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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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Author Steve Almond to read here October 9

17_almond_lgl 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.

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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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SUNY Geneseo at the 2013 Rochester Fringe Festival

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).

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Alumni in print

Two English major alums have made recent appearances in print.

1234434_10201834896536813_1150199307_nMarc DiPaolo (1997), Assistant Professor of English and Film at Oklahoma City University is the editor of Unruly Catholics from Dante to Madonna: Faith, Heresy, and Politics in Cultural Studies, recently out from Scarecrow Press. Unruly Catholics is an interdisciplinary anthology featuring essays by, among others, SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Teaching Professor Ronald Herzman, who contributed the essay “Dante: Cafeteria Catholic?” DiPaolo’s own contribution to the volume is an autobiographical essay on C.S. Lewis, Madonna, and the greatness of a SUNY Geneseo liberal arts education. Other contributors include Frederick S. Roden, Darren Middleton, and John Kenneth Muir. DiPaolo is also War, Politics, and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film (2011); Emma Adapted: Jane Austen’s Heroine from Book to Film (2007); Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture (2013); and Devised and Directed by Mike Leigh (2013). You can learn more about him on the alumni profile page he recently created on our website.

Meanwhile, Patrick Morgan (2010), who is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Duke University, has contributed an essay on Practicing Web Wisdom: Mindfully Incorporating Digital Literacies into the Classroom” to a new volume on open teaching  titled Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning from HASTAC.

morgan_highlight copyFrom the website: “Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning is intended to assist anyone embarking on open teaching. It offers foundational methods, examples, and explanatory theories for how to set up the practices of a class, how to determine guiding principles, how to theorize what you are doing in the classroom, how to design the class, how to include multimedia elements and approaches such as games, and how to ensure that you have designed a class for inclusion, not exclusion. Finally, the openness of the learning should continue even after the book is published/goes public, and the chapters in the ‘Invitations’ section offer advice on how to extend your open practices to the world beyond the classroom. This is by no means the only way to set up peer-to-peer teaching, but it is an account of the way we have done it, with as much detail as possible to encourage others to try, in whatever way suits their community and purposes.”

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Laura Dassow Walls to deliver 2013 Harding Lecture

Laura Dassow Walls HeadshotThis 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.

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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.