Tate Times

NEWS ITEMS

Chris Bell has been awarded a two-year, federally funded post-doctorate fellowship to undertake disability policy research at Syracuse University in New York beginning in August. During this time he will write and publish his own work and, perhaps, teach a course or two every now and then.

Jess Bowers was a finalist in Glimmer Train Stories' Summer 2007 Very Short Fiction contest and had a paper accepted at SC3: The Slayage Conference on The Whedonverses.

Stephanie Carpenter will be reading from Doctor and Patient, her novel-in-progress, at the 2008 Writing the Midwest Symposium in East Lansing, MI. Her short story, "Witnesses," is forthcoming in The Crab Orchard Review.

Jessica Garratt's poem "Cogito" appears in the current issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. She also has poems forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review and North American Review.

Rachel Harper (director, Writing Center) recently received the MU Parents' Association grant. Dr. Harper will work in collaboration with Katie Zimolzak on a project to create a digital film archive of tutorials. The project will also produce training and promotional materials for the Writing Lab and Learning Center.

Haskell Hinnant's edition of the anonymous picaresque novel, The London Jilt (1683), has been published by Broadview Press (January 2008). His essay, "Gifts and Wages: The Structures of Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Drama," has been accepted for publication by Eighteenth-Century Studies. A companion piece, "The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Novel," will be published in The Culture of the Gift, edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008).

Patricia Jones, a first year MA candidate specializing in Rhetoric and Composition, will be presenting at two conferences this spring. Her first presentation is as a panel coordinator for a leadership forum on chapter formation, funding, and organization at the national Sigma Tau Delta conference in Louisville Kentucky on March 7th. Her second presentation is as a contributor at the CEA conference in Saint Louis on March 27. She will be reading a presentation of creative non-fiction titled "Snapshots" and discussing the value of non-traditional narrative structure in the presentation of trauma.

George Justice was elected to the Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature Division Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association and will serve from 2008-2011.

Devoney Looser and George Justice are serving as faculty mentors to English major Alex Streiff, who won an Undergraduate Research Mentorship Award through the College of Arts and Science for spring 2008. Streiff will continue to work with Looser and Justice on editing one volume of the correspondence of Samuel Richardson, under contract to Cambridge University Press.

Devoney Looser chaired a Late Eighteenth-Century English Literature Division-sponsored session at MLA in Chicago, titled "Are Eighteenth-Century Studies Changing Literary Studies? Novels and Readers." Professor Looser served as chair of the Division's Executive Committee in 2007 and ends her term in 2008. Professor Looser is also serving as President of the Midwest Modern Language Association in 2008. MMLA's convention will be held November 13th-16th in Minneapolis, MN. The informal theme of the meeting is "Fame/Infamy," and the keynote speaker will be Lennard Davis of the University of Illinois-Chicago. Professor Looser has also been awarded an American Philosophical Society grant of $5000 to support travel to archives for work on her next book project, "Sister Novelists: Jane and Anna Maria Porter"; and she has also been invited to serve as a keynote speaker at the symposium "Writing Cultures: Gender, Class, and Authorship in Early Modern England," to be held at Texas A & M University in October 2008.

Nathan Oates's story, “The Empty House," which appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of The Antioch Review, has been selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2008. His collection of stories, Migratory Patterns, was selected as a semi-finalist for the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award. One of the stories from his collection, “Off Center," was recently published in the print issue of Juked.

Darren Pine's short stories "Ember's Song" and "Surges" will be published this spring in Nimrod International Journal and The Potomac Review, respectively. In January, he and his wife, French PhD candidate Tori Pine, welcomed a son, Samuel Noah, to their family.

Angela Rehbein will be presenting her paper, “Transported into the Tropics in Feeling: Affective Aesthetics in Isabella Bird's Six Months in the Sandwich Islands" at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association annual conference in Chicago, April 18-20.

Jeff Rice's “The Logic of Too Much: Network Boxes" appeared in College Composition and Communication 59.2 (December 2007).

Maureen Stanton's essay, "Let Us Eat Cake" received the American Literary Review nonfiction prize in December 2007, and is forthcoming in Spring 2008. In March, she will serve as the final judge in the William Allen Creative Nonfiction contest sponsored by The Journal (Ohio State University Press). She continues to serve as an Assistant Editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, a literary journal published biannually by Michigan State University Press.

Mizzou English Well Represented at SASEC

The 34th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies was held Friday, February 14th to Sunday, February 16th at Auburn University, and MU was well represented by faculty and students.

The theme of this year's SASEC was “Contexts and Legacies." Andrew Warburton (PhD student) chaired a panel early Friday morning on “The Classical Heritage," which included Crystal Lake's (PhD ABD) paper, “The Rise and Fall of Man: The Sexual and Historical Legacies of Masculinity in the Collections of Sir William Hamilton and William Beckford."

Later that morning, Emily C. Friedman (PhD ABD) gave her paper, “Identification Reconsidered: Beyond Sympathy in Eighteenth-Century Novels."

After the first plenary, Leigh Dillard (PhD ABD) spoke on “Visual Heirs: The Legacy of Eighteenth-Century Book Illustration."

Saturday morning Professor Devoney Looser gave a talk on “Jane Porter and Feminism in the 1790s," which was part of a panel on Theorizing Early Feminism.

The day continued with Katie Zimolzak (MA)'s paper, “Mr. Darcy is an Actor: Romantic Social Commentary in Bridget Jones's Diary."

Bri Kneisley (MA/PhD) presented on “Austen, Antigua, and Abolitionism: An Exploration of Slavery as Related to Mansfield Park" in a session on Legacies of Shifting Opinion in Policies in Literature.

English Department members also did service chairing on a number of panels: Leigh Dillard chaired a panel on the Eighteenth-Century Novel in Context; Emily Friedman chaired a panel on Formalism and Narrative; and Dr. Looser chaired a panel on Staging Sexualities.

"Body Project" Conference Coming April 12

The University of Missouri's first interdisciplinary graduate conference, "The Body Project: Anatomy, Relationships, and Representations: An Interdisciplinary Study," will be held Saturday, April 12, at the Old Alumni Center. Graduate students and affiliated researchers will present their work relating to the human body--its physiology, material and symbolic representations, and political intersections. This conference will bring together graduate students, research assistants, and post-docs from 22 different departments in a spirit of learning, professionalism, and collaboration. The English department will be represented with presentations by Constance Bailey, Katy Didden, Liz Fletcher, Robert Foreman, Emily Friedman, Erin Gore-Wilson, Tahna Henson, Shelley Ingram, Bri Kneisley, Joanna Luloff, Svitlana Matviyenko, Maggie McDermott, Marc McKee, Scott Mitchell, Pete Monacell, Neesha Navarre, John Nieves, Leta Reppert, Claire Schmidt, Joe Scott, Penny Smith-Parris, Andrew Warburton, Ramsay Wise, and Katie Zimolzak. Dr. Stefani Engelstein, from the Department of German and Russian Studies, will deliver the keynote address. The conference is sponsored by the Center for Arts and Humanities, in collaboration with the English Graduate Student Association and graduate students from Chemistry; Classics; Communications; Electrical Engineering; History; Integrative Anatomy; Learning Teaching and Curriculum; Music; Physics and Astronomy; Theatre; and Women's and Gender Studies. To register, please email mubodyproject@gmail.com.