Eagleton on Wilde at Notre Dame

Terry Eagleton will deliver the Notre Dame Department of English public lecture "The Contradictions of Oscar Wilde" at 4:30 PM in the Hesburgh Center Auditorium on Wednesday, November 3rd.

The Fall 2010 issue of Third Coast is now available! The issue includes work by Jake Adam York, John Matthew Fox, David Wagoner, Patty Seyburn, Keith Ratzlaff, Jennifer Fawcett and many others. There's also an interview with Alicia Ostriker AND a Symposium on Writing and the Midwest (with contributions from Eula Biss, Mark Halliday, Patricia Henley, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and our own Bill Olsen, Nancy Eimers and Stuart Dybek, among others). It's a cornucopia of literary delights.

To order a copy, visit http://thirdcoastmagazine.com, stop by the Third Coast office, or email Emily Stinson. We'll also have issues available at our Nov. 6 party (7-9pm at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center).

Sweeney receives Graduate College support

Creative Writing Graduate Student Chad Sweeney is the recipient of a competitive Graduate Student Research and Travel Grant by the WMU Graduate College. Congrats!

academic publishing internship opportunities

Comparative Drama, WMU’s scholarly journal devoted to the study of drama, invites applications for an internship position in Academic Publishing for the Spring 2011 semester.

Comparative Drama seeks three exceptional students to participate in the journal’s production for a semester term. The students will gain valuable, hands-on publishing experience and exposure to advanced academic writing.

Interns will meet with an editor once a week and attend editorial meetings. Responsibilities include reading essay contributions, fact checking, researching humanities databases, and assisting with editing and correspondence.

All undergraduate English majors are encouraged to apply. The internship will be helpful especially for students pursuing careers in publishing and/or who wish to attend graduate school. The internship will serve as an elective toward the English major. For students majoring in Practical Writing, the internship can substitute for 3620, “Readings in Creative Nonfiction,” or 3700, “Writing Creative Nonfiction.” Contact comparative-drama@wmich.edu for more information.

comparative drama staff

Eve Salisbury, Editor

Anthony Ellis, Associate Editor         

Cynthia Klekar, Associate Editor
Nick Gauthier, Editorial Assistant

comparative-drama@wmich.edu

 

Academic Publishing: Internship Application

(Spring 2011 semester)

Completed applications are due by 4:00 p.m. on Friday, November 12, 2010, to Professor Anthony Ellis’s mailbox in the English Department main office, 6^th floor, Sprau Tower. For questions, please contact either Professor Cynthia Klekar (cynthia.klekar@wmich.edu or 387-2600) or Professor Ellis (anthony.ellis@wmich.edu or 387-2606).

Name: ______________________________________________________________________

Address: _____________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________

Phone:          ______________________________________ 

Email:          ______________________________________

Major:          ______________________________________

Minor:          ______________________________________

Major GPA:         ______________________________________

Please submit a one-page explanation of why you are interested in completing an internship with Comparative Drama.

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CFP Michigan Academy 2011 Annual Meeting

CALL FOR PAPERS

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE SECTION

Michigan Academy 2011Annual Meeting

MARCH 11. 2011

Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, Michigan

TWENTY MINUTE PAPERS

ON ANY ASPECT OF LITERATURE

BRITISH, AMERICAN, ETHNIC, COMPARATIVE, LITERATURE AND FILM

LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE

Some  Suggested Areas

Interdisciplinary approaches to Literature

From Literature into  Film

Popular Culture and Literature

Seventeenth and Eighteenth  Century Literature

Shakespeare and the Renaissance

Ethnic Voices in  Literature

Victorian Literature

Modern and Contemporary Literature

Foreign Literature in English

Submit 200 Word abstracts to the Michigan Academy Website. For questions concerning the Language and Literature Section Contact

Maureen Thum

Department of English

University of Michigan-Flint

mthum@umflint.edu   ( “Michigan Academy” as Subject)

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: December  23, 2010

Please Submit 200 word Abstracts on the

Michigan Academy Website:  http://themichiganacademy.org/

ENGL 1000 student wins second place in WMU Essay Contest

One of our English 1000 students, Petter Kerizareth, was a finalist in the university-wide "Grab the Reins" essay contest held last month.  Petter is a student in Joe Law's ENGL 1000 class and his essay, "Who helped Me Grab The Reins", won second prize.  Though this year's "Grab the Reins" contest is finished, other students in Joe's class are interested in writing essays about who has inspired them to attend Western.  So, Joe is organizing his own essay contest for these students during the month of November, and Erinn J. Bentley, Director of Developmental Writing, will be serving as the contest's judge.

Chad Sweeney to be read on NPR

Garrison Keillor will read Chad Sweeney's poem on the Writer's Almanac on NPR this Halloween Sunday.  The poem is "The Methodist and His Method" from the new book Parable of Hide and Seek. 

Also Chad has just won a Travel Grant from WMU to support his book tour and readings from Farsi translations at the ALTA translators conference in Philadelphia. His cotranslation of the Iranian poet H.E. Seyeh's Selected Poems 1946-2000 will be published by White Pine Press next year.

Utz @ MEMESAK Conference

Richard Utz delivered the plenary lecture, "Medievalism and Medieval Romances," at the 2010 International Conference of the Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea (MEMESAK) at Ewha Womans [sic] University, Seoul. The conference, which united scholars from the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, was entitled, "The Once and Future Romance: The Transformation of Romance Tradition in the Middle Ages and Beyond." Utz also delivered a seminar, entitled "The Colony Writes Back: F.N. Robinson's Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Translatio of Chaucer Study to the United States," to faculty and graduate students from Ewha Womans University, Seoul National University, Sogang University, and Yonsei University.

Why Mark Twain Matters

Profs. Lisa Minnick and Nicolas Witschi were recently interviewed by a writer for the A&E section of the Kalamazoo Gazette regarding the forthcoming publication by the University of California Press of an authoritative, uncensored edition of Autobiography of Mark Twain . See the full story here.

Christoph Irmscher of Indiana U. to Speak about American Literature and Sustainability on 10/28

On Thursday, October 28, 2010, Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, will visit WMU to participate in the English Department’s Scholarly Speakers Series.
Dr. Irmscher will give the lecture “Straw Leaves, Table Bugs, and Birch-Bark Poems: Sustainability in American Literary Culture” at 7 pm in Brown Hall 3025. In this lecture, he will discuss an art exhibit on literature and sustainability that he curated this fall at IU’s Lilly Library.
Prof. Irmscher teaches and writes about nineteenth-century American and Canadian literature and culture, and has a particular interest in ecocriticism. His published books The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (Rutgers UP, 1999), an edition of the writings of John James Audubon (Library of America, 1999), Longfellow Redux (UP of Illinois, 2008), and the anthology A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Temple UP, 2009), co-edited with Alan Braddock. He recently completed a book about the nineteenth-century anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz, which also seeks to understand the beginnings of graduate instruction in this country.
This speaker has worked extensively with public institutions, the National Park Service, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Maine Historical Society, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library, where he guest-curated the recent Bicentennial Longfellow exhibit.
Dr. Irmscher’s visit is being co-sponsored by WMU’s Environmental Studies Program.
Please contact Professor Anthony Ellis of the English Department for further information at (269) 387-2606 or anthony.ellis@wmich.edu.

Newberry Grad Seminars (Jan-March 2011)

Registration is now open for this Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies Winter 2011 graduate seminar:

Disability and Marginality in Medieval England and France
Professor Edward Wheatley, Loyola University Chicago
2:00-5:00 p.m. Thursdays, January 6 - March 10 at the Newberry Library, Chicago

Limited enrollment: www.newberry.org/renaissance/consortium/consortiumsems.html#wheatley

Printable flyer--please post and distribute: www.newberry.org/renaissance/consortium/WheatleySeminar.pdf

Enrollment fees are waived for graduate students from Center for Renaissance Studies consortium institutions. Faculty auditing is encouraged.

Registration is also open for this Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies Winter 2011 graduate seminar:

The Anglo-Saxon Seminar: Masculinity and the Anglo-Saxons
Professor Allen Frantzen, Loyola University Chicago

2-5 p.m. Fridays, January 7 to March 11 at the Newberry Library, Chicago

Limited enrollment: www.newberry.org/renaissance/consortium/consortiumsems.html#frantzen

Printable flyer--please post and distribute: www.newberry.org/renaissance/consortium/FrantzenSeminar.pdf

Enrollment fees are waived for graduate students from Center for Renaissance Studies consortium institutions. Faculty auditing is encouraged.

~


Faculty and graduate students from Center for Renaissance Studies consortium schools are eligible to apply for travel funding to attend Center for Renaissance Studies programs or to do research at the Newberry Library. Contact your school's faculty representative for details: www.newberry.org/renaissance/consortium/exec.html. The Center's main web page is: www.newberry.org/renaissance.

________

Gordon nominated for National Book Award

Please check HERE for excellent news about Jaimy Gordon's forthcoming novel, Lord of Misrule.

Third Coast Magazine Celebrates 15 years

"Mark your calendars!  Third Coast magazine is having a 15th Anniversary Celebration/Fall Issue Release Party on Saturday, Nov. 6, from 7-9pm, at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center (located in the Park Trades Center, 326 W. Kalamazoo Avenue). The celebration will include readings, refreshments and live music.  It's free and open to the public! (Tell your students!  Tell your friends!).
Featured readers include  Nancy Eimers, William Olsen, and Monica Berlin, who are part of the Fall 2010 issue's Symposium on Writing and the Midwest.  Austin Bunn will also be performing his one act play "Basement Story," from the Spring 2010 issue. Live music will be provided by the always wonderful Joe Gross.
More details to follow....  For now, save the date and plan to help celebrate a decade and a half of Third Coast, WMU's own national literary magazine."

All best,
Laura
--
Laura Donnelly
Instructor of English
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
laura.k.donnelly@wmich.edu

Book Arts for Poets Reading

(left) Sheep, From Indigo by Susan Ramsey; 

(right) pages from Joe's Garage by Elaine Koren Seaman

Book Arts for Poets, an Exhibition and Reading
Saturday, October 23, 7 to 9 p.m., doors open at 6:30

KBAC Gallery, 103A Park Trades, 326 W. Kalamazoo Avenue

During the summer of 2010 six local poets participated in a six-week workshop in which they created limited-edition handmade books at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center. These poets include Nina Feirer, Shanda Hansma Blue, Conrad Hilberry, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Susan Ramsey, and Elaine Seaman. The poets made handmade paper covers for the books, created relief print illustrations, and sewed the books together by hand.

For this event the poet’s books will be displayed in the gallery, and they will read from their work. Please join us for this special exhibition and reading.

Tiffany on Shakespeare

Grace Tiffany's "Being English through Speaking English: Shakespeare and Early Modern Anti-Gallicism," first presented at a conference of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, has been published in Word and Rite: The Bible and Ceremony in Selected Shakespearean Works, edited by Beatrice Batson. Another article by Tiffany, "Rank, Insults, and Weaponry in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy," will appear in the forthcoming issue of Papers on Language and Literature.

Thisbe Nissen Reads Her Work: Fall 2010 Gwen Frostic Reading Series

We welcome you to join us for our first reader of the Fall 2010 Gwen Frostic Reading Series. We’re very honored to have WMU’s new fiction faculty member, Thisbe Nissen, read her work this Thursday, Oct. 7th. The reading will take place at the WMU Bernhard Center, in room 209-210, starting at 8:00 PM. We look forward to seeing you there.

CFP: Newberry Grad Conference (10/15/10)

The Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies is pleased to announce:

Call for Papers for the 2011 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

Deadline for submissions: October 15, 2010

Conference dates: January 27-29, 2011

www.newberry.org/renaissance/conf-inst/gradstudents.html

www.newberry.org/renaissance/conf-inst/2011CFP.pdf: PDF flyer printable in color or black-and-white. Please distribute and post.

We invite abstracts for 15-minute papers from master's or Ph.D. students on any medieval, Renaissance, or early modern topic in Europe or the Mediterranean or Atlantic worlds. We encourage submissions from disciplines as varied as the literature of any language, history, classics, art history, music, comparative literature, theater arts, philosophy, religious studies, transatlantic studies, disability studies, and manuscript studies.

We also hope to include at least one panel of papers dealing with the digital humanities.

Priority is given to students from member institutions of the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium.

Please feel free to forward this message to others who may be interested.

~

Faculty and graduate students from Center for Renaissance Studies consortium schools are eligible to apply for travel funding to attend Center for Renaissance Studies programs or to do research at the Newberry Library. Contact your school's faculty representative for details: www.newberry.org/renaissance/consortium/exec.html. The Center's main web page is: www.newberry.org/renaissance.

Carol Jago on Writing in the digital age

NCTE President Carol Jago spoke Thursday evening to a full lecture hall in Writing on the digital age. English Department Distinguished ALumnus Dave Dempsey, himself author of five books, was in the audience during his 'homecoming' to Western.

Fall Titles from New Issues

New Issues Poetry & Prose published three new books of poetry this fall:

Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Pima Road Notebook by Keith Ekiss
Vivisect by Lisa Lewis

Check out www.wmich.edu/newissues for more info

Mark your calendars: Beckian Fritz Goldberg will be reading at WMU on Thursday, November 4th.