August 2010

August 25, 2010

From Michael Warner, English Department Chair


–This year we welcome Professor Joe Cleary to the faculty.  He will initially serve as Visiting Professor for three years beginning in the fall of 2011, dividing his year with the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.  As of July 2014 he will be Professor of English full-time at Yale.  Professor Cleary is a leading specialist in postcolonial studies, Irish literature, and the comparative analysis of colonialism.  He is the author of Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, co-edited with Claire Connolly, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and  Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, (Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2006, new edition 2007, reprinted 2009).

This fall we welcome four new assistant professors to the ladder faculty in English:

GerShun Avilez (Ph.D. Penn), an African-Americanist specializing in the Black Arts movement and its legacies in contemporary literature and art (joint with African American Studies);

Wendy Lee (Ph.D. Princeton), an eighteenth-century scholar who writes about bad affect and the love plot in novels from Richardson to Eliot;

Shital Pravinchandra (Ph.D. Cornell), a postcolonialist who writes about problems of transnational bodily movement in contemporary fiction, drama, and film; and

Anthony Reed (Ph.D. Cornell), an African-Americanist specializing in temporality and poetics in twentieth-century writers of the U.S. and the Caribbean (joint with African American Studies).

–Michael Cunningham joined the faculty as Senior Lecturer in English, teaching in the spring term for a three-year term.  Cunningham is the author of A Home at the End of the World, Specimen Days, and The Hours, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

–Caleb Smith was promoted to Associate Professor English.  His book The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale, 2009) won the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize.

–Shameem Black departed for Australia.

–Amy Bloom left the Writing Program to become the Kim-Frank Family University Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University.

–Elliott Visconsi departed for Notre Dame, where he is Associate Professor of English.

–Christopher R. Miller will join the English department faculty at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, in a tenure-track position.

–Marc Robinson was named the recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.  The award recognizes Marc’s recently published book, The American Play, 1787-2000 (Yale University Press, 2009). 

Books published by our faculty in the past year include Robert Stepto’s collection of essays, A Home Elsewhere: Reading African-American Classics in the Age of Obama (Harvard); Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, by Pericles Lewis (Cambridge); Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Harvard); Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, by Brian Walsh (Cambridge); Lee Patterson’s Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture (Notre Dame); The Crimean War in the British Imagination, by Stefanie Markovits (Cambridge); and Louise Gluck’s newest collection of poems, A Village Life (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux).

–David Kastan was the inaugural Oxford-Wells lecturer, delivering four talks at Oxford on “Shakespeare and Religion,” which will appear from Oxford University Press.  His Shakespeare and the Book appeared in Hungarian and Chinese.

–Jesssica Pressman received the Sarai Ribicoff ‘79 Award for the Encouragement of Teaching in Yale College.

–Fred Strebeigh’s Equal: Women Reshape American Law (Norton, 2009) was listed by the Silver Gavel Awards of the American Bar Association.

–Karen Gosselink assumed a position at the Writing Center, where she will continue to teach for the department.

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