Commonwealth Professor Rita Dove publishes new poem, "Trayvon, Redux"
Commonwealth Professor Rita Dove published her new poem "Trayvon, Redux" on July 16, 2013 in the online magazine The Root.
Commonwealth Professor Rita Dove published her new poem "Trayvon, Redux" on July 16, 2013 in the online magazine The Root.
Professor Lisa Russ Spaar was awarded the 2013 Jefferson Scholars Faculty Prize.
Professor Gregory Orr discussed his latest collection of poems, River Inside the River, on the PBS NewsHour. Read the full article and listen to excerpts from Professor Orr's interview here.
Professors Elizabeth Fowler, Clare Kinney, and A. C. Spearing went on the air October 9th to talk about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on WTJU's "Soundboard." Professor Kinney read her own translation of a passage, Professor Spearing read from the original, and all discussed the powerful resonances that the fourteenth-century work still has for us today.
Charles Tyson, a fourth-year student majoring in Political and Social Thought and English, became one of two University of Virginia undergraduates to win a 2014 Rhodes Scholarship. Tyson, who has previously won Wagenheim and Pruden scholarships through the English Department, plans to pursue two one-years master's programs in Victorian literature and history of science before returning to the U.S. for a Ph.D. in English literature.
Mary Szybist, a graduate of the University of Virginia and former English major, has been awarded the 2013 National Book Award for poetry. Read more about Szybist and her winning work Incarnadine here.
James Seitz, the new director of UVA's academic writing program, spoke to UVA Today about undergraduate writing requirements and the ways they might further enhance the university's educational goals. Seitz, who joined the English department faculty this semester, sees in small undergraduate writing courses abundant potential for thoughtful academic inquiry and rewarding student-teacher interaction.
Read more about these ideas and Seitz's own work here.
Jahan Ramazani, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, talked to UVA Today about his recent professional accomplishments and service. Ramazani served as one of five judges for this year's National Book Award for Poetry, which was ultimately awarded to UVA English graduate Mary Szybist's Incarnadine. Ramazani also discussed his new book, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres, which explores poetry's interactions with other forms of writing.
English Department doctoral candidate William Rhodes has been awarded the 2014 Schallek Fellowship by the Medieval Academy of America. Rhodes is working with Professor Elizabeth Fowler on a dissertation entitled "The Ecology of Reform: Land and Labor from Piers Plowman to Edmund Spenser." This fellowship, which is supported by the Richard III Society, American Branch, provides a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (c.1350-1500).
Professor Jane Alison's newest work, Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid, has just been released from Oxford University Press. In Change Me, Alison freshly translates and arranges selections from Amores and the Metamorphoses that focus on desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion. Read more about the work here.
Tomorrow
Poetry’s “Ancient Liberties”: A Mirror for Magistrates and the Resources of ComplaintABSTRACT“To be heard as complaining is not to be heard,” writes Sara Ahmed. Though Ahmed’s focus on twenty-first century institutional abuses and strategies might seem remote from early modern poetry, her observation chimes with familiar criticisms of the poetic mode termed complaint, frequently maligned for its supposed solipsism and inefficacy. While populating a vast, generically and formally diverse terrain, early modern complaints often issue from the brink (or from the beyond), as characters and lyric personae bemoan catastrophes or seek to forge their own memorials. The dissertation project In Tragedy’s Shadow: Complaint and English Early Modern Poetry seeks to recall complaint from the margins, exploring its rhetorical and philosophical underpinnings to reveal the mode’s deep entanglement with and impact on more critically exalted genres. It locates the questions, conventions, and strategies of complaint in tragedy, via a connection with exemplarity in didactic verse history; in satire and elegy, via the vernacular tradition of de casibus tragedy; and in the deep structures of sonnet sequences. This presentation, adapted from a chapter-in-progress on William Baldwin and tragedy, explores complaint’s productive potential by attending to the earliest editions of A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; 2nd edition 1563), one of the most important prosimetric texts of the English early modern period. Part of the so-called de casibus tradition, and a significant influence on dramatic tragedy, the Mirror is comprised of verse narratives describing the downfalls of bad kings and office holders. Highlighting complaints from the first and second editions of the Mirror, this presentation investigates how the work’s reliance on first-person voicing of historical figures’ downfalls and its recapitulation of moral precepts taken from older de casibus texts function to destabilize historical authority, testifying to poetry’s power to rethink authority within the present. Ultimately, the Mirror draws subtle and disturbing parallels between poets and their deviant historical subjects, foregrounding a new account of what it terms poetry’s “ancient liberties” and suggesting the recuperative power of complaint as a mode.
April Charlottesville Reading Series event, featuring MFA alumna Raisa Tolchinsky and CW professor Kevin Moffett.
Sunday, April 28th
Emeritus Professor Chris Tilghman reads from his new novel, On the Tobacco Coast
Wednesday, May 1st
Thursday, May 2nd
Friday, May 3rd