Lectures and Panels:
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:
Bob Volpicelli (2009) 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.
Peter Messmer (2010) has won an Emerson Humanities Collaboration Award for Summer 2008. Pete's project is titled "Ye Olde American 'Ye.'" It studies 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 is Michael Twomey, Department of English.
Jon Callan (2008) has written an original screenplay in the horror genre, "Hellschool High," for which he has been awarded fifth place in the WriteSafe Screenwriting Contest.
Jenna Whittaker (2007, shown in the photo above with mentor Prof. Wendy Hyman) has been accepted, with full tuition remission and fellowships / TA positions for six years, into the Ph.D. program at the University of Pittsburgh; she has also been accepted, with various kinds of funding, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Indiana University, Boston University, and Tufts University.
Jillian Bateman (2007) has written an essay, "Sounds of the Sea," looking at father-daughter relationships, that was accepted for publication in the Public Essay category of the Sigma Tau Delta honor society's journal The Rectangle and subsequently won third prize in the category of Creative Nonfiction / Personal Essay in Sigma Tau Delta's Eastern Region 2006 Awards.
English majors completing honors theses and graduating with honors in English in 2008 are (mentors' names in parentheses): Jade Ballard (Anjali Nerlekar), Peter Ford (Hugh Egan), and Michelle Quirk (Daniel Breen).
Gail Belokur, an administrative assistant in the departments of English and Politics and a Theatre major, has been honored with the 2006-2007 JJ Staff Scholar Award. This scholarship assists staff members enrolled in a degree program at IC in covering the cost of their education. Recipients must have a GPA of 3.2 or higher and they must have completed at least 90 credits toward graduation. The 05-06 recipient was Lynn Tordella, an English major and an administrative assistant in the Dean's Office in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Alumni / -ae:
Vanessa Graniello (2007) is studying for an M.A. in English Literature at Queens College, CUNY.
Patrick Bradley (2006) is in a Master of Science program at the University of Edinburgh, where his focus is upon European theatre. He is also the principal trombone player for the university orchestra. At IC, Patrick was an English major with a minor in Music.
Paul McCabe (2004) had his play, Get Off, produced in May and June of 2006 as part of the Kitchen Theatre Company's New Play Festival, in Ithaca, New York. Paul wrote the play in an independent study that he took with Claire Gleitman in the fall of his senior year. In 2004 the play was produced as a staged reading by the On the Verge theater troupe at IC, and in 2005 it was awarded the Jean Kennedy Smith award for best play on the subject of disability by the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Read about it in the May 4, 2005, Ithaca Journal.
Maggie Coleman (2003) is completing the musical theater program in the Tisch School of New York University, which she entered in Fall, 2006. Her play, "Memento Mori," was produced at the Beechman Theater, 407 W. 42nd St., NYC on April 407 West 42nd St., NYC, on April 6, 13, and 20, 2007.
Samantha Mosher (2003) lives in New York City, where she is working on her master's degree in Applied Educational Psychology, with a concentration in Reading, from Teachers College, Columbia University, at the end of December. At Teachers College Samantha received both the Neff Scholarship for Excellence in Reading Interventions and the Neff Fellowship. She was also the Graduate Research Assistant to Dr. Deloris Perin, who is doing research on Adolescent Literacy and adult developmental education. Samantha also works working in a learning center in Manhattan.
Kendra Scaletta (2003) is in her fifth year of teaching high school English in Arizona. Already department chair, as well as an instructional coach for new teachers at her school, Kendra is working towards an M.Ed. at Northern Arizona University. She reports, “I feel stressed and blessed, all at the same time. I get to teach the The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, and The House on Mango Street to my freshmen, and I love seeing them fall in love with literature and change their lives because of what they have read. Teaching is such a rewarding profession, but it truly is challenging each day.” Kendra and her fiancé have a house, two dogs, and plans to marry in 2007. “All in all, I am very happy and healthy and fortunate.”
Zack Howard (2001) is working on an M.P.A. at the the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. After a year of classes, he plans to apply to work for an additional master's degree in urban planning.
Lauren Byler (2001) completed a master's degree in English at Tufts University in 2002. She is currently writing her Ph.D. dissertation at Tufts. Her specialty is 19th century British literature. Lauren has presented papers at the Tufts English Graduate Conference on The Influence of Anxiety (2003) and at the University of Exeter (UK) conference on Victorian Criminalities (2005). In 2006 she presented a paper at North East MLA. Her essay "'The stake is not the power': Narratives of the Unslayable in *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*" is under consideration for inclusion in a volume on narrative structures and the psyche.
Melissa Littlefield (2000), who graduated from IC with honors in English, accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Women's Studies department at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign for the 2005-06 academic year. She received her Ph.D. in June 2005 from Penn State University, where she pursued a dual degree in English and Women's Studies.
Kathy Lubey (1996), who graduated from IC with honors in English, has a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in the English Department at St. John's University in Queens, New York City. Her Ph.D. is from Rutgers University, and her dissertation, on 18th century literature, concerned aesthetics and pornography.
Azhar Tyabji (1993) has published a book titled Bhuj (Usmanpura, India: Mapin Publishing, 2006), a study of the artistic, architectural, historical, and civic-planning issues involved in rebuilding the city of Bhuj, India, after it was destroyed by an earthquake in 2001. Reviewer Rahul Mehrotra wrote that Bhuj "celebrates collaboration and demonstrates how ethnography and advocacy planning can be intertwined to engage people in the making and remaking of a place.... The book will serve as an important precedent for all those interested in urban scholarship and design." Bhuj is available internationally: see www.mapinpub.com.
Steven Hartman (1987) has discovered a letter by Henry David Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson that was previously believed to be lost. Hartman found the letter in a volume by Thoreau owned by the National Library of Sweden. Among other things, the letter tells of Thoreau's first encounter with Henry James, Sr., and it records Thoreau's mostly unfavorable impressions of life in New York in the 1840's, when Thoreau was living in Staten Island and tutoring the children of Emerson's brother. Of the thirty known letters that Thoreau wrote to Emerson, it is one of three presumed to have been lost or destroyed; and it is the only one of Thoreau's letters to Emerson to have been discovered outside the United States. Read the announcement in English by the National Library of Sweden. and read the story by English major Meredith Farley in IC Fuse.
Faculty:
In 2006-07 the department welcomed Lauryl Tucker (Ph.D., University of Virginia), who teaches modern British and Irish literature, and Anjali Nerlekar (Ph.D., University of Kansas), who teaches postcolonial and world 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 has an article forthcoming, 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 presented a paper on Brian Friel and Luigi Pirandello at the October 2006 American Conference for Irish Studies convention in Storrs, Connecticut. More recently, she presented a paper entitled, "'We are the Chosen of God': Chosen and Stolen Identities in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror" at the 2007 meeting of the College Language Association, in Miami, Florida. Her essay, "Another look at those 'three bollocks in a cell,'" to be published in Irish Theatre in America, is forthcoming in 2008.
Wendy Hyman has published an article, "Seizing Flowers in Spenser's Garden and Bower," English Literary Renaissance 37.2 (May 2007), 193-214; and a book review of Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, by Garrett Sullivan, forthcoming in Modern Philology 105.1 (August 2007). In March 2007, she presented a paper, "Marlowe's Hero and Leander: Seducing Venus' 'None,'" at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America.
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 completed his three-year term as Robert Ryan Professor in the Humanities at the end of Spring 2007. On April 17th, he delivered a public lecture titled "The Irish Political Elegy: William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney" in the Handweker Gallery to an audience of faculty, students, and members of the Ithaca community.
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.
