Faculty News - English Department

English Department Faculty News

The Irish Arts Council has awarded Professor Connie Roberts a Literature Bursary Award, worth $5,700.00. Her proposal was selected from a total of 520 applications.

Professor Connie Roberts received first prize—500 euros and a week-end at the Killaloe Hedge-School for Writing, County Clare, Ireland—in the 2010 Dromineer Literary Festival Poetry Competition. The awards ceremony will take place at the Lough Derg Yacht Club, Dromineer, County Tipperary on October 8th.

In July, Prof. Roberts received a Highly Commended award in the iYeats Poetry Competition in County Sligo.

In June, she was shortlisted for the Swift Satire Competition in County Meath.

This fall her work will appear in the Long Island anthology Toward Forgiveness and in the Irish literary journal Boyne Berries.

Janet Kaplan's book, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame Press, will be published in 2011.

Martha McPhee’s fourth novel , Dear Money, has been published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Dr. Joseph McLaren’s book, I Walked with Giants: The Autobiography of Jimmy Heath (Temple University Press, 2010), has been nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association for “Best Book About Jazz.”

Professor Martha McPhee’s fourth novel, Dear Money, will be published in June by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In May, her article on food and recipe books will appear in More Magazine.
Professor Richard Pioreck’s play Child’s Play was presented in December by the Act II...gether Children's Theatre Co, affiliated with the Abingdon Theatre. In February a staged reading of his play Prove That You Love Me was presented as part of the Abindgon Theatre's Playwright Challenge. In November Professor Pioreck became cordinator of the Queens Theatre in the Park Playwrights Group.
Professor Connie Roberts has been selected to present her work at the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2010. She will read at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, in May.
Dr. Joseph McLaren is the co-author, with jazz great Jimmy Heath, of a new book, I Walked with Giants: the Autobiography of Jimmy Heath, published by Temple University Press.

Professor Zachary Lazar’s latest book, Evening's Empire, was selected as a best book of 2009 by the Chicago Tribune.
Professor Patricia Horvath was awarded a residency fellowship to the Can Serrat Foundation in El Bruc, Spain, for June 2010. In November 2009 she gave a reading/lecture on the topic of "sudden" fiction at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
Dr. Scott Harshbarger’s essay, “Intimations of Neoteny: Play and God in Wordsworth’s 1799 Prelude,” will appear in an upcoming issues of Philosophy and Literature.
Dr. Andrew Stambuk’s book, The Man Who Is and Is Not There: The Prose and Poetry of Robert Francis, has been accepted for publication by the University of Massachusetts Press.
Dr. Vimala Pasupathi was one of 20 scholars from North America and Great Britain invited to participate in the New Directions in Medieval and Early Modern Performance Workshop at the University of Calgary. Papers from the workshop will appear in two volumes of essays published by Palgrave Press.
Dr. Alice Levine delivered a paper, "Byron's and Verdi's The Two Foscari: From History to Closet Drama to Grand Opera," at the 35th International Byron Conference, at Missolonghi, Greece, on 11 September 2009. Her edition, Byron's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, was published in August 2009. She will participate in a round table discussion by editors of Romantic poetry at the 37th International Byron Conference in Boston in July 2010.

Dr. John DiGaetani has edited a new book, Wagner Outside the Ring: Essays on the Operas, Their Performance, and their Connections with Other Arts , published by McFarland Press.

Dr. John DiGaetani has edited a forthcoming book, Wagner Outside the Ring, published by McFarland Press.

Dr. Phillip Lopate's newest book, Notes on Sontag, has been published by Princeton University Press.
Dr. Joseph McLaren presented a paper titled "Obama's Kenyan Ethnicity: New African Diaspora Identity and Conflict Resolution" at the Third European Conference on African Studies, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, June 2009.
He presented a second paper titled "Obama and Soyinka: Blackness, Ethnicity, and the Nation" at the 35th African Literature Association Conference, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, April 2009.
Dr. Karyn Valerius presented a paper titled "Corrupting Books and Womanly Virtue: Literary Seduction in Louisa May Alcott's A Modern Mephistopheles" at the American Literature Association meeting held in Boston, Massachusetts.

Dr. G. Thomas Couser’s new book, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in fall 2009.
A chapter from his memoir of his father, “Posted to (and from) Aleppo: My Father in Syria, 1930-33,” appeared recently in Lifewriting Annual (2008).
Dr. Couser recently delivered a paper titled “Filiation in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father” at a conference on The Work of Lifewriting, held at King’s College, London,
Dr. Scott Harshbarger presented a paper, "Intimations of Neoteny: Play and God in Wordsworth's 1799 Prelude" at Hofstra's Darwin's Reach conference.
Dr. Robert Sulcer presented a paper titled "Keeping School: Romancing the Everyday" at the annual conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, held this year at Wellesley College. The topic of the conference was "The Victorian Everyday."