Newsworthy: Trudier Harris Scheduled for the English Symposium Series

Trudier Harris will present the Benson Memorial Lecture titled "Seeping into the Twentieth Century: Fear of Slavery in Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata." The lecture will be held March 15, at 3 p.m. in Ballroom B of the Auburn University Dixon Conference Center.

Trudier Harris taught at the College of William and Mary for six years before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has lectured and published widely in her specialty areas of African-American literature and folklore. In addition to lecturing throughout the United States, she has lectured in Jamaica, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, England, and Northern Ireland.

The Ohio State University (Columbus) presented her with its first annual Award of Distinction for the College of Humanities in 1994. Dr. Harris has published articles and book reviews in such journals as Callaloo, Black American Literature Forum, Studies in American Fiction, and The Southern Humanities Review. Her authored books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award ), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996), Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (2001), and South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (2002). She co-edited three volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on African American writers and edited three additional volumes. She edited New Essays on Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1996) for Cambridge University Press and co-edited The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998).

During 1996-97, she was a resident fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2000, she was presented with the William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, appeared from Beacon Press in 2003. In 2005, she won the UNC System Board of Governors' Award for Excellence in Teaching. Also in 2005, she received the John Hurt Fisher Award of the South Atlantic Assocation of Departments of English (SAADE) for the outstanding contributions she has made to the field of English scholarship throughout her career.

Back to Top

Jim Ryan's Article Published

Jim Ryan's article on Norman Mailer's contributions to American pulp fiction, “‘Insatiable as Good Old America': Tough Guys Don't Dance and Popular Criminality,”  appears in the current issue of Journal of Modern Literature 30.1 (2006), 17-22.

Back to Top

Robin Bates Accepts Assistant Professor Postion

Robin Bates has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, beginning in August. She will teach Shakespeare and his literature.

Back to Top

Mary Ann Rygiel Receives ACETA's William J. Calvert Award

Mary Ann Rygiel is this year's recipient of ACETA's William J. Calvert Award for a scholarly paper. She read the paper, "Charles W. Chesnutt's 'The Web of Circumstance': Transformations Wrought by the Law," February 17, at the organization's annual meeting in Andalusia. She wrote the paper for Dr. Joy Leighton's Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature course in Spring 2006.

Back to Top

EGO Meeting Today

EGO will meet today at 3 p.m. in HC 8009. There will be a discussion about the upcoming April elections as well as information on the available positions. Everyone is encouraged to attend.

Back to Top

Two MTPC Students to Present Portfolios

Kimberly Shumack will present her portfolio on Tuesday, February 27, 10:00-11:00, and Jennifer Browning will present hers on Thursday, March 1, 1:00-2:00.

Both presentations will take place in HC 3130.  These presentations are open to the public.  All members of the department and MTPC students, in particular, are encouraged to attend.

Back to Top

Alumna Mary Jane Curry Announces Essay Reprint by Chelsea House Publishers

Mary Jane Curry reports that her essay “‘Not a day went by without a solitary walk': Elizabeth's Pastoral World” has been reprinted in Harold Bloom's volume on Pride and Prejudice, from Chelsea House Publishers.

She is a 1994 graduate and was Don Wehrs' first doctoral student. From 1994-2000 she was on the English faculty of AUM, where she earned tenure before moving to Georgia. In 2003 she formed a company conducting intercultural and education consulting.  Since moving to Birmingham in August 2005, she has been doing much grant writing as intercultural consulting and enjoys it immensely.  

One of her new clients is Constructores para Cristo (CPC), a nondenominational mission in Mexico with free medical and vet clinics, a preschool, and summer home-building program somewhat like Habitat for Humanity.

For CPC she does grant writing and other fundraising as well as intercultural coaching. Her biggest client is the Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center, for which she does lots of grant writing; in the process, she learns more about all kinds of artists from Joan to the Beaux Arts Trio.

Lately she has joined the Japan-America Society of Alabama and is about to join the Alabama-India Partnership and Alabama-Germany Partnership. She finds interacting with people from other cultures endlessly fascinating. She thanks Don for helping to open up some opportunities for work that she enjoys.

Back to Top

Walter Benn Michaels to Visit

Walter Benn Michaels' Itinerary

• Thursday, March 1 - Meeting with Penny Ingram's and Jame Goldstein's classes
• Thursday, March 1 - Lecture, " Model Minorities and Silent Majorities:  The Meaning of Ethnic Identity in Modern American Literature,” HC 1203, 4 p.m.
• Friday, March 2 - Informal gathering with English majors and faculty and a discussion about his recent book on issues relating to diversity, Thach 317, 10 a.m.

Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at University of Illinois at Chicago and chairman of the department.  Before going to Illinois in 2001, he taught at the University of California-Berkeley and at Johns Hopkins University, where he was founding director of the Program in Comparative American Cultures.  He is the author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; Our America:  Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism; The Shape of the Signifier:  1967 to the End of History; Promises of American Life:  1880-1920; and, forthcoming, The Trouble with Diversity or, How the Left Learned to Love Inequality.  Recent essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and American Literary History.

He has directed two NEH summer seminars and was a Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton, a visiting professor in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, and Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Tel Aviv University.  He has delivered the Lahey Lecture, Concordia University (Montreal); the Inaugural American Studies Lecture, University of Wisconsin; and the Ian Watt Lecture in the History and Theory of the Novel, Stanford University.

Professor Michaels' public lecture on March 1 will be about the social and intellectual work performed by the idea of a minority literature. Its central example will be the development of a distinctively Asian-American Literature (the central literary texts will be John Okada's No No Boy and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker) but, it will include some discussion of African-American and Jewish identity. The point of the lecture will be to examine and criticize the role played in American society today by the idea of identity itself.

Back to Top

English Channel Message

We would like to know about your current news! Please send information about awards, lectures, publications, etc. to be included in The English Channel. The deadline for submitting information is Tuesdays at 10 a. m. Check the bottom of the page for more information about submitting your news.

Back to Top

Calendar for 2006-07 Academic Year

Here is information about Departmental events for academic year 2006-07.

• March 1-2 - Walter Benn Michael's visit sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa
• March 10 - Graduate Student Colloquium
• March 15 - Trudier Harris (English Symposium Series)
• March 21 - Toni Bowers, "What's the Difference?: Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies," Auditorium of Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, 3 p.m.
• April 20 - Department Awards Ceremony (3:00 p.m.)

Here are dates for departmental faculty meetings.

Faculty Meetings

• March 7
• April 18
• April 25

Here are the important dates for the spring 2007 semester.

• March 26-31 - Spring Break
• April 30 - Last Class Day
• May 10 - Commencement

For more information on these events and more, visit the Department's Calendar page.

Back to Top

---

To include an item in The English Channel, submit text items by Tuesday at 10 AM for publication Wednesday. Submit items by email to Heather Finch or Margaret Kouidis or put the information in their mailboxes. Please check your submission for accuracy and completion—all calendar items and meeting announcements must include the date, time, and location of the event.

Email comments or questions about this page.
Last updated February 21, 2007

---

Department of English
9030 Haley Center
Auburn University, AL 36849-5203
Phone (334) 844-4620
FAX (334) 844-9027
© 2006 Department of English at Auburn University. All rights reserved.

Return to top of page