Olivia DrakePublishers Weekly named Assistant Professor of English Lisa Cohen’s book, All We Know: Three Lives, as one of the "Best Books of 2012." In All We Know, Publishers Weekly says "Cohen ... fully delineates the conventional biographical matters of ancestry, parents, schooling, marriages, affairs, friendships, breakups, work, and death. This well-researched, gossipy, informative, and entertaining biographical triptych is also a thoughtful, three-part inquiry into the meaning of failure, style, and sexual identity." The New York Times also named the book one of the "100 Notable books of 2012." In a book review, the NYT says "Cohen’s own idiosyncratic hybrid doesn’t disappoint. She builds a rich picture…
Hannah Norman '16Elizabeth Willis, professor of English, Shapiro-Silverberg professor, was a part of a talk commemorating Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York on Nov. 16. Cornell was an American artist, sculptor, and experimental filmmaker. He was also one of the pioneers of an art form known as assemblage, which involves compositions of various 2-D and 3-D objects. In this distinctive event, Willis joined other contemporary poets and filmmakers and shared poetry readings inspired by Cornell’s unique creations.
Kit Reed, resident writer in the English Department, is the author of Son of Destruction, published by Severn House (U.K.) in October 2012. The U.S. version will be released in March 2013. When his mother dies, Dan Carteret has only two leads to the identity of his father: a photograph of four young men, and a newspaper cutting showing the remains of a victim of spontaneous human combustion. Carteret travels to his mother's hometown of Fort Jude and discovers that three cases of spontaneous combustion have occurred there in the recent past. In the search for his father, he confronts…
Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, is the author of All We Know: Three Lives, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2012. The book is 448 pages and includes 52 illustrations and notes. In All We Know, Cohen describes three women’s glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind of achievement. The quintessential fan, Mercedes de Acosta had intimate…
A new book by Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, was given an enthusiastic early review in The New Yorker’s book blog on March 12. Her book, All We Know, will be published in July 2012. "Cohen’s remarkable, sui generis study about three modernist figures—Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland, for many years a fashion editor at British Vogue—is, in part, about dread, which is to say failure and fear of self-exposure, and how we accommodate our lives to suit the various shadows splashed by the sun of occasional triumph... By servicing Murphy and, in the book’s shattering final section about Madge Garland,…
Lauren RubensteinMagda Teter, Chair of Medieval Studies, Jeremy Zwelling Professor of Jewish Studies, professor of history, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, and Elizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing, professor of English, have been awarded 2012 fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. According to the Guggenheim Foundation, the prestigious academic honor is presented to scholars “who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” This year, the 87th annual competition recognized 180 scholars, artists and scientists from across the U.S. and Canada. They were selected from a pool of…
Joel Pfister, the Kenan Professor of the Humanities, chair of the English Department, is invited to serve as one of two American faculty members in the West-China Faculty Enhancement Program in American Studies. The program, which will take place in July in Xi'an, China, is sponsored by the Ford Foundation and China Association for the Study of American Literature. Pfister will present 10 intensive, two-hour lectures on American literature to faculty from universities in western China that have poor rural students. He'll also conduct a seminar session on American studies pedagogy. "The aim is to better equip these university teachers…
A book written by Deb Olin Unferth, assistant professor of English, was named a 2011 finalist in the National Book Critics Circle. Olin Unferth's Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt) is one of five finalists in the autobiography category. In the memoir, Unferth describes the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas. Winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards will be announced at the awards ceremony on March 8 at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York.…
MacArthur Fellow and award-winning author Edwidge Danticat will deliver a reading at 8 p.m. Feb. 8 in Memorial Chapel. Danticat, a Haitian-American writer, is the 2012 Fred B. Millett Visiting Writer. Danticat, a 2011 recipient of the Langston Hughes medal, is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory (an Oprah Book Club selection), the story collection Krik? Krak! (a National Book Award finalist), The Farming of Bones (an American Book Award winner), and the novel-in-stories, The Dew Breaker. Her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle…
Kit Reed, resident writer in the English Department, is the author of the book, What Wolves Know, published in spring 2011. The collection of stories includes tales of mothers who are monstrous in their maternalness, families on the brink of implosion, children mutated by parental pressure in every dream home a dystopia. The title story is about a boy raised by wolves who struggles to adapt to the modern world. Read more about this story collection and others at http://www.kitreed.net/.
Sally Bachner, assistant professor of English, is the author of The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction. 1962-2007, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2011. In The Prestige of Violence, Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented. Bachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a…
This issue we ask "5 Questions" of Natasha Korda, professor of English, professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality studies. Korda's book, Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2011. She also co-edited a book, Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, published by Ashgate in February 2011. Q: Professor Korda, you've taught English and gender studies at Wesleyan since 1995, and you were promoted to full professor in 2010. What courses do you teach and what are your scholarship interests? A: My area of expertise is Renaissance literature…