Faculty Publications: Recap on the January Celebration
amidst plates of gouda and cookies, the English Department presented and discussed recent faculty publications!
Prof. Susan Farrell discussed the nature of trauma, art, and gender within war. Her book Imagining Home: American War Fiction from Hemingway to 9/11 explores the works of writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien—and who gets to tell our stories, and why.
Prof. Myra Seaman detailed the medieval humanism in Fragments for a History of Vanishing Humanism, as well as her co-edited open access scholarly collection, now being used in classrooms: The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. She discussed the importance of academic accessibility and her chapter, “Feminism and Women’s Experience in the Manciple’s Tale.”
Prof. Lindsey Drager discussed gender as well: her novel, The Lost Daughter Collective, explores grief and loss, transgender identities, the dystopian, and some of Drager’s favorite women writers, like Virgina Woolfe. “It’s definitely weird,” she says. (But we know it’s the great kind of weird)
Prof. Anthony Varallo presented his collection of short-fiction Everyone Was There, which is comprised of more than 50 stories. He discussed the importance of form, exercising the writing muscle, and “getting a lot from a little.”
and though they didn’t present…
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Prof. Simon Lewis wrote an article on South African poetry published in the Journal of the African Literature Association. The interview he did with South African poet Antjie Krog and U. Penn Prof. Rita Barnard can be heard here.
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Prof. Michael Owens has a new book, Burned: Conversations with a Black WWII Veteran, which shares the first-hand account of a local black WWII soldier who was subjected to top secret chemical experiments and later sworn to secrecy.
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Prof. Julia Eichelberger, author of Tell About Night Flowers: Eudora Welty’s Gardening Letters, 1940-1949, did an interview with a Malaysian radio program detailing To Kill a Mockingbird, why it’s been banned in the past, and how best to teach it in schools. Her part of the podcast begins about 18 minutes into the program, and can be heard here.
