Lectures and Panels, Spring 2009:
The On the Verge players presented a staged reading of John Millington Synge's comedy, "The Playboy of the Western World," on Thursday, April 23, at 6:30 p.m. in the Handwerker Gallery. The cast, directed by Prof. Claire Gleitman, included English/Theatre major Nicole Intravia as Pegeen Mike Flaherty, English major Anthony Derrick as Philly, Prof. Michael Twomey as pub owner Michael James Flaherty, and Prof. Kevin Murphy as the father of Christy Mahon, the "playboy" of the title. Click here to see a video clip.
Indian novelist Kiran Nagarkar delivered two lectures: "A Glimpse of Bombay/Mumbai" (a reading and discussion of his novel Ravan and Eddie) on Tuesday, April 21, 6:30 p.m. in the Handwerker Gallery; and "Violent and Non-Violent Change" on Wednesday, April 22, 7:00 p.m. in the Klingenstein Lounge. Mr. Nagarkar's visit was part of CSCRE's lecture series "Chaos or Community? MLK and the Politics of Resistance." His visit was co-sponsored by DIIS, CSCRE, the Departments of Writing, Politics, History, and English, the H&S Honors Program, the H&S Educatinal Grant Inititative, the Linden Center for Creativity and Aging, and the Gerontology Institute.
English majors presenting at the Whalen Symposium on April 16th: Nicolette Bucciaglia, "Morgan and Morgause in Modern Retellings of Malory"; Robert Volpicelli, "Stripped to the Waste: D. H. Lawrence, Postcoloniality, and Mimesis"; and Danielle O'Reilly, "'What Ought to Be True': Tennessee Williams and His Pursuit of the Ideal."
Thursday, April 9: Laura Murphy, Department of English, Ithaca College: "Narrating 'White Slavery!': Unionized Labor, Organized Crime, and Commodified Women in The Wire." Sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta.
Tuesday, March 31: Kimberly Huth, Ph.D candidate, University of Wisconsin/Madison: "Private Justice, Public Sport: Laughter and Revenge in Shakespeare's Comedies." Sponsored by the English Department, Sigma Tau Delta, and the H&S Dean's Office.
Fall, 2008
Monday, Dec. 1: Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People: "Ending Slavery," sponsored by the English Department, School of H&S, and IC Chapter of Free the Slaves. For more information, click here.
Tuesday, November 18: Heather Dubrow, Department of English, Fordham University: "Rethinking Lyric Immediacy," sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium.
Spring, 2008
Friday, April 18: The English Department Alumni Career Panel, sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, featured former English majors Rosie Barki (2007), David Corvi (2007), Liz Fox (2006), Sylvie Larsen (2007), and Brandi Remington (2006).
Monday, April 7: Wendy Hyman, Department of English: "Enchantment via Techne: The Renaissance Trope of the Mechanical Bird," sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium.
Friday, March 28: Lauryl Tucker, Department of English: "'Writin' Home: Linguistic Slippage in Louise Bennett's Epistolary Creole Poetry," sponsored by the Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society.
Monday, March 17: Catherine Batt (Fordham University and the University of Leeds, England): "Headless Ladies and Female Suicides: Repetition of Motifs in Malory's Morte Darthur," sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium.
Students:
English majors completing honors theses and graduating with honors in English in 2009 are (mentors' names in parentheses): Nicolette Bucciaglia (Michael Twomey), Christa Calkins (Anjali Nerlekar), Danielle O'Reilly (Claire Gleitman), and Robert Volpicelli (Lauryl Tucker).
Bob Volpicelli (2009) has been accepted into the Ph.D. program in English, with six years of full funding, at the Pennsylvania State University. In 2008, Bob presented a paper titled "Mythopoetics: The Fringes of Academia" at the 22nd annual National Conference on Undergraduate Research on April 11th at Salisbury University in Maryland. Bob was one of a group of 12 Ithaca College students at the conference, and he was the only student from IC in the humanities. The conference featured oral presentations and posters by 2800 students from sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts.
Christa Calkins (2009) and Fiana Muhlberger (2009) each won Emerson Humanities Collaboration Awards for research projects with members of the English Department. Christa worked with Anjeli Nerlekar on a new course in Anglophone Caribbean Literature, and Fiana worked with Elizabeth Bleicher on an article about 19th century British novelist Anthony Trollope. Read the full story in Intercom.
Peter Messmer (2010) won an Emerson Humanities Collaboration Award for Summer 2008. Pete's project was titled "Ye Olde American 'Ye.'" It studied the use of the "open thorn," a medieval letter represented by modern "th"and found frequently in documents and headstones in colonial America. Pete's faculty collaborator was Michael Twomey, Department of English.
Alumni / -ae: Click here for Graduate Profiles
Faculty News:
In 2008-09 the department welcomed Laura Murphy (Ph.D, Harvard University), who teaches African and African American literature.
Dan Breen has published an essay, "Early Modern Historiography," in the online reference work Literature Compass (June, 2005), published by Blackwell's in Oxford, England. Read it at literature-compass.com. On April 10, 2006, Dan gave a presentation on "Shakespeare-aphernalia" to faculty and students. The talk was sponsored by the Sigma Tau Delta honorary.
Hugh Egan published an article, co-authored by David DeVries of Cornell University, in Leviathan, a journal whose focus is upon Melville scholarship. The article is entitled, "'The Entangled Rhyme': A Dialogic Reading of Melville’s Battle-Pieces"; it was originally presented at the Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia in 2005.
Claire Gleitman has an article in the spring 2009 edition of the New Hibernia Review. It is entitled, "Three Characters in Search of a Play: Brian Friel's Faith Healer and the Quest for Final Form." She also presented a paper at the March 2009 College Language Association convention; its title is "'Parading daily in thuh Great Hole of History': Foraging for Selfhood in Suzan-Lori Parks' Two 'Lincoln' Plays."
Katharine Kittredge has published an article, “The Poetry of Melusina Trench: A Growing Skill at Sorrow,” in British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (2005), 201-13.
Kevin Murphy traveled to Seoul, South Korea, as the guest of the Korean government for a reunion of Peace Corps volunteers in July, 2009. Read about it in the Korean Herald, South Korea's English-language newspaper.
Jim Swafford's article, "Jump-Starting Honors Community with Introductory Biographies," has appeared in the inaugural (2005) issue of Honors in Practice, a journal devoted to "nuts and bolts" issues in honors education.
Michael Twomey has published an article about his recovery of a previously unknown text in the legend of King Arthur in the 2008 issue of Arthurian Literature (Cambridge, England). Read the story by English major Meredith Farley in IC Fuse. In April 2007, he was appointed the Charles A. Dana Professor of Humanities. He is currently part of a team based in Germany that is producing the first modern edition of a medieval book known to modern scholars as "Shakespeare's encyclopedia": Baudouin van den Abeele, Heinz Meyer, Michael W. Twomey, Bernd Roling, and R. James Long, eds., Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum, vol. 1, De Diversis Artibus 78 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).
Staff:
Gail Belokur, departmental administrative assistant, is one of two 2006-07 JJ Staff Scholar Award winners. The award, started in 1997, is given to staff members enrolled in a degree program at the college who demonstrate excellence in their academic and administrative work. Read about it in the October 30, 2006 Ithaca Journal.
News to share?
Want to share good news about an English major, alum, or faculty member? Please send a note or an e-mail to Claire Gleitman or Michael Twomey at the Department of English, IthacaCollege, Ithaca, NY 14850.
