2009 Tom Rogers Award Announcement
The 2009 Tom Rogers Award for the best undergraduate student essay has been awarded to Amanda Korber for her essay " Paul Laurence Dunbar's Double Consciousness." Amanda
wrote the paper in Fall 2009 for the Honors English seminar, EGL 490, directed by Professor Susan Scheckel.
The award is funded by private donations in honor of Thomas Rogers, who
taught in the Stony Brook English Department. It honors the best
analytical essay of at least five
pages written in an upper-division English course by a student majoring
in any field. The stipend is $1000.
To learn more about the author and read the prize-winning essay, please click here.
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$200,000 Mellon Grant for Dissertation Seminar
Peter Manning,
Professor of English, has been awarded a $200,000 grant
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Dissertation Seminar in the
Humanities Program, which, as described in its call for proposals,
"provides support for dissertation seminars overseen by outstanding
faculty members." The seminar will meet for eight-week periods during
the summers of 2009 and 2010, and will be hosted by the Humanities
Institute at Stony Brook. Professor Manning has invited applications
from advanced graduate students in the Departments of English, History,
Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Hispanic Languages, Art,
Philosophy, Sociology, and Music. The graduate student stipend is $4500
- thus the seminar will not only provide dissertators with intellectual
stimulation and guidance, but will also free them from the employment
obligations that typically interfere with summer research (and slow
their progess to degree). "We are delighted that the Mellon Foundation
had the good sense and good taste to select Peter Manning for the
Dissertation Seminar," commented Stony Brook University President Shirley Strum Kenny. "The program itself is inspired, and our students will be greatly advantaged by the experience."
The theme of the seminar is "Framing the
Object." The theoretical readings and guest lecturers (including H.
Aram Veeser and Diane Barthel-Bouchier) will explore the relation
between the close analysis of their objects of study and broader
concerns. In the language of Professor Manning's proposal, they will
consider the connection between a cultural work and "the motives from
which it springs and the social relations within which it exists, and
which its emergence alters in ways hard to quantify or specify."
Ultimately, the students will incorporate this developing perspective
into their own writing, which they will workshop with their fellow
participants over the course of the seminar. |
New Book By Stephen Spector
 Stephen Spector's Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, was published in November by Oxford University Press. In a review for Foreign Affairs,
Walter Russell Mead observes that "Christian Zionism and its
relationship to U.S. politics and the American Jewish community have
seldom received as sensitive and sound a treatment as in Spector's
helpful new book." Professor Spector has done interviews about the book
with two radio programs in California and with the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation. See his interview with the literary
magazine Nextbook, which identifies him as a "freewheeling professor of English at Stony Brook University." |
DEPARTMENT
CV (Fall 2008)
Faculty
Alumni Spotlight
 Carey Snyder (PhD 2000) is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Ohio University, specializing in British Modernism. Her
book, British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic
Modernism from Wells to Woolf, published last year by Palgrave
Macmillan, demonstrates how deeply British
modernists engaged with ethnographic scenarios,
methods, and ideas in their
fiction. One chapter, "When the Indian was in Vogue": D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological Tourism in the Southwest," was published as an article in Modern Fiction Studies,
and won the 2007 "Margaret Church Memorial Prize" for best essay in
that journal. Professor Snyder is currently working on a book on
the London-based writings of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, which
explores the ways these colonial writers negotiated a place within
metropolitan society and its literary marketplace.
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Graduate Examinations
Congratulations to the following PhD students, who passed their general and/or special field examinations in 2008:
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General
Eileen Chanza
Emily Churilla
Rachel Ellis
Amy Falvey
Kat Hankinson
Lisa Held
Matt Lorenz
Liliana Naydan
Jeff Starks
Janet Tuthill
Lawrence Zellner
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Special Field
Aliza Atik
Anthony Dotterman
Lisa Held
Matt Lorenz
Liliana Naydan
Lauren Rosenblum
Stephanie Wade
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English Honors
Susan Scheckel taught the honors seminar on the topic of Nineteenth-Century
Literature and Visual Culture. The course considered the primacy of
sight to nighteenth-century American constructions of national identity
before, during, and after the Civil War. The participants explored the
significance of nineteenth-century models of vision, visual culture,
and new visual media as they informed attempts to define the meaning of
character, citizenship, nationhood, truth, or the "real" itself. The
following students successfully completed the course (with grades of A
or A-) and will be writing Honors Theses this spring: Mary Bravmann,
Ivy Cherian, Leily Faridzadeh, Candace Ishmael, Amanda Korber,
Geeta Malieckal, Heather McGonnell, William Meehan, Thomas Mistler,
Rebecca Newman, Alyssa Petrone and Peter Ward.
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Patricia A. Dunn presented a paper, "Teaching/Evaluating New Teachers on Issues of Grammar and Writing," at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Conference on November 22, 2008, in San Antonio.
E. Ann Kaplan
was invited to Vanderbilt’s Humanities Institute in September
2008 for a two-day visit, first to lead a discussion on her 2005 Trauma Culture volume
(for a year-long faculty seminar on “Trauma”), and then to
give a Public Lecture on “Public Feelings and Global Images of
Trauma.” She has two articles in press: “Sontag, Modernity
and Cinema: Women and an Aesthetics of Silence, 1960-1980,”
forthcoming in The Scandal of Susan Sontag,
eds. Barbara Ching and Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008); and “Women, Modernity and Silence in
Cinema: Sontag and Duras 1960-1980,” forthcoming in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.
Celia Marshik published "How it Struck a Contemporary: Negative Press on the Omega" in the Fall issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany and presented a paper, “National Censors, Global Accords: the Home
Office as Expressive State Apparatus” at the Modernist Studies
Association Conference 10 in Nashville, TN, in November.
Andrew Newman
presented "'The True Intention of the Grantors': Lenape Traditions,
Quaker Testimonies, and the Walking Purchase," at a seminar of the
McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia; "Who
Remembers Penn's Treaty?" at the American Studies Association Annual
Meeting in Albuquerque; and "Early American Literary Studies and Social
Science Fields" on "Theorizing Early American Literature," a panel of
the American Literature to 1800 Division at the Modern Language
Association Convention in San Francisco.
Stephen Spector ( see above) also published opinion pieces in Newsday (" Faith tints Palin's Politics") and The Jerusalem Post (" Five Questions for Sarah Palin").
Graduate Students
Paul Devlin
wrote several pieces for The Root, a subsidiary of Slate, owned by the
Washington Post and focusing on African American issues. His most
well-received piece was an eye-brow raising comparison of Obama with
Pope John Paul II.
Lisa Held presented
"Never Last Orders: John McGuffin and the Legacy of Internment-era
Literature" at the Northeast Irish Cultural Network Conference at the
University of Sunderland.
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