Visiting Assistant Professor Lydia Yaitsky Kertz has published an essay, “Literal and Literary Ekphrasis: A Medieval Poetics,” in the journal Medievalia et Humanistica. More information about the publication is available here.
Composer Gregory Spears to deliver 2019 Walter Harding Lecture
Composer Gregory Spears will deliver the 2019 Walter Harding Lecture on Wednesday, September 25, at 7 pm in Doty Recital Hall on the SUNY Geneseo campus. His subject will be “Thoreau and Music.”
Spears’ song cycle Walden, which premiered in 2018 in a performance that the Washington Post called “gripping,” takes a series of excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden and arranges them in four structurally interconnected songs to loosely tell the story of Thoreau’s departure from and return to society in Concord, Massachusetts. Along the way we see Thoreau’s progression from anxious social critic, to passionate naturalist, to contemplative mystic.
Spears’ other compositions include Fellow Travelers, written in collaboration with Greg Pierce and based on the McCarthy-era lavender scare, and Paul’s Case, written in collaboration with Kathryn Walat and based on the Willa Cather short story of the same name. The latter was described as a “masterpiece” and a “gem” (New York Observer) with “ravishing music” (New York Times).
Spears’ music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (Boston Globe). In recent seasons Spears has been commissioned by The Lyric Opera of Chicago, Cincinnati Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seraphic Fire, The Crossing, Volti, BMI/Concert Artists Guild, Vocal Arts DC, New York Polyphony, The New York International Piano Competition, and the JACK Quartet among others. He is currently working on a new evening-length opera, Castor and Patience, with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, commissioned by Cincinnati Opera and scheduled for premiere in 2020.
Spears holds degrees in composition from Eastman School of Music (BM), Yale School of Music (MM), and Princeton University (PhD). He also studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen with Hans Abrahamsen. He currently teaches composition at SUNY Purchase.
The Walter Harding Lecture is sponsored by the English department and supported through the generosity of the Harding family.
English department 2019 writing contest winners
The English department has announced the winners of its annual writing contest.
Irene E. Smith Award in First-Year Critical Writing
Winner: Alissa Moeller
John H. Parry Award for a Critical Essay
Winner: Katelyn Sullivan
Honorable mention: Sean Welch
Jérome de Romanet de Beaune Award for an Essay in Diversity Studies
Winner: Autumn Piletz
Honorable mention: Elyse Manosh, DongWon Oh
Research Paper
Winner: David Beyea
Honorable mention: Victoria Cooke
Self-Reflective Essay
Winner: Sean Welch
Honorable mention: Katelyn Sullivan
Creative Non-Fiction
Winner: Torie Wiley
Honorable mention: Grace Gilbert, Sean Welch
Agnes Rigney Award in Drama and Screenwriting
Winner: Autumn Piletz
Honorable mention: Kristopher Bangsil, Brittany Pratt
Lucy Harmon Award in Literary Fiction
Winner: Jen Galvao
Mary Thomas Award in Poetry
Winner: Grace Gilbert
Honorable mention: Natalie Hayes, Isabella Higgins
Green New Deal Exhibit Opens May 2 in Mount Morris
A collaboration between SUNY Geneseo and the New Deal Gallery in Mt. Morris is updating a collection of more than 200 paintings from the 1930s, and seeing new relevance for the ecological challenges of our own times. The project, called “The Green New Deal: Art During a Time of Environmental Emergency,” is taking the form of a gallery show that opens May 2, along with a digital exhibit created by students of Associate Professor of English Ken Cooper.
The gallery’s collection owes its existence to the Federal Art Project, which “allocated” paintings to the state tuberculosis hospital on Murray Hill. They seem to have been chosen for their restful associations, however, and weren’t always typical of the artists’ more experimental or political work—an important context recovered by the project. For the past year, junior English major Abigail Ritz has been re-photographing and researching the collection thanks to an Ambassadorship through the Center for Integrative Learning. Students in Cooper’s OpenValley course this spring have continued that work and developed a series of linked online exhibits to re-evaluate paintings now approaching a hundred years old.
Why a Green New Deal? Americans already know how the Dust Bowl intensified the social crisis of the Great Depression. But new “attribution studies” by climatologists suggest that a series of record temperatures during the late 1930s probably were the first to have some Anthropogenic dimension. In other words, those past events have a direct lineage to climate change today and our own efforts to mobilize an effective response.
Kertz publishes essay on Pearl
An essay by Visiting Assistant Professor Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, “The Positive Lessons of Luxury: Pearl as a Romance-Adjacent Text,” appears in volume 33 of Medieval Perspectives, a refereed journal of the Southeastern Medieval Association.
SUNY Geneseo teams with University of Rochester to celebrate Thoreau and creativity
SUNY Geneseo is partnering with the University of Rochester to sponsor a week’s worth of events celebrating Henry David Thoreau and creativity, April 3-5.
Wednesday, April 3: Concert and Lecture
- Time: 7:30 p.m.
- Place: Hatch Recital Hall, Eastman School of Music
- Admission: Free
- Sponsor: University of Rochester
Heather O’Donnell (piano) and Laura Lentz (flute) will perform Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860.” Ives biographer Jan Swafford will deliver a lecture contextualizing Ives’ sonata.
Swafford writes regular columns on music and other subjects in Slate, and is heard as a commentator on NPR and the BBC. His writing honors include a 2012 Deems Taylor Award for internet writing and a Mellon Fellowship at Harvard. His Brahms and Ives biographies were end-of-year Critics’ Choices in The New York Times. The Ives biography was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in biography and won the Pen-Winship prize for a book on a New England subject. His biography Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph in its first week appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.
Thursday, April 4: Lecture
- Time: 5:00 p.m.
- Place: Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester Humanities Center, Room D
- Admission: Free
- Sponsor: University of Rochester
Laura Dassow Walls, William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, will deliver the University of Rochester’s 2019 George Ford Lecture, titled “The Death of Nature and the Life of Thoreau.”
Walls is the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by the University of Chicago Press. The first full-length, comprehensive biography of Thoreau in a generation, Walls’s book draws on extensive new research and the full range of Thoreau’s published and unpublished writings to present Thoreau as vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions — fully embedded in his place and time, yet speaking powerfully to the problems and perils of today.
Friday, April 5: Film, Henry David Thoreau, Surveyor of the Soul
- Time: 6:00 p.m.
- Place: The Little Theatre, Rochester
- Admission: Free
- Sponsor: SUNY Geneseo
The Little will screen independent director Huey Coleman’s feature-length film, Henry David Thoreau, Surveyor of the Soul. The screening will be followed by a conversation between the filmmaker and Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls.
For thirty years, Huey has been making films about artists, education, the environment, and Maine. His films have been shown at film festivals throughout the US, on PBS, and on European television. Surveyor of the Soul explores Thoreau’s life and the impact of his writings on environmental issues, civil rights, and individual thinking in our time. It includes appearances by Bill McKibben, Howard Zinn, Robert Bly, Rep. John Lewis, and Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls.
Note: Huey will be on the SUNY Geneseo campus Friday, April 5 at 1 p.m. in Bailey 204 to talk about Surveyor and about his career as an independent filmmaker.
Leah Christman wins Fulbright
English major Leah Christman (’19) has won a prestigious U.S. Student Fulbright Award for 2019-20. Leah will travel to India, where her award will enable her to serve as a Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant (ETA) in either a middle or secondary school in a community to be determined by the United States-India Educational Foundation. The Fulbright Program is the highly competitive flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and citizens of other countries.
More in this SUNY Geneseo News story.
Lima and Goldberg, faculty member and alum, in journal special issue
Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters will be publishing a special issue titled Unchaining Selves: The Power of the Neo-Slave Narrative Genre, co-edited by Professor Joan Anim-Addo (Goldsmiths University of London) and Geneseo Professor of English Maria Lima.
Lima has taught a course on the genre of neo-slave narratives at Geneseo for a number of years, and has been working on this special issue with Anim-Addo since 2015, when she chaired a panel at the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Meeting on the topic.
Generally, the term neo-slave narrative refers to a genre of literature in which twentieth and twenty-first century writers take Atlantic slavery as the occasion for their literary texts. Neo-slave narratives often both draw on and depart from the earlier genre of slave narratives — autobiographical writing by enslaved and emancipated peoples of African descent addressing the experiences of living through slavery. Some examples of neo-slave narratives include Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2011), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016).
In their original call for papers, Anim-Addo and Lima write, “The main reasons for this seemingly widespread desire to rewrite a genre that officially lost its usefulness with the abolition of slavery are to re-affirm the historical value of the original slave narrative and/or to reclaim the humanity of the enslaved by (re)imagining their subjectivity. No other genre has undergone such widespread creolization—both a process and a concept used to describe many forms of contact across a wide range of cultural and ideological formations—having become a mode shared by many cultures in an uneven yet interdependent world.”
Lima and Anim-Addo’s special issue brings fresh scholarship to this established literary genre, interrogating some of the ways recent currents in black and Africana studies theory and criticism open up new conversations about slavery’s afterlife through this literary genre.
The issue includes essays by two Geneseo English alumni from the class of 2012 – Jesse Goldberg and Stephanie Iasiello – and an essay by SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Teaching Professor of English Beth McCoy.
Since graduating from Geneseo, Goldberg earned a PhD in African American literature at Cornell University and is now Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Longwood University in Virginia, where, like Lima, he is teaching a course on neo-slave narratives. Goldberg’s essay is titled “The Restored Literary Behaviors of Neo-Slave Narratives: Troubling the Ethics of Witnessing in the Excessive Present.”
Iasiello earned a PhD in African Diaspora Literature at Emory University and is now Board President at Reforming Arts, a non-profit organization providing liberal arts higher education to people incarcerated in women’s prisons in Georgia. Iasiello’s essay is titled “Photographing A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: Kara Walker’s Take on the Neo-Slave Narrative.”
McCoy’s essay, “Flights of Principled Fancy Dress: Steve Prince’s Katrina Suite and the Neo-Slave Narratives” extends the rich and ongoing collaborative work she has been engaging in with New Orleans artist Steve Prince.
The issue is in its final printing stages and is scheduled to be published by the end of 2018.
This post has been updated to reflect Iasiello’s and McCoy’s contributions to the forthcoming special issue.
Spencer Crew to deliver 2018 Walter Harding Lecture September 28
The 2018 Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Dr. Spencer Crew, Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University, on September 28, 2018 at 2:00 p.m. in Doty Recital Hall on the campus of SUNY Geneseo.
Dr. Crew’s lecture is titled, “Civil Disobedience, the Underground Railroad, and Thoreau.”
A distinguished public historian, Professor Crew served for six years as president of the National Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio and for nine years as director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, where he curated, and wrote the companion volume for, the exhibit Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915–1940 (1987). He is also the author of Black Life in Secondary Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Black Communities of Camden and Elizabeth, N.J. 1860–1920 (1993) and co-author of both The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden (2002) and Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (2002).
The Harding Lecture, which is sponsored by the English department with support from the Office of the Provost and the Office of the President, is free and open to the public.
You can download and print the poster for this lecture.
McCoy publishes essay on Everett and Jefferson
Distinguished Teaching Professor Beth McCoy’s essay “The Great [White] Wail: Percival Everett’s The Water Cure and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia” appears in American Revenge Narratives, a 2018 Palgrave Macmillan collection of critical essays edited by Kyle Wiggins.