Professor Brad Pasanek talked to Ploughshares Literary Magazine as part of their "People of the Book" series, a series of interviews charting an informal ethnography of the book. Pasanek fielded questions ranging from how he defines a book to his most unusual interaction with books, in addition to discussing his own book, Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.
"Forget Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa tower; the hot new super-agent is 14th-century writer Geoffrey Chaucer. Thrill to his daring Middle English rimes! Gasp at his mighty scansion! Here in the pages of Bruce Holsinger’s medieval adventure, that randy old poet finally gets the 'Mission Impossible' cameo he deserves."
Eleanor Henderson's first novel, Ten Thousand Saints, is being made into a film. Henderson is a 2005 graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program and began her novel, which captures the straight edge youth counterculture of the 80s, while still a student at UVa. Shari Springer Berman and Bob Pulcini wrote the screenplay and are directing the film, and the film will star Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Emile Hirsch, Julianne Nicholson, and Ethan Hawke.
The Teaching Awards Committee has honored Professor Stephen B. Cushman with the Cavaliers' Distinguished Teaching Professorship, the highest teaching award at the University. This is the 23rd year of an awards program designed to recognize outstanding teaching in all schools of the University. For a further description of the award and past winners, click here.
A new track has been added to the undergraduate English major. The undergraduate track in Global English Literature and Culture (GELC) allows students in the English major to extend their study into the widest contexts of international literary achievement. As with other paths through the major, it will offer engagement with major works in the Anglo-American literary tradition and will provide strong preparation in writing.
UVa alumnus Daniel Jones, editor of the popular personal-essay column “Modern Love” in the New York Times, will be in the Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge this Monday, March 24, at 10am for a talk about writing, editing, and love. Jones's new book, Love Illuminated: Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject (With the Help of 50,000 Strangers), is just out. You can read more about Jones, the stories of "Modern Love," and his time with the UVa English Department at the University of Virginia Magazine.
Professor Bruce Holsinger was on Here and Now to talk about his new novel, A Burnable Book. Holsinger spoke to Robin Young about the bawdiness of medieval England, what he learned about the Middle Ages from the writing process, and the endurance of medieval culture in the modern world. Listen to the conversation and read an excerpt of A Burnable Book here.
Laura Goldblatt, a PhD candidate in the English Department, has won the 2013-14 All-University Graduate Teaching Assistant Award in Arts and Humanities.
A C Spearing, William R Kenan, Jr Professor of English, has been awarded the Doctor of Letters (Litt.D) from the University of Cambridge, an honor conferred on those who have achieved the highest national or international prominence in their field.
Professor John O'Brien of the English Department has been awarded the Daniels Family National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorship, a three-year appointment. O'Brien describes his project in part thus:
![MOSQUITOES [by William Faulkner]](https://english.as.virginia.edu/sites/english.as.virginia.edu/files/styles/publication_crop__180x250_/public/vander2.jpg?itok=CRKFR0a2)
Thursday, October 28th
Hannah Dierdorff and Nana Nyarko Boateng
Friday, October 29th
Tuesday, November 2nd
Thursday, November 4th
Katherine James and Sophia Saklikowski
Saturday, November 6th
Join us as we celebrate the release of Lisa Russ Spaar’s new poetry collection, Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: This career-spanning volume portrays in stunning fashion Lisa Russ Spaar’s exquisite obsessions: spiritual hunger, lingual pleasures, bodily decay. The “ringleader of a stunning lexicon” (Shenandoah), Spaar offers poems that are both colloquial and sumptuous, hyper-attuned to contemporary idiom while rooted in language’s primordial, earthy roots. Whether writing of the erotic or the divine, of anorexia or insomnia, of fairy tale or literary history, Spaar’s writing is unmistakably her own, a trove of music and magic like nothing else in contemporary poetry. In Madrigalia, her oeuvre is on full display; it is a showcase of her indispensable poetic gifts, a tribute to a writer both ascetic and ecstatic.
About the Author: Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Orexia (Persea, 2017), and a collection of essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry. She is the editor of four poetry anthologies, most recently More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and professor of English at the University of Virginia.
