Congratulations to the following English majors who have just been elected to the UVa chapter of Phi Beta Kappa!
Abigail McKenzie Meredith
Emily Rose Sullivan
Kevin Christian Hermann
Morgan Alayna Dresner
Seyed-Sassan Mousavi-Vapouri
Elizabeth Barrott Bickley
Katherine Todd Hutto
Laura Ritland Gaul
Sarah Elizabeth Angelo
This year, the UVA quizbowl team consisting of Matt Bollinger (undergrad, English), Tommy Casalaspi (undergrad, English), Evan Adams (grad, law), and Dennis Loo (grad, math) performed the rare feat of uniting the sport's two national titles. On March 29 they won the NAQT Intercollegiate Championship Tournament.
At its 313th Commencement on Monday, May 19, 2014, Yale University bestowed an Honorary Doctor of Letters on Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Anna Ioanes, a PhD candidate in the English Department, has won this year's Zora Neale Hurston prize for best graduate student essay. The competition was held by the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Ioanes's essay is titled "Disgustingly Beautiful: Affect and Aesthetics in Sula and Kara Walker's 'Silhouettes'."
An interview with Professor Bruce Holsinger will air on With Good Reason beginning May 31st to June 6th. You can find broadcast times posted here.
The 2014-2015 Scholars' Lab graduate fellows include three graduate students from the English Department- Jennifer Foy, Amy Boyd, and Andrew Ferguson.
Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English, has released the following statement on Maya Angelou's life and work:
Maya Angelou was indeed a phenomenal woman – rising from the ashes of a childhood that would have rendered many of us mute and enraged, she made her way in a world that all too often despised her kind – a black woman, tall, fierce, and most fearsome of all, unafraid.
Professor Andrew Stauffer traveled to Greece as a representative of the Byron Society of America, where he gave a lecture on Byron’s poetry to approximately 200 local citizens of Messolonghi.
Jerome McGann, University Professor and John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, has been elected to the American Philosophical Society. He becomes the eighth U.Va. scholar to join the ranks of the country’s first learned society, joining such previous members as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Robert Frost. Election to the society honors extraordinary accomplishments in all fields.
The Library of Congress will name Charles Wright, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia, America's next poet laureate. Wright, whose work he once described as reckoning with “language, landscape, and the idea of God,” has formerly won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Read more about Wright and his poetry at the New York Times article here.
![MOSQUITOES [by William Faulkner]](https://english.as.virginia.edu/sites/english.as.virginia.edu/files/styles/publication_crop__180x250_/public/vander2.jpg?itok=CRKFR0a2)
Friday, April 19th
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
