English Department News

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Another year, another chance to exchange books for what else but – more books! Sigma Tau Delta (the English Honor Society) was so impressed with the turnout and enthusiasm for last year’s Book Exchange that they conducted another one this year, complete with performances, snacks, and, of ,.

The Starbucks on campus donated coffee and passion-tea lemonades again this year so Sigma Tau Delta could sell the drinks at a discount for She’s the First, a charity that sends girls in Third World countries to school. Sigma Tau Delta matched every dollar that was made between the first and second Book Exchange, enabling two girls to school.

The success of this event has prompted Sigma Tau Delta to make the Book Exchange an annual tradition at Geneseo. The Honor Society hopes to continue the trend of great entertainment, good food for a good cause – and, of course, books!

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Last night, members of Sigma Tau Delta (The English Honor Society) conducted story and craft time for a group of local children at Wadsworth Library. The group read The Rainbow Fish and Elmer the Elephant. After each story was read aloud, the children were able to create their own Elmer with paint and sponges and their own Rainbow Fish with tissue paper and tinfoil for the shiny scales.

Both the students and the children had a blast! Sigma Tau Delta enjoyed the opportunity to give back to the community and to volunteer to help local families. They plan to volunteer again at the library in the Spring and hope more students would like to join them!

Professor of English Tom Greenfield kicked off the mini-lecture series presented by Sigma Tau Delta (the English Honor Society) today, giving an exciting and entertaining look into dandyism and the witticisms of Oscar Wilde. The mini-lecture series, Celebrate Literature, connects a mini-lecture from a Geneseo English faculty member with the theme of the month (Oscar Wilde’s birthday is in October).

Dr. Greenfield got the lecture off on the right note with a song. Readings from Wilde’s work interspersed with the history of his life and career were educational but not without hilarity. After hearing excerpts from Wilde’s plays including An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance, Dr. Greenfield asked the students to script their own small scene of witticisms. The crowd was burstling with enthusiasm as the students paired into small groups and created their own scene. Two groups were asked to briefly act out their scene, and their witty performances were greeted with applause and laughter.

The lecture was a great success and set the tone for the rest of the series. The next lecture in the series is Dr. Caroline Woidat’s “Native American Thanksgiving: Food for Thought,” Thursday, November 17th at 4:30 p.m. in the Fireside Lounge in the Union.

This year’s Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Professor Martha Nell Smith.

The lecture, titled Digital Forensics: Texting Emily Dickinson, will be held on Thursday, September 29 at 4 p.m. in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Ballroom.

Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. Her numerous print publications include five singly and coauthored books, three of them award-winning – Emily Dickinson, A User’s Guide (2012); Companion to Emily Dickinson (2008); Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson (1998); Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (1993); Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992) – and scores of articles and essays in journals and collections such as American Literature, Studies in the Literary Imagination, South Atlantic Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Profils Americains, San Jose Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, ESQ, and A Companion to Digital Humanities. The recipient of numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for her work on Dickinson, American literary history, and in new media, Smith is also Coordinator and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. Smith co-edited Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (2008) published by Rotunda New Digital Scholarship, University of Virginia Press, and has worked on two interrelated Mellon-sponsored data mining and visualization initiatives, NORA and MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge). A founding board member of the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS), Smith also serves on the editorial board and steering committee of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship); serves in an advisory capacity for C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and is on numerous advisory boards of digital literary projects such as The Poetess Archive, Digital Dickens, and the Melville Electronic Library (MEL). A leader in innovations in academic publishing, Smith served on the Executive Council of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (2001-2004), co-chaired the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE, 2004-2008), and chairs the University of Maryland’s Library Council (2008-2011). For outstanding scholarly achievement and innovative leadership in which diversity inheres in any definition of excellence, Livingston College at Rutgers University awarded Smith its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2009, the highest honor that the college bestows upon its former students. In 2010, Smith was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, and in 2011 she was appointed ADVANCE Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities as part of a NSF-funded project to cultivate inclusive excellence. In May 2011, Smith was vote Chair-Elect of the University of Maryland Senate.

The winners of the 2011 Genesee Valley Peace Poetry Contest shared their poems at SUNY Geneseo’s Alice Austin Theater on May 12. This year’s winning poems were selected from about 900 poems submitted by children in public and private schools of the Genesee valley in grades kindergarten through 8.

Go here to watch the video.

Senior English major Fiona Harvey, together with fellow students Margot Terc and Derek Weng, contributed the video below to the It Gets Better Project.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sap_ofJv5bQ&w=560&h=315]

Harvey is this year’s winner of the English department’s Joseph O’Brien Memorial Award and will be delivering the senior oration at Geneseo’s 145th commencement on May 14.

On April 29, award-winning novelist Andrea Levy spoke here, explaining the genesis of, and reading an excerpt from, her latest novel, The Long Song.

Go here to see the video.

The English department will host its 6th annual Genesee Valley Peace Poetry Contest Awards Ceremony on May 12 at 7 p.m. in Alice Austin Theater.

This year, students from over 30 local elementary and middle schools will take part in the event by reading their poetry for family, friends, and others.

 Roughly 500 poems on the theme of peace are submitted for the contest each year, from which 70 winning poems are selected. Contestants compete in three separate age categories: kindergarten through 2nd grade, 3rd grade through 5th grade, and 6th grade through 8th grade.

The contest is organized each year by Geneseo English professor Rob Doggett, a scholar of the poetry of W.B. Yeats.

“Young people need a stable, nurturing and peaceful environment to flourish,” says Doggett. “Unfortunately, a lot of young people aren’t given the chance to find that peaceful environment, because they live amid conflict and sometimes, as is the case with many young people in the US; they simply aren’t given the chance to think about peace – about the things that make them happy, content, loved.”

Doggett also emphasizes that the poetry contest is about “helping students to develop their own creative skills. Writing poetry is a difficult skill, and it’s something that some students naturally do well. So what’s great is when one of these students, someone who’s maybe become frustrated with school, suddenly finds that he or she has a real gift.”

The contest is important, Doggett adds, “because it teaches everyone involved that peace is something valuable – it’s something worth thinking about and writing about.”

English major Will Porter has racked up another prize – this one for an essay he delivered in Pittsburgh at the 2011 convention of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society (March 23-26).

Will’s essay on Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself took second place in the “Critical American Literature” category.

Back in November, Will won the Dante Prize for “best essay submitted by an undergraduate in any American or Canadian college or university,” awarded by the Dante Society of America.