Faculty News Spring 2024

 

Cynthia Turner Camp was awarded the Franklin College Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023-24. Her students continue to do amazing work, which you can read here and here, and on Instagram at @ugareadscrime. She also published at essay in the Oxford History of Poetry, and she participated in the inaugural cohort of Humanities Fellows in Franklin College.

 

Jeff Fallis published a sequence of 23 poems called "The Never Ending Sonnets," about Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan's live performances from 1987-1997 on his "Never Ending Tour," in the edited collection, The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan's Live Performances, published by Routledge in late 2023 and edited by Erin C. Callahan and Court Carney. Fallis's poems serve as a creative encore to the essays in the rest of the collection, and they compose a crown of sonnets, an interlocked sequence of poems in which the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next one and in which the first and last lines of the sequence mirror each other. 

LeAnn Howe was awarded the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book (OCB). This award recognizes individuals who have left an indelible mark on Oklahoma's literary landscape. Some previous awardees include N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, and Rilla Askew. 

Sujata Iyengar hosted research faculty from France and Germany this Spring. Professors Nora Galland and Emmanuelle Peraldo, from Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France, joined Dr. Iyengar, Dr. Cari Goetchus (Environment + Design), Dr. Mario Erasmo (Classics), Dr. Miriam Jacobson (English), and Dr. Iyengar’s Environmental Literature students for a symposium on the Early Modern Environmental Humanities and for a week of visits to UGA’s gardens. She describes her prior pedagogical collaboration with French and American universities and middle schools in an essay co-authored with PhD candidate Mikaela LaFave and alumna Hayden M. Benson (MA 2020), “Existential Shakespeare: Citizenship in the International Service-Learning Classroom,” which appeared in the collection Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major (Palgrave Macmillan). At the end of April, Professor Enno Ruge visited from Ludwig-Maximilian Universität, Munich, Germany, to deliver our annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture and to lead a discussion with Dr. Iyengar’s Shakespeare on Film students.

Aruni Kashyap was chosen as a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellow for the year 2024 – 2025 that will enable him to spend the upcoming academic year at Harvard University to work on his new novel. 

Rebecca Hallman Martini has won the 2024 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award for Disrupting the Center: A Partnership Approach to Writing across the University. The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). This award honors an empirical research publication in the previous two years that most advances writing studies. The selection committee noted the following about Disrupting the Center: "Martini takes the worst-case scenario and leverages it into a strategic university-wide collaboration among professors, administrators, and tutors, who deliver writing support and instruction in smart, knowledgeable, and productive ways. Her vision weaves the mission of the writing center into the fabric of writing studies broadly.” Hallman Martini also secured a $1 million gift for the UGA Writing Center, now known as the Jill and Marvin Willis Center for Writing.

J. R. Mattison was named as a 2024-26 Lilly Teaching Fellow. Two of her articles appeared in print: "Books, Translation, and Multilingualism in Late Medieval Calais" in New Medieval Literatures, and "Between men: French books and male readers in fifteenth-century England" in the volume Literatures of the Hundred Years War, edited by Daniel Davies and UGA alum R. D. Perry (available open access).

Barbara McCaskill’s essay on the scholarship and career of Dr. John Wharton Lowe was published in MELUS 49.1, and she presented on the literary reception of Phillis Wheatley at the College Language Association national conference. Culture and Community at Penn Center National Historic Landmark, the Mellon Foundation-funded project she co-directs, received a Public Humanities Award for Leadership in Practice and Communities, Honorable Mention, from the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. She moderated a talk at Ciné for this initiative with executive director Dr. Robert Adams, and introduced Grammy-nominated vocalist Victor Ryan Robertson and pianist Adrianne Duncan for the Spring 2024 public conversation at Penn Center. She appeared in a video tribute for the induction of Black educator Adella Hunt Logan into Georgia Women of Achievement, and discussed formerly enslaved couple William and Ellen Craft for SONY Music’s podcast “You Had Me at Hello” hosted by actor Taye Diggs.

Reginald McKnight was selected as a judge for this year's National Book Awards for Fiction, in committee with Jamie Ford, Lauren Groff, Zeyn Joukhadar and Chawa Magaña.

Adam Parkes zoomed-in two talks on D.H. Lawrence this Spring. The first, on cruelty and kindness, was given the the D.H. Lawrence Society. The second, on punctuation, was presented at the annual Lawrence conference at the University of Paris-Nanterre. He is also at work on a special issue on (in)security that he is guest-editing for South Atlantic Review.

Esra Mirze Santesso spent the spring semester at the Dean Rusk International Law Center, studying Public International Law under the mentorship of Diane Amann, Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law. She was recently interviewed for a podcast on her recent publication, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing by Elizabeth Allyn Woock, the host of New Books Network. Her essay, “From Muslim to Muselmann: Muted Prisoner in Guantanamo Comics” will appear in Studies in Comics in their forthcoming issue.