Professor Obermeier Publishes Book Review

Dr. Obermeier has published a book review of Joerg O. Fichte's From Camelot to Obamalot: Essays on Medieval and Modern Arthurian Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2010) in the Journal for English and Germanic Philology 114.3 (2015): 453-56.

Relevant Links: 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jenglgermphil.114.3.0453#pdf_only_tab_contents

Faculty & Graduate Conference Appearances and Presentations October 2015

Assistant Professor of English Sarah L. Townsend organized the 2015 American Conference for Irish Studies Western Regional meeting (ACIS-West) October 16-17 in Rapid City, South Dakota. The conference theme, "Ireland: Memory and Monument," explored acts of memory and commemoration in Irish literature, history, politics, and culture. Keynote speakers included David C. Lloyd (Distinguished Professor of English at UC Riverside), Eamonn Wall (poet and essayist, Smurfit Professor of English at the University of Missouri, St. Louis), and Myles Dungan (RTE presenter and instructor at City Colleges Dublin). The conference concluded with a performance of the play Fionnuala by award-winning actor and playwright Donal O'Kelly (Director, Benbo Productions), as well as a discussion between Irish and Lakota artists, activists, and scholars about multinational oil production and the preservation of indigenous environments and communities. At the conclusion of the conference, Townsend was named Treasurer of the organization.

Sarah L. Townsend. "Waiting in Anatolia: Beckett, Ceylan, and the Procedural Body." American Conference for Irish Studies, Western Region. . Rapid City, SD: October 17.

Julie Williams. "Waist High in the West: A Study of a Wheelchair Perspective." Western Literature Association. University of Nevada, Reno. Reno, NV: October 14-18, 2015.

Megan Malcom-Morgan. "Modernism's 'Other:' D.H. Lawrence in Mexico.." Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association . . Santa Fe, NM: October 10, 2015.

Julie Williams. "Gender Expression in the American West: Femininity is in the Eye of the Beholder." Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. . Santa Fe, NM: October 8-10, 2015.

Rudolfo & Patricia Anaya Lecture on Literature of the Southwest

Please Join us!
October 22, 7:00 p.m., George Pearl Hall, Room 101

Anne Hillerman

On Thursday, October 22, the UNM Department ofEnglish will host distinguished writer Anne Hillerman as the featured speaker for the sixth annual Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture on the Literature of the Southwest.

Hillerman will speak about “Why Stories Matter” at 7:00 p.m. in Room 101 of George Pearl Hall (the School of Architecture and Planning), with a reception to follow. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information about the lecture and series, visit our website.

About the Author
Hillerman lives in Santa Fe, is a UNM alumna, and is the author of eight published non-fiction books, including one about her father, the late novelist Tony Hillerman. Her first novel, Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013), made the New York Times bestseller list and received the 2014 Spur Award for the Best First Mystery from Western Writers of America. She just published her second mystery novel, Rock With Wings (2015), and is working on a third.

About the Lecture Series
The English Department established the annual lecture series on the literature of the Southwest in 2010 through a gift from the renowned fiction writer Rudolfo Anaya and his late wife Patricia Anaya. In the past the department has hosted Simon Ortiz, Denise Chávez, John Nichols, N. Scott Momaday, and Ana Castillo. This year, Hillerman joins the distinguished list.

Thank you for supporting the Rudolfo Anaya Fellowship Fund!
The UNM English Department also has the Rudolfo Anaya Fellowship Fund, which is very close to endowment and would then be available for student fellowships. We would like to encourage you to make a contribution to this fund; gifts of $100 or more will receive a poster of this year’s Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya lecture signed by Rudolfo Anaya and Anne Hillerman.

Thanks to our UNM co-sponsors for the 2015 Anaya Lecture with Anne Hillerman: Center for Southwest Research, Department of History, Feminist Research Institute, University College and The Center for the Southwest.

Helen Damico's Book Discussion and Signing at the UNM Bookstore

Professor Emerita of English Medieval Language and Literature, Damico hosted a discussion and signing of her new book, Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England (West Virginia University Press, 2015)  on Tuesday, October 13th, at the UNM Bookstore:

Daniel Worden published by Cambridge University Press

Worden's essay on "The Popular Western" will be published this month in Cambridge University Press's History of Western American Literature, edited by Susan Kollin.

Relevant Links:

• http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/history-western-american-literature

Karra Shimabukuro publishes "I Framed Freddy: Functional Aesthetics in the A Nightmare on Elm Street Series"

While existing work on modern horror tends to focus on a small range of exceptional examples of the genre, and generally finds value in the films through the application of sociopolitical, psychoanalytic, or other theoretical frameworks, the broader trend of the for-profit Hollywood studio produced and/or distributed texts and the elements of their construction have been largely ignored. Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film aims to fill this existing gap in scholarship on horror. This book collects essays from a range of academics to consider the place of some of these films within the history of the slasher, how their construction provides a more complex experience than initially conceived, what this can tell us about the genre, and how a study of form can support and aid theoretical analyses.

Relevant Links:

• http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/style-and-form-in-the-hollywood-slasher-film-wickham-clayton/?isb=9781137496461

Kelly Hunnings published in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Fall 2015

Review of Gender Hurts: a Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism by Sheila Jeffreys [New York: Routledge].  Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Fall 2015 (69.2)

Daniel Mueller published by The Writing Disorder, Summer 2015

"The Embers" is a short story set in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Themes of religion, marital fidelity, teenage pregnancy, incest, and abortion rights.

Relevant Links:

• http://writingdisorder.com/daniel-mueller/

Julianne Newmark published by Modern Language Studies, Summer 2015

"Claims to Political Place through the National Council of American Indians: Locating Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin in the Nation’s Capital."

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, many Native leaders emerged on the national political stage, figuring prominently as lobbyists, contributors of Congressional testimony, leaders of national pan-Indian organizations, and vitally important members of specific tribal communities.  Among the most prominent of these indigenous activists were Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin. The Bonnins dedicated themselves to, as they called it, the Indian cause in a variety of ways in this period. Some of their efforts have been well studied by current scholars, particularly Gertrude's autobiographical writings under her self-given name Zitkala-Sa and her early activist scholarship as a prominent member of the Society of American Indians, as Secretary and as Editor of the publication The American Indian Magazine. This essay considers a sampling of the less frequently studied, later efforts of Gertrude Bonnin's, particularly epistolary and pamphlet-writing activities of 1926, 1927, and 1928. 

Julianne Newmark published by IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication First Quarter 2015

Learning Beyond the Classroom and Textbook: Workplace Enculturation via Technical Communication Client Projects and Internships with Elisabeth Kramer-Simpson and Julie Dyke Ford.

From the online description on the journal's website: the article "explores how approaches such as client projects in technical communication courses for majors prepare students for internships and their transition to the work world."

Relevant Links:

• http://pcs.ieee.org/first-quarter-2015-issue-of-the-transactions-now-available/

Kelly Hunnings published in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Spring 2015

Review of Wordsworth and Welsh Romanticism by James Prothero [Cambridge Scholars Publishing].  Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Spring 2015 (69.1): 114-116.

Julianne Newmark published The Pluralist Imagination from East to West in American Literature in January 2015

The first three decades of the twentieth century saw the largest period of immigration in U.S. history. This immigration, however, was accompanied by legal segregation, racial exclusionism, and questions of residents national loyalty and commitment to a shared set of American beliefs and identity. The faulty premise that homogeneity as the symbol of the melting pot was the mark of a strong nation underlined nativist beliefs while undercutting the rich diversity of cultures and lifeways of the population. Though many authors of the time have been viewed through this nativist lens, several texts do indeed contain an array of pluralist themes of society and culture that contradict nativist orientations. In The Pluralist Imagination from East to West in American Literature, Julianne Newmark brings urban northeastern, western, southwestern, and Native American literature into debates about pluralism and national belonging and thereby uncovers new concepts of American identity based on sociohistorical environments. Newmark explores themes of plurality and place as a reaction to nativism in the writings of Louis Adamic, Konrad Bercovici, Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Alexander Eastman, James Weldon Johnson, D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Zitkala-Sa, among others. This exploration of the connection between concepts of place and pluralist communities reveals how mutual experiences of place can offer more constructive forms of community than just discussions of nationalism, belonging, and borders.

Published by University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2015


Relevant Links:

• https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Pluralist-Imagination-from-East-to-West-in-America,675995.aspx
• http://www.amazon.com/Pluralist-Imagination-East-American-Literature/dp/0803254792

Faculty & Graduate Conference Appearances and Presentations since Spring 2014

Anita Obermeier. "Birth and Birth Control in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales." Biennial London Chaucer Conference: Science, Magic, and Technology. University of London. London, UK: July 10-11, 2015.

Anita Obermeier. "Merlin, the Clown, and the Queer in Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin." 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies,. Western Michigan University. Kalamazoo, MI: May 14-17, 2015.

Anita Obermeier. "Teaching Provençal Lyrics and the Cathars." 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. Western Michigan University. Kalamazoo, MI: May 14-17, 2015.

Kelly J. Hunnings. "Patronage, Poetic Identity, and Domestic Tensions: Jane Wiseman and Mary Leapor, 1717-1746." Feminist Research Institute (FRI) Lecture Series . Univ. of New Mexico. Albuquerque, NM: April 2015.

Anita Obermeier. “Medieval Empress Cunegund’s Sterility as Disability and Magic in 21st-Century German Historical Fiction." Annual Meeting of the Medieval Association of the Pacific. University of Nevada-Reno. Reno, NV: April 10-11, 2015.

Kelly J. Hunnings. "Mary Robinson, Collaborative Writing, and Genres of Women's Autobiography." America Society of Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS). . Los Angeles, CA: March 2015.

Presented with Leslie Morrison, PhD

Julie Williams. "One Voice is Not Enough to Tell a Story: Writing as Community Creation in Native American Women's Fiction." Native American Literature Symposium. . Isleta, NM: March 12-14, 2015.

Julie Williams. "Access to Nature for Students with Disabilities." Center for Teaching Excellence Success in the Classroom Conference. University of New Mexico. Albuquerque, NM: February 19, 2015.

Julie Williams. "Trans-Atlantic Artistry in Blue Ravens, Hungry Generations, and The Heartsong of Charging Elk." American Indian Studies Association. . Albuquerque, NM: February 5-6, 2015.

Julie Williams. "Preparing for Take-Off: Learning to Fly in Graduate School." Modern Language Association. Canada. Vancouver, BC: January 8-11, 2015.

Kelly J. Hunnings. "Solitude and Isolation: John Clare's Struggle for Childhood Familiarity." Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association (PAMLA). . San Diego, CA: May 2014.

Anita Obermeier. “’Torn between Two Lovers’: Formalism, Feminism, and Other Isms in Teaching the Pan-European Medieval Lyrics." 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies. Western Michigan University. Kalamazoo, MI: May 8-11, 2014.

Helen Damico Book Discussion & Signing - Tuesday, October 13th

Tanaya Winder Poetry Reading and Book Release: Words Like Love

UNM MFA alumna Tanaya Winder will host a poetry reading and book release at Bookworks (4022 Rio Grande Blvd NW) on Tuesday, September 29th, at 7:00pm.

In her debut collection, Words Like Love, poet Tanaya Winder sings the joys, glories, and laments of love. Love is defined by familial, cultural, platonic, and romantic bonds in these passionate and thoughtfully rendered poems. Winder’s voice resonates through the dark—and the light— on a quest to learn more about the most complex of subjects.

Words Like Love is her first full length poetry collection (West End Press, 2015).

Read more writing and find events @tanayawinder.wordpress.com and find her on Twitter @a_girl_on_fire.

Announcing the Inaugural ALS Seminar Symposium

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

4:00pm-7:30pm

Humanities 108

The ALS faculty invites all English Department graduate students and faculty to participate in the inaugural ALS seminar symposium and reception. The event brings together Dr. Vizcaíno-Alemán's English 610: Critical Regionalism and Dr. Coleman's English 660: Race and the African American Novel to discuss selected seminar readings with all attendees.

This year's symposium facilitates an understanding of critical regionalism through selections from Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk; Gilroy's The Black Atlantic; Stecopoulos' Reconstructing the World; an article on bell hooks and another on the global west.

Dr. Krista Comer, associate professor at Rice University, former Western Literature Association president, and leading scholar of critical regionalism, will cap the event with a lecture titled:

"Thinking Otherwise across Global Wests:

Issues of Mobility and Feminist Critical Regionalism”

All attendees are expected to read the material and are invited to participate in discussion. The following readings can be found on e-reserve: 

http://ereserves.unm.edu/eres/courseindex.aspx?&page=search

Course: ENGL610; password: lobo610

• Du Bois, "Of the Black Belt" and "Of the Coming of John" from The Souls of Black Folk;
• Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (selection)
• Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World (selection)
• Comer, "The Problem of the Critical in Global Wests”

An additional reading can be found online:

• Christina Van Houten, "bell hooks, Critical Regionalism, and the Politics of Ecological Returns”http://politicsandculture.org/2014/03/09/bell-hooks-critical-regionalism-and-the-politics-of-ecological-returns-by-christina-van-houten/

Schedule:

• 4:00-5:45pm--Welcome and facilitated discussion
• 5:45-6:00pm--Break and refreshments
• 6:00-7:30pm--Lecture, Q&A, and light reception

Food and refreshments will be available at the event.

Sponsored by the English Department, the Center for Regional Studies, and the English Graduate Student Association

Contact: Dr. Jesse Alemán 

jman@unm.edu

Alemán publishes chapter on teaching nineteenth-century US Latino/a literatures

Jesse Alemán’s chapter, “Recovered and Recovery Texts of the Nineteenth Century,” leads off Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Teaching, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and recently published by Routledge. The essay is a scholarly piece on teaching nineteenth-century US Latino/a literatures, surveying major texts to be included in the classroom, presenting approaches to themes, genres, and authors that structure the Latino nineteenth century, and most importantly, arguing for a different model of teaching American literary history to be inclusive of early US Latino/a print cultures.

Anita Obermeier publishes article on Merlin's Devil Conception in Arthuriana's special volume dedicated to "Arthur on the Stage."

In her most recent article, “Merlin’s Conception by Devil in William Rowley’s Play The Birth of Merlin” (Arthuriana 24.4 (2014): 48-79), Anita Obermeier argues that Rowley’s early modern play amalgamates both the medieval Galfridian-based and Francophone narratives of Merlin’s conception by daemon, incubus, and devil in order to engage contemporary early seventeenth-century debates on the devil’s influence in the world, to ventriloquize social commentary via the figure of the Clown, and to have Merlin hail Prince Charles as the future Arthur.

Baker Named the 2015-16 Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellow

W. Oliver Baker, an American Literary Studies Ph.D. candidate in the University of New Mexico English Department, has been awarded the 2015-2016 Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship.

Baker earned both his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In his master's program, Baker studied American literature, rhetoric and composition, while also serving as a graduate instructor, teaching and assisting with writing, literature, and film courses. Baker joined the UNM English Department in the fall of 2012. Baker’s areas of study include nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, Critical Theory, Marxist Cultural Theory, and Pedagogy. He also works as a UNM Graduate instructor in Core writing, a Freshman Learning Communities instructor, and teaches courses on American and World literature.

Baker will use the CRS Torres Fellowship to research and draft his dissertation, tentatively titled, “Literatures of Dispossession: Representing U.S. Settler Colonialism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” which examines how American literature from mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century offers a cultural history of a key period in the development and expansion of U.S. settler colonialism. The dissertation highlights the role of settler colonialism as a structure of dispossession and its relationship to the processes of U.S. industrialization and monopoly capitalism. In particular, Baker focuses on the works of Indigenous, African American, and Mexican American writers of this period, demonstrating how the form and style of their writings register the uneven development and structural violence of settler colonialism and capitalist expansion in North America. Dr. Jesse Alemán directs the dissertation.

The CRS Hector Torres Fellowship, a $10,000-$15,000 stipend, was inaugurated in 2010 by the University of New Mexico’s Center for Regional Studies in memory of the English Department’s slain colleague. The fellowship supports graduate research and scholarship in the English Department directly related to the late Dr. Torres’ fields, as well as the mission of the Center for Regional Studies. Areas include Chicano/a literary and cultural studies; theory (i.e. Marxism; post-structuralism; deconstruction; psychoanalysis; and globalization); film studies; and scholarship related to the mission of the CRS, including history; archival research; literature; and other interdisciplinary fields related to New Mexico, the US-Mexico borderlands, and the greater southwest.

Daniel Worden’s edited volume The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World published by the University Press of Mississippi

Daniel Worden’s latest book, an edited collection of essays titled The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, has just been published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book also features an essay by UNM English PhD Candidate Ann D’Orazio.

The Comics of Joe Sacco addresses the range of his award-winning work, from his early comics stories as well as his ground-breaking journalism Palestine (1993) and Safe Area to Gorade (2000), to Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and his most recent book The Great War (2013), a graphic history of World War I.

First in the new series Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, this edited volume explores Sacco's comics journalism, and features established and emerging scholars from comics studies, cultural studies, geography, literary studies, political science, and communication studies. Sacco's work has already found a place in some of the foundational scholarship in comics studies, and this book solidifies his role as one of the most important comics artists today.

Sections focus on how Sacco's comics journalism critiques and employs the "standard of objectivity" in mainstream reporting, what aesthetic principles and approaches to lived experience can be found in his comics, how Sacco employs the space of the comics page to map history and war, and the ways that his comics function in the classroom and as human rights activism. The Comics of Joe Sacco offers definitive, exciting approaches to some of the most important--and necessary--comics today, by one of the most acclaimed journalist-artists of our time.  

The book is available through booksellers everywhere, and here:  http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1764

ALS PhD Student W. Oliver Baker wins the Michael Sprinker Essay Prize

W. Oliver Baker’s essay “The Materialism of Violence and the Politics of Recognition in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian” has won the Michael Sprinker Prize, a national essay competition hosted by the Marxist Literary Group and the editors of the journal Mediations. The Michael Sprinker award recognizes an essay or dissertation chapter that engages with Marxist theory, scholarship, pedagogy, and/or activism. The winner receives a prize of $500 and automatic entry of the essay into the peer review process for the journal Mediations. Commenting on Oliver’s essay, the judges “agreed, with very little quibbling of any kind, that [it] was the most original and publishable submission we received.  We were especially impressed with the elegance with which the essay managed to be a critique both of the new materialisms and of the McCarthy novel.” 

Oliver’s essay argues that Blood Meridian represents the history of settler colonial violence in the form of a productive materialism or “object-oriented” aesthetic, and that in so doing forecloses a view of colonialism as a structure of capitalist violence. By representing settler colonial domination in positive terms as an “event” or “stage” of violence rather than in negative terms as a structure of dispossession, what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” McCarthy’s novel participates in a politics of neoliberal recognition whereby settler subjects of today “recognize” and reconcile colonialist violence of the past as a way not to acknowledge the role it still plays in contemporary forms of global capitalism that continue to dispossess and bring violence against Indigenous peoples of the world.

Oliver recently completed his third year as a PhD student in American Literary Studies. After passing his comprehensive exams last spring, Oliver is now working toward defending his dissertation prospectus after which he will begin his dissertation work this coming fall. 

More information about Mediations and the MLG can be found here: http://www.mediationsjournal.org/

Alemán Delivers Burke Lecture in Taos

As the 2015 Jim and Linda Burke Visiting Scholar in Literature at the Doel Reed Center for the Arts in Taos, Dr. Jesse Alemán delivered a lecture on Southwestern horror in film at the Taos Art Museum and Fechin House. Read more about it below in Laura Bulkin's article from the Taos Tempo:

Taos lecture: 'From Atomic Ants to Texas Cannibals'

What do giant radioactive ants have in common with inbred feral cannibals? How has our post-atomic Southwestern culture shaped the horror movie genre? And is it really aliens taking away our cattle, or could there be more sinister economic agents at work?

These questions and more will be addressed in a lively presentation by University of New Mexico-Albuquerque professor Dr. Jesse Alemán on Sunday (May 31), 2 p.m. at the Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, 227 Paseo del Pueblo Norte.

The event is titled “From Atomic Ants to Texas Cannibals: The Social Significance of Southwestern Horror in Film,” and is being offered free of charge by Oklahoma State University’s Doel Reed Center for the Arts in Taos.

The Doel Reed Center came about through the generosity of late Taos icon Martha Reed, whose famed broomstick skirts have adorned fashionable dancers from Taos to the White House.

“Martha was an alumna of Oklahoma State, and her father Doel taught art there,” said center director Dr. Edward Walkiewicz. “When she passed in 2010, she left us her property, including her father’s old art studio, with the stipulation that it be used for arts and humanities.”

Alemán will discuss “the way specific events that take place in the Southwest show up in horror films — environmental and economic disasters generating forms of horror.” He gives the example of “Them,” a 1954 release considered one of the pioneers of the “nuclear monster” genre. “Them” is set in Alamagordo, New Mexico, site of the first atomic bomb test — an environmental nightmare that, in the film, spawns an army of giant mutant ants.

As well as atomic events, Alemán will cover the economic horror story of the demise of cattle culture. He posits a direct line of cinematic influence, from the 1963 cattle-industry drama “Hud,” to 1970s horror classics such as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Hills Have Eyes,” where the cannibal antagonists have been left in social and economic isolation by the decline of the cattle economy.

This rich vein of material ties in with another field of expertise for Alemán: Chicano folklore, especially as it is translated into the medium of film. “We could look at low-brow horror movies as just campy or simplistic, but this genre of subaltern forms has a long history of articulating complex social messages.”

He gives the example of the many “chupacabra films” that have been made in Mexico and the U.S. over the years, and points to a metaphorical subtext of “blood-sucking labor practices and exploitation of workers” underlying the chupacabra’s vampirism.

La Llorona, “The Weeping Woman,” has also been a favorite horror-genre theme, with Mexican Llorona films dating back to the 1930s. Alemán spoke of the differences between the character of La Llorona as she has traditionally been passed down in stories from elders to children, and the way that the character has been portrayed cinematically.

“I love the fact that she’s in film and doesn’t have to be the same as she is in folklore. Many of the Mexican movies add the element of La Llorona possessing the body of someone, often a white woman. This never happens in the folklore stories, it was completely made up for cinema. With this added element of ‘possession,’ you wonder, what’s up with that, what does that mean? Who is possessing and owning whom, and why? There are profound metaphors here for the possession of land, the possession of culture and power and property.”

“There is also a tradition of zombies in horror films representing ‘racial others’ who will suck life from the dominant culture,” Alemán continued, citing the 1996 cult film “From Dusk Till Dawn.”

“That film captured those tensions in its very structure. It’s a Quentin Tarantino film until the Tarantino character dies, and then we get Robert Rodriguez’ perspective and it’s a different point of view on the genre. This was set in a trucker bar, and made at the very beginning of NAFTA. Who are the real vampires— the Mexicans in the film, or the corporate entities about to come swarming in?”

Alemán grew up in a small town in rural California, and says his upbringing there, in a region he describes as “98 percent raza,” helps him feel at home teaching in Albuquerque. “The work I’m doing now is a synthesis of all the cultural impressions I took in as a kid, filtered through rigorous academic mentoring and training in thinking analytically.”

While in Taos, Alemán will also be interacting with OSU professor Martin Wallen’s intensive two-week course on the subject of “The Nuclear Bomb and the Land of Enchantment.” Wallen says the class will be visiting Los Alamos, “along with the sites of peaceful artistic engagement, such as the Fechin House and the Greater World Earthships.”

“This is the third summer that we’re hosting a visiting scholar,” said Walkiewicz. “We do a nationwide search for the person with the best credentials who can also contribute to a class. Jesse Alemán already has a great body of work in Southwestern culture and contemporary film, and in how that ties in to social and economic issues.”

Later this year, the Center will be taking part in the Pressing Through Time exhibition. This celebration of printmaking in Taos will encompass 150 years of work, including that of Doel Reed himself. “We are always trying to participate in the artistic and intellectual life of the community, and to bring in more than we take out,” Walkiewicz said.

For Sunday’s event, Alemán assures attendees that they won’t be subjected to a typical dry lecture. He’ll be showing clips from the films as he speaks about them, and then will invite the audience to join in what he hopes will be a spirited discussion. “It’s about the power of folklore. Some may view it as mythology. For us, it is articulating how we live all the time.”

For more, call the museum at (575) 758-2690.

Tiffany Bourelle Named 2015-16 Teaching Fellow

The Center for Teaching Excellence selected Assistant Professor Tiffany Bourelle to be a 2015-16 Teaching Fellow.

Teaching Fellows will investigate carefully-defined teaching challenges by examining the latest research on teaching and learning in their disciplines, designing a teaching innovation, and by collecting and evaluating evidence of student learning in their own courses. At the end of the program, Fellows will present their results in a campus presentation and at national conferences in their disciplines.

Jonathan Davis-Secord Awarded Medieval Academy Book Subvention

Assistant Professor Davis-Secord's book, Joinings: Compound Words in Old English Literature, forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press, has been awarded the Medieval Academy Book Subvention, which provides support for the publication of first books at university and scholarly presses.

Julie Williams Receives Inaugural ALS-Arms Dissertation Research Assistantship

Julie Williams, PhD candidate in American Literary Studies, has garnered the inaugural ALS Elizabeth and George Arms Fund for American Literature Research Assistantship for Dissertation Completion to assist and facilitate the research and writing of her dissertation, “Embodying the West: A Literary and Cultural History of Environment, Body, and Belief.”

Focusing on embodiment in women’s writing in the American West from the 1880s to the present, the dissertation argues that texts, authors, and cultural events depicting bodies that do not fit into the narrative identity created by discourses about the West—bodies that are all “marked” through an alternative mode of gender construction, sexual desire, illness, disability, or race—reveal the limits and possibilities of the mythic West and the discourses of rejuvenation which have shaped it. Dr. Jesse Alemán chairs the dissertation.

The assistantship pays $16,500.00 from the Arms Endowment Fund over one academic year to support dissertation research, and UNM’s Graduate Studies provide dissertation hour tuition remission and heath care coverage for the recipient.

The Elizabeth and George Arms Fund for American Literature is an endowed graduate award fund with the UNM Foundation in recognition of research in American Literature within the College of Arts and Sciences Department of English.

Christine Beagle awarded A&S Dissertation/Thesis Completion Award for Summer 2015

Christine is a Rhetoric & Writing PhD candidate completing her dissertation, "The Chicana Speaks: Dolores Huerta and the Chicana as Rhetor".

Filar Wins First ALS-Arms Outstanding Graduate Student Essay

Diana Filar’s essay, “Palms: Poetry, Little Magazines, and the ‘Making it New’ of Modernist American Literature,” has been selected by a committee of ALS faculty as the first ALS-Arms Outstanding Graduate Student Essay. The award is $500.00 from the Elizabeth and George Arms Endowment Fund in recognition of research in American Literature. Ms. Filar graduated with her MA in Literature in Spring 2015.

The selection committee agreed that the essay “is a cogent and thorough analysis of the little magazine published in Guadalajara, Mexico, that traces the history of the publication and the significance of its mission, visual art, and poetic selections in relation to modernist studies, the literature of the American West, and transnational networks of cultural exchange. The essay is detailed and precise in its focus with lucid writing and excellent supporting images. The project draws on the resources of the CSWR archives in creative and significant ways . . . that not only addresses the region, but also that is tied specifically to UNM and its resources.”

Ms. Filar will be presenting a version of her award-winning essay, which she penned in a course offered by Dr. Daniel Worden, at the upcoming Modernist Studies Association Conference, and now that she’s earned her MA at UNM, she is heading to the PhD program in English and American Literature at Brandies University on a graduate fellowship. Congratulations on all counts to Diana Filar.

Daoine Bachran and Natalie Kubasek Garner Mellon Dissertation Fellowships

Two ALS PhD candidates in English, Daoine Bachran and Natalie Kubasek, have both garnered UNM-Mellon Dissertation Fellowships to facilitate the completion of their dissertations. 

Daoine Bachran’s dissertation, “From Recovery to Discovery: Ethnic Science Fiction and (Re)Creating the Future,” argues that science fiction by Native, Chicana/o, and black artists re-imagines scientific paradigms for understanding history, the present, and future possibility. 

Natalie Kubasek’s dissertation, entitled “Chicana Feminist Acts: Revising the Script of Chicana/o Theater from the Early Twentieth Century to the Present” proves that since the 1930’s, Chicanas have staged feminist acts in theater that challenge patriarchal and nationalist ideas of gender and sexuality by imagining and performing multiple Chicana identities. 

Dr. Jesse Alemán chairs both award-winning dissertations.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the highly competitive and nationally recognized Mellon award provides dissertation fellowships in the humanistic social sciences across ten UNM departments to senior doctoral students working on studies relevant to Latino/a or Native American communities. The year-and-a-half award is meant to assist in the completion of the dissertation by providing a $25,000.00 stipend at the beginning of each semester for three semesters; tuition remission; health care coverage; and up to $1,500.00 for professional development or research support during the tenure of the award. The Mellon also awards the fellow’s dissertation chair a $3,000.00 stipend.

Stephanie Spong Receives Bilinski Fellowship

Stephanie Spong was recently awarded the prestigious Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship. The Bilinski Educational Foundation recognizes excellent doctoral students in the humanities at UNM. Eight doctoral students have already completed their dissertations and degrees supported by Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowships. The 2015 finalists for the Bilinski Fellowship stand out for their potential impact on both scholarship and community. Stephanie Spong (English) is reexamining Modernist poetry to reveal how poets from Gertrude Stein to Langston Hughes created new and influential ideas of love and eros. Read more here

Kelly Hunnings Receives Gallagher Scholarship

Kelly Hunnings was recently awarded the Joseph C. Gallagher Scholarship, which provides funding for year-long study in Ireland and Europe. She will be splitting time in between Ireland, Scotland and England; her research will trace the role of laboring-class women's writing from the shift to Georgian to Romantic models of writing.

Kalila Bohsali Receives Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship

The University of New Mexico selected its first Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows recently. The recipients for the the 2015-2017 cohort of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program include: Amber Lopez, Kalila Bohsali, Melissa Auh, Nina Raby and Shayanah Chiaramonte.

Kalila Bohsali is an undergraduate student, double majoring in literature and French, with a minor in Arabic.

See Mara Kerkez' full article from the UNM Newsroom.

Bourelle, Griego-Schmitt and Spong Receive Center for Teaching Excellence Awards

Sponsored by the Faculty Senate Teaching Enhancement Committee and the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), Teaching Awards recognize UNM’s Outstanding Educators.

Each year the Faculty Senate Teaching Enhancement Committee selects recipients for a variety of campus-wide teaching awards.  Awardees are selected following a nomination and dossier-review process.

2014-2015 Online Teacher of the Year:

Andrew Bourelle, English

2014-2015 Susan Deese-Roberts Outstanding Teaching Assistants:

Breanna Griego-Schmitt, English

Stephanie Spong, English

Professor Warner Receives the Wertheim Faculty Award

The Wertheim Award is awarded annually to a member of the senior faculty whose scholarship, creative work, teaching, and service make a noteworthy contribution to the department, the College, the university, and the community beyond UNM.

This year a panel of recent Wertheim recipients chose Professor Sharon Warner as the awardee for 2015.

Assistant Professors Tiffany and Andy Bourelle Receive the Julia M. Keleher/Telfair Hendon, Jr. Faculty Award

The Julia M. Keleher/Telfair Hendon, Jr. Faculty Award is given annually to an Assistant Professor who demonstrates a strong commitment to teaching.  In 1995 the Keleher Award account was augmented by its combination with the Telfair Hendon, Jr. Memorial and the first award was given in the 95/96 academic year.

Recent recipients of the Keleher/Hendon Faculty Award named Drs. Tiffany and Andy Bourelle as the recipients of this year’s award.

Assistant Professor Elder Receives Louie Award for Dedicated Service to UNM

Cristyn Elder received the Outstanding Student Service Provider award.  Dr. Elder has been deeply engaged in changing the way we deliver core writing to our students, and her efforts on that and the UNM Lobo Reading Experience, as well as restructuring the 537 Practicum, have made a world of difference to the university.

Please see related articles from Inside UNM and the Division of Student Affairs.

Daniel Worden’s article “Laughing Horse Magazine and Regional Modernism in New Mexico” published in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies

New Mexico was central to the development of American modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, and Laughing Horse magazine documented the distinctive form that modernism took there. Crucial to the arts and literary communities in Santa Fe and Taos, Laughing Horse provided a venue for established writers like Mary Austin and D. H. Lawrence, as well as younger writers like Lynn Riggs and Frank Waters, and the magazine also featured iconic visual images that reinforced the magazine’s regionalist, yet also modernist, aesthetic. This essay argues that Laughing Horse and its network of little magazines are central, rather than peripheral, to modernism.

The article is available through the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

Spong Wins Teaching Assistant Award for 2014

Ms. Stephanie Spong, Graduate Teaching Assistant for the Department of English, earned the College of Arts & Science Teaching Assistant Award for 2014 for embracing both face to face and online teaching and also for finding creative ways to encourage undergraduates to do productive group work in class.

Assistant Professor Wallace Receives Research Grant

The Research Allocation Committee has awarded Dr. Belinda Deneen Wallace a $10,000.00 grant to conduct archival research in the Anglophone Caribbean in order to complete her monograph, Mapping the Meta-Colonial: Caribbean Women Writers and the Queer Path to National Belonging. Her manuscript demonstrates how contemporary Caribbean women writers reimagine Caribbean rebellions, revolutions, and acts of resistance in order to inject queer women’s stories into both the national consciousness and the national narrative. The end result of this injection is the creation of a new nation where queer Caribbean women may fully exist/belong.  Over the next year, Belinda will conduct research in Grenada, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago.

New Mexico Museum of Art to host Shakespeare exhibition in 2016

The New Mexico Museum of Art has been selected as the one New Mexico venue to host an exhibition of First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare in 2016.

Spring 2016 may be far away, but this upcoming exhibition will be of interest to those teaching early English literature, theater history and performance, and Southwest literature.

First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare will feature a copy of the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare's plays. A series of events will explore the Folio's significance in terms of Shakespeare, theater, and our state. Sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Cincinnati Museum Center, American Libraries Association, and National Endowment for the Humanities, the exhibition comes to NMMoA after a competitive application process to select one host institution in each of the fifty states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico. 

Assistant Professor Marissa Greenberg will be speaking on local Shakespeare, as part of her ongoing work on the history and performance of Shakespearean adaptation in New Mexico. First Folio! will be on display February 5th through 28th, 2016.

Scharnhorst pens 'Owen Wister and the West'

From James Fenimore Cooper to Gary Cooper, stories set in the American West have served as vehicles for topical commentary. In Owen Wister and the West, a biographical-literary account of Wister’s life and writings, University of New Mexico Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English Gary Scharnhorst shows how the West shaped Wister’s career and ideas, even as he lived and worked in the East.

Visit the UNM Newsroom for the full article.

MFA Alumna Bonnie Arning's Book Accepted for Publication

Bonnie Arning's The Black Acres has been accepted for publication in The Center for Literary Publishing's Mountain West Poetry Series, and it will come out in June of 2016​. This book was her dissertation, which she defended in the spring of 2013.

PhD Alumna Ashley Carlson accepts Tenure Track position

Please join us in congratulating Ashley Carlson on her Tenure Track position teaching later British literature (18-21st centuries) at the University of Montana Western!

Andy Bourelle's short story selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2015

Andy Bourelle’s short story “Cowboy Justice” has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2015. 

“Cowboy Justice” was published in 2014 in an anthology titled Law and Disorder. Otto Penzler, series editor for The Best American Mystery Stories, selected it as one of the top 50 mystery stories of the year. The 2015  guest editor, James Patterson, chose it from that group as one of the best 20 to be reprinted in the annual volume. 

The anthology, which is part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Best American series, is scheduled for release in October.  

Helen Damico publishes Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England

In Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England, Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of Beowulf’s 3,182 lines in the context of the sociopolitically turbulent years that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England.

Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem’s quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings. 

Given the poet’s compositional skill—widely relational and eclectic at its core—and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned or darkly satirized or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet’s compositional process.

Damico illustrates the poet’s use of the tools of his trade—compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character—to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical “facts” of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled are simultaneously operative. 

Beowulf and the Grendel-kin lays out the story of Beowulf, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.

Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England is available through the West Virginia University Press.

The Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship

The Center for Regional Studies and the English Department at the University of New Mexico announce the Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship for Fall 2015-Spring 2016.

The Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship supports graduate research and scholarship in the English Department directly related to the late Dr. Hector Torres’ fields, as well as the mission of the Center for Regional Studies. These areas include Chicano/a literary and cultural studies; theory (i.e. Marxism; post-structuralism; deconstruction; psychoanalysis; and globalization); film studies; and scholarship related to the mission of the CRS (including history; archival research; literature; and other interdisciplinary fields related to New Mexico, the US-Mexico borderlands, and the greater southwest).

The award amount ranges from $10,000 to $15,000 a year, depending on availability. Renewal is not automatic. The Fellowship is housed in the English Department but sponsored by the Center for Regional Studies. Fellowship funding pending final budgetary approval.

Qualified graduate student applicants must meet the above criteria; be graduate students in good standing (3.0 GPA or better); maintain full-time graduate student standing during the tenure of the award; and complete a CRS application, which includes a letter of intent; transcripts; resume; two letters of recommendation; and proof of enrollment. Preference will be given first to advanced doctoral students (post-exams); doctoral students in coursework; and advanced MA students. Highly qualified applicants to the English doctoral program in American Literary Studies will also be considered for the fellowship for recruitment purposes. Submit all inquires and all application materials (in hardcopy) to Dr. Jesse Alemán, Professor, Department of English.

Deadline: 5pm, May 4, 2015

Shimabukuro to be published by Palgrave Macmillon in Fall 2015

Karra Shimabukuro's chapter "I Framed Freddy: Functional Aesthetics in the Nightmare on Elm Street series" in Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film edited by Wickham Clayton, is forthcoming Fall 2015 from Palgrave Macmillon. One of the readers stated, "'It is a collection that demands re-examination of the subgenre (and the foundational scholarship upon which it rests), and is original in its treatment of contemporary slasher films."

Announcing the ALS-Arms Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Essay in American Literature

American Literary Studies announces an inaugural $500.00 award in recognition of an outstanding graduate student essay written in an ALS course during the 2014 academic year (Spring 2014 & Fall 2014).

Faculty are responsible for soliciting and nominating essays that demonstrate scholarly or imaginative excellence directly related to American Literature. Nominated essays must be 6,000 words or more (excluding notes and bibliography) and will be submitted for anonymous review to a committee charged with selecting one essay for the award. The award is open to any graduate student enrolled in an approved literature or theory course taught by an ALS faculty member.

The deadline for the essay submission is Friday, April 24, 2015, by 5pm and announcement of the recipient will be by Friday, May 5. The recipient must attend the EGSA and department commencement events in the spring, where the awardee will be recognized.

The Elizabeth and George Arms Fund for American Literature is an endowed graduate award fund with the UNM Foundation in recognition of research in American Literature within the College of Arts and Sciences Department of English.

Direct initial inquires about the award to your ALS faculty instructor or advisor.