Olivia DrakeElizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing, associate professor of English, is the author of a poetry collection titled Address, published by Wesleyan University Press in March 2011. According to Wesleyan UniversiyAddress draws readers into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees—beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully…
Ruth Nisse, associate professor of English, and Matthew Garrett, assistant professor of English, received a 2011-12 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. The ACLS is a competitive fellowship for scholars in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences. Applications are peer reviewed by scholars in the applicant's field. The fellowship is designed to provide scholars with devoted time for their research and writing. Seventy national scholarly organizations below to the ACLS. Nisse will use her fellowship to complete her book called Jacob's Shipwreck. “The book focuses on Jewish-Christian relations and the transmission of ancient texts into both medieval…
Susan Howe, the English Department's Distinguished Visiting Writer for 2010-11, was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize in American Poetry at Yale University. Previous recipients include Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and Adrienne Rich. Two of Howe's most influential books, Singularities (poetry) and The Birthmark (essays), were published by Wesleyan University Press. Of Howe’s most recent book, the three-member judging committee said: “Susan Howe is a fierce elegist. That This, prompted by the sudden death of the poet’s husband, makes manifest the raw edges of elegy through the collision of verse and prose, visionary lyricism and mundane incident, ekphrasis, visual patterning, and the…
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Khachig Tölölyan, professor of letters, professor of English, founder and editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, was interviewed by the French weekly publication L’Express about Thomas Pynchon on Oct. 6. The article is online, in French.
Olivia DrakeComposer Nicholas Stoia has written three songs based on poems by Elizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing, associate professor of English. Stoia performed the songs at the Monadnock Music Festival July 15, 16 and 18 in New Hampshire.
Elizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing, has a group of poems published in the current issue of BOMB.
Khachig Tölölyan, professor of letters, professor of English, editor of "Diaspora," was one of two keynote speakers at a conference on “Diaspora as a resource: Comparative Studies in Strategies, Networks and Urban Space.” The international event was held in Hamburg, Germany June 4-6. Tölölyan’s interests include diasporas, transnationalism, the world/globe polarity and the Armenian diaspora.
Corrina KerrAmerican history has almost completely edited out Henry Roe Cloud from its story, even though this full-blood Winnebago was one of the most accomplished and celebrated American Indians in the first half of the twentieth century. Joel Pfister's The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud corrects this omission. Pfister, chair of the English Department and the Kenan Professor of the Humanities, and former chair of the American Studies Program, began exploring American Indian archives when he was a Yale doctoral student in the 1980s and started his research on Yale’s Roe Cloud letters in 1995. Very little has…
For more information on the Distinguished Writers Series go to: http://www.wesleyan.edu/writing/distinguished_writers/
Deb Olin Unferth has joined the Department of English as assistant professor. She specializes in fiction writing, innovative literature, the short story and the novel. She says she was attracted to Wesleyan because of its well-known writing program. “Wesleyan is a fantastic liberal arts school,” Unferth says. “I am very excited to be here. I am enjoying my classes immensely. The students are excellent—in ability, focus, creativity, intelligence, and temperament.” Unferth has a B.A. in philosophy with distinction from the University of Colorado, where she was Phi Beta Kappa. In 1998, she earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse…