Lois Rudnick will talk on "The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan" on Wednesday, October 24th

Lois Rudnick will give a talk on "The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture"
on Wednesday, October 24th at 4pm in Dane Smith Hall.

Lois Rudnick is professor emerita of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and she is a leading scholar of modernist art and literary cultures in New Mexico.
The talk is free and open to public, and her books will be available for purchase.
For questions or more information, please contact Daniel Worden: dworden@unm.edu

The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan:
Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture

Dr. Lois Rudnick

Wednesday, October 24th

4 p.m.

Dane Smith Hall, Room 120

Internationally known as a writer, hostess, and patron of the arts of the twentieth century, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) is not known for her experiences with venereal disease, unmentioned in her four-volume memoir that was published in the 1930s. Making the suppressed portions of Luhan’s memoirs available for the first time, Lois Rudnick examines Luhan’s life through the lenses of venereal disease, psychoanalysis, and sexology. She shows us a mover and shaker of the modern world whose struggles with identity, sexuality, and manic depression speak to the lives of many women of her era.

Among Lois Rudnick's many books are Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds and Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture, both available from the University of New Mexico Press.

Sponsored by
Center for Southwest Research, Center for the Southwest, Department of English Language and Literature, Department of History, and the Feminist Research Institute

Randall Gann Lecturer in Literature and Film Studies at NAU

Randall Gann, PhD in American Literature, 2011, has accepted a lectureship in Literature and Film Studies starting this fall at Northern Arizona University. Congratulations, Randall!

British Women Writers Conference at UNM in April 2013

Looking forward to April 2013!

The English department at the University of New Mexico is pleased to be hosting the 2013 British Women Writers Conference. The conference will be April 4-6, 2013 at the Hyatt in downtown Albuquerque, NM. The conference theme is “Customs,” and we look forward to a wide range of unique presentations on the topic. Please see:  http://2013bwwc.com/ for detailed description of the conference and topics.

The 2013 British Women Writers Conference will center around the theme of “Customs.” Customs are often thought of as the habits or social norms that dictate behavior, sometimes so rigidly that they appear to be laws. Conversely, though, “custom” can refer to a product or service tailored to the “customer’s” individual specifications, or the taxes or duties on imports/exports, the governmental department charged with implementing such fees, or the place in which all items entering a country from foreign parts are examined for contraband. Regardless of its particular connotation, “custom” denotes a sense of rigidity, restriction, or control; it is these forms of social, economic, and/or personal limitations that we wish to explore with this year’s conference. Prospective panelists are encouraged to think of “customs” broadly as the term might apply to British and Transatlantic women writers and their often-underrepresented contributions to literary studies.

Please send abstracts of 250 words for panel proposals by November 15, 2012 and for individual paper presentations by December 15, 2012 to BWWC2013@gmail.com.

Daniel Worden's book wins Thomas Lyon Book Award

Daniel Worden's book, "Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism, has won this year's Thomas Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies! Each year, the Western Literature Association honors outstanding, single-authored scholarly books on the literature and culture of the American West.

The chair of the 2012 Lyon award committee called the book a, "lucidly written and cogently argued examination of the construction of masculinity and its deployment in a number of significant western American texts. The field of nominees was rich and representative of the best in recent literary and cultural criticism."

A previous winner of the award is Gary Scharnhorst, so he's in good company. To see other books and authors who share this honor, go to http://www.usu.edu/westlit/thomas-j-lyon-book-award-in-western-american-literary-and-cultural-studies/.

Todd Ruecker publication and presentation

Todd Ruecker has published an article: “Exploring the Digital Divide on the U.S.-Mexico Border Through Literacy Narratives.” in Computers and Composition, 29.3 (2012): 239-253. Print. He has also made a presentation: “L2 Students’ Stances and Identities in Graduate Peer Review Interactions.” to the Symposium on Second Language Writing. West Lafayette, IN. 6 September 2012.

Karmen Lenz publishes Ræd (Counsel) and Frofer (Consolation): Christian Poetics in the Old English Froferboc [book of consolation] Meters

We are happy to report the publishing success of one of our recent graduates in Medieval Studies, Karmen Lenz. Rodopi just published Karmen's book Ræd (Counsel) and Frofer (Consolation): Christian Poetics in the Old English Froferboc [book of consolation] Meters, with a Foreword by Kurt Otten. Published by Rodopi, Costerus New Series 195, 2012. (http://rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=COS+195)

Froferboc refers to King Alfred's OE translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and was the subject of Karmen's Popejoy award-winning dissertation about six years ago. Kurt Otten, who wrote the foreword, is a major scholar on Alfred and his translation of the Boethius Consolation. Kurt was also a visitor in our department from Heidelberg for a semester. Karmen is Associate Professor of English at Macon State College.

Daniel Worden co-edited Twentieth-Century Literature

Daniel Worden has co-edited a special issue of the journal Twentieth-Century Literature, which has just been published.

The journal Twentieth-Century Literature has just published a special, double issue on Postmodernism, Then (volume 57, numbers 3-4), edited by UNM English Department faculty member Daniel Worden and Jason Gladstone (Ball State University). In a contemporary moment that signals both the institutionalization and the exhaustion of postmodernist aesthetics, the Postmodernism, Then special issue returns to the category of the postmodern and explores how postmodernism takes on new meanings when scholars can think of postmodernism as not only the present but also the recent past, not only a unifying category that contains all late 20th-century literature but also one aesthetic among many.

The special issue features an introductory essay by Daniel Worden and Jason Gladstone, as well as contributions from leading scholars in the field: Rey Chow, Hillary Chute, Madhu Dubey, Ursula Heise, Andrew Hoberek, Caren Irr, David James, Adam Kelly, Mark McGurl, Brian McHale, Walter Benn Michaels, Emilio Sauri, and Rachel Greenwald Smith.

Opioid Addiction Guidelines Edited by James Burbank

Professional Writing lecturer, writer, and technical editor James Burbank has just completed work on New Mexico Treatment Guidelines for Medical Providers Who Treat Opioid Addiction Using Buprenorphine. In collaboration with six New Mexico physicians, two nurses, and members of the Heroin Awareness Committee, Burbank served as project management editor in developing, designing, editing, and publishing the first guidelines for innovative opioid addiction treatment in the United States. Sponsored by the state Dept. of Health, the book-length guidelines were just published and will be distributed free to qualified New Mexico physicians during training sessions and to inform doctors of the treatment, policy, and clinical procedures required to conduct medication assisted treatment (MAT) of opioid addictions. Burbank also edited an electronic version of the guidelines that will appear on a special website dedicated to opioid addiction treatment. Burbank also was project editor of Managing Co-occurring Mental and Substance Use Disorders in Primary Care: A Guide for the Busy Primary Care Provider by Florian Birkmayer, M.D. published by the UNM Center for Rural and Community Behavioral Health in 2010.

Center for Regional Studies Research Scholar Joins the English Department for the Year

Dr. Karen R. Roybal

The Center for Regional Studies and the English Department are happy to announce that Dr. Karen R. Roybal, a CRS Visiting Research Scholar, will be housed in UNM’s English Department of Language and Literature for the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 academic year.

As a CRS scholar, Dr. Roybal will work on her book manuscript, Archives of Dispossession: Uncovering Mexicana Memory through Testimonio —a project that draws on literature, land title records, and testimonios to argue that the history of Mexican land claims cannot be understood only as a racialized story, but must also be recognized as a story linked to gender. In the book, she coins the phrase testimonios de herederas to describe inherited histories of land struggle on the part of women of Mexican and/or Spanish descent. Dr. Roybal’s interdisciplinary book chronicles women’s active participation in and indispensability to the legacy of land-related struggle by focusing on a combination of archival court testimonies taken from 1854-1890 by the United States Surveyor General’s Office in New Mexico during the land adjudication process; literary-based testimonios de herederas penned by Mexican American women—such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita González, and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca—directly and indirectly involved in land struggles from 1848-1954; and ethnographic oral history interviews provided by women engaged in the contemporary land grant movement in New Mexico. She argues that because the legacy of land grant studies has largely excluded women from view, the stakes of re-materializing women and making their active participation visible is crucial to understanding the full nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of the “violence over the land” in the U.S. Southwest.

While visiting in the English Department, Dr. Roybal is also slated to teach two courses. The first, English 315: Chicana Literature and Film, is being offered in the second eight week session of the fall semester and will provide a historical survey of Chicana literature and film in relation to gender, race, agency, and aesthetics. See the course description below. Her second class will run in the spring. She’s also working with the department on launching a Southwest Studies Institute initiative.

Dr. Roybal received her PhD in American Studies from the UNM in July 2011 as an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellow, and from 2011-2012, she was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Latina/o Studies Department. She was recently awarded a short-term research fellowship by the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin to conduct research at the Benson Latin American library. Her broader research interests include Chicana/o, Latina/o Literature, Autobiographical Theory, Chicana/Latina Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Nineteenth & Twentieth Century Mexican-American History.