UPCOMING EVENTS
May 8 at 10am – ?: A marathon reading of Northanger Abbey will be hosted by Stephanie Hershinow’s Jane Austen class in the department lounge. Stop by to read or listen for a few minutes—or the whole day! Snacks and copies of the novel will be available.
May 8 at 1pm: Annual English Department End-of-Year Event. Join us immediately after the department meeting (12:30-1) to celebrate our faculty and students. Awards will be announced and several students will read from their work. VC 14-270.
May 8 at 6pm: Join us for a talk by John Brenkman, “Democratic Fragility, Liberal Disarray: How Does Max Weber Speak to Our Moment?” (Library, Room H-750). The talk, which will be followed by a reception, kicks off a two-day event hosted by Weissman and The CUNY Grad Center: “Polemos: The Art of Theory, a conference on the work of John Brenkman.”
May 15 at 4pm: Faculty End-of-Year Festivities! Join us as we toast the end of the spring semester in the department lounge.
May 28 at 9am: Baruch will hold its 2025 Commencement Ceremony at the Barclay’s Center, 620 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Please make plans to attend graduation if you have not done so in the past three years.
July 31: Baruch will host its tenth annual conference on J.R.R. Tolkien. Baruch faculty are encouraged to present (past presenters include our very own Frank Cioffi!), and students are warmly invited to attend. Register here. Reach out to Christopher Tuthill with questions.
LOOKING AHEAD
Next year’s Works-In-Progress series will feature talks by Saronik Bosu, Rick Rodriguez, Steven Swarbrick, and Ami Yoon. For questions, or to claim one of our few remaining slots, contact Allison Deutermann.
PUBLICATIONS & ACCEPTANCES
Laura Kolb’s review of the Morgan Library’s exhibit, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, appeared in the April 25 edition of the TLS.
Erica Richardson recently published a chapter in the transdisciplinary volume Autotheories (MIT Press, February 2025), “‘I’ll Take You There:’ Reading Autotheory Through Black Feminism.” Drawing on the music of Mavis Staples to read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts through Black feminist thought, the essay shows how Black feminism carries us to autotheory even as the genre fails to make a home for Black feminist belonging in the academy.
Hillery Stone’s memoir, Be Good to Your Mother, sold to Simon and Schuster at auction; it will be published next year.
Steven Swarbrick’s new book, Divest, is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press series “Forerunners.” A dossier centered on his coauthored book, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, is forthcoming in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Steven and his coauthor, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, wrote a response to the dossier titled “Splitting.”
Rafael Walker’s essay, “Junot Díaz’s Forced Disappearance Act,” was published on April 15 in The Chronicle of Education and republished in its bimonthly print edition.
CONFERENCES, READINGS, WORKSHOPS & PRESENTATIONS
Timothy Aubry gave a presentation on his research for the department’s Works-In-Progress series: “Out of Place: Diana Trilling and the 1968 Columbia Uprising.”
Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado helped organize the International Comics Arts Forum (ICAF) conference, “Comics Intersections,” at San Diego State University on April 10-12, 2025. She also presented a chapter from her book manuscript, “Pushing the Bounds of the Comic Form in Latinx Graphic Life Writing,” to the Latinx Studies Colloquium at the CUNY Grad Center on April 25, 2025. Along with Rebecca Salois from Black and Latino Studies, Jennifer also interviewed the Fall 2025 Harman writer-in-residence, Edel Rodriguez, after his talk as part of a live recording of the Latinx Visions Podcast.
Naomi Lee gave an invited talk on “Induced (not Innate) Grammatical Gender Features” at the Morphologie à Montréal (MorphoMo) workshop, which was held at UQAM on May 1–2.
In June, Erica Richardson will present “‘Then and There the Whole Race Enters’: Black Feminist Thought and the Intellectual History of Racial Progress” at the Anna Julia Cooper, 1925–2025 colloquium at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. In July, she will speak at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP)’s annual conference, “Communities and Values of the Book,” sharing work from her manuscript, How Black Women Count at the University of Rochester. Erica’s talk, “Ephemeral Stages, Enduring Pages,” explores how Willis Richardson’s role in the Little Negro Theater movement has been overshadowed by his limited publication, despite his influence on Black dramatic culture.
Hillery Stone gave a TEDx talk titled “Where Do Essays Come From?” at the TEDx-CUNY Conference on May 1st.
In April, Steven Swarbrick gave an interview about his first book, The Environmental Unconscious, on the graduate student-run podcast Soapbox, hosted by the University of Amsterdam.
Above: Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado moderates a talk by comics artist Breena Nuñez at the ICAF conference, “Comics Intersections.” Top left: the flier from the Latinx Studies Colloquium at CUNY Grad Center (featuring an image from comics biography Qui Est Ana Mendieta? by Christine Redfern and Caro Caron).
ACTIVITIES, ACCOLADES & GRANTS
Allison Deutermann has been named one of the recipients of the Sandi Cooper Award for Outstanding Research for Associate Professors at CUNY, 2024-2025.
Stephanie Hershinow’s thesis student, Sazia Islam, presented her research at the Seton Hall Undergraduate English conference: “Mutations of Grief: Structural Echoes of Loss in Frankenstein.” Sazia reports: “It was so exciting and fun to listen to all the panels! I had the best time, especially during the Q&A, discussing so many varied opinions, and just getting to meet people with such vibrant interests!”
Rafael Walker has been named one of CUNY’s 2024–25 recipients of the Feliks Gross Award for Outstanding Research.
On April 22, the English and Journalism Departments, in partnership with REFRACT and Encounters, co-sponsored the first-ever R.U.C.k.U.S. (Reading of Undergraduate Compositions and Unpublished Stuff), organized by Naima Coster (JRN), Amy Baily, and Rick Rodriguez, as well as WAC Fellows Philip Wiles and Katharine Williams. Nearly 50 students and several faculty attended, and 17 students read original prose and poetry. The event fostered connections and community among writers across years and courses.
Stephanie Hershinow, Laura Kolb, and Brooke Schreiber supported Writing Across the Curriculum Fellows Madeleine Barnes and Joseph Riccio in hosting a launch party for the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 issues of Pedagogy in Praxis. The event, titled “PIZZA + PRAXIS!,” was held in the English Department Lounge on May 1 in celebration of our wonderful teachers and recent journal issues. Featured speakers included Safia Jama, Ju Ly Ban, and Alexander Pau Orejuela. The forthcoming Spring Issue also features Ghenwa Antonios, Coco Fetterman, Alex Hall, Rasheed Hinds, and Nathan Nikolic, and will be sent out to the department mid-May.
Students and faculty gather for Baruch’s first annual R.U.C.k.U.S.
Recent graduate Sazia Islam presents her honors thesis research at the Seton Hall Undergraduate Research conference.
Faculty gather for “PIZZA + PRAXIS!” with Writing Across the Curriculum Fellows Madeleine Barnes and Joseph Riccio, pictured above.
CALLS FOR PAPERS
Steven Swarbrick asks faculty in English to encourage their students working on environmentally-related projects (research or creative work) to enter the Susan Locke Environmental Sustainability prize competition. The deadline for submissions is May 12. The first-place prize is $500. You can read more about the Locke seminar and prizes here. Please spread the word to faculty in other departments and email Steven ([email protected]) with any questions.
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