EMINENT VICTORIANIST DELIVERS WOODS LECTURE
The Clarabelle Woods Lecture for academic year 2009, the Year of the 19th Century, was given on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 by
Professor Nicholas Dames. The title of Professor Dames's talk was "The Chapter: A History of Segmented Life, 1200-1900."
Nicholas Dames is Theodore Kahan Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
He is the author of The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2007) and Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford, 2001). Professor Dames’s lecture was funded by the Clarbelle Woods fund and the Fae Rawdon Norris Endowment for the Humanities.
AMANDA COBB-GREETHAM JOINS THE FACULTY
The literature faculty welcomes Dr. Amanda Cobb-Greetham as a tenured associate professor of English. Professor Cobb-Greetham
specializes in Native American Literature and Studies and currently edits American Indian Quarterly.
In addition, she serves as Administrator of the Division of History and Culture of the Chickasaw Nation. Dr. Cobb-Greetham is the author of Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949 (2000), the co-author of Chickasaws: Unconquered and Unconquerable (2006), and the co-editor of The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations (2008).
FULBRIGHT LECTURER
William Decker served from September 2008 to February 2009 as a Fulbright Lecturer at Université Catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. During his time in Belgium, Professor Decker taught graduate-level courses in 19th Century American poetry and fiction of the American color line. Decker's most recent book is Henry Adams and the Need to Know (2005).
MORE ON MOORE
Supported by a prestigious Visiting Research Fellowship, Linda Leavell spent five months (January-June 2008) at The Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University. During her residency, Professor LeavellI wrote several 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biography of Moore to receive the full support of her literary estate and thus the first to quote from her letters and unpublished papers.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 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. Marianne Moore: Possessed to Write will be published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR
For the second year in a row, a member of the Department of English has received a Regents Distinguished Research Award.
At a November 2008 ceremony, Martin Wallen was named a recipient of the award, the highest honor Oklahoma State University bestows on faculty members for their "creative scholarly activities."
Supported by a John H. Daniels Fellowship, in June 2008 Professor Wallen conducted research at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Virginia, where he also delivered a talk on "Foxhounds and the Rise of Dog Breeds in Eighteenth-Century England." The research he carried out in Virginia 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. Wallen's most recent major publication is Fox.
NEW DIRECTOR OF GENDER & WOMEN'S STUDIES
Associate Professor of English Carol Mason was appointed in August as the new director of Gender and Women's Studies, OSU's academic program offering an undergraduate minor and faculty support for feminist research. In September, she gave a talk "Gender and Women's Studies in Queer Times and Red-dirt Environs" at the University of Oklahoma during a one-day workshop assessing gender and women's studies in Oklahoma. Professor Mason is the author of Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-life Politics (2002) and the forthcoming Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy.
INDIANS, ENVIRONMENT & IDENTITY
Lindsey Claire Smith is the author of Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature, published in 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan. Professor Smith's book foregrounds amalgamation among American Indians, African Americans, and Euramericans as a central feature of American literature. The authors discussed, including James Fenimore Cooper, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Leslie Marmon Silko, place this cross-cultural contact in nature, not only collapsing cultural and racial boundaries, but also complicating divisions between “wilderness” and “civilization.” Responding to contemporary theoretical approaches to race, culture, and nationhood, this book points toward the multiple perspectives and cultures that distinguish American literature. Smith highlights the role of geography in these critical discourses, forging a connection between ecological theory and ethnic studies.
PHOENIX AWARD WINNER
Edward Jones was named the 2008
recipient of
the Phoenix Award for Outstanding Graduate Faculty Member, a university-wide honor
conferred by the OSU Graduate and Professional Student Government Association. The award "recognizes
outstanding achievement in leadership, scholarship, professional involvement and university and community service."
Professor Jones also received the
2008 English Graduate Student Association’s Faculty Award for his mentoring of graduate students.
Among other things, Jones serves as editor of the Milton Quarterly
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