Ginger Strand will read from her work at the Aetna Celebration of Creative Nonfiction on April 7 at the Co-op Bookstore at 6 pm. She is the author of a novel, Flight, and four books of nonfiction, the most recent being The Brothers Vonnegut. Strand has received various grants from institutions such as the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Mellon Foundation.

Modern U.S. history scholar Christian Appy (UMass) will be giving a talk on Wednesday, April 6th at 4 p.m. in the Class of 1947 Conference Room (plaza level of the Homer Babbidge Library). Appy’s talk, “Why the Vietnam War Still Matters,” will draw from his latest book, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015). UConn’s History Department is generously co-sponsoring this event along with EGSA and the English Dept.

The Gerson Irish Reading, featuring award-winning poet Sinéad Morrissey, will be held on April 5 at the Benton Museum at 7 pm. Morrissey was raised, educated, and currently lives in Ireland. She has published five poetry collections and is writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Belfast.

The annual undergraduate conference will be held on Saturday, April 2, from 10:00 am – 4:45 pm in Student Union rooms 304C, 303, and 304A.

This year’s program features two public events: a plenary talk titled “‘How Britain Fights’: Shakespeare and World War II Film Propaganda” by Garrett Sullivan (at 1 pm in SU 304C), Neag Visiting Professor in the Department of English (Professor of English, Penn State) and the last event of the day which will showcase cast and crew members of the Connecticut Repertory Theater’s recent production of Twelfth Night as well as conversation with UConn Stamford Professor of English Pamela Brown, Shakespeare scholar and early modern theater critic/historian (at 4 pm in SU 303).

Conference registration is not required for the two public events. If interested in attending the full conference, register at the following site www.regonline.com/shakespeare2016. The fee for attenders (to include the full day’s program and lunch) is $20.

Grateful thanks to our generous sponsors: The Department of English, the UCHI, and the Honors Program at UConn.

Please contact Dr. Elizabeth Hart, Coordinator at elizabeth.hart@uconn.edu with any questions.

Calliope Wong, who will graduate a year early this Spring with Honors in English, is a pre-med English major who won an IDEA Grant to record an album of piano music. An interview with Wong was recently published in UConn Magazine.

Congratulations to Giorgina Paiella, who has curated a fascinating exhibition on female automata related to her Honors thesis/University Scholar project. The opening reception was held at the Dodd Center on March 10.

Woman a Machine: Gender, Automation, and Created Beings

Giorgina S. Paiella (curator)

Featuring a variety of materials sourced from Archives and Special Collections, and archives external to the University of Connecticut, Woman a Machine will explore the intersection of gender and automation from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. This exhibition explores the intertwined history of female created beings and human female embodiment, including representations of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century female android automata, the twentieth-century mechanized housewife, and cyborg imagery in twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture.

The following English majors have been admitted into the program for Secondary English Education: Tala Adawiya, Abigail Benner, Stephanie Consoli, Mary Kozan, Rebekah Labak, Jordyn Meyenberg, Asfia Qutub, Sierra Rice, and Kaylee Thurow

The following students have been admitted into the program for Elementary Education with a concentration or degree in English: Devon Castiello, Anne Denerville, Rebecca Feuerberg, Catherine Friar, Rebekah Goldberg, Alyssa Gunther, Shanza Hussain, Maggie Luongo, Anna McCormick, Sabrina Ortiz, Emily Otten, Jasmine Patel, Hana Picorelli, Abigail Plouffe, Samantha Schwartz, Emily Sebesky, and Heather Vasquez

The following students have been admitted into the program for Special Education with a concentration or degree in English: Alyssa Amici, Samuel Caramante, Sean Curvelo, Christopher Leslie, Annie MacLachlan, Jane Munson, and Bricherland Quinones

The following senior English majors were accepted into Neag’s one year MA program in Secondary English Education (the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates):

Hartford Campus – Julie Bartoli, Alexandra Cichon, Garrett Connolly, Jeffrey Even, Patrick Gosselin, Benjamin Guerette, Jessica Lundquist, Glenda Reilly, Tessla Donovan, and Griffin Colopy

Waterbury Campus – Joseph Cristofano, Eric Dunn, Theresa Kurzawa, and Jonathan Novitski

On Wednesday, May 4 from 2:00-3:30pm in the Babbidge Class of 1947 Room, Ken Wissoker from Duke University will be speaking on the state of American Studies publishing.

Contact Chris Vials at christopher.vials@uconn.edu for more information.

Wednesday March 23 from 3:30-5:00pm in Austin 217 with Eric Zinner, Glenn Hendler, Micki McElya, and Cathy Schlund-Vials.

Please join us for a roundtable panel on the state of American Studies as a field, a methodology, and a site of social critique. Panelists will address what they see as the emergent tendencies and problematics in the field, including its overlaps with other interdisciplines such as ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies.

Eric Zinner is editor-in-chief of New York University Press. Glenn Hendler is a Professor of English at Fordham University and editor of Keywords for Asian American Studies (NYU, 2014). Cathy Schlund-Vials is a jointly-appointed Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at UConn, and co-editor of Keywords for Asian American Studies (NYU, 2015). Micki McElya is an Associate Professor of History at UConn and author of Clinging to Mammy (Harvard), which won a 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

This event is sponsored by UConn American Studies and the Asian American Studies Institute.

Carl Phillips appeared as the 2016 Wallace Stevens Poet on Tuesday, March 22 at 7 pm.

A 6 p.m. reception was followed at 7 p.m. with a poetry reading by Mr. Phillips. He was preceded by student winners of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Award. Both reading and reception were held in the Konover Auditorium (and the adjacent lounge) at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, on the UConn Storrs Campus (405 Babbidge Road, Storrs, CT 06269).

Referred to as “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets,” Carl Phillips is the author of a dozen books of poetry (including his debut collection, In the Blood, which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize in 1992) and two books of criticism. Phillips’s more recent books of poetry include Silverchest (2013, nominated for the Griffin Prize), Double Shadow (2011, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award), and Speak Low (2009, finalist for the National Book Award). His most recent collection, Reconnaissance, was published in September, 2015. Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches creative writing. He was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006, and since 2011 he has served as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Tuesday, March 22, at 7 pm in the Konover Auditorium.

Phillips will also be appearing off-campus at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts at 1:30 pm on Wednesday, March 23.