News from the Chair, Judith Goleman The academic year, 2007-08, began with a new chair, Judith Goleman, introducing a new chancellor, J. Keith Motley, to the English Department at its first meeting. In his opening remarks to the department, Chancellor Motley repeated a comment he made at the CLA Fall Faculty Meeting, that the liberal arts are the “core of the university” and that he is committed to our well-being. New Faculty and Program Development This past year also marked the first full cycle of our revised major as well as our new MFA program. Joining us in the Fall to teach Composition pedagogy and studies in the essay was new Assistant Professor, Stephen Sutherland. Joining us in the Spring to teach poetry in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing program was new Assistant Professor Suji Kim. Joyce Peseroff, Director of the MFA, reports that the first class of students had a great year and that applications for the 2008-09 class were robust. The department won approval for extensive course name and number changes intended to give the offerings in our new major more consistency and clarity. In addition, a proposal for establishing concentrations in Irish Studies, Professional Writing and Creative Writing was passed by the Faculty Senate, enabling us to offer these long-standing programs both as minors for non-majors and concentrations for our majors. The MA program, under the direction of Robert Crossley, continued to build its curriculum and attract excellent students from both the metropolitan area and across the country. Two new MA courses also received approval: The Harlem Renaissance, proposed by Susan Tomlinson, and Politics, Literary Culture, and Theatrical Media in London, 1659-1735, proposed and taught collaboratively by Cheryl Nixon and Malcolm Smuts of the History Department. In her first year as Director of Freshman English, Elsa Auerbach spear-headed many important initiatives for the improvement of teaching and learning in our lower division writing courses. Under her leadership, the Freshman English Program held its first in-house mini-conference, consisting of three pairs of concurrent sessions developed by members of the Freshman English staff and a plenary address by Stephen Sutherland, “Teaching Reading in a Writing Class.” Faculty Research, Grants and Creative Work The faculty of the English Department published prolifically and won many awards, grants and distinctions. New books that came out this past year include: John Fulton’s The Animal Girl: Two Novellas and Three Short Stories (LSU Press); Lloyd Schwartz’s co-edited Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (Library of America); Askold Melnyczuk’s novel, The House of Widows (Graywolf Press); Taylor Stoehr’s translations from classical Chinese of the T’ang dynasty, I Hear My Gate Slam: Chinese Poets Meeting and Parting, (Pressed Wafer Press); Vivian Zamel’s co-edited collection, Language Lessons: Stories for Teaching and Learning English (U of Michigan Press); Joyce Peseroff’s fourth volume of poems, Eastern Mountain Time (Carnegie Mellon University Press). Joe Torra published two novels: Call Me Waiter I (Pressed Wafer Press) and They Say (Quale Press); Dorothy Nelson published a book of poems, The Dream of the Sea (Cambridge O.L.D. Press) and Laurie Marks published a novel, Water Logic by Small Beer Press. In addition, numerous poems, works of fiction, scholarly and critical articles have appeared in such journals as Salamander, Salmagundi, American Literature, Studies in Romanticism, Language Issues, Radical Teacher, African American Review, The Shakespeare Yearbook, The Worcester Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, Woolf Studies Annual and Human Architecture. Nadia Nurhussein won a prestigious fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, allowing her to take a research leave next year. Patrick Barron has won the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his bilingual edition of The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto and Rajini Srikanth was co-principal investigator on the Ford Foundation “Engaging Islam” grant of $100,000. Cheryl Nixon won two external grants: a research fellowship from the Huntington Library and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. In collaboration with Scott Maisano and Len von Morze, Nixon was also awarded a grant by the President’s Creative Economy Initiative Fund to support a BPL/UMB partnership for access to rare books. Stephanie Kamath was granted an award from the British Academy’s Neil Ker Memorial Fund to support her archival research. And Betsy Klimasmith was awarded the Stephen F. Botein Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society. The senior members of the department continue to win Chancellor’s awards: Linda Dittmar in 2007 and Lois Rudnick in 2008 for Distinguished Teaching and Robert Crossley in 2008 for Distinguished Service. Student Achievements One of our greatest sources of pride as a faculty is seeing our students clarify their professional goals and winning admission to graduate school. This year, a number of our students will go on to PhD or MFA programs, supported by assistantships and funding, at the following schools: Brown University, Tufts University, Temple University, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, University of Nevada/Reno. In addition, two students have been accepted to our own MFA Program. This year’s named prizes for undergraduate achievement went to Jessica Oviatt, Caroline Kautsire, Lauren McShane and Ian Tarter. The graduate prize winners were Itai Halevi, Kristen Bennett, Lindsey Kate Fay, Jaclyn Partyka, Alexander Gang and Yasuhito Yamamoto. Transitions Over the past year there have been significant transitions within the department and noteworthy events sponsored by the department. Robert Crossley stepped down as chair, having served in that role for eleven years and Linda Dittmar retired in December 2007, having taught at UMass Boston since 1968. The annual Shaun O’Connell lecture, organized by Tom O’Grady and Len von Morze, drew over 200 people to campus in November for a reading by South Boston native, Michael Patrick MacDonald. Not one to be outdone by his own success, Tom has managed to secure the novelist Tom Perotta for the 4th Annual Shaun O’Connell Lecture on November 16, 2008. Upcoming Year Poems by Lloyd Schwartz, the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at UMass Boston, will be set as songs at the Tanglewood Music Center Poems by Lloyd Schwartz, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at UMass Boston, will be set as songs by this year's six composition fellows at the Tanglewood Music Center. The fellows are young composers chosen from hundreds of applicants from all over the world--coming from China, Australia, Israel, England, Scotland, and Madison, Wisconsin. Each is setting one Schwartz’s poems for voice and piano. They are working with this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning composer-in-residence at Tanglewood, Shulamit Ran. The composers have each been given a sheaf of poems from which to choose one to set. The shortest poem chosen, “Renato’s Dream,” is a brief narration by a Brazilian poet friend about his dream of speaking with the great Brazilian poets; it was chosen by Jeff Stanek, from Madison, Wisconsin. “Shut-Eye,” a violent prose poem depicting a frightening dream about shooting oneself in the eye, was the choice, quite against stereotype, of British composer Charlotte Bray, from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. Chinese composer Yao Chen picked “Her Waltz,” a poem in which the poet’s elderly mother describes a dream in which she sees herself dancing with a chair. “In the Mist,” all hushed atmosphere, was the choice of Helen Grime, from Edinburgh, Scotland. Matti Kovler, from Jerusalem, selected what is perhaps the most “American” poem in the group, “Song,” a playful lyric about a moose on the loose in the Maine woods. And Jane Stanley, from Sydney, Australia, picked “Six Words,” an intricately compressed dialogue poem with only one word per line. Schwartz likes to think that this is the world’s shortest sestina. “[When] I learned which poems of mine each of the composer-fellows had chosen, I was happily surprised by both the choices themselves and who made them,” said Schwartz. “I admired all this independent thinking, and am now looking forward all the more eagerly to meeting the composers into whose hands my poems are being put.” The concert at which these compositions will be performed takes place in the Chamber Music Hall at Tanglewood on Tuesday evening, July 29, at 8:00 PM. “I’ve been writing poems seriously for nearly fifty years, but I’ve also been a music critic for more than thirty years,” said Schwartz. “Rarely does a door ever open between these two compartments of my life. Now it has!” Schwartz won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His three books of poems, These People, Goodnight, Gracie, and Cairo Traffic have received widespread critical acclaim. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Best American Poetry. Editor of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, he is an internationally recognized authority on Bishop’s poetry, and has also recently co-edited a collection of her work for the Library of America. He is classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix and a weekly contributor to NPR’s Fresh Air. The Tanglewood Music Center is an annual summer music academy in Lenox, Massachusetts, in which emerging professional musicians participate in performances, master classes and workshops designed to provide an intense training and networking experience. The Center operates as a part of the Tanglewood Music Festival, an outdoor concert series and the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Among the esteemed musical figures who will be involved in Tanglewood productions this summer are pianist Emmanuel Ax, soprano Renée Fleming, superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma, choreographer Mark Morris, and conductor/composer/pianist André Previn.
Academic year 2008-09 promises to be an active one for the English Department with many exciting happenings and initiatives to report. See below
All the World’s a Page: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Print
All the World’s a Page: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Print showcases the books that were most vital to the education and inspiration of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) as well as the books—the First Folio of 1623 in particular—that have been responsible for transforming Shakespeare himself from a proficient playwright in his own day to the world’s most famous author in our own. Visitors to the exhibit will discover, with their own eyes, the effects of political censorship on Shakespeare’s “history plays” under the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James; the textual corruption that resulted from “pirated” versions of Shakespeare’s plays being sold by profit-seeking printers; the impact that engravings and illustrations have had on our imagination of what Shakespeare’s characters—and Shakespeare himself—might have looked like; and much, much, more. ********* GLOBAL VOICES READING SERIES (Readings by Junot Diaz, Kevin Young, Tom Perrotta and more ********** The M.A. English program
Spring 06 Newsletter (PDF) |
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