Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Doug Trevor is the winner of this year's John C. Gerber Award for Teaching Excellence. The presentation of this $1,000 award, which recognizes outstanding teaching within the Department of English, was made at the English Department Graduate Reception, Tuesday, October 25. The award recognizes our near-legendary past colleague, John Gerber, who was a faculty member in the department 1944-1976, chair 1961-1976, and who passed away in 2003. Recent past recipients of this honor (since 1998) include Miriam Gilbert, Mary Lou Emery, Linda Bolton, Paul Diehl, Carol de St Victor, and Bonnie Sunstein.

Kathleen Diffley is this year's recipient of the Graduate College Outstanding Mentor Award. The award recognizes her energetic engagement in advising graduate students, both in her field and in association with the M/MLA. Colleagues in the Humanities and Fine Arts are eligible every other year for this award selected by the Graduate College. The 2003 winner was Florence Boos.

Linda Bolton just returned from Portland, Oregon, where she was the second of five writers in Marylhurst University's year-long "Binford Literary Series." Bolton gave an evening lecture on "Frederick Douglass, Sarah Winnemucca and the Ethical Command that Transcends Time" for Marylhurst students and faculty, and taught a Master Class on the work of Joy Harjo and N. Scott Momaday for Clackamas Community College.

Ed Folsom gave the lecture at the "Whitman Sings!" sesquicentennial celebration at the Bettendorf Public Library on October 15 and will give the annual College of tw he Humanities Lecture at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, on Thursday, October 27. He will appear on the "Know the Score" radio program on Friday, November 4, to talk about Whitman and the "Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman" exhibition opening at the UI Museum of Art on November 5. He appears on the MLA-produced "What's the Word?" radio program, broadcast this month on affiliated NPR radio stations.

In early October, Eric Gidal delivered a talk on "Cosmopolitan Melancholy: Sorrow and the European Union" at the 30th Annual European Studies Conference at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He will present a related paper on "Mme. de Staël and the Sociology of Melancholy" at the end of the month at the annual conference of the Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held this year at Indiana State University.

Tom Lutz writes: "I appeared on ABC News Now Monday morning to talk about emotion in the workplace on Monday, October 17th and my work was featured in stories this week in The New York Times and the Brazilian magazine TPM. I am now being identified as Director of the MFA in Writing and Professor of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts rather than a professor at Iowa, so these will not be showing up in the UI news service’s dispatches. I gave a paper this weekend at the Stanford Humanities Center on political emotions and have been asked to contribute a paper for a volume on Iraq and America with essays by Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Arato, and Alain Badiou. I have also agreed to write a piece on Claude McKay for an Indiana UP volume on teaching the Harlem Renaissance. This coming weekend I am moderating and responding to a panel at the Los Angeles Noulipo Conference; speakers include Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Johanna Drucker, Paul Fournel, Tan Lin, Bernadette Mayer, Ian Monk, Harryette Mullen, and Rodrigo Toscano."

Jon Wilcox recently published "AElfric in Dorset and the Landscape of Pastoral Care" in Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Francesca Tinti (Cambridge: Boydell, 2005): 52-62.

Research Support Matters

The Vice President for Research makes available funding for a wonderful opportunity for faculty to support their research projects with the help of undergraduates. The Iowa Research Experiences for Undergraduates (IREU) encourages the direct involvement of undergraduates in the research of faculty by funding students for up to $3,000 to work on faculty research. You can employ a UI full-time student for almost 200 hours with this amount (Gayle Sand will help you figure the student costs), or you can use up to one third of the award for student expenses with the rest going towards a student stipend. Full details of the program are available at http://research.uiowa.edu/ifi/?get=ireu2005. My understanding is that the award is drastically under-used by faculty in the humanities, so English Department applications are likely to be well received.

The application form is online at https://login.uiowa.edu/uip/login.page?service=https://uiris.research.uiowa.edu/index.php. Applications are due by November 14.

Another funding opportunity is the Perry A. and Helen Judy Bond Fund for Interdisciplinary Interaction (see http://www.clas.uiowa.edu/deomailing/2005/10/12/bondfund.shtml) which makes available $2000-$6000 awards to support interdisciplinary research. Applications are continuous, i.e. there is no deadline.

Visitor Matters

The English Department is playing host this academic year to a Fulbright Scholar visiting from Nigeria: Onuora Benedict Nweke. Dr. Nweke received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Lagos in 2005 and has served as an assistant lecturer in the Department of English there since 2003. Dr. Nweke, who arrived in Iowa City last week, is particularly interested in pursuing his research under the guidance of Peter Nazareth and will be sharing Peter’s office, 468 EPB. Dr. Nweke is interested in learning more about 20th-century African American literature during his stay. Please make him welcome in our department.

Whitman Matters

Whitman opportunities abound next month in conjunction with the "Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman" symposium.

UI reports: Early training as a printer's apprentice gave American poet Walt Whitman such appreciation for the style, type, binding, and other physical attributes of a book that his work cannot be understood fully outside the context of the packages he crafted so carefully, said Ed Folsom, Carver Professor of English in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. To facilitate a more detailed scholarly and public examination of Whitman's publishing prowess, Folsom will lead a symposium and guest curate an exhibit at the UI Museum of Art, "Whitman Making Books: Books Making Whitman." The symposium, sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, will be held Nov. 10-12 at the Museum of Art, where the exhibit runs from Nov. 5 to Feb. 12. http://www.uiowa.edu/~ournews/2005/october/102005whitman.html.

A full schedule of events of the symposium is available: http://www.uiowa.edu/obermann/whitmanmakingbooks/schedule.html. Registration is free, but space is limited, so please see the site for details on registering in advance.

On Nov. 4 (Fri.), 5-7 p.m. at the Univ. of Iowa Museum of Art, "Know the Score LIVE" will focus on Walt Whitman and will feature Ed Folsom. The show will be broadcast live on KSUI, 91.7 FM.

And Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University will be here the entire week of November 7, Whitman Week at Iowa. He will give the Carver Lecture on Tuesday evening, November 8, at 7:30 in the Gerber Lounge on "Whitman at Night: 'The Sleepers' in 1855."

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