Reading Matters, Vol. 10, Issue 12, April 20, 2005

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Matt Brown has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Initiative grant for the summer to work on his study of reading practices in early New England. In June, he will give a paper entitled “Hand Piety: Devotional Steady Sellers and the Conduct of Reading” at the American Antiquarian Society’s Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America conference. In addition, he has been selected for this July’s Summer Institute in Literary Studies on Benjamin Franklin at the National Humanities Center.

Huston Diehl was named a Collegiate Fellow in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in recognition of her years of distinguished teaching, research, and service to the college. The following statement was part of the U of I news release: "Diehl is a major scholar of Renaissance drama and an internationally acclaimed expert on iconography and images in the English Renaissance. The author of the classic book Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England, as well as several highly influential articles, she also wrote 'An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books,' an extremely useful research tool funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has supervised ten doctoral dissertations, eight of which received awards. Named a Faculty Scholar in 1988, she received the UI's Excellence in Teaching Award in 1989 and the Regents Award for Faculty Excellence in 2000."

Last week, Ed Folsom gave the annual DeGraaf Lecture in the Humanities at Hope College in Michigan; this week he travels to Camden, NJ, as a featured speaker at the "Whitman and Place Conference," where he will talk about Whitman and the prairies.  He will be the keynote speaker at the "Celebrating Walt Whitman" conference at the University of Paris VII this coming July.

Garrett Stewart will be among the speakers at Time@20, an interdisciplinary symposium on the 20th anniversary of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, which will also include, among literary scholars, long-romanticist James Chandler of the University of Chicago, sampling his work on the history and theory of sentimentality. The symposium will take place at Harvard during the first weekend in May, and the full program is available at http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/events/deleuze.html.

  

Graduate Matters

On Apr. 20, Marty Gould will defend his dissertation, "Rose Britannia: Theatricality and Empire in the Victorian Period." Teresa Mangum is the chair, and the defense will occur at 10:20 a.m., 331 EPB.

Upcoming Events

Wed., Apr. 27, 4 p.m., Gerber Lounge - Susan Willis, Associate Professor of Literature at Duke Univ., will give a talk titled "Quien es mas Macho? The Abu Graib Photos." Professor Willis is promoting her forthcoming book Portents of the Real:  A Primer for Post-9-11 America (Verso).

Thr., Apr. 28, 3:30 p.m., South Room, IMU - Undergraduate Honors Ceremony

Thr., Apr. 28, 7:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge - Joan Landes, Ferre Professor of Early Modern History and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University, will give a talk titled "Women and the French Revolution." This talk is hosted by the Interdisciplinary 18th- and 19th- Century Colloquium and is part of the speaker series for this year (in celebration of the Year of Arts and Humanities): "Global History through the Eyes of the Artist: War and Revolution in the 18th and 19th Centuries."

Tue., May 3, Noon, Gerber Lounge - Gretchen Murphy will speak informally about her new book, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Duke University Press, 2005). Murphy is assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Morris, where she teaches American literature from the colonial era to the present, with special emphasis on issues of colonization and nation-building, American women writers, the rise of the popular novel and genre fiction, and social reform literature of the nineteenth century. She is broadly interested in feminist theory, postcolonial studies and cultural studies, and her essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Richard Harding Davis, Onoto Watanna, and Ranald Macdonald have appeared in Genre, Emerson Society Quarterly, American Transcendental Quarterly, Prospects: An Annual of American Literature and Culture, and American Studies. All graduate students and faculty in English are invited to attend.  Lunch will be provided.  In order to get an accurate lunch count, please sign up for this event on the sheet in the Zimansky Room.

Fri., May 6, 4 p.m., Gerber Lounge - Lori Branch and Doug Trevor will present a Faculty Colloquium.

Future Issues

Please send any items for Reading Matters to Carolyn Jacobson at carolyn-jacobson@uiowa.edu. Reading Matters will appear every other Wednesday, and submissions should be received by 5 p.m. on the preceding Monday. Please send submissions for the next issue by 5 p.m. on May 2. Thanks very much.