Geneseo English Department News

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Martha Nell Smith to deliver 2011 Walter Harding Lecture

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:25:00 -0400

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.

Cori Winrock Joins English Department as Visiting Assistant Professor

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:24:02 -0400

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...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:32:26 -0400

A photo of the actual tree house

Miller's painting

Close up of the painting

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

2011 Peace Poetry Contest Winners Read Their Poems

Sun, 15 May 2011 10:19:00 -0400

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.

Geneseo students: It Gets Better

Fri, 06 May 2011 14:38:07 -0400

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.

Andrea Levy Reads from "The Long Song"

Wed, 04 May 2011 20:38:00 -0400

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.

2011 English department awards and scholarships

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:43:00 -0400

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”

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

Prize-winning Author Andrea Levy Here April 29

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:42:58 -0400

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.

6th Annual Peace Poetry Contest May 12

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:04:00 -0400

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.”

Another prize for Porter

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:02:03 -0400

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.

Stelzig book on Robinson wins Barricelli Prize

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Back in June, we reported on the publication of Gene Stelzig’s Henry Crabb Robinson in Germany: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Life Writing by Bucknell University Press.

Stelzig’s book has now been awarded the 2010 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize for the year’s best book in Romanticism studies.

In communicating the award, Prof. Larry H. Peer, Executive Director of the International Conference on Romanticism and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University, wrote to Stelzig that, “Your book is a particular piece that has been needed in the field of Crabb Robinson studies for generations.”

Stelzig will receive a commemorative plaque at the annual meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism in Montreal next October.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) met Goethe and Schiller and left his impressions of S.T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and other writers in his Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, first published in 1869.

New Course! Hum II in Thoreau Territory

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:56:48 -0500

This summer, SUNY Geneseo students can take Western Humanities II within walking distance of Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau went to “live deliberately,” an experience that inspired one of the most influential and important works of American literature, Walden.

Students will read and discuss the works on the Hum II syllabus - Walden included - in an area steeped in the history that those works reflect and, in some cases, helped to bring about.

If you enroll in the course, you’ll live in Concord’s historic Colonial Inn, which British soldiers and American minutemen passed in order to exchange “the shot heard round the world” just a few hundred yards away. (The Inn has been featured, more recently, on SyFy’s “Ghost Hunters” television show: stay away from room 24!) You’ll be able to walk from your own room, haunted or not, to the Concord battle site, but also to places connected to 19th-century controversies over women’s rights and African-American slavery. Besides Thoreau, authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott lived and worked in Concord.

Classes will be held in a variety of locations in the area, including the house where Thoreau was born, the Thoreau Institute at the Walden Woods Project in Concord, and, of course, outdoors at the pond itself.

There will be field trips to downtown Boston, where colonial revolutionaries took actions derived from the words of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government; and to the National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, to see examples of the factory system that provoked intellectuals like Karl Marx because of its dehumanizing features.

Concord is a commuter-rail stop in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority system, which means that the Freedom Trail and the Boston Commons, the Museum of Fine Arts, the New England Aquarium and Fenway Park, fabulous restaurants and splendid musical performances - all the cultural and recreational offerings of one of America’s great cities - are just a half-hour away.

This new course is part of SUNY Geneseo’s continuing connection to the work and legacy of Walter Harding, pioneering Thoreau scholar and Geneseo English department faculty member from 1956 to 1982.

Another Triumph for Molly Smith Metzler (English ’00)

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:18:00 -0500

Dramatist and Geneseo English alum Molly Smith Metzler, who launched her playwriting career in Geneseo’s Black Box Theater, has had a play selected for main stage production in the 2011 Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. Metzler’s Elemeno Pea was one of six plays selected from over 1,000 entries for the country’s largest and most prestigious competition for new plays and emerging playwrights. The play will open March 8, 2011 at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Marc Masterson, Artistic Director of the Humana Festival, said that Metzler’s play has “the potential … to be a break-out production both for Metzler and for the festival. It’s funny, it’s socially aware and the character work is extraordinarily confident and full. … You would not think this was written by an early-career playwright. It’s so confident and self-assured and fully-rendered.”

Since graduating from Geneseo, Metzler has fashioned an impressive career. In 2003, a revision of her original Geneseo play, Training Wisteria, won the Kennedy Center’s Best New Play Award in the National Student Playwriting Contest, the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award, and the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award. Her play Carve was produced in London’s Tristan Bates Theatre. Close Up Space was produced this past summer at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, the artistic “birthplace” of Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson’s early major works as well as premieres of major plays by Wendy Wasserstein and John Guare, among others.

Geneseo English major wins prestigious Dante Prize

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:24:51 -0500

The Dante Society of America has awarded its annual Dante Prize for the “best essay submitted by an undergraduate in any American or Canadian college or university” to William Porter, a junior English major at SUNY Geneseo and a participant in Geneseo’s Edgar Fellows program.

Porter’s winning essay, entitled “‘L’arco de lo essilio’: The Nexus of History, Pilgrimage, and Prophecy in the Heaven of Mars,” is, in Porter’s words, “about the nature and significance of exile” in the Divine Comedy — in particular, “how Dante’s own exile can be transformed into spiritual pilgrimage, shown through the prophecy of his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida in Cantos 15-17 of Paradiso, or the Heaven of Mars.”

Porter is the second SUNY Geneseo student in the last five years to win the Dante Prize. In 2006, the prize was shared between Lisa Caruana, for her essay “The Dynamic Motion of Paradise,” and John Davies, a student at Harvard College, for his essay “Purgatorio Petroso : The Rime in the Purgatorio.” Prize winners in other years have submitted their essays from undergraduate programs at Princeton, Duke, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, Bowdoin, Duke, and Brigham Young.

The Dante Prize is “meant as a sign of encouragement for those younger scholars on whose contributions the future of Dante studies in America will depend,” according to Vincent Pollina, Secretary-Treasurer of the Dante Society of America, who signed for the Prize Committee in his letter to Porter this fall.

Join us at the fall Advisement Mixer

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:51:30 -0400

The English department’s fall Advisement Mixer is this Wednesday, October 20, at 2:30 p.m. in the Harding Room (Welles 111).

English majors, minors, and concentrators are welcome to join us for pizza and beverages. Faculty will be mingling and will be glad to answer any questions you may have about their spring, 2011 courses.

You can read descriptions of our spring course offerings here.

Geneseo English profs win award for digital humanities project

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:13:00 -0400

The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) has awarded its October 2010 Community Contribution Award to two projects: The Early Novels Database at Swarthmore College and English 170: The Practice of Criticism at SUNY Geneseo.

English 170: The Practice of Criticism is a collaboration among four Geneseo professors — Schacht, Doggett, Woidat, and Paku — teaching Geneseo’s course of the same name.

Students in the four sections are engaging in online conversation about several “big questions” raised by literary criticism as an enterprise. They’re also working together to annotate a baker’s dozen of short poems.

For their part, the four faculty members have gone out on a limb by recording brief audio commentaries on Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916” in order to give their students a feel for the questions that critics typically ask of poetry.

Schacht, Doggett, Woidat, and Paku plan to publish a case study of their project in Academic Commons in April, 2011 under the theme “Digital Humanities and the Undergraduate.”

English 170: The Practice of Criticism lives in the SUNY Geneseo wiki.

Creative writing application deadline is 10/28

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:42:00 -0400

Students seeking admission to spring, 2011 workshops in creative writing, or to the English major writing track, must apply by 4 p.m. on October 28. To apply, download this form, attach it to a sample of your prose or poetry (as explained on the form), and bring the form and sample to the English department main office, Welles 226. Applicants will be notified of the result by mail shortly after November 1.

Ghostly reunion

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 21:30:00 -0400

The Geneseo English department was well represented at the Fall 2010 meeting of the Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Study Group, October 1-2, at Cornell University. The theme of the meeting was “Ghost Stories.” Study Group members were invited to a lecture by Dana Luciano on “Touching, Clinging, Haunting, Worlding: On the Spirit Photograph,” and discussed ghostly tales by such writers as Lydia Maria Child, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Pictured here are Geneseo professors Caroline Woidat (left) and Alice Rutkowski (right), flanking Jonathan Senchyne (Geneseo ‘04), who is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University writing a dissertation on early American and antebellum fiction.

English faculty win advancement, honors

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:41:00 -0400

Congratulations to three English department faculty who received professional advancement this fall. Rachel Hall and Graham Drake were both promoted to the rank of Professor. Alice Rutkowski was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.

And congratulations to Assistant Professor Jun Okada, who was awarded leave for spring, 2011 under the United University Professions’ Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave Program to complete work on a book project, Producing Asian American Media: Institutional History and the Making of a Genre.