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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

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!

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."

R&W graduates accept Tenure Track positions

Please join us in congratulating two R&W graduates on their Tenure Track positions:

Dan Cryer, Roosevelt University, Chicago.

Mellisa Huffman, San Angelo State University, Texas.