Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently presented "Hot/Cold Ecosystems in the Americas: Recycling Trash Cinema from Santo to Dr. Humpp" at the annual conference of the Literature/Film Association in Missoula, Montana, Sept. 21-23, 2023. … [Read more...]

Professor and Department Chair Jonathan Levin delivered a paper titled “'A tree is a passage between earth and sky’': Navigating Scientific and Animistic Frameworks in Richard Powers’s The Overstory” at the American Literature Association Annual Meeting in Boston this past May. … [Read more...]

Professor of English Eric G. Lorentzen presented a paper entitled "The Sights/Sites of Dickens in 2023: Literary Tourism, Cultural Studies, and the University Literature Classroom" at the recent Dickens Society Symposium in Rochester (RIT). The talk included research he conducted in museums and other literary sites across England, as well as the pedagogical methodologies involved with his recent new course on Dickens at UMW, "Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture," two sections of which ran for the first time during the fall 2022 semester. He was also one of six scholars to be invited to join the roundtable "Teaching Dickens," at which he presented the talk "Wisdom of the Heart: Dickens and Cultural Studies."  Professor Lorentzen hopes to offer the course again during the fall 2024 semester. … [Read more...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

Maya Mathur presented the paper, "Strange Fish: Laughter and Race-Making in The Tempest" at the academic symposium, "Shakespeare and Race: Spoken Word(s)," which was held at Shakespeare's Globe, London, on November 4-5, 2022. The conference was organized by the Shakespeare Center, a collaboration between Shakespeare's Globe theater and King's College, London. … [Read more...]

Professor of English Chris Foss recently presented a paper, "‘We are the zanies of sorrow’: Oscar Wilde's Post-Prison Relationship to Mental Disability,” on Sat. Oct. 15th at the Anniversaries and Auguries: The Victorians Institute’s Golden Jubilee Conference in Spartanburg, SC. … [Read more...]

Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently presented "Alucard and Alucarda: From Universal to Hemispheric Horrors” at the Literature/Film Association Conference in New Orleans, October 20-22, 2022. … [Read more...]