Welcome

Welcome to the English department’s first monthly newsletter. Like Madison Square in 1908, our site is under construction, but we are very much alive.

Here you will find news about activities, publications, awards, and events involving our faculty and students. Check us out, and please send along your news!

Upcoming Department Events​

All events will take place in the department conference room, VC 7-238.

Publications & Acceptances

Allison Deutermann is co-editing a collection of essays on publicity in early modern England, now in contract with Palgrave, featuring contributions from Karen Raber, Richard Preiss, Joe Roach, and other theater scholars.

David Hershinow‘s book Shakespeare and the Truth-Teller: Confronting the Cynic Ideal will be published by Edinburgh University Press in November.

Stephanie Insley Hershinow‘s book Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel ​will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July. Code HTWN gets you 20% off!

Polina Kroik’s new book Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Literature and Film (Routledge) traces an alternative history of modernism by emphasizing the interrelation among women’s workplace roles, modes of authorship, and processes of subject-formation. Analyzing work by Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, and Sylvia Plath, the book also points to some of the reasons for the persistence of limiting gender roles into the late 20^th and 21^st centuries. Dr. Kroik teaches in the Great Works program at Baruch and at Fordham University.

Jessica Lang has just published “Narrating the Past in a Different Language: Teaching the Holocaust through Third-Generation Fiction” in New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures, edited by Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky (SUNY).

Sean O’Toole’s chapter “Oscar Wilde’s American Forebears: A Genealogy of Form for Reading The Picture of Dorian Gray” appears in Wilde’s Other Worlds, edited by Michael F. Davis and Petra Dierkes-Thrun, now out from Routledge.

Brooke Schreiber and co-author Missy Watson published “Translingualism ≠ code-meshing: A response to Gevers’ ‘Translingualism revisited’ (2018)” in the Journal of Second Language Writing. Available here​.

Steven Swarbrick had an article accepted in February: “The Violence of the Frame: Image, Animal, Interval in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.” The article will appear in Cultural Critique in 2020. Steven also has two publications appearing in print in March: “Dancing with Perdita: The Choreography of Lost Time in The Winter’s Tale,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance; and “Idiot Science for a Blue Humanities: Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Deleuze’s Mad Cogito,” in the Journal for Cultural Research. The latter is an invited contribution to a special issue on Shakespeare and Deleuze, titled “Minor Shakespeares.”

Christopher Trogan published “Suicide and Social Freedom: Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler” in the Humanities Bulletin.

Conferences, Readings, Workshops & Presentations

Allison Deutermann and Laura Kolb will be attending the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Washington, DC, where they will present papers in the “Shakespeare’s Forms” seminar.

Stephanie Insley Hershinow will be presenting “That Sinking Feeling,” on bathos and the novel, as part of a seminar on “Minor Aesthetics” at the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Washington, D.C., March 8-10.

Maria Plochocki will be moderating two sessions at the 50th Annual Northeastern Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention, March 21-24, in Washington, DC: a roundtable titled “The Place of Grammar: Content First?” and a seminar titled “Detective Fiction’s Ability to Mould Character and Promote Empathy.” She is the Association’s Area Director for Pedagogy and Professionalization. She will also give a talk titled, “Adjunct Faculty: Diversity, Yes – but What about Inclusion?” at the CUNY Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Conference, on March 29, at the CUNY Graduate Center. Finally, as Trustee of the New Jersey College English Association (NJCEA), she is supporting the organization of the 2019 Spring Conference, at Seton Hall University, in South Orange, NJ, on March 30.

Brooke Schreiber, as the Chair of the Second Language Writing Standing Group at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, will be leading the group’s sponsored workshop at this year’s conference in Pittsburgh. The workshop, entitled “Promoting Justice for Multilingual Students,” will address topics such as: effectively identifying multilingual student populations, using rhetorics of diversity and globalization to advocate for multilingual students, designing pedagogy that create spaces for multilingual students to negotiate language, and promoting ethical responses to plagiarism.

Steven Swarbrick spoke on the “Queer Milton” roundtable at the CUNY Graduate Center in February. The roundtable was convened to celebrate the release of Queer Milton (Palgrave, 2018); Steven’ s chapter, “Milton’s Queer Earth: A Geology of Exhausted Life,” is a part of that collection. In April, Steven will attend the annual Shakespeare Association of America conference, where he will share new work on Marlowe and disability in a seminar called “World, Globe, Planet: Macrocosmic Thinking in the Age of Shakespeare.”

Christopher Trogan presented “Evaluating Attitudes: Mark Rothko and the Ethical Criticism of Art” at the Ninth International Conference on the Image, Hong Kong University, and chaired a panel entitled “Visual Ethics.”

Activities, Accolades & Grants

Peter Hitchcock’s co-edited book The Debt Age was highlighted by CUNY SUM, the CUNY-wide initiative to highlight faculty research, scholarship, and creative work.

Grace Schulman has received the tremendous honor of election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member in the Department of Literature, to be inducted on May 22. As the letter of notification from the Academy states, this honor is “considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in this country.” Brava!

Michael Staub’s book The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve, published by the University of North Carolina Press, in the Studies in Social Medicine Series, was recently featured on New Books Network, a podcast dedicated to new academic monographs, and on The Majority Report with Sam Seder, a podcast about contemporary political issues and ideas. The Mismeasure of Minds was also a 2019 PROSE Award Finalist from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and the recipient of a Baruch College Provost’s Award for Faculty Book Publication.

Let’s add our warm personal congratulations to all!

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Have news or noteworthy happenings to share?

The English department encourages all faculty to submit stories about their activities and publications of note by emailing [email protected].

Guidelines​. ​It will help greatly if you:

1)  Write in third person.

2)  Follow MLA guidelines for titles of works:

> Titles of articles, essays, chapters, poems, songs, and speeches are wrapped in quotation marks

> Titles of books, films, periodicals, plays, and databases are italicized

3) Attach any relevant hyperlinks to words or phrases like this (not like this: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/wsas/academics/english/index.htm).

Multiple submissions and submissions in multiple categories are welcome​!

Hat tip to Stephen Francoeur of Newman Library for the featured image of Madison Square, to Christopher Silsby of the Center for Teaching and Learning for help with setting up the site, and to Steven Swarbrick for the excellent idea for a newsletter.