Prof. Emerita Margaret Gibson, our new poet laureate, was interviewed by Randall Beach in Connecticut Magazine on August 27, 2019.

Gibson says she wants to “green” the state poet laureate position, “to be able to give voice to the fact that what we’re doing to the planet is endangering it and us and our children’s lives and our grandchildren’s lives.”

She sees today’s poets as having a double mission. In addition to issuing that “prophetic warning,” they can write about “our relationship with the living world” and helping others “fall in love with it — for its necessary and wild beauty.”

Matt Jones, who anticipates completing his PhD this year, has accepted a lectureship in composition and introduction to literature at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. The position is renewable for 3 years. Congratulations, Matt!

Our Director of Creative Writing, Sean Forbes, has been chosen to read two of his poems at the inauguration of UConn President Thomas Katsouleas on Friday, October 4. The poems, “An Oracle Remembering Providencia’s Formation” and “Isla Providencia,” are from Forbes’s book Providencia: A Book of Poems, published in 2013 by 2Leaf Press.

 

The inauguration will be in the Jorgensen, starting at 3pm.

Professor Susanne Davis will be in Michigan for a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Congratulations, Susanne!

Professor Ellen Carillo has won a research grant from the Council of Writing Program Administrators for her project “Tracing the Impact of Mindful Reading Beyond First-Year Composition.” Congratulations, Ellen!

We are proud to announce that four of our grad students have earned the $4,000 (each) Wood/Raith Living Trust summer fellowships.
Congratulations to Sarah Bertekap, Micah Goodrich, Mollie Kervick, and Samadrita Kuiti.

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Darcie Dennigan, who won the 2019-20 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts. The award is for $5,000.

The Graduate School has chosen Abby Fagan’s dissertation, “Bloated: Power and the Body in American Temperance Literature,” as UConn’s nominee for the CGS/Proquest Dissertation Award.

Abby’s dissertation also won the English Department Milton Stern Dissertation Award, which recognizes the best dissertation submitted for a PhD in English or Medieval Studies. The committee noted that Abigail’s dissertation, “Bloated: Power and the Body in American Temperance Literature,” makes clear and creative interventions in multiple fields of study, providing a new understanding of women’s history in the nineteenth century and indeed of the idea of political activity in the broad time period she considers. Abigail’s claims are based on sweeping archival work and expressed in elegant, readable prose.

Congratulations to Abby, and thanks to her committee: Anna Mae Duane, Margaret Breen, and Wayne Franklin.

Amanda Greenwell has just accepted a tenure track position in the Department of English at Central Connecticut State University. Amanda’s dissertation is titled “Confronting America: The Child Gaze in American Literature, 1930-2018.” Her major advisor is Kate Capshaw; her associate advisors are Victoria Ford Smith and Anna Mae Duane.