Eric G. Lorentzen, Professor of English, published "A Wisdom of the Head and a Wisdom of the Heart: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture" in the recent "Dickens and His Publics" special issue of Dickens Quarterly. The article examines the two sections of the Fall 2022 course that Lorentzen taught for the first time at UMW, English 251TT: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture, and the cultural studies methodologies that allowed his classes to connect with the ongoing influence that the author has in the twenty-first century, particularly with regard to social justice. Lorentzen argues that only by recognizing that Dickens’s novels not only teach us a great deal about Victorian England, but also about our lives in the here and now, can we remain vibrantly one of Dickens’s “publics.” We must transcend the usual “wisdom of the head,” the traditional academic study of his novels, and connect with the “wisdom of the heart” as well, the meaningful student-centered ways that his texts … [Read more...]
Lorentzen Publishes Article on UMW ENGL 251TT: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture Course
Levin Essay on Pragmatism to Appear in The Cambridge History of the American Essay
Jonathan Levin is pleased to share that his essay “American Pragmatism: An Essayistic Conception of Truth” appears in The Cambridge History of the American Essay, edited by Christy Wampole and Jason Childs (Cambridge UP, 2024). The essay looks at essays by American pragmatists and literary figures influenced by pragmatism as well as at the relationship between what William James described as the “pragmatist conception of truth” and the prevailing temper of the essay, from Montaigne to the present … [Read more...]
Mathur Publishes Book Chapter
Professor of English Maya Mathur recently published a book chapter “Intersectionality, Inclusion and the Shakespeare Survey Course” in Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance, edited by Sonia Freeman Loftis, Mardy Philippian, and Justin P. Shaw (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). … [Read more...]
Levy Publishes the Novel ‘School’ with University of Alabama Press
Assistant Professor of English Ray Levy's novel, School, comes out this week, on October 12, with the University of Alabama Press. More information and links to purchase the book can be found here. … [Read more...]
Mathur Publishes Book Chapter and Presents Paper
Professor of English Maya Mathur's essay, "When Students Recognize Gender but not Race: Addressing the Othello-Caliban Conundrum," was recently published in the collection, Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, edited by Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright, ACMRS Press, 2023, pp.15-33. Professor Mathur also presented the paper, "The Ballad of Tom and Greg: Comic Masculinity, Aspirational Whiteness, and Succession," in the seminar, "Shakespeare and Race in Popular Culture," at the Shakespeare Association of America's annual conference, which was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota from March 30 to April 1, 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...]
Fallon Publishes Review
Associate Professor Paul D. Fallon of the Department of English and Linguistics was invited to review The Oxford Handbook of African Languages, edited by Rainer Vossen & Gerrit Dimmendaal, and published by Oxford University Press in 2020. His review appears online in The Linguistic List vol. 33, number 2209. The Linguist List is a major online linguistic resource and listserv with thousands of subscribers worldwide. … [Read more...]
Barrenechea Publishes Enclopedia Entry on Literature of the Americas Story Content
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published “Literature of the Americas” in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980-2020. Ed. Leslie Larkin, Stephen Burn, and Patrick O’Donnell. London and New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022: 835-44. … [Read more...]
Mathur Publishes Essay
Maya Mathur, Professor of English, recently published an essay, “Barbarous Customes: Mughal Might and Anglican Virtue in the Journals of Thomas Roe and Edward Terry,” in the volume Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace, edited by Scott Oldenburg and Kirstin M.S. Bezio, Routledge, 2022, pp. 87-106. … [Read more...]
Lorentzen Publishes Book Review
Eric G. Lorentzen, Professor of English, published a review of Adam Grener's new book, Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel, in the latest volume of the Victorians Institute Journal (48). Grener's novelists (Austen, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy) were committed to a mode of fiction that primarily foregrounded chance and coincidence to "represent a historical and contingent world," rather than creating a convincing tale of ordinary and conventional probability. … [Read more...]