SUNY Geneseo
Steve Almond, author of ten books — including the nonfiction Candy Freak and Rock and Roll Can Will Save Your Life, and the story collections My Life in Heavy Metal and the recent God Bless America — will read at SUNY Geneseo as part of the all-college hour Distinguished Speakers Series this Wednesday, October 9, in the College Union Ballroom.
The event begins at 2:30. There will be a reception and book signing afterwards, and the bookstore will have God Bless America for sale.
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.”
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.
SUNY Geneseo is sponsoring three performances at this year’s Rochester Fringe Festival: on Saturday, September 28, Geneseo Bhangra (RAPA on East Avenue, 3:15 pm) and the musical revue Starting Here, Starting Now (Blackfriars, 8 pm); and on Thursday, September 19, Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries (Writers and Books, 8:30 pm), directed by Melyssa Hall, 2013 graduate, English major, and Cothurnus secretary. There will be a second performance of Starting Here, Starting Now at Blackfriars on Sunday, September 22 at 7 pm.
The cast of Starting Here, Starting Now are all musical theatre majors at Geneseo: sophomore Alex Imbrosci, juniors Megan McCaffrey and CJ Roche, and seniors Elyssa Ramirez and Jacob Stewart. Gruesome Playground Injuries stars 2013 graduate Russell Allen and senior Gabby Formica, with makeup by Kristen Leadbetter (2012).
This year’s annual Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Laura Dassow Walls, William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
The lecture, to be held on Thursday, September 12 at 4 p.m. in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Ballroom, is free and open to the public.
The title: “Of Compass, Chains, and Sounding Lines: Taking Thoreau’s Measure.”
Professor Walls specializes in American Transcendentalism, transatlantic romanticism, literature and science, and environmental literature and ecocriticism, with a particular emphasis on the work of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her most recent book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2009), won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for the best book in American intellectual history, and the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.
Professor Walls is currently at work on a new biography of Thoreau.
A few things we’ve been up to recently…
With apologies for the protracted radio silence, we offer this roundup of important events and developments from the Spring 2013 semester:
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.
But the memories linger on…
Pictured below are the students who took Geneseo’s Humanities II course at Walden Pond last summer with Adjunct Professor Wes Kennison. They were snapped at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering dinner in July with renowned Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, Marjorie Harding, Allen Harding, and Kay Gainer. Geneseo’s Humanities@Walden course will be offered again this summer, this time by Prof. Cathy Adams of the History department. For information about the course, and to register, visit Geneseo’s Study Abroad website. Thanks to Thoreau Society Executive Director Michael Frederick for sending along the photo.
FRONT ROW, L to R: Marjorie Harding, E.O. Wilson, Allen Harding, Kay Gainer. BACK ROW, L to R: Antonia Olveida, Sean Endress, Greg Palermo, Mattew Hill, James McGowan, Wes Kennison, Jeff Handy, Adam Lashinsky, Rory Cushman
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 Ide
ntity: 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.
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.