Steelman Seeking Eden

On November 4 graduate student Sheridan Steelman presented "Seeking Eden: The Power of Paradox in Andrew Marvell's Poetry" at the Midwest Conference on British Studies, hosted by Indiana State University.  Her essay observes that the sacredness of the green world becomes the antithesis of a rude society and therefore medicinal in its purpose: man will only find Paradise if he leaves God’s work untouched.   She discusssed Marvell’s poetry in light of colonization and the paradox inherent in man’s need to control.

"Grand Illusion" Premiere 12/4@Kalamazoo 10 ~ new Bentley film starring WMU students, faculty, alum

N.B.: tickets are FREE, but also limited (first-come, first-served) for this one-time screening at the cinema. If you want to be certain, you can reserve a seat in advance by emailing: chuckbentley@gmail.com

Comics Studies Poster Event - December 7

On Wednesday, December 7, from 4:10-6:10 pm in 4002 Brown Hall, students in ENGL 4100, Graphic Narratives, will be putting on a poster presentation of their semester projects.

If you have an interest in comics and graphic novels or if you are curious about the sort of scholarship that English students conduct in the field of comics studies, please feel free to attend. You are welcome to bring friends, colleagues, and students. As an added enticement, delicious baked goods will be on offer.

The event is set up in four sessions, each running for a half an hour. During each session, seven students will be standing next to their digital posters, ready to answer questions and to discuss their work. In the past, these sessions have been lively events, where participants and attendees have learned a great deal. Many of the students enrolled in the course are seniors, most of them are members of Sigma Tau Delta, and all of them would welcome the opportunity to show you their work.

Feel free to drop by for a few minutes -- or stay for the whole event!

Anne Fausto-Sterling visit to WMU ~ 12/1, 12/2

The WMU Department of Anthropology
Gender and Sexuality Speaker Series…

ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING

Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Biology and Gender Studies
Brown University

"How does a child know it is male or female?
From presymbolic to symbolic embodiment"
7-8:30 p.m.
Thursday, Dec. 1
Fetzer Center

Reception following
Free and open to the public



Faculty Seminar

9:30 a.m.
Friday, Dec. 2Moore Hall Anthropology
Seminar Room
RSVP requested but not
required to: bilinda.straight@wmich.edu

Special Student
Meeting
1 p.m.
Friday, Dec. 2
WMU Center for the Humanities
Knauss Hall
Snacks will be available


For more information contact:
bilinda.straight@wmich.edu


Sponsored by: College of Arts and Sciences, Departments of English;
Gender and Women’s Studies; Psychology; University Center for the
Humanities; University Cultural Events Committee;
Visiting Scholar Program; School of Medicine; Women’s Caucus

LINK TO WMU NEWS: http://www.wmich.edu/wmu/news/2011/11/067.html

WMU Alumni Writers Read Their Work: Fall 2011 Gwen Frostic Reading Series

We welcome you to join us for our final reading of the Fall 2011 Gwen Frostic Reading Series. We're honored to have three WMU alumni: poet Elizabeth Knapp, fiction writer Melinda Moustakis, and fiction writer Jason Skipper. They will read their work this Thursday, December 1st. The reading will take place at the WMU Bernhard Center, room 157-158, starting at 8:00 PM. We look forward to seeing you there.

The Fall 2011 issue of Comparative Drama, volume 45.3, is now available on-line at Project MUSE. Hard copies will begin mailing in early December. This volume features the following contributions:

Essays
Adapting “The Liberal Lover”: Mediterranean Commerce, Political Economy, and Theatrical Form under Richelieu
Ellen R. Welch

Why did Steele’s The Lying Lover fail? Or, The Dangers of Sentimentalism in the Comic Reform Scene
Aparna Gollapudi

“Allow, accept, be”: Terrence McNally’s Engagement with Hindu Spirituality in A Perfect Ganesh
Raymond Frontain

Opening The Notebook of Trigorin: An Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s Adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull
Zackary Ross

Play Doctor, Doctor Death: Shaw, Ibsen, and Modern Tragedy
Bert Cardullo

Reviews
Deathly Experiments: A Study of Icons and Emblems of Mortality in Christopher Marlowe's Plays
by Clayton G. MacKenzie
reviewed by Clifford Davidson

Shakespeare’s Freedom
by Stephen Greenblatt
reviewed by Coppélia Kahn

French Origins of English Tragedy
by Richard Hillman
reviewed by Hassan Melehy

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
by Jonathan Hart
reviewed by Hillaire Kallendorf

Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor's Show, 1585-1639
by Tracey Hill
reviewed by Kara Northway

Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists
by Marvin Carlson
reviewed by Barbara Ellen Logan

Declan Kiberd @ Notre Dame, Fri., 11/18

Call for Manuscripts

Knox Robinson Publishing (2010) is unique in that we are an international, independent publisher specializing in historical fiction, historical romance and medieval fantasy. We are keen to sign authors who write in these areas. We welcome the submission of well-written, original and engaging manuscripts in the areas in which we specialize. Unagented manuscripts direct from the author are accepted.



As an international company based in London with a presence in New York, we currently publish writers from five countries. We have enjoyed international success with our books, and we are looking for promising new writers to join us. Click here for submission guidelines.

News
Call For Reviewers
Are you an avid reader? Would you like to receive free books?

We are looking for reviewers of our upcoming novels. If you have an interest in our books and you have an active blog or if you are a regular reviewer on sites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, we will provide free copies of our upcoming novels in ePub (iBooks and Nook), Mobi (Kindle), or PDF format. Hardcovers and paperbacks are available if essential.



To apply to become a reviewer, email us at reviews@knoxrobinsonpublishing.com. Please provide us with links to your online reviews.

Free eBooks


Medieval Fantasy

In Torquemada's Spain during the Inquisition, scholar and manuscript hunter Richard Longmoor knows that everything is not always as it seems...Read more


Historical Fiction

Geoffrey Hotspur is one of the most talented squires in the hall of John of Gaunt; but his place rests on the good will of the lady of the hall and she does not suffer fools gladly.... Read more


Historical Romance

Escaping a brutal father, Briony runs to James, the man she loves. With his family's blessing, they marry and prepare for a new life in a new country – America....Read more


Upcoming Books



ISBN - 978-1-9084830-3-4
Hardcover - 8 December
Paperback & eBook - 6 September 2012

Podcast with the author available

Easter Monday, 1809: Kirkley Hall manor house is mysteriously burgled. When suspicion falls on Jamie Charlton... Read more


ISBN - 978-0-9567901-1-8
Hardcover - 8 December
Paperback & eBook - 6 September 2012



A Viking saga that begins with a fateful kidnapping in Brittany, on to intrigue in Constantinople and ends on a battlefield in England in 1066... Read more


ISBN - 978-1-9084830-6-5
Hardcover - 8 December
Paperback & eBook - 6 September 2012

Podcast with the author available

1494 Barcelona. As Torquemada lights the fires of religious fervor, accused heretics are not the only victims..Read more


Excerpts

The Hermetica of Elysium
1498, Spain

Nadira awoke long before dawn when she felt Marcus roll onto her, his elbow digging into her ribs. He apologized before he got up from his bedding, pulling her to her feet with a strong arm. He passed his hands chastely up and down the sides of her body from her shoulders to her hips.

“Did I crush anything?” His voice was soft and low, a hint of a smile beneath the black beard.

Nadira shook her head, pulling bits of dry grass from her dark braid. He bent double, rolled his bedding with hers. "I spend days keeping you from harm only to squash you myself," he joked, his



blue eyes twinkling.The others were moving about as well, gathering the horses and loading them with bedding and tools. The two boys worked the pack animals while Garreth, already mounted, rode alone up the trail in front of them. Nadira waited until Marcus was ready with his horse, but instead of hauling her up beside him as he had always done before, he led her to one of the packhorses.... Read more


Literally Dead
Chicago, 1935

Ernest Hemingway and I met in the spring of 1935. "April is the cruelest month," a fellow expatriate of his wrote. Hemingway's train from New York was three hours late. Chill rain was falling in Chicago on its arrival. America was in its sixth year of Depression. All that and, to be blunt, the man considered by many as the greatest living prose stylist was just plain pissed about just plain everything.

I recognized him immediately. Broad, large head, bushy mustache, high forehead, and immense eyes were right off the dust jackets of his books. But his mouth was different. I had seen it



photographed clenched as he typed. Crinkled with private irony in pictures from the Twenties. Even smiling over a kudu carcass he'd bagged on safari. On the platform of Union Station that mouth was curled in the most malevolent sneer I ever encountered. Despite being forewarned about his volatile moods, I had a duty to perform...Read more


The House of Women
Leeds, England 1870

Montgomery Woodruff scowled at the low, dirty clouds as though they had appeared just to torment him. He tugged at his lapels, jerking his greatcoat close as the wind tried its best to wrestle a way into his inner garments. The end of January had been unrelenting with blizzards, storms and freezing temperatures. Woodruff entered his carriage and yanked at the folded blanket on the seat, his impatience sending it sliding to the floor.

With a muttered oath, he arranged the blanket to better suit his needs, ignoring his clerk who stood dithering in the elements waiting for last minute instructions.



Woodruff sent him a withering glare before a curt command from his driver, Sykes, sent the showy black horses away from the three-storey Georgian building to merge with the traffic in the bustling streets of the great Yorkshire town. Sighing heavily, Woodruff stretched his neck from the starched collar, trying to relax as they traversed around pedestrians and vehicles. Winter gloom and the cold sent most people hurrying home, shop keepers were packing up, women scolded children towards their own hearths while business men headed for the warmth and smoky atmosphere of expensive clubs... Read more


Harald Hardrada: The Last Viking
Coast of Brittany, 1031

The men from the sea sank for cover in the trees on the far side of the clearing, waiting for the scout to return. Across the glade they grouped together. No word was spoken by any, but a longer shaft of light from the moon lit up bearded faces both tense with expectation and alight with the anticipation of what was to come. Here and there a tongue moistened dry lips, while broken-nailed fingers flexed on the shafts of swords, axes and spears.

At length, the scout returned and spoke in a low murmur to one of the crouching men, one whose face in the moonlight was incongruous in its youthfulness, his only flaw an arm hideously scarred



by a crudely administered cauterization.

"Nothing moves, leder. No lights, no sound. What now?" Harald looked about him, gestured to another shadowy form and pointed wide and to the right. "Skallagrim - your party to cut the road."
“Aye, Harald."

Ten men rose and moved off at a trot in the direction given. The main body moved carefully and slowly through the trees until they thinned, revealing the outlines of several buildings clustered about a small, whitewashed church with a bell tower at its seaward end. Harald whistled softly, and two men turned to him.

“Thorkill and Sweyn - to the church,” he said. “That bell must not ring. Go."Read more


www.knoxrobinsonpublishing.com

Playwright Carlos Murillo Presents His Work: Fall 2011 Gwen Frostic Reading Series

We welcome you to join us for our fourth reading of the Fall 2011 Gwen Frostic Reading Series. We’re honored to have playwright Carlos Murillo present his work this Thursday, November 17th. The reading will take place at the WMU Bernhard Center, room 157-158, starting at 8:00 PM. We look forward to seeing you there.

Seth Abramson & Matthew Guenette

Kalamazoo Book Arts Center 

 

Poets in Print: Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011, 7-9 p.m.
Broadside artists: Elizabeth King and a collaboration between Alta Price and Jonah Koppel

Join us for the Poets in Print reading featuring Seth Abramson and Matthew Guenette. Readings are free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 with time to browse current exhibitions, the broadsides and books by the poets available for purchase and signing.

Seth Abramson is the author of two collections of poetry, Northerners, winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). He is also the co-author of the forthcoming third edition of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2012). In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize for Poetry, and his poems have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Best New Poets 2008, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Boston Review, Colorado Review, and New York Quarterly. A regular contributor to Poets & Writers magazine and The Huffington Post, he is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Matthew Guenette is the author of Sudden Anthem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press. His latest book, American Busboy, a Finalist and Editor’s Choice of the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize, will be published in 2011. His work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Barn Owl Review, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Indiana Review, and other publications. He is an English instructor at Madison College in Madison, Wisconsin.

Kalamazoo Book Arts Center

326 W. Kalamazoo Avenue, Suite 103A

Kalamazoo, MI

Nagle has Queer Time in Ireland

Chris Nagle recently returned from a conference on “Queer Temporalities” held at the Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin, where he was invited to discuss the recent work of Elizabeth Freeman, whose Time Binds conceptualizes chrononormativity, temporal drag, and erotohistoriography, offering one of the most important interventions in queer theory and cultural studies of the past decade. The event was sponsored by The(e)ories: Critical Theory & Sexuality Studies, an interdisciplinary seminar series that has been convened by Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke since 2002, and which has established itself as one of the leading queer theory seminars in the world.

Sigma Tau Delta to Induct 58 on Sunday, Nov 20

Inductees, returning members, faculty, and friends of Sigma Tau Delta: Please join us on Sunday, November 20, at 3 p.m., in 3025 Brown Hall, as we welcome our Fall 2011 inductees to the Alpha Nu Pi chapter of Sigma Tau Delta. We will induct 58 new members on November 20, making the Fall 2011 induction class the second largest in our chapter’s history.

And thanks to continuing support from faculty, friends of the Department of English, Dean Alex Enyedi and the College of Arts and Sciences for the Sigma Tau Delta Membership Fund, all 58 inductees will receive their lifetime memberships free of charge. (Faculty, friends, alumni: Please click here if you’d like to contribute to the fund. A gift of only $50 makes it possible to provide a deserving student with a lifetime membership to Sigma Tau Delta.)

The festivities will include (in the immortal words of 2007-08 chapter president Dan Kenzie), a “short but moving ceremony,” with a reception to follow, featuring a cake created by WMU senior and cake baker/decorator extraordinaire Cody Mejeur (Fall 2010 inductee).

Inductees, please invite your family, friends, and significant others. Returning members, please join us in welcoming our new members.

Hope to see everyone on November 20!

Congratulations to our Fall 2011 inductees:

Shantell Ann Aiken

Brittany Marie Aguinaga

Nicole Lynnae Allen

Catherine Bailey

Briana Marie Barnett

Kalani Barbara Bates

Michael Berry

Dustin Brown

Rosie Sharhonda Capps

Micah Isaac Carlson

Emily Chaney

Andrew J. Draper

Madison Edwards

Roslyn Marie Ellis

Erin E. Faultersack

Sebastian Fryer

Beth A. Fuller

Michael Joseph Gahry

Allison Glismann

Melissa Hall

Patrick Heflin

Thomas Kimble

Valerie Krzewski

Jared Seth Madden

Kimberly Ann Mattern

Kelsey McClure

Christen McCool

Shannon Katharine McCullough

Christy McDowell

Christopher George Miller

Kaitlyn Mitchell

Benjamin Adam Moran

Ellen Rachel Murad

Jessica Neuenschwander

Erin Maureen O’Connor

Maureen Elizabeth Pfaff

Kelsey L. Pretzer

Kimberly May Reikow

Cheryl Ririe-Kurz

Jordan Samuel Rossio

Devin Ryan

Samantha Rae Sandler

Nickolas Schrader

Tracy Sever

Joshua Paul Soloc

Alex J. Stacy

Jacob P. Szydzik

Katherine Nicole TerBerg

Taline Breann Topouzian

Paige Van De Winkle

Krista Lynn Van Prooyen

Lauren Vitu

Ashley Lauren Wall

Sarah J. Watkins

Molly Elizabeth White

Jennifer Leigh Wiley

William R. Witters IV

Amy Yuengert

[CANCELLED] Hoad on Wilde and Savagery - Visiting Lecture 11/10

*************************************************************************

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN *CANCELLED* & WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR A FUTURE DATE TBA!

*************************************************************************

NEVILLE HOAD (University of Texas-Austin)

“Wildean Savagery”

In his lecture Hoad locates Victorian origin narratives, both Darwinian ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation and Freud's theories of psychosexual development, as sites which produced curious and deeply imbricated discourses of the primitive and the homosexual. He proceeds to investigate how racial and imperial rhetorics of savagery and sexual deviance became entrenched in the writings of Oscar Wilde as well as in public declarations about the author, particularly during his infamous 1895 trial.

Thursday, November 10, 2011
7:00PM / Knauss 2500 (Center for the Humanities)
a reception will follow


Neville Hoad is an associate professor of English and affiliated faculty with the Center for Women's and Gender Studies, the Center for African and African American Studies, and the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He authored African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota, 2007) and co-edits (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) Sex & Politics in South Africa (Double Storey, 2005) and currently is writing a book on the literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. His areas of research include African and Victorian literature, queer theory, and the history of sexuality.

Utz on Semantic Concepts, Temporality, and Medieval Rituals

Richard Utz recently published "Negotiating Heritage: Observations on Semantic Concepts, Temporality, and the Centre of the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals," Philologie im Netz 58 (2011): 70-87. This essay is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the "Fifth Conference on the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals" at University of Copenhagen on October 26, 2009. It seeks to review the interdisciplinary scholarship done by the Centre of the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, a project funded by the Danish National Research Foundation since 2001, from the perspective of Reinhart Kosellek's work on semantic concepts and temporality, focusing specifically on a 2009 Centre publication: Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, edited by Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser as volume 4 in Brepols Publishers' book series, Ritus et Artes: Traditions and Transformations. By bringing the "father" of conceptual historiography to bear on some of the scholarship in Negotiating Heritage, the essay contributes to tracing, from a meta-perspective, the momentous mutations through which Western societies and their scholars continue to conceive their experiences of the medieval past.

Third Coast poem wins Pushcart Prize

Kathleen Flenniken's poem "Horse Latitudes," which appeared in Third Coast's Spring 2010 issue, was selected by the editors of the Pushcart Prize series for inclusion in Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses.

The FYW Professional Development Series Proudly Presents

Dr. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss

Friday November 11, 2011 in Brown 1002

Dr. DeVoss is a professor of Professional Writing in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. Her numerous publications include a National Writing Project book, Because Digital Writing Matters (in collaboration with Elyse Eidman-Aadahl and Troy Hicks) and the 2007 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award winning title, Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues (with Heidi McKee). Her work has also appeared in publications such as Computers and Composition; Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; The Journal of Popular Culture; among others. See https://www.msu.edu/~devossda/bio.html for a full bio.


WORKSHOP (10:00 a.m. -11:30 a.m.)
"Text and Typography"

This hands-on workshop will provide some scaffolding discussion of the importance of text as a design element and documents as designed objects. Participants will look at some theory and scholarship about text—from rhetoric and writing studies and from graphic design. Participants will then explore different typefaces and the ways they can express meaning, and do some downloading, playing, and creating of different designed texts. All participants will leave with a jump drive of teaching materials and readings.

SEMINAR (12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.)
"Digital-Visual Rhetorics: Themes, Issues, and Questions"

This presentation will introduce seven dominant themes, issues, and questions related to issues of digital-visual rhetorics. For each of the themes, Dr. DeVoss will share contemporary, situating theory and scholarship, and also contemporary, circulating examples. After the initial discussion of the seven themes, attendees will discuss the implications of these themes in our teaching and scholarship, and work to identify other emergent themes.


If you would like to attend either the workshop or seminar (or both), please RSVP to Jessica Neuenschwander, jessica.m.neuenschwander@wmich.edu, by Friday Nov. 4, 2011.

Words, Imagination, and Calls to Action

Monday November 14th

6:00pm, Edwin & Mary Meader Rare Book Reading Room (#3016), Waldo Library, WMU

Alison Swan, Adjunct Professor, Western Michigan University

Title: No Complacency: Words, Imagination, and Calls to Action


Description: Award-winning writer and wildlands advocate, Alison Swan, has been immersed in the literary arts for as long as she can remember. Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction have been central to her connection and commitment to the wild places that have shaped her. She’ll talk about this, and read from some of the poems and prose she’s written as she works to preserve space for wild nature in an increasingly built-up Michigan.

The lecture series is co-sponsored by the WMU University Center for the Humanities and the Department of English. The reading is free and open to the public.