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...]
Barrenechea Authors Simpson Library Page on Rare Books
April 19, 2023 by
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
April 3, 2023 by
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
March 31, 2023 by
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
March 30, 2023 by
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...]
Lorentzen Presents Conference Talk on New Dickens Course
March 23, 2023 by
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
March 2, 2023 by
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...]
Richards Leads Discussion for 75th Anniversary of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
November 8, 2022 by
To mark the 75th anniversary of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Gary Richards led the discussion of that play in the One Book, One Festival series at the Louisiana Book Festival on Saturday, October 29, 2022, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This was his tenth time to participate in that series at the festival, having also led the programs on Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” and Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, among others. His appearance was made possible in part by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. … [Read more...]
Mathur Presents Paper at Shakespeare’s Globe
November 7, 2022 by
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...]
Foss Presents Paper on Oscar Wilde
October 31, 2022 by
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...]