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MORE ON MOORE

Linda Leavell has been awarded a prestigious Visiting Research Fellowship at The Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University. During her five-month residency (January-June 2008), Professor LeavellI will write four chapters of Marianne Moore: Possessed to Write, the first biography of Moore to receive the full support of her literary estate and thus the first to quote from her letters and unpublished papers. These chapters will portray Moore’s life during the 1940s and 1950s, when her mother died and when she subsequently began a career, at age 65, as a public figure. After winning the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Bollingen Prize in 1952, Moore became a celebrity known for her love of baseball and her tricorn hat.

SERVING UP JOYCE IN

CAMBRIDGE & DUBLIN

Ed Walkiewicz emulates James Joyce's Gabriel Conroy, who "found the carving hot work." The feast, a "Dead Dinner" held in the very house where the famous story "The Dead" is set, was one of the high points of a summer course sponsored by the OSU Office of Scholar Development and Recognition and the Lew Wentz Foundation. Focusing on "Biology, Joyce, and the Irish Colonial Experience," the course was co-taught by Walkiewicz and Professor Doren Recker of the Philosophy Department. Classes were held at Magdalene College, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin. Past OSU summer courses at Oxford and Cambridge have been taught by Blaine Greteman, Edward Jones, and Martin Wallen.

NOSTALGIA ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

Linda Austin's book Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917 was published in 2007 by the University of Virginia Press. Professor Austin's study traces the shift in the collective understanding of nostalgia from memory disorder to recreational distraction in poems, novels, historiographies, and illustrations. Beginning with an account of its origins, as pathological homesickness depicted in poetry before 1850, the book examines its transformation from an individual into a collective re-enactment of an invented, rather than a remembered, past or place, paying special attention to communal representations of childhood and of vernacular dwellings.

ALL THAT JAZZ

William J. Harris, associate professor of English at the University of Kansas, delivered the inaugural Jimmy Rushing Distinguished Lecture at OSU in spring 2007. Illuminating "The Jazz Life of Amiri Baraka," Professor Harris explored the influence of jazz on Baraka's career as both a writer and a critic. During his engaging multimedia presentation, Harris introduced the audience to some of the poems in which Baraka endeavors to translate poetry into jazz. Professor Harris is the author of The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic and co-editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader . His lecture was sponsored by the OSU Department of English, the OSU American Studies Program, the Center for Africana Studies & Development, and the OSU Music Department (Jazz Studies).

TRACKING THE FOXHOUND

Martin Wallen, author of Fox, is the recipient of a John H. Daniels Fellowship. The fellowship supports researchers at the National Sporting Library, a research center for horse and field sports located in Middleburg, Virginia, 42 miles from Washington, DC.  The library has a collection of over 16,000 books, manuscripts, papers, photographs, and art housed in a modern facility modeled on an English carriage house.  During his month-long stay at the library in June 2008, Professor Wallen will examine works from the 18th century on the development of the foxhound in both England and America.  This research will form a significant part of his study on the explosion of interest in creating new breeds of dogs during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR

Robert Mayer was the recipient of a 2007 Regents Distinguished Research Award, the highest honor Oklahoma State University bestows on faculty members for their "creative scholarly activities." Professor Mayer's most recent major publication is a co-edited collection, Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman. Released by the University of Delaware Press in 2007, the volume consists of essays examining connections between the early British novel and related narrative forms, including historiography, utopias, autobiography, romance, and accounts of piracy and crime. The pieces in the collection also investigate literary forms of particular importance during the long eighteenth century, such as fables, travel narratives, gothic fiction, and satire, as well as one architectural form, the cottage ornée. The book contains two essays by OSU English Department faculty, Richard Frohock’s “Woodes Rogers’s World of Words: Creating the Privateer in A Cruising Voyage Round the World” and Mayer's own “Authors and Readers in Scott’s Magnum Edition.”

McHUGH AWARD WINNER

Elizabeth Grubgeld received the Roger McHugh Award for her essay "Castleleslie.com: Autobiography, Heritage Tourism, and Digital Design." The award is given by the Center for Irish Studies at The University of St. Thomas for the best essay published in The New Hibernia Review, one of the two major interdisciplinary journals of Irish studies in the United States.
The essay analyzes the lively family histories that were until very recently part of an extensive website maintained by Samantha Leslie of the Castle Leslie Hotel.  Written by her father, Desmond Leslie (1921-2001), they reflect the traditions of three centuries of comic autobiography as practiced by what was primarily an upper-class Anglican ruling minority in Ireland.

IMPERIALISM & AMERICAN IDENTITY

In March 2007, Professor Susan K. Harris of the University of Kansas delivered a fascinating and informative lecture on "Imperialism, American Identity, and the National Christian: The Crisis of 1899." Examining debates about the annexation of the Philipines at the end of the Nineteenth-Century, she explored the role religion played in the rhetorical development of American imperial identity. Professor Harris is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at KU and the author of several books, including Annie Adams Fields, Mary Gladstone Drew, and The Work of the Late 19th-Century Hostess. Her talk was funded by a grant from the Kirkpatrick Foundation and sponsored by the OSU Department of English