Reading Matters, Vol. 12, Issue 16, May 3, 2007

From (under) the Chair's Desk

What a delight to see the strengths of our graduate program on display at the Graduate Awards ceremony (thanks Barbara and Cherie) and of our undergraduates at the Honors Awards ceremony (thanks Mary Ann). If you missed the event, you can catch the story in a press release (with thanks to Kelly Ruth Anderson).

As this semester hastens to its end, this may be a good moment to look back briefly at a few of this year’s initiatives and where they now stand.

• The Gateway course will be a reality for the first time in the Fall as 008:005 Introduction to the English Major: the Theory and Practice of Literary Study. All students who declare the major from Fall 2007 onwards will be required to take this course. We are expecting a class of about 120 students per semester, with six discussion sections led by first-year Ph.D. students, although the likely enrollment number for this fall is something of a guess. The first version of this course will be taught by Laura Rigal and the second, in Spring 2008, by Lori Branch.
• Our Outcomes Assessment of the major will become a reality next year. As part of this exercise, we now have our mission statement and goals and objectives for the major prominently displayed on the undergraduate website (see here and here). More details on the actual assessment process will circulate next term.
• The Writing Track is still a work in progress. Now that the department has approved the plan, we need to pass it through CLAS’s Educational Policy Committee and Faculty Assembly (necessary for any selective admissions programs) as well as coordinate with the Provost’s Office on the necessary resources, including the key faculty hire.
• NWP faculty have restructured both the MFA requirements and the undergraduate nonfiction writing courses to shape a more rational progression.
• In the Ph.D. program, we have now introduced a new Dissertation Research-Teaching Fellowship so that we can support two senior Ph.D. students with a year of research time interspersed with teaching a single course in their specialty for English majors.
• We have expanded the support for graduate students to attend discipline-appropriate summer institutes and the like.
• Attempting to reduce the characteristic teaching load of Ph.D. students with a non-teaching semester after the comprehensive exam remains a work in progress. Other small adaptations to Ph.D. requirements are being implemented following the faculty discussion to help enable timely completion.
• This year has seen an attempt at increased cooperation with other CIC English Departments (see the story below).
• The review of the funding mechanism and structure of the department’s journals remains a work in progress. I am expecting to receive the review report any day now and expect to share this with faculty and discuss it at a departmental meeting early next fall.

As the semester ends, we can expect some 280 students to graduate with an English major, along with some 15 NWP MFA students and 10 Ph.D. students. That and the approximately 10,000 students who have enrolled in the roughly 400 courses we have offered across the year gives a sense that, as a department, we have not been shirking our mission to teach the good burgers of Iowa, while the half a dozen books and forty scholarly articles and essays that English Department faculty published in 2006, along with the hundred or so conference papers, lectures, and readings that we collectively delivered, suggest that we have also been doing our bit to contribute to scholarly discussion!

I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow at a retirement celebration for Bill Kupersmith after his 35 years in the English Department (Friday, May 3, 12-2 in the Gerber Lounge). I will then be doing some conference traveling during finals week, and then be broadly available in 308 EPB until the end of May. After that, I am looking forward to handing over to this year’s summer chair, Barbara Eckstein, and being broadly unavailable until the first week of August! Good luck in your classes to all who are teaching summer school and happy and productive research to the rest of you. I look forward to seeing everyone, refreshed and reinvigorated, at our traditional formal opening reception of the new academic year on the evening of Sunday, August 26, when we will have the opportunity to welcome our new colleague, Steve Kuusisto, along with our year-long NWP senior visitor, Mary Ruefle, and a small group of new visitors and adjuncts.

Happy travels and enjoy the summer break!

Policy Matters

CLAS has provided a handy summary of recent and anticipated changes in policy affecting teaching. These are summarized here:

Teaching Matters

The College is still accepting applications for 1 s.h. First-Year Seminars for Spring 2008. Details are available here.

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Congratulations to John D'Agata, Barbara Eckstein, Patricia Foster, and Bonnie Sunstein, each of whom has been successful in their applications for Arts and Humanities Initiative (AHI) Program grants.

Gina Bloom's book, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, has just been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Here's part of the description from the press's website, which also contains a link to the table of contents and an excerpt: "Voice in Motion explores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction."

David Dowling has two essays forthcoming: “Capital Sentiment: Fanny Fern’s Transformation of the Gentleman Publisher’s Code” in ATQ: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 21.4 (December 2007) or 22.1 (March 2008) and “’Hard as a Diamond’: Running and Living Deliberately in Parker and Thoreau” in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, 25.1(Spring/Summer 2007) or 25.2(Fall 2007). He will present a paper on the research of the latter publication at this year’s Sport Literature Association meeting. The paper’s title is “’Grounded in the Basics’: Running and Living Deliberately in Parker and Thoreau.”

On Friday, May 3, 2007, from noon to 2:00 p.m. in Gerber Lounge, we'll gather to celebrate Bill Kupersmith, who will be retiring after teaching at the Univ. of Iowa for 35 years. Bill came to Iowa in 1972, after undergraduate work at Georgetown, graduate work at the Univ. of Texas at Austin, and a few years teaching at Rice University and Gonzaga University. His books and many articles have primarily focused on seventeenth and eighteenth-century satirists and satirical writing, and his latest book, English Imitations of Roman Verse Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century is forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press. His recent teaching has focused on classical and biblical literature, British 18th-century literature, and nonfiction. Since 1975, Bill has served as the editor for the Philological Quarterly, overseeing publication of countless articles on classical and modern literature. All the best, Bill, in your future endeavors!

News Matters

The UI issued a press release about the graduate and undergraduate awards ceremonies the department held last month. The press release is here. Thanks to Kelly Ruth Anderson for compiling the information for the release.

The DI recently ran a story about the framed poetry on display in April--National Poetry Month--at Grounds for Dessert Coffeehouse. NWP student Michael Potter helped conceive of and create the display, using poetry submitted by local poets. Works by a number of English Department members was included, including poetry by Michael Potter, Eve Rosenbaum, Ori Fienberg, and Steve McNutt.

CIC Matters: A Potential Summer Institute

A recent meeting of chairs of English of the CIC institutions saw us acting on one proposal and trying to keep alive another. The success was our desire to make available postdoctoral visiting positions to recent graduates from each others’ institutions. While the dust has yet to settle on the details, it seems that our recent graduate, Joyce Kelley, will be going to teach at Northwestern next year, while we will be hosting a visiting early modern specialist, Jeffrey Gore, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. More challenging has been the idea of a CIC Summer Institute. We had hoped to see the institute funded by our collective institutions but, in twelve out of thirteen cases, CIC Humanities Deans were appreciative of the concept but not of the request for funding. (The exception was Michigan, which came up with half the recurring $10K we were each requesting.) CIC chairs have agreed to go ahead with a call for proposals, although now as a pilot project that will need to seek one-off funding. That call follows. Feel free to come and talk with me if you are interested in talking about possible proposals.

CIC Summer Institute: Call for Proposals

The Heads of English of the CIC (Big Ten) Schools are pursuing a collective initiative to enrich doctoral studies in English. Accordingly they have proposed founding an annual intensive two-week or three-week Summer Institute in Theory and Criticism, to be co-taught by two primary faculty from CIC English departments, with two guest faculty from CIC English departments other than those of the primary faculty. The Institute will be attended (on a competitive basis) by two doctoral candidates from each of the thirteen participating CIC English departments.

The Summer Institute will be followed each fall by a conference based on the Institute theme. Participation in the annual post-Institute conference would be open to faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in English studies. The theme of the Institute will change each year, as will the site of the Institute; the site of the conference will be at a location different from the Institute’s.

The theme of each annual Institute will be chosen from proposals by CIC English faculty submitted, on a competitive basis, to CIC Heads of English by September 15 in the fall prior to the Institute.

The CIC Heads of English now seek proposals for a pilot Summer Institute, two weeks in duration, in 2008. The site of the Institute is to be determined. Proposals, no more than two pages in length, should formulate a broadly speculative intellectual inquiry, and an intensive two-week plan of study, that will comprehend interests of all doctoral candidates in English studies. Along with proposals brief CV’s of the faculty proposers and of their prospective guests must be submitted to the proposers’ department Heads by September 15, 2007.

Placement Matters, updated

Please join us in congratulating the following job candidates for their recently accepted positions. If you have additional information or corrections, please contact Barbara Eckstein, Director of Graduate Studies, or Kathy Lavezzo, Director of Placement.

 

Incoming Matters

We're happy to announce the incoming graduate classes:

Incoming Ph.D. Students 2007:

Raquel Baker, B.A., San Francisco State University, 2002; M.F.A., Mills College, 2005
Area of Interest: Anglophone Postcolonial Literature

Cassandra Bausman, B.A., Augustana College, 2006
Area of Interest: Women’s Literature

Thomas Hughes Blake, B.A., University of Tennessee-Knoxville, 2002; M.A., University of Tennessee-Knoxville, 2005
Area of Interest: Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Blake Bronson-Bartlett, B.A., Hunter College, 2006
Area of Interest: 19th Century American Literature

Craig Carey, B.S., Syracuse University, 2001; M.A., University of Chicago, 2002; M.A., Brooklyn College, 2007

Andrew Crooke, B.A., Cornell University, 2001
Area of Interest: Twentieth Century American Fiction

Kerry Anne Delaney, B.A., Washington College, 2007
Area of Interest: Renaissance

Robert Fernandez, B.A., Florida Atlantic University, 2004; M.F.A., University of Iowa, 2006
Area of Interest: Theory/Contemporary Literature

Mary Hickman-Fernandez, B.A. Boise State University; M.F.A., University of Iowa, 2006
Area of Interest: Poetry

Sunghyun Jang, B.A., Yonsei University, 2003; M.A., Seoul National University, 2005
Area of Interest: British Romanticism

Bryan Mangano, B.A., Massachusetts College Lib. Art, 2005; M.A., Boston College, 2007
Area of Interest: 18th Century Novel Studies

Sarah Fay McCarthy, B.A. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 1994; M.A., Warren Wilson College, 2006,
Area of Interest: Modern American Poetry

Paul McCullough, B.A. California Polytech State University, 2007
Area of Interest: American Literature

Christine Norquest, B.A. Southwestern University, 2003

Melanie Reichwald, B.A., S U N Y – College at Purchase, 2006
Area of Interest: African American Literature

Ross Salinas, B.A., Southwestern University, 2003; M.A., University of Texas, 2007
Area of Interest: American Literature

Jillian Walker, B.A., Trinity University, 2003; University of Colorado-Boulder, 2005
Area of Interest: Victorian

Lacey Worth, B.A., Kenyon College, 2005
Area of Interest: American Literature and African American Literature

Incoming NWP Students 2007:

Tim Denevi
Nicole Erickson
Nina Feng
Erik Habecker
Jenna Hammerich
Janet Henderickson
Cheyenne Nimes
Jennifer Percy
David Rompf
Leslie Van Wassenhove
Maris Venia
Stephen West
Ellicott Wood

Graduate Matters

In our last issue, we left out an important detail when posting information about graduate awards. Ania Spyra's dissertation is co-directed by Claire Fox and Mary Lou Emery. Our apologies for the omission.

NWP Matters

The winner of this year's Provost's Church Street Fellowship is Matthew Davis. Matt will be working over the next year for the IWP as part of his fellowship.

The BBC in London will be featuring an excerpt from Rebecca Sheir's NWP thesis, a radio documentary on the Jewish burial ritual of Taharah. The show is called "A World in Your Ear," and features snippets from English-language programming around the world. Once the program airs this weekend, you'll be able to listen online for the next seven days here.

Undergraduate Diversity Matters

Jennifer Modestou, Director of Campus Relations, Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity recently send out the following email:

MEMORANDUM

TO: Deans, Directors, and Departmental Executive Officers
FROM: Jennifer Modestou, Director of Campus Relations, Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity
RE: First report from the Diversity Campus Climate Survey released
DATE: April 30, 2007

The Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity is pleased to announce the release of the first in a series of four reports from the Diversity Campus Climate Survey Committee. Commissioned by the President’s Office, the surveys were sent during 2005 to undergraduate students, graduate and professional students, faculty and staff to assess the climate for diversity on The University of Iowa campus. Results from the first report, the undergraduate student survey, show that while the overall diversity climate is good, there is some room for improvement.

All four surveys examined three main areas: campus climate; quality of relationships among groups; and diversity awareness. In compiling its report, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity considered the responses of all undergraduate students in the survey, but also responses for subgroups based on racial/ethnic group status (majority or minority), citizenship status (U.S.-born or non-U.S.-born), gender (male or female), age group (18-19 years old, 20-22 years old, 23-25 years old, or 26 years old and older), and class standing (freshman/first year, sophomore, junior, or senior).

Some key findings included:

--While responses in the survey were generally positive in terms of diversity, students who are racial/ethnic minorities, non-U.S.-born citizens, and 26 and older reported less access, equity, and inclusion at the university and perceived less institutional commitment to diversity than majority, U.S.-born, and younger respondents. When asked if they felt as though they belonged at the UI, 80.1 percent of all respondents selected “yes.” Minorities, non-U.S. citizens and older undergraduate students responded “yes” at lower rates.

--Racial/ethnic minorities, non-U.S.-born citizens, and students age 26 and older also tended to rate the quality of their living, learning, and working environments lower than did majority, U.S.-born, and younger respondents.

A six-member subcommittee, with the assistance of a campus-wide advisory committee, compiled the report and made several recommendations covering the areas of communication, student engagement and skill development, and future research and assessment.

The subcommittee is next working to finish analysis on the climate survey for graduate and professional students, to be followed by analysis of faculty and staff surveys.

The complete report from the undergraduate student survey, along with an executive summary report, is available on the Internet at: http://www.uiowa.edu/president/task-forces/diversity-climate/index.htm .

Virginia Tech Matters

Ed Folsom delivered the following at the UI memorial service on Monday, April 23, one week following the shootings at Virginia Tech, and we thank him for letting us print them here.

There is something deep in the experience of living things that makes death in spring seem particularly cruel. The horrific murders at the University of Iowa sixteen years ago came with the beginning of November, as an early snow fell and a dark winter was beginning to settle in. But the mass deaths at Virginia Tech came in April, just as, nearly 150 years ago, on just about the same springtime date, an assassin’s bullet pierced Abraham Lincoln’s skull, and four years of unimaginable mass carnage of the nation’s youth seemed distilled in that one bullet in that one skull. It was April 14, and Walt Whitman, hearing the news, walked out of his mother’s house into the back dooryard, where the lilacs were in early bloom. In the inhalation of his grief, he breathed in the scent of lilacs, of spring, of new beginnings, and that springtime scent would forever after remind him of death, not just Lincoln’s death, but the deaths of all those hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the torn nation, young men about the same age as those who were gunned down on April 16 in Virginia.

Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” is often called an elegy to Lincoln, but there is little solace in the poem, and Lincoln is never mentioned. Instead, it is the poet’s attempt to force into language an unspeakable grief, not to gain or provide comfort, but rather to provide words, words that are, as he says in the sentence fragment that concludes this fragmented poem, words that are “retrievements out of the night.”

At one point near the end of the poem, Whitman allows himself to put into words the horror of the mass death that he and the nation had witnessed for the previous few years, when each April had brought hope of an end to the war, only to conclude once again with a blood-soaked spring, until, as Whitman wrote, “the infinite dead” saturated the entire land, distilling through “Nature’s chemistry” their substance “in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw.”

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles
I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and
bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffered.

This “splinter’d and broken” landscape that Whitman opens his eyes and words to was not just a battlefield landscape—it was a national one. As Lincoln’s coffin traveled from Washington DC to Illinois across America’s spring landscape, thousands of citizens broke sprigs of lilac from their lilac bushes and festooned the coffin and the train itself with those spring flowers. It was the year that lilac bushes across the country were broken, a reflection of the broken families, the broken futures, that every town in the nation experienced from the countless deaths of those years.

This is, it seems to me, what poetry can do for us at times like this: provide words for our grief, words to make our grief articulate, not to comfort us or to make us forget or to make us create a positive out of this dark emptiness of mass death in April. We at Iowa heard the news from Blacksburg and thought once again of those whose futures stopped sixteen years ago, some of them old friends: Chris Goertz, Dwight Nicholson, Robert Smith, Anne Cleary, Linhua Shan. So, once again, we create memorials, we print pictures and short biographies in the newspapers and on the Web, and we try, as Whitman tried, to pull some “retrievements out of the night”: “Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night.”

Let me conclude with a brief poem by Lucille Clifton, one that was written after 9/11 and that echoes Whitman, and that, with one slight change, is every bit as appropriate today, after another mass death event that leaves us speechless but not without words:

thunder and lightning and our world
is another place no day
will ever be the same no blood
untouched

they know this storm in otherwheres
israel iraq palestine
but God has blessed America
we sing

and God has blessed America
to learn that no one is exempt
the world is one all fear

is one all life all death
is one

Department Calendar

May 4 (Fri.), noon-2:00 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Celebration to mark the retirement of Bill Kupersmith

May 4 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB—The Early Modern Reading Group will meet to discuss a paper about King Lear by Doug Trevor. Please contact Stacy Erickson (stacy-erickson@uiowa.edu) for more details.

May 5 (Sat.), 3:00 p.m., Clapp Recital Hall, Voxman Music Building—World Percussion Concert with Ray Holman. This event is part of the Caribbean, Diaspora and Atlantic Studies Program’s Spring Lecture and Performance Series: Caribbean Discourses and Contrapuntal Modernity.

May 15, Tue.), end of day—deadline for submitting spring semester grades on OSIRIS

July 26 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Gary Frost will give a talk titled “Medieval Bookbinding.” His talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Aug. 2 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Raymond A. Mentzer will give a talk titled “Medieval Religious Texts.” His talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Aug. 9 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Edwin A. Holtum will give a talk titled “Breaking With Galen: Anatomy and Medicine in the Early Days of Printing.” His talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Aug. 16 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Cheryl D. Jacobsen will give a talk titled “They Did That All by Hand? The Dedicated Task of the Medieval Scribe.” Her talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Aug. 23 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Timothy D. Barrett will give a talk titled “On the Invention of Imitation Parchment: Papermaking in Europe 1300-1500.” His talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Aug. 24 (Fri.), 2:30-4 p.m., Gerber Lounge, 304 EPB—Orientation Meeting for Incoming PhD Graduate Students

Aug. 24 (Fri.), 5-7 p.m., UI Museum of Art—"Know the Score LIVE" will feature David Schoonover and Gregory Prickman discussing the "From Monks to Masters" exhibit. The program can be heard live on radio station KSUI, 91.7 FM (101.7 FM in Dubuque). It will be rebroadcast on KSUI 3-5 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 26, and 7-9 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 29. You may also listen to the broadcast on the Internet at http://ksui.uiowa.edu. More details of the program can be found here.

Aug. 26 (Sun.), 7:00-9:00 p.m., IMU South Room—Opening Meeting and Reception for Fall Semester

Aug. 27 (Mon.)—Start of fall semester classes

Aug. 29 (Wed.), 7 p.m., Prairie Lights Book Store—David Hamilton will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the International Writing Program with a reading of contributions to the Iowa Review by IWP writers. See the event live at Prairie Lights, listen live on the Internet at http://writinguniversity.uiowa.edu, or catch the reading when it is broadcast on Prairie Lights Live. Hour-long "Live from Prairie Lights" productions air at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Saturdays, and 7 p.m. Sundays on WSUI-AM 910 in Iowa City, WOI-AM 640 in Ames and KRNI-AM 1010 in Cedar Falls. A program is also broadcast at 5 p.m. Sundays on KSUI-FM 91.7 in Iowa City.

Aug. 30 (Thr.), 12:00 p.m., Rockwood Fellowship Hall, Congregational Church, 30 N. Clinton St. in Iowa City—Christopher Merrill, director of the University of Iowa International Writing Program, will present "A Levantine Journey" at a noon luncheon of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council. A UI News Release can be found here.

Aug. 30 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Sara T. Sauers will give a talk titled “Early Modern Typography.” Her talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Aug. 31 (Fri.)—Deadline for submission of reports to DEO on Career Development, Faculty Scholar, or Global Scholar Awards taken in Spring 2007.

Sept. 2 (Sun.), 5 p.m., Prairie Lights—South African fiction writer and poet Tom Dreyer and Bosnian/German fiction writer Sasa Stanisic will be joined by UI writing fellow Matt Davis, a recent graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program for an IWP reading. A UI news release is here.

Sept. 5 (Wed.), 2-3 p.m., Gerber Lounge (304 EPB)—A "meet and greet" reception will be held for the Nonfiction Writing Program.

Sept. 6 (Thr.), 3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge (304 EPB)—Departmental Meeting.

Sept. 6 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Elizabeth Aubrey will give a talk titled “From Singer’s Lips to Scribe’s Pen: Music in Medieval Manuscripts.” Her talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Sept. 7 (Fri.)—Deadline for submission of Career Development Award Applications to DEO. More details here.

Sept. 11 (Tue.), 4:00-5:15 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Curriculum Area Committee Meeting: Medieval & Early Modern Lit. & Culture, convened by Claire Sponsler

Sept. 12 (Wed.), 1:00 p.m., 331 EPB—NWP Advisory Committee Meeting

Sept. 12 (Wed.), 4:00-5:15 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Curriculum Area Committee Meeting: Modern British Lit. & Culture, convened by Eric Gidal

Sept. 13 (Thr.), 4:00-5:15 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Curriculum Area Committee Meeting: American Lit. & Culture, convened by Bluford Adams

Sept. 13 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Denise Filios will give a talk titled “Constructing Power: Illuminated Manuscripts in Medieval and Golden Age Spain.” Her talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Sept. 14 (Fri.)—Deadline for submission of Faculty Scholar and Global Scholar Award Applications to DEO. More details about the Faculty Scholar Awards are here, and more information about the Global Scholar Awards can be found here.

Sept. 14 (Fri.), 4:00-5:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge—English Department Faculty Colloquium: Matt Brown on "Undisciplined Reading"

Sept. 15 (Sat.), 5:30-7:30 p.m., 404 Linder Rd.—English Department reception

Sept. 18 (Tue.), 4:00-5:15 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Curriculum Area Committee Meeting: Transnational Lit. & Postcolonial Studies, convened by Claire Fox

Sept. 19 (Wed.), 4:00-5:15 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Curriculum Area Committee Meeting: Nonfiction Writing, convened by Robin Hemley

Sept. 20 (Thr.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Curriculum Area Committee Meeting: Literary Theory & Interdisciplinary Studies, convened by David Wittenberg

Sept. 20 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Jonathan Wilcox will give a talk titled “Questions of Authenticity: Medieval Charters, Medieval Manuscripts, and Modern Facsimiles.” His talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Sept. 27 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Glenn Ehrstine will give a talk titled “Medieval Studies in Iowa.” His talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Sept. 28 (Fri.)—2007 Old Gold Summer Fellowship reports due to DEO with a copy to the Dean's Office. More details here.

Oct. 4 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UIMA Carver Gallery—Matthew P. Brown will give a talk titled “The Persistence of the Medieval in Early American Book Culture.” His talk is part of the lecture series presented by University of Iowa Libraries and the University of Iowa Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibit "From Monks to Masters: The Medieval Manuscript and the Early Printed Book."

Oct. 18 (Thr.), 3:00-4:00 p.m., Hanson Family Humanities Gallery, Old Capitol Museum—Gallery Talk, "The Writer's Desk" by Kevin Kopelson, in conjunction with the exhibition, A Community of Writers: A History of Creative Writing at The University of Iowa.

Oct. 18 (Thr.), 7:00 p.m., Prairie Lights Bookstore—Jeff Porter will read from his new book Oppenheimer Is Watching Me. See the event live at Prairie Lights, listen live on the Internet at http://writinguniversity.uiowa.edu, or catch the reading when it is broadcast on Prairie Lights Live. Hour-long "Live from Prairie Lights" productions air at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Saturdays, and 7 p.m. Sundays on WSUI-AM 910 in Iowa City, WOI-AM 640 in Ames and KRNI-AM 1010 in Cedar Falls. A program is also broadcast at 5 p.m. Sundays on KSUI-FM 91.7 in Iowa City.

Oct. 19 (Fri.), 4:00-5:00 p.m., Gerber Lounge—English Department Faculty Colloquium: Garrett Stewart on "Little Dorrit and the Narratology of Closure"

Oct. 19 (Fri.), 4:00 p.m.—Guided bus tour of a portion of the Iowa River leading to Iowa Falls where, at 7:00 p.m., environmental and legal historian Ted Steinberg—author of Nature Incorporated—will read at the public library. This event is one of three planned by Barbara Eckstein in response to American Rivers placing the Iowa River on its 2007 most endangered rivers list. Each event includes a guided tour of a portion of the river with site visits where experts will explain their work and a reading/lecture by a talented writer and expert on the plight of another river within the US or beyond it.

Oct. 20 (Sat.), 10 a.m., Schaeffer Hall, Rm. 40—Linda Bolton will lead a Saturday Scholars course titled “Ethical Activism in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver." More on the Saturday Scholars program is available here, and more on Linda's presentation is here.

Oct. 24 (Wed.) - Oct. 25 (Thr.), Old Brick Auditorium, 26 E. Market St.—2007 Obermann Humanities Symposium: From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances

Oct. 25 (Thr.), 8:00 p.m., McBride Auditorium—A staged reading of Elizabeth Robins’s 1907 play Votes for Women! will be performed. This staged reading represents an innovative collaboration of students in a UI English class, faculty and students in Theatre Arts, the 18th-and 19th-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium of International Programs, the Center for Human Rights, the Women’s Resource and Action Center, and the League of Women Voters. Members of the University of Iowa and the local community will appear in the production (and small speaking parts are still available). For more information, contact Teresa Mangum, teresa-mangum@uiowa.edu.

Oct. 26 (Fri.)—2008-2009 Flexible Load Assignment applications due to DEO. More details here.

Oct. 29 (Mon.), 7:00-8:00 p.m., Prairie Lights—Kevin Kopelson will read from his new book, Sedaris (University of Minnesota Press).

Nov. 1-3 (Thr.-Sat.)—NonfictioNOW Conference

Nov. 7 (Wed.) through Feb. 2008, North Lobby of the Main Library—Blake at 250, an exhibition in honor of William Blake’s 250th birthday. The exhibit is curated by Mary Lynn Johnson, John Grant, Judith Pascoe, and Eric Gidal and will feature the library’s collection of limited edition reproductions held in Special Collections.

Nov. 9 (Fri.), 4:00-5:00 p.m., Gerber Lounge—English Department Faculty Colloquium: Judith Pascoe on Sarah Siddons and Bette Davis

Nov. 14 (Wed.), 8:00 p.m., Clapp Recital Hall—A celebratory concert of musical settings for works by William Blake by Virgil Thomson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilter, and others, led by Professor Katherine Eberle of the University of Iowa School of Music. Performers include Eberle, mezzo-soprano; John Muriello, baritone; Stephen Swanson, baritone, Kelsey Williams, soprano; Lynn Maxfield, tenor; Rene Lecuona, piano; and an oboist yet to be selected.

Nov. 15 (Thr.)—Joan Shelley Rubin will be the University of Iowa Center for the Book’s Brownell speaker on Thursday, Nov. 15.

Nov. 28 (Wed.)—The celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake will be celebrated with a birthday cake in the library and a reading at Prairie Lights featuring members of the UI community reciting favorite passages from his works. More details as they become available.

Dec. 14 (Fri.)—2008 Old Gold Summer Fellowship applications due to DEO. More details here.

Feb. 1 (Fri.)—Deadline for submission of reports to DEO on Career Development, Faculty Scholar, or Global Scholar Awards taken in Fall 2007.

March 2-March 4, 2008—Michael Warner will visit as an Ida Beam Scholar.

Other Calendars

UI Master Calendar of Events | UI Academic Calendar | The Writers Workshop Reading Schedule

Future Issues

Please send any items for Reading Matters or the departmental calendar to Carolyn Jacobson at carolyn-jacobson@uiowa.edu. This is the last issue of the school year, but Reading Matters will return in the Fall, appearing every other Thursday during the semester. Please feel free to send news and calendar dates throughout the summer. The calendar contained in this issue will be kept up to date.