Geneseo English Department News

This year’s Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Professor Martha Nell Smith.

The lecture, titled Digital Forensics: Texting Emily Dickinson, will be held on Thursday, September 29 at 4 p.m. in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Ballroom.

Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. Her numerous print publications include five singly and coauthored books, three of them award-winning - Emily Dickinson, A User’s Guide (2012); Companion to Emily Dickinson (2008); Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson (1998); Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (1993); Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992) - and scores of articles and essays in journals and collections such as American Literature, Studies in the Literary Imagination, South Atlantic Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Profils Americains, San Jose Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, ESQ, and A Companion to Digital Humanities. The recipient of numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for her work on Dickinson, American literary history, and in new media, Smith is also Coordinator and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. Smith co-edited Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (2008) published by Rotunda New Digital Scholarship, University of Virginia Press, and has worked on two interrelated Mellon-sponsored data mining and visualization initiatives, NORA and MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge). A founding board member of the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS), Smith also serves on the editorial board and steering committee of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship); serves in an advisory capacity for C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and is on numerous advisory boards of digital literary projects such as The Poetess Archive, Digital Dickens, and the Melville Electronic Library (MEL). A leader in innovations in academic publishing, Smith served on the Executive Council of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (2001-2004), co-chaired the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE, 2004-2008), and chairs the University of Maryland’s Library Council (2008-2011). For outstanding scholarly achievement and innovative leadership in which diversity inheres in any definition of excellence, Livingston College at Rutgers University awarded Smith its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2009, the highest honor that the college bestows upon its former students. In 2010, Smith was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, and in 2011 she was appointed ADVANCE Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities as part of a NSF-funded project to cultivate inclusive excellence. In May 2011, Smith was vote Chair-Elect of the University of Maryland Senate.

Poet Cori Winrock has joined the SUNY Geneseo English department this year as Visiting Assistant Professor.

Winrock holds an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University (2007) and BA degrees in Creative Writing and Psychology from Oberlin College (2004). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a wide range of journals, including Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Blackbird, Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, Pool, The American Poetry Journal, The National Poetry Review, and Crab Orchard Review.

Winrock has been a finalist for several noteworthy honors, including the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award and the National Poetry Review’s Annie Finch Prize.

In the fall 2011 semester, Winrock is teaching Engl 201 (Creative Writing), Engl 142 (Literary Forms: Portrait of the Artist - Autobiographical Comics, and Intd 105 (Writing Seminar: Literature and the Laboratory).

humanitiesatwalden:

A few days ago I walked to the Concord Art Association Museum and Gallery. The admission to the museum was free and it is within walking distance from the Inn, making it easily accessible. There were many beautiful exhibits including images of people made out of bronze covered tree branches. The exhibit that struck me as the most interesting took up the entire second floor of the gallery.

Once upstairs the walls were covered in large paintings of a tree house. The paintings were spread across the room completing a 360 view of the tree house and the surrounding forest. The painter, Nick Miller, first discovered the tree house at the Albers Foundation in Connecticut. Miller recalls his first sight of the tree house: “It was like a fairytale that first evening, climbing up, I fell asleep up here, then woke to the evening forest: and a kind of epiphany; that this was the place I needed to be.” He spent approximately seven weeks on the platform painting a panoramic view of nature. 

Miller’s retreat into nature reminded me very much of Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond. While Thoreau retreated to the Pond he wrote Walden and Civil Disobedience. While Miller retreated to nature he painted beautiful portraits of his forest. Both artists were working on some of their greatest pieces during their time in nature. Thoreau and Miller, for the majority of the time, stayed in nature while completing their works. Thoreau stayed in his cabin while Miller often slept on the platform of his tree house. Both of these artists also showed great respect and adoration for the bodies of water they had settled upon. Miller spent a lot of time at the nearby man-made “Anni’s Lake.” He states, “I’d go for a walk in the evening by the lake, and absorb its beauty.” In The Ponds chapter Thoreau writes, “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

It is very interesting to see the artwork of a modern day Thoreau figure. Miller’s 2009 painting is just another expression of Thoreau’s 19th Century ideals.

Katie

The winners of the 2011 Genesee Valley Peace Poetry Contest shared their poems at SUNY Geneseo’s Alice Austin Theater on May 12. This year’s winning poems were selected from about 900 poems submitted by children in public and private schools of the Genesee valley in grades kindergarten through 8.

Click the play button in the control bar below to bring up the streaming video. If you can’t get it to play below, try going here.

Senior English major Fiona Harvey, together with fellow students Margot Terc and Derek Weng, contributed the video below to the It Gets Better Project.

Harvey is this year’s winner of the English department’s Joseph O’Brien Memorial Award and will be delivering the senior oration at Geneseo’s 145th commencement on May 14.

On April 29, award-winning novelist Andrea Levy spoke here, explaining the genesis of, and reading an excerpt from, her latest novel, The Long Song.

Click the play button in the control bar below to bring up the streaming video. If you can’t get it to play below, try going here.

We’re pleased to announce this year’s winners of department awards and scholarships. We’ll be celebrating these formally in the Walter Harding Lounge, Welles 111, on May 4 at 2 p.m.

Writing Awards

Critical Essay

• 1st Place: William Porter, “Coleridge and Keats Look at a Nightingale”
• 2nd Place: Elizabeth Barber, “ ‘Command your price’: The Commodification of the Family Relationship in ‘Eumaeus’”
• 3rd Place: Cailin Kowalewski, “Knowledge and Identity in Paradise Lost”
• Honorable Mention: Justine Rosen, “One with the Land: A Disintegration into Nature”

Freshman Writing

• 1st Place: Gregory Palermo, “Mommy, My Teacher is a Dictator”
• 2nd Place: David Park, “RAF – An Unnerving Past”
• 3rd Place: Chris Kenny, “The Poet Soon To Be Eight”

Creative Non-fiction

• 1st Place Co-winner: Kate Jordhamo, “Exhumation”
• 1st Place Co-winner: William Porter, “On Returning to First Reflections of a First Funeral”
• 2nd Place: Alicia Goodwin, “Saying Goodbye to Hopedale”
• 3rd Place: Bridget Dunn, “Cloudy-ish”

Fiction

• 1st Place: Elizabeth Sackett, “Fifteen Things to do at an Airport”
• Bridget Dunn: “Breath”
• Bridget Adams: “Fields”
• Honorable Mention: Meghan Pipe, “Litany”

Poetry

• 1st Place: Yael Massen, “Acoustics in the Night”
• 2nd Place: Bridget Adams, “Martyn Died in a Train Accident on New Year’s”
• 3rd Place Co-winner: Gabrielle Gossett, “Poem Puddles and Comma Drops”
• 3rd Place Co-winner: Wyatt Mentzinger, “NYU Suicide”
Mention: Katherine Russell, “first”

Graduating Senior Awards

• William T. Beauchamp Literature Award: Meghan Pipe
• Patricia Conrad Lindsay Memorial Award: Katherine Hart
• Rita K. Gollin Award for Excellence in American Literature: Kathryn Strickland (F ‘10, Sp ‘11)
• Calvin Israel Award in the Humanities: Brittney Walker
• Joseph M. O’Brien Memorial Award: Fiona Harvey
• Rosalind R. Fisher Memorial Award for Outstanding Student Teaching in English: Kellie Fairchild

Department Scholarships

• Natalie Selser Freed Memorial Scholarship: Shea Frazier
• Rita K. Gollin Senior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: William Porter
• Rita K. Gollin Junior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Justine Rosen
• Hans Gottschalk Award: Emily Olmstead
• Joseph M. O’Brien Transfer Scholarship: Gabrielle Gossett
• Don Watt Memorial Scholarship: Stasia Monteiro

Andrea Levy will read from her latest novel, The Long Song, on April 29 at 4 p.m. in Newton Hall 201. The event is free and open to the public.

The Long Song was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2010 and was in contention for the Orange Prize in 2010. Set in Jamaica in the early 19th century, Levy’s novel explores the relationship between Great Britain and the Caribbean during the last years of slavery and the period immediately after emancipation. The daughter of Jamaican migrants herself, Levy uses her fiction to rewrite British history to include her ancestors.

Levy’s fourth novel, Small Island, won the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 2004 and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2005.

Levy will sign copies of her works, which will be on sale after the reading.

Levy’s visit to Geneseo is sponsored by the Department of English, the Office of the Provost, the Office of International Programs, Campus Auxiliary Services, Multicultural Programs and Services, and the Office of Residence Life.

The English department will host its 6th annual Genesee Valley Peace Poetry Contest Awards Ceremony on May 12 at 7 p.m. in Alice Austin Theater.

This year, students from over 30 local elementary and middle schools will take part in the event by reading their poetry for family, friends, and others.

Roughly 500 poems on the theme of peace are submitted for the contest each year, from which 70 winning poems are selected. Contestants compete in three separate age categories: kindergarten through 2nd grade, 3rd grade through 5th grade, and 6th grade through 8th grade.

The contest is organized each year by Geneseo English professor Rob Doggett, a scholar of the poetry of W.B. Yeats.

“Young people need a stable, nurturing and peaceful environment to flourish,” says Doggett. “Unfortunately, a lot of young people aren’t given the chance to find that peaceful environment, because they live amid conflict and sometimes, as is the case with many young people in the US; they simply aren’t given the chance to think about peace - about the things that make them happy, content, loved.”

Doggett also emphasizes that the poetry contest is about “helping students to develop their own creative skills. Writing poetry is a difficult skill, and it’s something that some students naturally do well. So what’s great is when one of these students, someone who’s maybe become frustrated with school, suddenly finds that he or she has a real gift.”

The contest is important, Doggett adds, “because it teaches everyone involved that peace is something valuable - it’s something worth thinking about and writing about.”

English major Will Porter has racked up another prize - this one for an essay he delivered in Pittsburgh at the 2011 convention of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society (March 23-26).

Will’s essay on Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself took second place in the “Critical American Literature” category.

Back in November, Will won the Dante Prize for “best essay submitted by an undergraduate in any American or Canadian college or university,” awarded by the Dante Society of America.