August. Dr. Simpson's latest book,Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2009.

Claire Waters’s edition Virgins and Scholars: A Fifteenth-Century Compilation of the Lives of John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Jerome, and Katherine of Alexandria will be coming out from Brepols in fall of 2008. She presented a paper, "Getting the Riffraff into Heaven: Popular Eschatology in the Thirteenth Century," to the Medieval Colloquium at Northwestern University, December 6, 2007.

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/FacultyNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:56 PM] Faculty News

Joe Wenderoth has an essay in the forthcoming Best American Essays 2008 and he also had a poem in Best American Poetry 2007.

Alan Williamson interviewed Gary Snyder, recipient of the Lilly Prize, for the Poetry Foundation; the interview focused on Buddhism and the Far East. You can read the interview here.

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/FacultyNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:56 PM] Graduate Program News

Graduate Program News

Graduate Student News 2007-2008 '07-'08 Ph.D.s PLACEMENT NEWS Alysia Garrison’s article, “Ill Seen, Ill Said: Trauma and Testimony in Beckett’s The Shellie Banga Steven Blevins Unnamable,” is forthcoming in the collection A Banquet of Florida International Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive. Alysia Silhouettes: William University presented a paper titled “Beckett’s (Im)postures” at Least Heat-Moon's the Ninth Annual Modernist Studies Association Maura Grady Travel Trilogy in Conference in Long Beach in November. She was Context University of Nevada, awarded an Office of Graduate Studies and a Reno Consortium for Women and Research Travel Award Seth Forrest to present a paper at the University of the West Janice Hawes "Thus far the Indies in Kingston, Jamaica this summer. She was transmission is oral": South Carolina State also awarded a Dissertation Research Fellowship University Orality and Aurality in from the Department of English for summer 2008. Poetry by the Black She is serving as Vice President of the MLA Jessica Hope Jordan Mountain School Graduate Student Caucus this academic year. University of the Pacific Maura Grady John Garrison’s essay, "Echoes of Influence: "I'm telling you she's Music, Social Power and the Law in Speculative Samaine Lockwood your man": The Female Fiction," appeared in Journal of the Fantastic in the George Mason Organization Man in Arts Volume 18, Issue 1. He presented a paper University Twentieth Century entitled "Imagining the Multitude in 'The Culture' of Fiction and Film Candace Taylor Iain M. Banks" at the MLA conference, and a paper Westmont College entitled "Hamlet and the Business of Being Seen" at Jessica Howell the annual gathering of the Popular Culture Under the Weather: Association. Disease, Race and Climate in Victorian Maura Grady accepted a three-year position at the Tales of Travel University of Nevada, Reno. Beginning Fall 2008, she will serve as Assistant Director of Core Writing http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/GradStudentNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:57 PM] Graduate Program News

Jessica Hope Jordan and Lecturer in English. Maura presented a paper in the Women's Studies area of the PCA/ACA Annual Andrea Lawson Conference in San Francisco in March '08, and Reading Farewell Gifts welcomed her second child, Ada, in August '07. in Renaissance Drama and Poetry Andrew Hageman published "The Uncanny Ecology of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive" in the Tony R. Magagna June ‘08 issue of the online journal Scope, and a Placing the West: chapter entitled "The Cinematic Confluence of Landscape, Literature, Ecological Aesthetics in Suzhou River" in the and Identity in the forthcoming collection Chinese Ecocinema. American West

2008-2009 Jessica Howell received the UCD Humanities and Poonam Sachdev, Research Award for 2007-2008, which she used to The "Gypsy" as Muse POSTDOCS develop and run the "Literature and Pathology" and Metaphor: conference, Feb 29- March 2nd. She recently filed Modernity, Mobility Shellie Banga her dissertation, and has been chosen as a 2008- and a People's Struggle 2009 Professors for the Future Fellow. for Subjectivity Seth Forrest Jessica Hope Jordan received a dissertation Tony Magagna fellowship for the 2008 spring quarter and received her Ph.D. June 2008; she has accepted a position at Poonam Sachdev University of the Pacific, as an Assistant Professor Jessica Howell of Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Tony R. Magagna completed his dissertation in spring 2008 and has accepted a position as a postdoc in English and UWP here at Davis for the 2008-09 year. He recently had an article accepted at Western American Literature entitled "Erased by Space, Ignored by History: Place and Gender in Marilynne Robinson's West."

Katie Rodger’s article, "A Shared Poetic: The Influence of Ricketts’s Literary Philosophy on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath," is forthcoming in Dialogue: The Grapes of Wrath, edited by Michael J. Meyer, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2009. In May, she gave a paper at the American Literature Association: “First Encounter: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast and the Rise of American Literature of the Pacific.”

Poonam Sachdev filed her dissertation in March 2008. Her field of study is Twentieth Century British and Post-colonial Studies with a DE in Critical Theory. In April 2007 she attended the annual American Comparative Literature Association conference in Puebla, Mexico. She also http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/GradStudentNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:57 PM] Graduate Program News

received a "small grant" from the English department last year, which she used toward research for her dissertation.

Lisa Sperber received a $500 grant from the UC Davis Consortium for Women and Research, and the $1500 summer research grant from the department.

Graduate Student Awards & Honors

UNIVERSITY AWARDS

2008-2009 PROFESSORS FOR THE FUTURE FELLOWSHIP Jessica Howell

UCD & HUMANITIES GRADUATE RESEARCH AWARD FOR 2007-2008 Jessica Howell & Steven Blevins

Graduate Student Assistant to the Dean and Chancellor for 2008-2009 Cynthia Degnan

Fellowship for Summer School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University Karen Embry

Globe Exchange to London Vanessa Rapatz

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/GradStudentNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:57 PM] Graduate Program News DEPARTMENT AWARDS

DISSERTATION QUARTER FELLOWSHIPS

Winter 2008 Dissertation Quarter Fellowships

Andrea Lawson, Julie Wilhelm

Spring 2008 Dissertation Quarter Fellowships

Melissa Bender, Catherine Fung, Jenni Halpin, Jessica Jordan, Tony Magagna, Ryan Poll, Katie Rodger

SUMMER FELLOWSHIPS

Sara Anderson, Gretchen Braun, Valerie Dennis, Margaret France, Alysia Garrison, Natalie Giannini, Courtney Hopf, Andrea Lawson, Genevieve Pearson, Kyle Pivetti, Vanessa Rapatz, Clara Van Zanten, Karen Walker, Julie Wilhelm

FRIENDS OF ENGLISH RESEARCH AWARDS OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH AWARD

Courtney Hopf and Uyen Hua

2007 DAVID NOEL MILLER SCHOLARSHIP ESSAY PRIZE Rachel Swinkin

OUSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT TEACHING AWARD Eric O’Brien, Lisa Sperber, and Chris Schaberg

2008 SMALL GRANTS Sharada Balachandran-Orihuela, Gina Caison, Valerie Dennis, Jason Dunn, Karen Embry, Darcy Irvin, Anett Jessop, Tim Kreiner, Jessica Loudermilk, Shannon Pufahl, Karolyn Reddy, Rosalinda Salazar, Lisa Sperber, Nick Valvo, Barbara Zimbalist

CREATIVE WRITING SMALL GRANTS Joe Atkins, Melissa Chordas, Tiffany Denman, Christopher Erickson, Sarah Hoagland, Maria Kochis, Carmen Lau, Austin Smith, Erin Steinke, Lauren Velevis, Elise Winn http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/GradStudentNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:57 PM] Graduate Program News

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/GradStudentNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:57 PM] Undergraduate Program news Undergraduate Program News

2008 Department of English Citation Winners Friends of English Including Honors Thesis/Creative Project titles for Undergraduate News Outstanding Graduating those students who participated in the Honors Senior Award Program Two people received Katie Conway has been this award this year: Elizabeth Allen accepted to the Jacob Chilton Practice Makes Perfect Possible: A Bloomian University of Oregon’s Melody Jue Community PhD program.

Brian Ang Melody Jue received Poems English Department English Department funding to attend the Essay Prize Daniel Bracco NCUR conference. 1st Place, Jacob Chilton, Growing Sideways “Hearse Verses Sickle: Jacob Chilton and Andy Killing Death With a Susan Calvillo Porter delivered papers Timeless Tomb or The Other Side of the Wall at the English Language Sonnet 86: The and Literature Entombing Womb Elizabeth Campbell Conference at Joliet Rehearsed in Verse.” Inscribed Signs: Dickens’ Commentary on Existence University in Illinois. Essay written in ENL 188 with Professor Whitney Carpenter Maria Kochis recently Richard Levin had her first short story, Jacob Chilton (2 honors projects) “Coral,” published in 2nd Place, Kevin Problems of Reproduction the Pisgah Review. Peterson, “Damnable “Delivery”: Deconstruction, Androgyny and Obstetrics Desire in the Aging in Milton’s Late Poems Queen.” Essay written Toni Chisamore in ENL 117B with Mustang Blood Judith Rose Ashley Clarke

Katie Conway Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Honors Taylor Cox Critical Essay Melody Jue, Stephanie Doeing “Navigating With Metaphor: At Home in Linnea Edmeier the Cybernetic Theater Young Woman and Fire: Transcending the Dilemna of Consciousness” of Difference as Woman and Firefighter

Daniel Fritz John Steinbeck, Edward Ricketts, and the Elliot Gilbert Memorial Environment: The Relationship and Philosophy Prize for Best Honors Behind Cannery Row Creative Work Two people awarded Elizabeth Frost

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/UndergraduateProgramNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:58 PM] Undergraduate Program news

this year: A Bit of Earth Dara Khan, “A Common Household Gregory Gaye Demon” & Danielle Hanosh Alana Washington, Rhetorical Seduction. The Alluring Fiend and “The Aroma of the Sexualization of Language in John Milton’s Paradise Citizen” Lost Paul Hobbs

Michelle Jackson Unbound Texts, Unbound Women: Female Disorderliness and Ballad Culture in Early Modern England

Melody Jue Navigating With Metaphor: At Home in the Cybernetic Theater of Consciousness

Alexandra Kagstrom

Svetlana Karaslavova

Shannon Kemena

Zoe Kemmerling

Dara Khan A Common Household Demon

Bo Hee Kim

Elizabeth Knox Make Believe

Antonina Mandrussow

Gabriella Martelino

Caitlin McCarthy

Alissa McGowan

Garrett McGrath

Nicole Nguyen “A Machine of Words”: locating William Carlos Williams’ negotiation of the linguistic and pictorial sign in modernity

Beth Noyes

Amanda Olson

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/UndergraduateProgramNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:58 PM] Undergraduate Program news

Trina Peng Billboard Train Frames

Andrew Porter Acting Authority: Cross-Dressing of Technology and Religion in Vonnegut and Twain

Katharine Rosen-Molina

Matthew Slagle

Manmeet Toor

Steven Tyra The Saracen as Muslim and Heretic: A Historical Context for the Treatment of Sir Palomydes in Le Morte D’Arthur

Alana Washington The Aroma of the Citizen

Natalie Williams-Munger Bringing a New Dawn to Women’s Frontier Literature: The Recovery of Dell H. Munger’s Writing

Jessica Wilson

CONGRATULATIONS ALL!! ALUMNI NEWS

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/UndergraduateProgramNews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:58 PM] Creative Writing News

Creative Writing News

Pam Houston, director

June 2008 Creative Writing Graduates and Thesis Titles

Crystal Lee Anderson. Strange Language Crystal Cheney, Feeder Rabbits Allison Hack, A Small Wake Samantha Hudson, Reprieve and Other Stories Patricia Killelea, Counterglow: Poems Jason Morphew, Shame Gabrielle Myers, Feeding, City & Memory Masin Persina, Suction Jeanine Peters Webb, Pirates vs. Ninjas Erica Scheidt, Uses for boys: A Novel and Stories

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/CWnews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:59 PM] Creative Writing News

Monica Lita Storss, Women’s Work Marc Wise, The Other Mark Wise or American Studies, Selected Writings of Dennis Herlofski

2007-2008 Creative Writing Contest Winners

Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize

Finalists for the state & campus wide competition James Wooden Haley Davis Kristen Judd Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing

First Place Fiction Koji Frahm

Second Place Fiction Susan Calvillo

First Place Tied for Poetry Brian Ang & James Wooden Poet Laureate Award at UC Davis

not funded this year Diana Lynn Bogart Prize

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/CWnews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:59 PM] Creative Writing News

First Place Kristen Judd

Second Place Qinger Kitty Liang

Third Place Michelle Tang Jackson

Honorable Mention Hailey Yager

Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize

First Place Austin Smith

Second Place henry 7 reneau jr.

2008 Maurice Prize in Fiction

The Maurice Prize in Fiction is generously funded by John Lescroart, one of the nationally known writers who contribute to the annual Tomales Bay Writer's Workshops. This year's winner of the Maurice prize will be announced on October 26th Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Honors Creative Work

Dara Khan, “A Common Household Demon” & Alana Washington, “The Aroma of the Citizen”

Graduate Student Winners of the Elliot Gilbert Prize Contest for Fiction and Poetry:

Erica Scheidt for Fiction short-story, "Something More" Masin Persina for his poem, "Behead "

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Tomales Bay Writer's Workshops

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/CWnews.html[3/29/2011 1:07:59 PM] Alumni News

Alumni News

Julie Dalrymple (BA 1998) has been trying out different career paths including public relations, graphic design and marketing. She is currently the Marketing Director at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek and use the skills learned from her undergrad studies (and years at the California Aggie as a reporter and editor) daily. She is currently finishing an MA at St. Mary's College in Moraga, focusing on the early Northern California writers who first inspired her during her undergrad days at UC Davis.

Melody Jue (BA 2008) is currently abroad on a Fulbright Scholarship, working as an English Teaching Assistant at the Open University of Hong Kong and blogging about the experience on her webpage. She won department awards at the end of the school year for best critical thesis/ outstanding senior, and had a winning entry in prized writing 2 years ago and a winning entry in Explorations last year.

Maria Kochis (MA) had her first short story, “Coral,” published in the Pisgah Review (Winter 2008).

Gail Lockhart (MA 1973) recently retired from state service after over 32 years in emergency management, including 20 years wit the California Army National Guard. In January 2008, she will become a subject matter expert (SME) at the Center for Collaborative Policy (CCP) at California State University, Sacramento. She is curently writing a book of short stories about Shiba Inus, a small spitz-type hunting dog from Japan.

Susan Edwards Richmond (MA 1987) published a new poetry collection, Purgatory Chasm, with Adastra Press in fall 2007. She recently served as poet-in-residence for the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA and continues to consult with the museum on poetry activities and events.

Michael Shapiro (MA 1992) received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Brandeis University. After teaching in Hawaii for ten years, he is now the editor of Hana Hou! the Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines. Last year, he was awarded Travel Writer of the Year by the Hawaii Tourism Authority. He continues to write and publish poetry, and is currently at work on a novel.

Cora Stryker (MA 2007) has been awarded the 2008-2009 Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University to write her novel.

John Vernon (Ph.D.1969) is a Distinguished Professor at Binghamton University (SUNY). In 2001, he went on half time teaching, and how teaches at Binghamton during the spring semester of each year and lives in the mountains of northern Colorado for the rest of the year. Houghton Mifflin will publish his sixth novel (and eleventh book), Lucky Billy, in 2009. His previous novel from Houghton Mifflin, The Last Canyon, was about John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon.

Alvin Ka Hin Wong (BA 2006) just published a book review of Lisa Rofel's new book Desiring China. The review, "Queering Chineseness, Unthinking Neoliberalism," was published in the 2008 issue of GLQ.

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Alumni News.html[3/29/2011 1:08:00 PM] Alumni News

We would like to include your news!! Please email your news and accomplishemets to [email protected].

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Alumni News.html[3/29/2011 1:08:00 PM] Retirements.08

2007-2008 RETIREMENTS

MARIJANE OSBORN

Reflecting on Marijane Osborn's retirement, Brad Busbee wrote:

" I was a little caught off guard when I got the invitation and email announcing Marijane’s retirement, probably because I have trouble thinking about UC Davis without thinking about Marijane. And so, it has taken me almost the entire month since to figure out what I might possibly say about such a wonderful scholar, teacher, mentor and friend in only a paragraph or two. After all, this is a lady who not too long ago boasted that she could swim the length of the Davis Community pool while wearing chain mail armor—we are still waiting for you to do that, Marijane. This is someone who once commissioned a reconstructed Viking ship to follow Beowulf’s sea journeys across the dangerous waters between Sweden and Denmark, a trip she completed and wrote a book about. This is someone who kept an astrolabe on her office desk to show students and to consider while conducting research—she wrote a book about the astrolabe, too. And this is someone who has taught and researched in places as far flung as Alaska, Belfast, California, Edinburgh, Hawaii, Lancaster, New York, Oxford and Reykjavik. Marijane Osborn has an active, eclectic mind: she’s a scholar of medieval texts, a poet, a translator, and a screenplay writer. And she is a teacher.

Those of us who have had the good fortune to be in her classes know first-hand know how Marijane gathers together knowledge and enthusiasm in order to bring language and literature to life. Gillian Overing (currently Professor of English at Wake Forrest and one of Marijane’s first students) sent the following account of her first encounter with Marijane:

Four British undergraduates look on, slightly bemused, skeptical, nonetheless interested, as the American Professor, Marijane Osborn, takes over the Beowulf class to fill in for a professor on leave. She is unusually enthusiastic, full of a sense of discovery; she has brought to class a collection of pictures and prints, some quite rare, of artistic renderings of the Grendel-kin. “Isn’t this Swedish one fascinating?” she questions, unrhetorically, looking directly at the student she is addressing. Well, yes, it is, the student replies. And so, under her tutelage, the cultural world of the poem unfolded throughout the rest of that Spring term . . .

For those four students, of whom I was one, and for many of Marijane Osborn’s students before and since, the study of Beowulf and of Old English has been transformed, and seeing the Anglo-Saxon world through her eyes has been a transformative experience.

As a student at the other end of Marijane’s career, I have had a similar inspiring and transformative experience. In the fall of 2000, Alessa Johns asked me to invite a professor to our graduate professionalization class, so I called Marijane and requested a meeting. Like my fellow classmates, I was pleasantly surprised when she arrived equipped with show-and-tell items, such as her astrolabe, some pictures of rune stones and Nordic landscapes, and an image of the Beowulf manuscript. I knew then that, to her, literature and language and life were inseparable, and that she was right: words are living things. She continually reminded me and others of this point as we studied Old English and wrote dissertations under her guidance. And today, I realize that her impact on me continues: as I write these words, I am sitting in the waiting room of the manuscript collection at Royal Library of Denmark, where in an hour or so I’ll be sitting in front of a particular medieval manuscript I’ve only had a chance to read about before. It is for moments like these, ones of discovery that we study and train and hope for, that I would like to thank Marijane Osborn. Marijane, you have been an inspiration to us. Thank you for that. I hope you enjoy retirement! And I’m looking forward to your making that armor-clad swim, the next time I’m in Davis."

Mark Bradshaw Busbee recieved his Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from UC Davis in 2005; his dissertation, completed under Marijane Osborn's advisement, is titled “N.F.S. Grundtvig’s Interpretation of Beowulf as a Living Heroic Poem for the People.” He is now an assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Retirements.08.html[3/29/2011 1:08:02 PM] Retirements.08

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KARL ZENDER

An Excerpt from Michael Hoffman's Remarks on Karl Zender’s Retirement—Tuesday, June 3, 2008

I’ve been looking forward to this day for seven years, to welcome Karl Zender into the delicious irresponsibility of retirement. I want to organize my remarks around our long friendship and to offer some insights into Karl that might surprise you, including a few silly moments that he and I have shared. (Jack Hicks once referred to us—lovingly, of course—as the odd couple.) In the http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Retirements.08.html[3/29/2011 1:08:02 PM] Retirements.08 process, I want to stress Karl’s accomplishments as a teacher and scholar and, especially, his contributions to the campus and to the English department. Let’s start at the beginning. Karl comes from a working-class family in Southern Ohio, and he’s proud of his origins. Here’s a passage from his first book on William Faulkner, which is dedicated to the memory of his parents: “My father came to this country from Germany in 1927; my mother grew up in the hills of southern Ohio. Neither went past the eighth grade in school. They did not read Faulkner, but they appreciated such beauty as their circumstances afforded them, and they loved wit and the play of ideas. I will always be in their debt.” After completing his physics major at Case Tech, Karl changed his mind about becoming a scientist and turned to literature. He took his masters degree at Western Reserve and his doctorate at Iowa, where he specialized in Renaissance literature and wrote a thesis on revenge tragedies. His first teaching job was at Washington University in Saint Louis. Like a lot of us from that generation, Karl didn’t get tenure at his first position, and he came to California in 1973 to find a fresh port in the storm and create a new career. After all, you can’t knock the climate. What makes Karl’s coming to Davis unusual is that he was appointed as a lecturer to run the Subject A Program, which was then administered out of the English department. From the start he was a good administrator, and when the director of Composition retired a few years later, Karl succeeded him. Karl was an excellent director of composition; by the time he’d been here less than a decade he’d had a major impact on two important writing programs that served the campus. Then, in 1980, he and Linda Morris—who had taken over Subject A from Karl—proposed a program to foster writing across the curriculum. This was the Campus Writing Center. I have a special affection for that unit because I was then an administrator in what is now the Provost’s Office, and we were able to fund it within the English department. If I’m not mistaken, we are one of only two UC campuses with an upper-division writing requirement, and the Campus Writing Center was instrumental in implementing it. More important, in my view, was that the Center established writing across the curriculum as being essential to undergraduate education at Davis. Along with the Composition Program it has evolved into the University Writing Program. As Emerson says in “Self-Reliance,” “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”

This is a good description of Karl’s impact on how writing is taught at Davis. But I can speak of one accomplishment there more easily than others, and that is the hiring of David Simpson and Margie Ferguson, two appointments that have had an immense influence on the department and on its future. While doing his administrative work, Karl published steadily, including a number of first-rate articles on Faulkner (one of which appeared in PMLA), and he was able to move to a regular academic senate appointment. Some of these essays formed the basis of his first book on Faulkner, which Rutgers published in 1989: The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkner, the South, and the Modern World. Focusing mostly on novels that Faulkner wrote late in his career, such as Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, The Town, and The Mansion, Karl showed how Faulkner reacted in his fiction to the disappearance of the traditional South and to an emerging, de-regionalized America. The book was well received by reviewers and established him as a writer of genuine merit. If you haven’t read any of his work, you should know that Karl’s prose is thoughtful, elegant, and absolutely clear. It’s a model of academic writing. The second book on Faulkner, published by the LSU Press in 2002, was begun while Karl chaired the department and completed during the years immediately afterward. It’s a work of recuperation and reconciliation, a reading of Faulkner’s major fiction in light of the political rejection of it that had taken place in the name of poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Typical of Karl, he read the theory and he re-read Faulkner, producing a book that reappraises those aspects of Faulkner’s work that recent critics had challenged (namely his representations of sex, gender, class, and race) and he shows how one can read Faulkner outside the extreme interpretations that had almost censored him out of the classroom.

I’ll conclude with two brief observations. First of all, Karl is ending his career on a high note, with a book coming out this year on Shakespeare, again with LSU, the fruits of teaching Shakespeare courses yearly. It’s a personal book, the kind an established scholar can write at the end of a career, in which reflections on ageing mix with shrewd observations about such matters in the plays. The readings of works like Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra are splendid. There are many things for which I admire Karl; but this is one thing for which I envy him. What timing! The other observation takes us back to the beginning of my talk. And that is my welcoming Karl to the delicious irresponsibility of retirement. Well, not quite. After seven years of our going to upscale lunches every month, of basketball games and baseball games, of reading books together that we have chosen simply because we want to read them, I figured that Karl was ready for the good life. He once told me that the reason I enjoy retirement so much is that I have no superego. I thanked him for the compliment. But what have we heard? It seems that Karl has been recalled to work in the dean’s office, drafting personnel letters. Can you imagine? He finds drafting personnel letters more delicious than experiencing the good life with me. I ask you, “What can you do with such a man?”

Laura Maestrelli (MA '02) reflects on her Advisor and Mentor Karl Zender http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Retirements.08.html[3/29/2011 1:08:02 PM] Retirements.08

"Although Karl never taught any graduate seminars, those of us grad students lucky enough to have encountered his teaching in other forums – in my case, as the T.A. for his undergraduate Shakespeare survey – knew all too well what our fellow graduate students were missing. His impeccably organized lectures. His prolific and varied publications on everyone from Shakespeare to Faulkner. His tremendous respect for his students and the craft of teaching.

But maybe most significantly, I pitied my fellow graduate students for missing out on Karl’s unbridled, even boyish, enthusiasm for the language and literature he had been teaching and writing about most of his life. As I listened to his lectures and watched him lead class discussions, I remember thinking to myself with a mixture of admiration and incredulity, “Here’s a man who still clearly loves his job.” Though he had been teaching many of those same plays and novels for years, his enthusiasm for their artistry and power clearly hadn’t diminished – and it was nearly impossible not to be affected by his infectious zeal for them. Karl somehow managed to elegantly illuminate and explain the complexities of the books and plays he was teaching while simultaneously convincing his students how much fun they were to read.

With all of those fond memories in mind, I am left here pondering Karl’s retirement. I must confess that I wasn’t sure this day would ever come. He always seemed to have some kind of excuse for putting off his retirement another quarter – a deferral which, admittedly, was a boon to his students and colleagues alike. And while I’m happy that Karl will now be able to put the “briars of this working day world” behind him, I can’t help but feel sorry for the future undergraduates who will never get to listen to one of his illuminating lectures on Hamlet… or struggle to decipher his nearly illegible but always astute marginal essay comments… or listen to one of his stories about growing up in the hills of southern Ohio. I was lucky enough to have benefited from a variety of the different hats Karl has worn throughout his career – teacher, scholar, mentor, and in the 5 years since I completed my Masters degree, good friend. For all of those, I am tremendously grateful."

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Terry Antonelli

Margie Ferguson reflects on Terry Antonelli's Retirement

Terry came to the English department as our MSO in 1994; more recently, and with her typical grace and pizazz, she took on the tasks of administering other units in Voorhies including the University Writing Program, Nature and Culture, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Davis Humanities Institute. Carolyn de la Peña, the Director of the DHI, wrote the following about Terry: she has been "amazingly supportive of the DHI. She knows the answer, apparently, to every question I can think up. She answers the phone with cheer. She finds answers for me-- pronto--and is right back on with the followup. . . She helps because she wants to, because she enjoys people and likes solving problems. . . She makes everyone feel valued (and she really likes my hair)!"

I'd like to relay some of the comments that the Voorhies Staff made about Terry as their MSO. "When she comes in at 9 a.m., usually with a big cup of coffee in her hand," says Lynda Jones, http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Retirements.08.html[3/29/2011 1:08:02 PM] Retirements.08 "Terry is already thinking and talking a mile a minute. She greets everyone by name and there is never a morning when there is any doubt about the different energy level on the hall after Terry arrives! She will stop and talk to you about what you're doing no matter what is on her mind; she never makes you feel that you are interrupting her even though she must sometimes feel irritated by the hundred interrupations she deals with daily." Another staff member says that Terry "never makes you feel that you've made her miss a deadline." "How Terry gets as much done as she does with her incredible open-door policy is a kind of a mystery, one we'll all be remembering for a long time. " Mary White notes that Terry changes gears really fast and everyone sometimes has to ask her to slow down; she always does that graciously, but then, within a few hours, she is back to Terry-speed and someone will say slow down again. There is kind of an interesting pattern to our days. She makes us all enjoy the day more than we would if she weren't here; in fact, when she isn't here, I've found myself wondering why I'm starting to nap in mid -afternoon. Terry is a tonic, a life-elixer!" Moreover, as another member of the staff remarks, "Terry doesn't know the word 'no.' If you come to her with a request, she will always and with a certain glee set to work to see how your request might be fulfilled."

Karl Zender, one of the many chairs who worked with Terry, said in his remarks at her retirement party that she DID "know no," and sometimes said it to him; but most of us would say, as her staff does, that she always starts by seeing how she can say yes to requests that have a shred of rationality to them. I'll give the last word to a staff member who wants to remain anonymous with a story that illustrates the fact that Terry isn't perfect even though she is almost so. "We called Terry requesting an interview with the Davis Enterprise. The caller wanted to know how she treated her staff. Little did she know, until the caller dissolved in laughter, that it was one of her staff members on the line. Terry was so easy to fool!" But she of course has the last laugh, playing with her husband Tony on the golf course instead of answering the phone at all.

Vita Simonsen

Margie Ferguson reflects on working with Vita Simonsen:

"The idea for a three-in-one retirement party, honoring Vita Simonsen, Terry Antonelli, and Marijane Osborn, is not an idea drearily dictated by impending budget cuts, but is rather a typically Terry Antonelli idea of how we can have fun, mixing staff and faculty colleagues and bringing everyone together for a big party that will end in time to let people go out to dinner with their families. I'm delighted to be celebrating three amazing women colleagues. Each has been at Davis a long time. Vita came to work in the Chancellor's Office in 1967, Terry came as a clerk in Biochemistry in 1971 and Marijane came as a faculty member in 1981. Vita wasn't initially very keen on having a public celebration because, as she says, she is not exactly retiring but is rather "moving on in her life," expecting--as has indeed transpired--to work part time in Voorhies. We are delighted that she 's not REALLY retiring because this gives us a chance to continue to benefit from the grace and competence she displays everyday as the Personnel Officer for English and the University Writing Program. She has been on the Voorhies' units' staff since 1990 as our "gateway" person, the person who helps all of our new hires-- faculty, staff, graduate teachers, exchange students, visiting lecturers--enter smoothly enough into the vast electronic and paperwork systems of this university so that they can get paid in a timely way. Vita welcomes people into the Voorhies community with truly amazing efficiency and kindness. She does critical tasks in a quiet, unflappable way that Terry, Chris Thaiss, I, and now Darla rely on--and for which we're truly grateful."

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Retirements.08.html[3/29/2011 1:08:02 PM] Friend of English

FRIENDS OF ENGLISH

What are the Friends of English?

The Friends of English encourages alumni and community members to stay connected to the English Department and to the reading and study of literature. “Friends” will be invited to attend scholarly talks and readings by our own sterling creative writers, and receive our annual departmental newsletter. In return, “Friends” will be helping the department continue to achieve distinction by supporting graduate and undergraduate fellowships and awards, supporting faculty and student research, and sponsoring public lectures and readings. For more information on how to become a member, visit the Friends of English website here.

We are sincerely grateful to the following individuals for their contributions to Friends of English (including gifts to the department) during the 2007-2008 academic year:

Nora Ann McGuinness Peter Horton Donald Thomas Jane Reed Sue Walther Jones Timothy Flynn Stephanie Spanja Emily Artiano Poonam Sachdev

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http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/FoE.html[3/29/2011 1:08:03 PM] UC Davis: English / Newsletters

Search UC Davis English Department News

English Department Newsletters Voorhies Hall University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 Printable version of Newsletter

Upcoming Events

To Be Announced

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/index.html[3/29/2011 1:08:04 PM] Untitled Document

This year's The 2008 Tomales Tomales Bay Writer's Bay Writer's Workshop Workshops will be held The Tomales Bay Workshops, directed by Pam October Houston, brings developing writers from across the country together with the UC Davis Creative Writing 22nd-27th, Program, top published writers from around the 2008 nation and publishing industry professionals. Participants enjoy five days of writing, readings, conversation and contemplation--all atop a hill overlooking Tomales Bay, in gorgeous Point Reyes The National Seashore. Highlights include intimate application evening receptions with faculty authors and publishing professionals, as well as readings by form is fellowship winners, conference participants and UC Davis Creative Writing Program graduate students; available on the conference closes with the announcement of the year's Maurice Prize winner and a sunset patio the UCD reception with local wine and oysters straight from Extension the bay. A collaboration between the UC Davis English Department, the UC Davis Creative Writing website Program and UC Davis Extension, The Tomales Bay Workshops are directed by Pam Houston, who hand-picks each year's faculty and presenters. The Workshops welcomes published and unpublished particpants in the areas of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction/personal essay. Fellowships are available each year, and information about these is available at the UCD Extension website.

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Tomales.html[3/29/2011 1:08:05 PM] Untitled Document

Alumni Experience

"Going to Tomales Bay was such a gift. The experience felt so balanced and complete: I enjoyed the camaraderie with other writers, but also got to spend time alone; I got helpful feedback on existing work but also wrote new stuff. Then there's the beautiful setting, simultaneously grand and intimate. The place just nourished me as a writer and as a person -- and has the best food I've eaten at any conference." --Naomi Williams, Tomales Bay ‘06

“Aside from the serene beauty of Tomales Bay, its bright weather and all the fine food, I was most enthralled by my workshop. Listening to a week's worth of Heather McHugh's insights on poems, ranging from ones written by Nobel Prize winners to ones by my fellow students, was beyond instructive. It was as though I had been given a higher vantage point from which to take in poetry's landscape. I was high off that refined writing air for a month.” --Masin Persina, Tomales Bay ‘07

"I didn’t go to Tomales Bay to read...workshops and conferences are good for giving other, more experienced eyes a chance to read you. Pam Houston has set up as perfect a situation for that process as you’re going to find anywhere. She seems to know every writer now typing in America, so she gets the best workshop leaders. And it’s very extremely effing beautiful out there in Tomales Bay. If you can get the dough together, I wouldn’t think twice about signing on up. I’ve got poems and stories and essays to write. Don’t you?" --Jason Morphew, Tomales Bay '07

http://enlnews.ucdavis.edu/Tomales.html[3/29/2011 1:08:05 PM]