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English department announces 2016 student awards and scholarships

The following students have won department awards and scholarships for 2015-2016 and will be honored at an awards ceremony on Study Day, May 4.

Graduating Senior Awards

  • William T. Beauchamp Literature Award: Jeremy Jackson
  • Patricia Conrad Lindsay Memorial Award: Sean Fischer
  • Calvin Israel Award in the Humanities: Britina Cheng and Harrison Hartsough
  • Joseph M. O’Brien Memorial Award: Mary Auld and Christy Leigh Agrawal
  • Outstanding Speech Buddy: Lauren Sarrantonio

Scholarships

  • Natalie Selser Freed Memorial Scholarship: John Panus
  • Rita K. Gollin Senior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Zach Muhlbauer
  • Rita K. Gollin Junior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Amanda Wentworth
  • Hans Gottschalk Award: Brendan Mahoney
  • Joseph M. O’Brien Transfer Scholarship: Jeffrey Curtin
  • Don Watt Memorial Scholarship: Jason Guisao
  • Bonnie C Henzel Memorial Scholarship: Gabriella Garcia, Chloe Forsell, Kiaya Rose Dilsner-Lopez, and Thomas McCarthy
  • Jesse M Rodgers Memorial Scholarship: Erik Mebust and Evan Goldstein

Writing Awards

Creative Non-Fiction

  • First place: Jeremy A. Jackson, “To Dr. C., Ph.D.”
  • Second place: Leandra Griffith, “Birthday for That Generic Someone in Your Life”
  • Third place: Lauren Sarrantonio, “The Amorphous Children”

John H. Parry Award for a Critical Essay

  • First place: Carrie Anne Potter, “Ahead of Their Time: Temporality and Spatiality in Two Keats Odes”
  • Second place: Joshua DeJoy, “The Objective, the Subjective, and the Ugly: E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class at Fifty-Two”
  • Third place: Zachary Muhlbauer, “Nietzschean Dualism in Heart of Darkness: A Structuralist Analysis”

Jérome de Romanet de Beaune Award for an Essay in Diversity Studies

  • First place: Ariana DiPreta, “Subversion of Bourgeois Masculinity in Ulysses”
  • Second place: Veronica Taglia, “Construction of Black Masculine Identity in African American Drama, 1959–1969”
  • Third place (tied): Emily Ercolano, “Toulouse-Lautrec and the Female Form”
  • Third place (tied): Joshua DeJoy, “The Dialectics of Slavery: Hegel and the Contradictions in Slavery”

Agnes Rigney Award in Drama

  • Emily Warnken, “Vampires”

Irene E. Smith Award in First-Year Critical Writing: INTD 105

  • First place: Isabel Owen, “Searching for Answers in Silence: The Issue of Memory in State Violence”
  • Second place: George Goga, “The Dictionary, the Gummy Worms, and the Grotesque”

Lucy Harmon Award in Literary Fiction

  • First place: Katie Soares, “We Buy Gold”
  • Second place: Leandra Griffith, “Mary”
  • Third place: Margaret Thon, “The Ballad of Summer ’72”

Mary Thomas Award in Poetry

  • First place: Savannah Skinner, “A Guide To Recognizing Your Ghost”
  • Second place: Cassandra Schweizer, “What I Wrote For You”
  • Third place: Kallie Swyer, “Hundreds of Birds”

Research Paper

  • First place: Erik Mebust, “Shakespeare’s Rising Stars”
  • Second place: Jessica Heppler, “Civil Disobedience and the Rawlsian Non-Citizen: An Appeal to Political or Natural Rights?”
  • Third place: Veronica Taglia, “Subversion of the American Dream: An Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Leading Protagonists.”

Africana/Black Studies

  • Best Analytical Essay: Azaria Davis, “Colorblind? That Ain’t Right!”
  • Best Research Paper: Kathleen O’Brien, “Would There Be Slave Resistance without Women?: The Crucial Role Women Play”
  • Best Creative Work: Chloe Forsell, “Mother Tongue”
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Geneseo students shine at 2016 Sigma Tau Delta Conference

Seven Geneseo students represented the English department last week at this year’s convention of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society. The students — Noah Chauvin, Ariana Dipreta, Jeremy Jackson, Elizabeth Landrum, Megan Meadows, Zachary Muhlbauer, and Michelle Mundt — were accompanied by Prof. Gillian Paku, faculty advisor to Geneseo’s chapter of the society.

IMG_9212Over the course of three days, the students presented their peer-reviewed work in front of engaged and enthusiastic audiences. Each student participated in a panel with papers on related topics (James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, issues of race or postcolonialism), offering opportunities for members of the audience to pose questions and for presenters to establish running dialogues among themselves. Showing great support for one another, the students attended the panels of their Geneseo peers, along with many other panels of interest, be it one focused on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, on African American literature, or featuring creative nonfiction on addiction and depression.

[See more photos from the convention.]

There were numerous ways to network and meet like-minded peers, domestic and international, as well as chances to explore the cultural backdrop of Minneapolis, from performances at the renowned Guthrie Theatre to wandering the huge Mall of America, plus the occasional gathering at an Irish pub. As has been the case for several years now, the Geneseo group also took home one of the convention prizes for best submissions, with Noah’s creative non-fiction essay, “For Want of Syncope,” winning second place as a response to the convention’s common reader, Charles Baxter’s The Soul Thief (2008).

All students who are members of Sigma Tau Delta are eligible to submit to the convention, a competitive process. Next year’s convention will be held March 29 – April 1 in Louisville, KY, where one of the featured speakers will be Marlon James, recent winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Submissions are usually due at the end of October, and the Sigma Tau Delta student e-board is always happy to help with the process and keep our excellent tradition of participation strong.

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McCoy publishes article on FEMA and Post-Katrina New Orleans

Distinguished Teaching Professor Beth McCoy’s article on “The Archive of the Archive of the Archive: The FEMA Signs of Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Vévés’s of Voudoun” appears in a new collection from Indiana University Press edited by Jonathan P. Eburne and Judith Roof, The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive. The collection “positions itself within the history of mirabilia launched by curiosity cabinets starting in the mid-fifteenth century and continuing to the present day. These archives (or are they counter-archives?) are located in unexpected places—the doorways of Katrina homes, the cavity of a cow, the remnants of extinct animals, an Internet site—and they offer up ‘alternate modes of knowing’ to the traditional archive.” You can preview the essay in Google Books here.

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English department and Milne Library break new ground with National Book Review Month

SUNY Geneseo’s English department and Milne Library have launched the first ever National Book Review Month: a month dedicated to encouraging readers and writers to review books.

Readers are encouraged to post a 100-1000 word review at the NaRMo website, which also offers tips for reviewing and other resources. Or post a review to an online store or send one to a literary magazine.

National Book Review Month is committed to sharing a wealth of exciting contemporary literature. Dr. Lytton Smith, Assistant Professor of Poetry at SUNY Geneseo and a former publicist for presses including Four Way Books and Persea Books, said, “I despair every time I hear about the death of poetry or fiction or books in general; there’s more amazing contemporary writing out there than anyone would have time to read, and NaRMo is our way of beginning to help people find the books that are looking for them.”

Use #narmo and @getreviewing in whichever ways seem right to you!

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English major Meghan Barrett wins Phi Beta Kappa writing internship

This news is so fresh that the press release below isn’t yet live on the Phi Beta Kappa website (though by the time you click that link, maybe they’ll have posted it).

English major (creative writing) Meghan Barrett has won a prestigious Phi Beta Kappa writing internship. Here’s the release:

MEGHAN BARRETT SELECTED FOR PHI BETA KAPPA WRITING INTERNSHIP

WASHINGTON, DC – The Phi Beta Kappa Society is pleased to announce that Meghan Barrett of the State University of New York at Geneseo has been selected for a 2016 Phi Beta Kappa Writing Internship.

The Phi Beta Kappa chapter at SUNY Geneseo recommended Meghan to work with the Society’s national office in Washington, DC. The internship begins this month and continues through May 2016.

A native of Penfield, New York, and a graduate of Our Lady of Mercy High School, Meghan is a senior with a double major in Biology and Creative Writing. She is also part of the college’s Edgar Fellows Honors Program and was inducted into the Alpha Delta of New York chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 2015.

Meghan is also serving as a website management intern for the Geneseo Office of Sustainability and is a writer of book four of Liber Primus Games’s Narborion Saga. She is the President of Alpha Delta Epsilon regional sorority and was named Geneseo’s 2015 Outstanding Sorority Woman. Meghan plans to earn a PhD in Biology after completing her bachelor’s this spring—while continuing to write poetry, plays, and novels in her spare time.

Phi Beta Kappa’s writing internships are for juniors and seniors majoring in the liberal arts or sciences who attend institutions where our chapters are located. Interns must make a five-month commitment to the program and prepare a minimum of six publishable articles for the Society’s publication for news and alumni relations, The Key Reporter.

The program has two deadlines annually, for internships in the fall or spring of each academic year.

No more than 15 students are selected from a national pool in each round.

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Jess Fenn article on Down-Syndrome screening in The Atlantic

Lecturer in English Dr. Jess Fenn has published an article in The Atlantic on Down-Syndrome screening.

Down-Syndrome Screening: A One-Parent Test for a Two-Parent Risk points out that while “research has shown that a father’s age can affect the risk of genetic abnormalities in a fetus . . . current testing methods still don’t take it into account.”

Dr. Fenn helped establish Geneseo’s NeuWrite/Edu initiative with Dr. Lytton Smith (English) and Dr. Olympia Nicodemi (Mathematics). Her work models the way creative writing and scientific research can come together to communicate new ideas to a wide audience.

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Rob Doggett to speak on editing Yeats at upcoming conference in Rochester

rob_doggettProf. Rob Doggett will lecture on “Editing Yeats’s Early Poetry, Drama, and Fairy Tales” Friday, November 20 at 10:00 a.m. in the Galisano Midlevel Gateway Building of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY.

The lecture is part of St. John Fisher’s two-day conference, W.B. Yeats at 150: A Celebration, marking the 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth.

Prof. Doggett is the author of Deep-Rooted Things: Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William Butler Yeats (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) and editor of When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays and Fairy Tales of William Butler Yeats (Penguin Classics, 2015).

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Pier Gabrielle Foreman to deliver 2015 Walter Harding Lecture November 16

This year’s Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Pier Gabrielle Foreman, Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Professor of Black American Studies, University of Delaware.

Professor Foreman’s lecture, titled “To Speculate Darkly: Slavery, Black Visual Culture, and the Promises and Problems of Print,” will take place at 7:30 p.m. on November 16 in Doty Recital Hall on the SUNY Geneseo campus.

Pier Gabrielle Foreman Press ShotAs a scholar of African American studies and nineteenth-century literary history and culture, Prof. Foreman has examined the relationship between literary and activist practices. Her book Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women In The Nineteenth Century (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2009), examines this relationship in the work of authors Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Frances E.W. Harper, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Amelia Johnson.

Professor Foreman is co-editor, with Reginald Pitts, of the Penguin Classics edition of Harriet Wilson’s 1859 autobiographical novel Our Nig, Or, Sketches From The Life Of A Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There.

Active in digital as well as print scholarship, and committed to collaborative work that advances public understanding and engages the community, Professor Foreman serves as faculty director of the Colored Conventions Project, a digital humanities project that documents the 19th-century African-American conventions movement through crowdsourced transcriptions of convention minutes.

The Harding Lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in the Doty Hall lobby.

Download the poster (11×17).

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New anthology includes Smith translation

Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith’s translation of a short-story by Icelandic writer Kristín Ómarsdóttir has been included in the just-published anthology A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance, out now from Tramp Press and edited by fiction writer Belinda McKeon.

The U.K. Sunday Times has described A Kind of Compass as a “vital collection,” while The UCD Observer dubs it a “perfect success.” Contributors to the volume include Sam Lipsyte, Gina Apostol, Porochista Khakpour, Francesca Marciano, Suzanne Scanlon, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.