Barrenechea Authors Simpson Library Page on Rare Books

Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently authored “The Story of Rare Books at Mary Washington, 1963-Present" for the UMW Simpson Library. Professor Barrenechea currently serves as faculty liaison to the UMW Simpson Library Special Collections. … [Read more...]

Richards Leads Fifteenth Discussion at the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival

Gary Richards, Professor of English, led a discussion of six of Kate Chopin's representative short stories at the sold-out special event "Books and Beignets with Gary Richards" at the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival on Saturday, March 25. Richards has presented in this series fifteen times since 2007, lecturing on authors that include Ellen Gilchrist, John Kennedy Toole, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, James Baldwin, and, in multiple sessions, Tennessee Williams. Richards teaches such English courses as Southern Short Stories (Summer 2023), Writing About the South (Fall 2023), and Global Issues in Literature (Fall 2023) and also offers WGST courses as Perspectives in Sexuality (Summer 2023). … [Read more...]

Levin Writes Letter to Editor about Value of General Education Courses

Professor of English and Department of English and Linguistics Chair Jonathan Levin’s “Letter to the Editor” on the value of taking courses outside the major appeared in the campus newspaper The Weekly Ringer. Professor Levin teaches such course as Contemporary American Fiction, a Freshman Seminar on The Craft of Storytelling, and Writing about Sports, among other offerings. … [Read more...]

McAllister Presents Paper at Health Humanities Consortium

Marie McAllister recently presented "Race and Medicine in the Physician Memoir: Stories and Silences" at the March 2023 Health Humanities Consortium national conference. McAllister's research addresses the intersections between literature and medicine. She teaches in the Department of English and Linguistics such courses as Writing about Medicine, Birth of the Novel, Jane Austen, and more. Her Literature of Death and Purpose will be offered in Fall 2023.   … [Read more...]

Alum Kate Leboff ’14 Announces Poetry Chapbook

Alum Kate Leboff, a 2014 English:Creative Writing graduate and Production Coordinator at Cornell University Press, has announced the publication of her first book with Finishing Line Press. It is a poetry chapbook she plans to entitle “Kintsugi” (the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum), based almost entirely of her own life experiences. Among those she thanks in her announcement are her “Creative Writing & Lit professors at University of Mary Washington.”       … [Read more...]

Barrenechea Produces Videos in Simpson Library Partnership

Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea has produced two videos on rare books in the Special Collections at the UMW Simpson Library. Barrenechea's work with Special Collections is featured in a story that appears in this week’s  The Weekly Ringer. The first two videos in the series focus on twentieth-century literary works: 2023: Rare Books Spotlight #1, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four 2023: Rare Books Spotlight #2, James Joyce’s Ulysses Barrenechea's project aims to highlight the resources of UMW’s special collection, the oldest book of which dates to 1496.  Barrenechea states, “I would also love to have more outside scholars be aware of how strong our collections are—particularly in Joyce studies.” Barrenechea's work with UMW's Special Collections connects with his research into rare books. Last year, Barrenechea received the William Reese Fellowship at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley for his research project on rare books. For 2023-24, Barrenechea … [Read more...]

Lorentzen Presents Conference Talk on New Dickens Course

Eric G. Lorentzen, professor of English, recently gave a talk entitled "Interdisciplinary English as Social Justice: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture," at the Virginia Humanities Conference. The talk was based on a new class Lorentzen taught in fall semester of 2022, in which the goal was to mark, as an intellectual community, the tremendous on-going, and often not readily perceived, influence that Dickens’ work has on a multiplicity of genres in the 21st century. The course included materials as diverse as: 20th- and 21st-century literary texts, such as Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, and the Harry Potter books. films/shows like Ridley Road, It’s a Wonderful Life, About Time, The Game, The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Last Tree, and Disney’s Christopher Robin. literary societies, reading groups, social clubs, and online serial novel projects. Dickens festivals, holiday fairs, walking tours, and other elements of literary tourism that … [Read more...]

Fallon Serves as Pronouncer for Local Spelling Bee

Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul Fallon served as the pronouncer for the Fredericksburg Regional Spelling Bee, held Saturday, Feb. 25, at James Monroe High School. Read more in The Free Lance-Star. … [Read more...]

Alum Chelsea Krieg ’10 Appointed Asst Director at NCSU

Alum Chelsea Krieg (2010) has been appointed Assistant Director of the Creative Writing Program at North Carolina State University, where she earned her MFA in 2016. In addition to her work advising and working with Creative Writing as a faculty member in the NCSU Department of English, Krieg has also worked with the NCSU library on integrating Citizen Science into the First-Year Writing classroom (ENG101). … [Read more...]

Barrenechea Wins Fellowship

Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, was awarded an M.C. Lang Fellowship in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching with Historical Sources at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia for 2023-2024. … [Read more...]