Category: Faculty

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Dante Thomas, 1922-2013

Dante Thomas, SUNY Geneseo Professor Emeritus of English, died at his home in Geneseo last Thursday, surrounded by family. He was 91.

Photo of Dante Thomas
Photo credit: SUNY Geneseo Archives

Those of us who arrived in the English department before the early 1990’s knew Dante as an insatiable reader and book-collector with an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s literatures and a special passion for discovering great writers ignored or forgotten by the majority of scholars.

Dante shared not only his passion for books but the books themselves, taking special delight in finding attractive editions tied to various colleagues’ interests, and simply giving them away. My own shelves include a number of volumes by Dickens, Conrad, and others that turned up at different times in my mailbox with a friendly note from Dante, or that he stopped by my office to deliver, together with an amusing or illuminating literary anecdote or two that I had never heard before.

Dante was a talented photographer, and after his retirement, with characteristic generosity, he offered to take individual portraits of the entire department. For many years these portraits lined the wall outside the main department office in Welles; they finally came down only because time hadn’t been as kind to his subjects as it had been to his art.

Soft-spoken, unassuming, gentle, and generous, Dante was a much-loved teacher and a wonderful colleague. His passing is a great loss.

There will be calling hours Friday, November 8, 2013 from 4-7 PM at the Rector-Hicks Funeral Home, 111 Main St. in Geneseo. The interment will be at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Geneseo.

If you’d like to share a memory of Dante, you can add one to his page on the Rector-Hicks website.

In lieu of flowers, Dante’s family asks that memorials be made in the form of book donations to Goodwill, 4119 Lakeville Rd. in Geneseo or Literacy Volunteers of America – Livingston County, 27 Lackawanna Ave., Mount Morris, NY 14510.

— Paul Schacht, Department Chair

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International conference features three Geneseo alums and one prof

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L. to R.: Andrew Kay, Will Porter, Elly Weybright, Gene Stelzig

Three Geneseo English major alumni, all now in graduate programs in English, delivered papers last month at the 2013 International Conference on Romanticism at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. The session, entitled “Versions of Romantic Love,” was organized and chaired by SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Teaching Professor Gene Stelzig.  Andrew Kay, currently finishing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,  read a paper on “Keats’s Death-Centered Poetics and the Allegory of Reading”; Elly Weybright,  in her second year at the CUNY Graduate Center, read a paper on “Byron’s Hebrew Melodies: Romanticizing an Old Testament Tradition of Love”; and Will Porter, in his first year at Harvard University, read a paper on “The Single Life: Love at Walden Pond.”

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Cori Winrock numbered among “Best New Poets”

For her poem “Débridement,” the online anthology Best New Poets has included Visiting Assistant Professor of English Cori Winrock on its list of 50 best new poets for 2013.

Each year, a guest editor selects 50 poems for the anthology from an open internet competition and nominations made by literary magazines and writing programs.

Correction (10-11-13): This post previously referred to Best New Poets as an “online anthology.” In fact, Best New Poets is printed on paper. (Submissions are solicited online.) You can order an individual copy from the Best New Poets website, buy it from online retails such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble, or purchase it from an independent bookseller.

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Summer roundup

A few things we’ve been up to recently…

  • Associate Professor Robert Doggett no longer goes by that title. Following a promotion, he is now Professor Robert Doggett.
  • Prof. Tom Greenfield was selected for induction into the Geneseo Greek Hall of Fame for his work as adviser to Alpha Delta Epsilon since 2002. He is the first non-Geneseo graduate ever selected for this honor. His formal induction will be held as part of Homecoming in late September.
  • In June, Prof. Caroline Woidat presented “Charlotte Perkins Gilman — Guest in Susan B. Anthony’s Home” for the Monday Lecture Series at the Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester, NY. Her slide show traced Gilman’s life and work, exploring her connections to Susan B. Anthony, Rochester, and the suffrage movement.
  • Prof. Woidat was awarded the 2013 Roemer Summer Faculty Fellowship for a book project on Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s Indian fiction and other writings.
  • Prof. Ed Gillin’s essay “Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University, and the Nassau Literary Magazine” was published in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context, edited by. Bryant Mangum (Cambridge University Press, 2013). This is the fourth Fitzgerald book to include a full-length article or essay by Professor Gillin.
  • During the spring and summer, Prof. Paul Schacht gave presentations on Digital Thoreau at the SUNY Conversations in the Discipline conference on Digital Humanities at Suffolk Community College on Long Island (April), the American Literature Association annual conference in Boston (May),the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, British Columbia (June); and the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, MA (July).
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Stelzig to read at Rochester Poets event

Image Distinguished Teaching Professor Gene Stelzig will read from his poetry this Sunday, August 18, from 2 to 4 p.m. at this month’s meeting of Rochester Poets, the oldest continuously active literary organization in upstate New York.

Prof. Stelzig will read from a recently completed manuscript, Traces, and a collection in progress, Whistling in the Wind, or Some Things Old Men Know.

Though perhaps best known to students as a scholar and teacher of British romantic literature, Prof. Stelzig has also published poetry during the past five decades in a variety of literary and (mostly) little magazines, including a long poem in The Literary Review (1976). His collection Fool’s Gold: Selected Poems of a Decade appeared in 2008 from FootHills Press.

Prof. Stelzig began writing poetry as a teenager; during his senior year at the University of Pennsylvania, he edited the campus literary magazine, The Pennsylvania Review.

This Sunday’s reading will be held at the Ross Gallery of the Skalny Welcome Center on the campus of St. John Fisher College.

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Lima essay accepted for publication

Prof. Maria Lima’s essay “The Choice of Opera for a Revisionist History: Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda as a Neo-Slave Narrative” has been accepted for publication in the 2013 volume of Caribbean Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (selected Proceedings of the “Islands-in-between Conference,” Grenada 2011).

Back in March, Prof. Lima participated by Skype in an International Expert Meeting, “Black British Women’s Writing: Where is it now?” Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, Belgium, delivering a position paper titled “Why Black British?”

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Spring Semester Roundup

With apologies for the protracted radio silence, we offer this roundup of important events and developments from the Spring 2013 semester:

Faculty

Alumni

Students

2012-13 saw the launch of SUNY Geneseo’s student-run online literary journal Gandy Dancer. Prof. Rachel Hall serves as faculty adviser to the journal, which invites submissions from across SUNY and is published twice yearly.

2012-13 Department Award Winners

Graduating Senior Awards

  • William T. Beauchamp Literature Award: Cailin Kowalewski and Yael Massen
  • Patricia Conrad Lindsay Memorial Award: Tim Caughlin and Pam Howe
  • Calvin Israel Award in the Humanities: Logan Mahlum
  • Joseph M. OBrien Memorial Award: Megan Cicolello
  • Rosalind R. Fisher Memorial Award for Outstanding Student Teaching in English: Marissa Liberati

Scholarships

  • Natalie Selser Freed Memorial Scholarship: Christine O’Neill and Ava Russell
  • Rita K. Gollin Senior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Eve Anderson
  • Rita K. Gollin Junior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Rebecca Miller
  • Hans Gottschalk Award: Sean Neill
  • Joseph M. OBrien Transfer Scholarship: Erica George
  • Don Watt Memorial Scholarship: Bibi Lewis and James Ryan

Writing Awards

African American Studies
  • 1st: Connor Burgevin
  • 2nd: Briana Onishea
  • 3rd: Gregory Palermo
Critical Essay
  • 1st Matthew Cordella
  • 2nd Co-winners Meghan Kearns and Gregory Palermo
  • 3rd Sean Fischer
Freshman Writing
  • Kathleen Trabert
Creative Non-Fiction
  • 1st: Alexa Burkett
  • 2nd: Megan Ross
  • 3rd: Pam Howe
Drama
  • Jennie Conway
Fiction
  • 1st: Suraj Uttamchandani
  • 2nd: Pam Howe
  • 3rd: James Ryan
Poetry
  • 1st: Yael Massen
  • 2nd: Daniel OBrien
  • 3rd: Bibi Lewis
  • Honorable Mention: Alexa Burkett and Emily Webb
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Gillian Paku wins award for innovative course design

SUNY Geneseo Assistant Professor of English Gillian Paku has been named a winner of the Innovative Course Design Competition organized by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for her course “Authorial Identity: What’s in a Name?”

Established in 1969, ASECS is an interdisciplinary group dedicated to the advancement of scholarship in all aspects of the period stretching from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

The organization’s award for innovative course design comes with a $500 honorarium and an invitation to present at the Society’s annual meeting.

In recognizing Professor Paku’s achievement, the selection committee observed:

This course takes a difficult topic – authorial identity – and makes it accessible and interesting without sacrificing any conceptual clarity or rigor. Indeed, its course objectives – with their attendant interest in the meta-analysis of authorship and canonicity – are remarkably ambitious. Laurence Sterne’s work is difficult to decipher and yet Paku succeeds in using Tristram Shandy to actually render a more recent postmodern text more accessible to students by the end of the semester. This is a serious and innovative accomplishment. Along the way, the use of Skype is perfectly tuned to the course goals and allows the living post-modern author (Plascencia) to ‘perform’ in ways that can be discussed and deconstructed after the fact. In a major authors course, the identity and intentions of the author are always foregrounded, but students inevitably seem to wonder if they’ve accessed the “real” Sterne or the “real” Dryden or the “real” Milton. Paku’s arrangement for an interview with a living author allows students to experience “authentic” contact that will shape their understanding of how well the written works capture the essence and intents of their creator. The use of puppets (and indeed muppets) is also conceptually sound and pedagogically useful. These are not gimmicks.

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Visiting Assistant Professor Beyazit Akman publishes second novel

The second novel of SUNY Geneseo Visiting Assistant Professor of English Beyazit Akman has just been published in Turkish by Epsilon, with a first printing of 100,000 copies.

A historical novel, The Last Sepharad: The War of Sultan Bayezid tells of the tragic expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and the unexpected help they received from the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, who welcomed tens of thousands of Jews to the Ottoman Empire. The novel interweaves three stories, focusing on that of the Nahmias brothers, who founded the first printing press to publish Hebrew books in Istanbul.  It offers an alternative history of multicultural co-existence and religious tolerance. The Last Sepharad is expected to be available in English within a year.

Beyazit Akman received his Ph.D. in English from Illinois State University. He completed his M.A. as a Fulbright Scholar from Turkey. His previous novel, 1453: The World’s First Day (the first part of the Empire series) has become a bestseller in Turkey. It focuses on Christian-Muslim relations in medieval times. Prof. Beyazit’s other publications include articles on “Shakespeare and the Turk,” “Defoe’s Turkish Spy,” and “Travel Knowledge and Orientalism,”  as well as book reviews and opinion columns in Turkish national dailies.