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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.