Carmen Nocentelli's Empires of Love published this month!

Carmen Nocentelli's Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity was released earlier this month by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Drawing on a wide range of sources in multiple languages, the book charts the overlapping construction of race and sexuality from the early sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries, arguing that the encounter with Asia contributed to the development of Western racial discourse while also shaping European ideals of erotic reciprocity and monogamous affection. A book presentation is scheduled for Wednesday 20 February at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, 12:00 to 1:00 pm.

October Blog

Our Graduate students and Faculty have been very busy this past Autumn. Please see below for a brief list of their accomplishments.

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Boulder, CO. October 11-13
Katherine Alexander. Session Chair, The Brontë Sisters
Katherine Alexander. “Catherine Earnshaw's Unexpected Gift? Love, Possession, and Dispossession on the Moors.”
Annarose Fitzgerald. “Gentle Jesus and the Sauce Tureen: Naming the Divine in Mina Loy’s ‘Ova’ Poems.”
Marcella Garvey. “Marriage and the Crisis of Faith in Emily Brontë’s WutheringHeights.”
Feroza Framji Jussawalla. Session Chair, Comparative and Non-Western Critical Approaches to Non-European Literatures
Doaa Abdel Hamid Omran Mohamed. “Occidentalism as Ambivalence: A Modern Understanding of Islam.”
Erin Woltkamp. “Subversive Gestures: Hands as Tools for Rebellion in Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Julie Williams. “Home Sweet (Dirty) Home: Discourses of Disease in Native American Boarding School Literature.”
Ying Xu. “A Chinese Serpent Prince or a Chinese Empress: Transculturation and Wong Chin Foo's Reconstruction of Chinese Women in Late Nineteenth-Century America.”

Modernist Studies Association, Las Vegas, NV. October 18-2
Matt Hofer. Panel Organizer, The New American Poetry and the West.
Matt Hofer. “ ‘Few / People are lost as I am’: Ed Dorn in the Great Basin-Plateau.” This work will also appear in his forthcoming expanded edition of Ed Dorn and Leroy Lucas's The Shoshoneans (UNM Press, fall 2013).
Matt Hofer. Panel Chair, Learning from Detroit.
Daniel Worden. Organizer of and Participant on the “Postmodern/Postwar: After the New Modernist Studies” Roundtable.

Greg Martin

Panel Discussion, The Lay of the Land: Memoir and Landscape; Readings from Stories for Boys. Montana Festival of the Book Missoula, MT. October 5.
Readings from Stories for Boys. Powell’s Books, Portland OR. October 11.
Readings from Stories for Boys with Kambri Crews; Workshop, Breaking the Conventions of Memoir: the Art of Speculation; Panel, One Big Happy Queer Family. Wordstock Book Festival, Portland, OR. October 13-14.
Readings from Stories for Boys. Village Books, Bellingham, WA. October 15.
Readings from Stories for Boys. Seattle Public Library, Seattle, WA. October 16.
Readings from Stories for Boys in conjunction with UMOCA’s exhibit Battleground States. Utah Book Festival, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. October 17.

Jason Bengtson. “Digital Scavenger Hunt” and “Smart Links” Tech Expos, and “Are We Poised For a Digital Biblioclasm?” Round Table. South Central Chapter of the Medical Library Association Conference, Lubbock, TX. October 13-17.

Justin Falk-Gee. “Deconstructing Differences in the Classroom.” The TYCA Southwest Conference, Las Cruces, NM. October 25-27.

Carmen Nocentelli. panel presentation, CL/CS Roundtable discussion, “What is Desire?” University of New Mexico. October 25.

Joe Serio. “Is What We See What We Get? Flip Wilson and the Civil Rights Movement.” 2nd Annual Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference: Mic Check: Resistance and Revolution, New York. October 26.

Jonathan Davis Secord has received funding for a Manuscripts lab

Professor Jonathan Davis Secord has received a Teaching Allocation Grant, for a “manuscripts lab,” consisting of a high-powered computer workstation, to facilitate undergraduate and graduate education in the Middle Ages.

Manuscripts are one of the best teaching tools available for medievalists, engaging students in unique ways by providing direct access to real historical materials. Guarded by European libraries, manuscripts are difficult to access physically, but many are now available digitally. The manuscripts lab will provide the computing power necessary to utilize the huge digital images these new resources produce. For years to come, the lab will bring the Middle Ages to life before our students’ eyes.

Karen Roybal lecture: Archives of Dispossession: Uncovering Mexicana Memory through Testimonio

Visiting Professor Karen Roybal will be giving a talk,
Archives of Dispossession: Uncovering Mexicana Memory through Testimonio
                       2:00 PM January 25, 2013
                       SUB, 3rd Floor, Fiesta A room

In this talk, Karen Roybal will use Mexicanas’ literal and literary testimonios to challenge nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives that privilege the male voice and experience in land grant history as it relates to the making of the U.S. Southwest. She argues that these testimonios reveal an alternative archive that challenges traditional historical accounts that elide the importance of gender in this contested history.

Dr. Karen Roybal is a Visiting Research Scholar in The Center for Regional Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UNM. Her 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.

Jesse Alemán elected to MLA Delegate Assembly

For the second time, Dr. Jesse Alemán has been elected to the MLA’s Delegate Assembly—this time as a three-year delegate for the Central and Rocky Mountain region. He previously served on the Delegate Assembly as a Special Interest Delegate for Ethnic Studies, and he currently sits on the Advisory Council of the MLA’s American Literature Section.

Also, Dr. Aleman’s article, “Wars of Rebellion,” will appear in the upcoming issue of American Literary History (25.1), which has posted an advanced copy on the journal’s website: http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/recent

Mary Luttrell publishes in Painted Bride Quarterly

Mary Luttrell, an English major pursuing her CW concentration, will publish her poem, "Porous," in Painted Bride Quarterly, Vol. 86.

Some great MFA publishing news to start off 2013

MFA Alumni Jeremy Collins’s essay “Papa Don’t Preach” received the Wabash prize for nonfiction, judged by Mary Karr, and will appear in 2013 in The Sycamore Review.

MFA Alumni Elizabeth Tannen’s essay “Jackie” appeared in The Rumpus in December 2012. You can read her essay here: http://therumpus.net/2012/12/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-jackie/

Current MFA student Nora Hickey’s essay “The World is a Mirror (and Other Tales of Drinking)" was a finalist for Diagram’s nonfiction contest and will appear in the magazine in February 2013. Congrats to Jeremy, Elizabeth and Nora!

Daniel Worden's essay on Ansel Adams and Mary Austin's Taos Pueblo published in Criticism

Daniel Worden's "Landscape Culture: Ansel Adams and Mary Austin's Taos Pueblo" has been published in the Winter 2013 issue of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts.

The issue is available here: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/criticism/toc/crt.55.1.html

Cheryl Fresch wins Shawcross Prize for her Milton edition

Professor Cheryl Fresch, who retired from our department a few years ago, was awarded the Shawcross Prize by the Milton Society at the MLA meeting in Boston this month.  It was presented for her variorum edition of John Milton's Book IV of Paradise Lost published by Duquesne University Press in 2011.