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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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Autumn frosts have slain July

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

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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.

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Erika Dreifus to read here November 12

Erika Dreifus, author of the short story collection Quiet Americans, which won the 2012 ALA Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding Jewish literatureErika Dreifus, will read from her work at 4 p.m. on November 12 in the Walter Harding Lounge, Welles 111.

As Dreifus’ website explains, the stories in Quiet Americans “reframe familiar questions about what is right and wrong, remembered and repressed, resolved and unending. Portions of the proceeds from sales of Quiet Americans are being donated to The Blue Card, which supports survivors of Nazi persecution and their families in the United States.”

You can read a full bio of Erika Dreifus here.

Correction: Earlier versions of this post incorrectly gave the date of this event as November 4 and November 14. The actual date is November 12.

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Dennis Looney, Professor of Italian, to speak on “Freedom Readers”

Dennis O. Looney, Professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, will deliver a lecture titled “”The Poetics of Lynching: Dante, Allen Tate, and other Freedom Readers” on Monday, October 15, at 4:00 p.m. in Welles 121.

Examining “The Swimmers,” a poem written amid American poet and literary critic Allen Tate’s “literal conversion to Catholicism and his move away from segregationist ideology,” Looney argues that the poet turned—as did many African American writers—to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in order to grapple with the legacy of white supremacy.

Professor Looney is the author of Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in its Devers Series in Dante Studies, 2011, and of Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian (1996).

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Megan Marshall to deliver 2012 Harding Lecture September 27

Award-winning biographer Megan Marshall will deliver the 2012 Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo on September 27 at 4 p.m. in the College Union Ballroom. The event is free and open to the public.

Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005), which won the Society of American Historians’ 2006 Francis Parkman Prize. On the Society’s website, Patricia Cline Cohen, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, observes that “Marshall brilliantly succeeds in bringing to life the complex sisters, each maneuvering to make her mark in a world just on the verge of a dawning feminism.  Marshall restores their place in the history of Transcendentalism, and, thanks to unusually rich primary sources she has uncovered, she presents a seamless, almost filmic narrative of actions, interior thoughts, even gestures and meaningful silences.  this is a rare feat in biographies, most especially biographies of antebellum women.”

Marshall’s reviews and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and The Boston Review. Her latest book, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, will be published in March, 2013 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

At Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, Marshall holds the position of Writing, Literature and Publishing Assistant Professor. In 2012, the Emerson College Graduate Student Association named her Outstanding Faculty Member.

The annual Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo honors the life and legacy of SUNY Distinguished University Professor Walter Harding, who taught in the Geneseo English department from 1956 to 1982 and was, in his time, the world’s foremost authority on the life and work of Henry David Thoreau.

Megan Marshall’s 2012 Harding Lecture, which will focus on Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, is titled “Biography as Intellectual History: Two Lives of the Mind.”

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Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão to read here October 4

Salgado Maranhão, one of Brazil’s leading contemporary poets, will read at Geneseo from his most recent collection, Sol Sangüíneo (Blood of the Sun), with his translator, Alexis Levitin, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Plattsburgh. In addition to eight books of poetry, including The Snake’s Fists, The Kiss of the Beast, and the recent Tiger’s Fur, Maranhão has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians.MaranhãoSalgado Maranhão‘s white father was descended from a wealthy family whose plantations in the past had been worked by slaves. His mother was a black field worker who sang to him from her folk tradition. According to Maranhão, because “The Mansion” and “The Shanty” flow together in his veins, questions of race and history permeate several of the poems in his latest collection.

One of Brazil’s leading critics, Antonio Carlos Secchin, writes: “With a deeply-rooted personal diction, Salgado Maranhão, in Blood of the Sun, has reached the high point of his work (so far), in this cohesive collection of poems in which a speculative intelligence and a celebration of the corporality of the world are expressed with great metaphoric vigor.”

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Beth McCoy named SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor

The Board of Trustees of the State University of New York has awarded Geneseo English Professor Beth McCoy the title of SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor.

From the SUNY press release:

The Distinguished Professorship recognizes and honors mastery of teaching. For this prestigious tribute to be conferred, candidates must have demonstrated consistently superior mastery of teaching, outstanding service to students, and commitment to their ongoing intellectual growth, scholarship and professional growth, and adherence to rigorous academic standards and requirements. Further, a faculty member must have attained and held the rank of full professor for five years, have completed at least three years of full-time teaching on the nominating campus, 10 years of full-time teaching in the System, and must have regularly carried a full-time teaching load as defined by the campus at the undergraduate, graduate, or professional level.

About Professor McCoy herself, the press release accurately observes:

Both students and other faculty extol [Professor McCoy’s] generosity as a mentor, and note that what they learn from her stays with them long after they leave her classroom or office. Professor McCoy … is highly skilled at bringing everyone in her classroom into the conversation regardless of their background or inclination to tackle difficult questions. Professor McCoy sets a high bar and assists her students in achieving beyond their own expectations. She has been successful in adapting this model to campus-wide teach-ins, which she introduced as a method of engaging the Geneseo community in national and local issues related to race, identity and privilege.

SUNY’s distinguished ranks represent the highest system honor conferred upon SUNY instructional faculty. All distinguished faculty in active service within SUNY also become members of the SUNY Distinguished Academy.

Professor McCoy joins Professors Ron Herzman and Gene Stelzig as active English department faculty members holding the rank of Distinguished Teaching Professor.