English Department News

Back in June, we reported on the publication of Gene Stelzig’s Henry Crabb Robinson in Germany: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Life Writing by Bucknell University Press.

Stelzig’s book has now been awarded the 2010 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize for the year’s best book in Romanticism studies.

In communicating the award, Prof. Larry H. Peer, Executive Director of the International Conference on Romanticism and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University, wrote to Stelzig that, “Your book is a particular piece that has been needed in the field of Crabb Robinson studies for generations.”

Stelzig will receive a commemorative plaque at the annual meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism in Montreal next October.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) met Goethe and Schiller and left his impressions of S.T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and other writers in his Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, first published in 1869.

This summer, SUNY Geneseo students can take Western Humanities II within walking distance of Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau went to “live deliberately,” an experience that inspired one of the most influential and important works of American literature, Walden.

Students will read and discuss the works on the Hum II syllabus – Walden included – in an area steeped in the history that those works reflect and, in some cases, helped to bring about.

If you enroll in the course, you’ll live in Concord’s historic Colonial Inn, which British soldiers and American minutemen passed in order to exchange “the shot heard round the world” just a few hundred yards away. (The Inn has been featured, more recently, on SyFy’s “Ghost Hunters” television show: stay away from room 24!) You’ll be able to walk from your own room, haunted or not, to the Concord battle site, but also to places connected to 19th-century controversies over women’s rights and African-American slavery. Besides Thoreau, authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott lived and worked in Concord.

Classes will be held in a variety of locations in the area, including the house where Thoreau was born, the Thoreau Institute at the Walden Woods Project in Concord, and, of course, outdoors at the pond itself.

There will be field trips to downtown Boston, where colonial revolutionaries took actions derived from the words of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government; and to the National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, to see examples of the factory system that provoked intellectuals like Karl Marx because of its dehumanizing features.

Concord is a commuter-rail stop in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority system, which means that the Freedom Trail and the Boston Commons, the Museum of Fine Arts, the New England Aquarium and Fenway Park, fabulous restaurants and splendid musical performances – all the cultural and recreational offerings of one of America’s great cities – are just a half-hour away.

This new course is part of SUNY Geneseo’s continuing connection to the work and legacy of Walter Harding, pioneering Thoreau scholar and Geneseo English department faculty member from 1956 to 1982.

Dramatist and Geneseo English alum Molly Smith Metzler, who launched her playwriting career in Geneseo’s Black Box Theater, has had a play selected for main stage production in the 2011 Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. Metzler’s Elemeno Pea was one of six plays selected from over 1,000 entries for the country’s largest and most prestigious competition for new plays and emerging playwrights. The play will open March 8, 2011 at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Marc Masterson, Artistic Director of the Humana Festival, said that Metzler’s play has “the potential … to be a break-out production both for Metzler and for the festival. It’s funny, it’s socially aware and the character work is extraordinarily confident and full. … You would not think this was written by an early-career playwright. It’s so confident and self-assured and fully-rendered.”

Since graduating from Geneseo, Metzler has fashioned an impressive career. In 2003, a revision of her original Geneseo play, Training Wisteria, won the Kennedy Center’s Best New Play Award in the National Student Playwriting Contest, the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award, and the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award. Her play Carve was produced in London’s Tristan Bates Theatre. Close Up Space was produced this past summer at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, the artistic “birthplace” of Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson’s early major works as well as premieres of major plays by Wendy Wasserstein and John Guare, among others.

The Dante Society of America has awarded its annual Dante Prize for the “best essay submitted by an undergraduate in any American or Canadian college or university” to William Porter, a junior English major at SUNY Geneseo and a participant in Geneseo’s Edgar Fellows program.

Porter’s winning essay, entitled “‘L’arco de lo essilio’: The Nexus of History, Pilgrimage, and Prophecy in the Heaven of Mars,” is, in Porter’s words, “about the nature and significance of exile” in the Divine Comedy — in particular, “how Dante’s own exile can be transformed into spiritual pilgrimage, shown through the prophecy of his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida in Cantos 15-17 of Paradiso, or the Heaven of Mars.”

Porter is the second SUNY Geneseo student in the last five years to win the Dante Prize. In 2006, the prize was shared between Lisa Caruana, for her essay “The Dynamic Motion of Paradise,” and John Davies, a student at Harvard College, for his essay “Purgatorio Petroso : The Rime in the Purgatorio.” Prize winners in other years have submitted their essays from undergraduate programs at Princeton, Duke, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, Bowdoin, Duke, and Brigham Young.

The Dante Prize is “meant as a sign of encouragement for those younger scholars on whose contributions the future of Dante studies in America will depend,” according to Vincent Pollina, Secretary-Treasurer of the Dante Society of America, who signed for the Prize Committee in his letter to Porter this fall.

The English department’s fall Advisement Mixer is this Wednesday, October 20, at 2:30 p.m. in the Harding Room (Welles 111).

English majors, minors, and concentrators are welcome to join us for pizza and beverages. Faculty will be mingling and will be glad to answer any questions you may have about their spring, 2011 courses.

You can read descriptions of our spring course offerings here.

 

The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) has awarded its October 2010 Community Contribution Award to two projects: The Early Novels Database at Swarthmore College and English 170: The Practice of Criticism at SUNY Geneseo.

English 170: The Practice of Criticism is a collaboration among four Geneseo professors — Schacht, Doggett, Woidat, and Paku — teaching Geneseo’s course of the same name.

Students in the four sections are engaging in online conversation about several “big questions” raised by literary criticism as an enterprise. They’re also working together to annotate a baker’s dozen of short poems.

For their part, the four faculty members have gone out on a limb by recording brief audio commentaries on Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916” in order to give their students a feel for the questions that critics typically ask of poetry.

Schacht, Doggett, Woidat, and Paku plan to publish a case study of their project in Academic Commons in April, 2011 under the theme “Digital Humanities and the Undergraduate.”

English 170: The Practice of Criticism lives in the SUNY Geneseo wiki.

Students seeking admission to spring, 2011 workshops in creative writing, or to the English major writing track, must apply by 4 p.m. on October 28. To apply, download this form, attach it to a sample of your prose or poetry (as explained on the form), and bring the form and sample to the English department main office, Welles 226. Applicants will be notified of the result by mail shortly after November 1.

The Geneseo English department was well represented at the Fall 2010 meeting of the Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Study Group, October 1-2, at Cornell University. The theme of the meeting was “Ghost Stories.” Study Group members were invited to a lecture by Dana Luciano on “Touching, Clinging, Haunting, Worlding: On the Spirit Photograph,” and discussed ghostly tales by such writers as Lydia Maria Child, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Pictured here are Geneseo professors Caroline Woidat (left) and Alice Rutkowski (right), flanking Jonathan Senchyne (Geneseo ‘04), who is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University writing a dissertation on early American and antebellum fiction.

Congratulations to three English department faculty who received professional advancement this fall. Rachel Hall and Graham Drake were both promoted to the rank of Professor. Alice Rutkowski was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.

And congratulations to Assistant Professor Jun Okada, who was awarded leave for spring, 2011 under the United University Professions’ Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave Program to complete work on a book project, Producing Asian American Media: Institutional History and the Making of a Genre.

Huston Diehl, a member of the SUNY Geneseo English department from 1975 to 1979, died in Iowa City, Iowa on September 8 at age 61. At the University of Iowa, Diehl was Professor of English and CLAS Collegiate Fellow and a specialist in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature.

From today’s obituary in the Iowa City Press-Citizen:

Huston published widely on the theatrical, visual, and religious cultures of early modern England. She was the author of An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books (1986), a reference work funded by a publication grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (1997), named an “Outstanding Academic Book of 1997” by Choice Magazine. Dream Not of Other Worlds, her memoir about teaching in a segregated “Negro” elementary school in rural Virginia, in 1970 was published in 2007. A critical reflection on education and the history of segregation, this book recounts what Huston had hoped to offer her students and the obstacles she faced but above all recalls the voices of her students and the lessons they taught her. Huston’s scholarship was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1978-79 and a University of Iowa Faculty Scholar Award from 1988 to 1991, as well as by numerous research grants from SUNY, the University of Oklahoma, The University of Iowa, and the Folger and Newberry Libraries.

In 2007, Diehl was joined by Matilda Beauford, one of her former students at Morton Elementary School in Louisa County, Virginia, for an interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition about Dream Not of Other Worlds. You can hear the interview and read an excerpt of the book here.

Diehl’s former undergraduate students at Geneseo include Lynn Kennison (‘79) and Adjunct Lecturer in English Wes Kennison (‘78). Her former graduate students at the University of Iowa include Anne Clark Bartlett (Geneseo ‘87, Iowa ‘93), now Chair of the English department at DePaul University.

The cause of Diehl’s death was adenoid cystic carcinoma. Ron Herzman, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at Geneseo, recalls that

In 1998, an operation for cancer severely altered Huston’s (beautiful) speaking voice. Heroically, and with no evidence at all of self-pity, she continued teaching. She told her students, “It will take you a couple of weeks to be able to figure out what I am saying. Stay with it. I’m worth it.” Indeed she was. Those of us who visited her classroom in Geneseo were blown away by her ability to bring students into a profound conversation on the texts that she loved, with her ability to read texts – in all senses of that word – and by her astonishing rapport with her students. As someone who was her colleague here and also at the University of Chicago as Fellows in Residence during the academic year 1978-79, my respect and affection for her is profound. Among other considerable talents, Huston was among the best if not the very best listener I have ever met, inside and outside the classroom, and she taught me by example the necessity to cultivate that skill.

Before her death, Diehl established the Huston Diehl Memorial Fund to help support teaching and research at the University of Iowa Department of English. Contributions may be sent to University of Iowa Foundation, Levitt Center for University Advancement, 1 West Park Road, Iowa City, IA 52255.