Professor of English Chris Foss has published a refereed article entitled “Reconsidering the Role of Pity in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Star-Child’” for the current number of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, one of the top venues for scholarly work on disability and literature. This piece will serve as the basis for the second content chapter in Foss’s Waple Professorship book project tentatively called The Importance of Being Different: Intersectional Disability and Emotional Response in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales, and on the basis of this and other work already completed on the manuscript Foss recently has been offered an advance contract for his book from the University of Virginia Press. The article aims at a critical reconsideration of pity through a close reading of Wilde’s fairy tale “The Star-Child,” exploring how it seems both to replicate stereotypically pejorative assumptions about disability and to contain more progressive aspects. Through the … [Read more...]

Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published a review essay in the journal American Literature. The review discusses recent developments in the literature of the Americas field, with attention to three recent books: The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Feinsod), Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (Lawrence), and Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White (Bebout). … [Read more...]

Chris Foss, Professor of English, has published an approximately 1600-word book review of Chris Gabbard’s A Life Beyond Reason in the most recent number of the journal Eighteenth Century Studies. Gabbard was hired out of Stanford by the University of North Florida because of his expertise in the literature of the British Enlightenment. His book, however, is no scholarly monograph on the Age of Reason, but rather a moving personal memoir chronicling his family’s life and times in their own very different Augustan Age, a period which commenced with the birth of his son August. This amazing boy lived for 14 years facing a litany of diagnoses stemming from the complications of an obstructed labor: “cerebral palsy, spastic quadriplegia, profound mental retardation, cortical visual impairment, microcephaly, seizure disorder, osteopenia—and the list went on” (35). There is pain and suffering aplenty in this narrative, along with understandable doses of anger and frustration, but above all … [Read more...]

Gary Richards, Professor of English, recently published “Taking Steps to Understand Jim Grimsley and Randall Kenan,” a review of David Deutsch’s Understanding Jim Grimsley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019) and James A. Crank’s Understanding Randall Kenan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019),  in North Carolina Literary Review Online (2020): 108-111. … [Read more...]

Chris Foss, Professor of English, has published a book chapter entitled “The Importance of Being Green: Pen, Pencil and Poison as a Study in Close Reading and Color Decoding” in Critical Insights: Oscar Wilde, an essay collection from Salem Press/EBSCO edited by Frederick S. Roden. Oscar Wilde is indisputably one of the most colorful literary figures of the past 150 years, perhaps in no small part owing to his own awareness, appreciation, and application of color across his life and work. Given the heyday Irish writers currently continue to enjoy (in both academic and more popular circles) as part and parcel of the general ascendancy of all things Irish in the 1990s, it may seem self-evident that green might serve as one of the most significant pigments on Wilde’s palette. It is, though, perhaps somewhat more provocative to suggest one must turn to his largely overlooked prose piece “Pen, Pencil and Poison”—a piece republished and newly minted with a green subtitle during his golden … [Read more...]

Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently published the award-winning essay “Hemispheric Studies beyond Suspicion/Estudos hemisféricos além da suspeita” in Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, the premier journal of comparative literature in Latin America. … [Read more...]

Colin Rafferty, Associate Professor of English, recently published an essay on Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary Shoah in the new issue of Wig-Wag, a literary magazine on film edited by UMW graduate Brad Efford. Rafferty also gave a talk on “Writing the Travel and Food Essay” at this weekend’s Rappahannock Writers Conference, sponsored by the Central Rappahannock Regional Library and held at UMW’s Stafford Campus. … [Read more...]

Elizabeth Johnson-Young, Assistant Professor of Communication, has published a co-authored essay "Assessment of Pediatric Residents’ Attitudes toward Anticipatory Counseling on Gun Safety" now available in the peer-reviewed journal Children. This project was completed in conjunction with research colleagues in emergency pediatrics from University of Maryland, Kaiser, and The Herman and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai and is part of a larger set of data and projects. The current publication is the first among a few upcoming publications from the project and presents data and conclusions regarding pediatric medical residents’ attitudes towards anticipatory guidance counseling about firearms and firearm safety. Survey items asked residents about their knowledge of current gun safety campaigns, as well as their own gun safety counseling practices. Overall conclusions are that residents support the idea of counseling patients on firearm safety as part of their anticipatory … [Read more...]