Welcome Back--Upcoming Changes

Welcome to the 2009-2010 academic year! As part of our preparations for the fall semester we will be updating the EGO website frequently for the next few weeks. First of all, Google is ending the Google Pages hosting program and switching all content to Google Sites. The main EGO website will automatically transfer over to Google Sites soon. The old URL will redirect to the new site, so disruptions will be minimal, but you will see some changes before and after the transfer. We will also be adding a calendar that will synthesize departmental events, deadlines, social events, and events outside the department into one easy to access place. Another useful update will be a new page that will cover all of our reading groups. This page will provide group descriptions, current readings, meeting dates, and contact information for someone in charge of the group. In addition, there will be a new “Guide to Syracuse” page with helpful links and recommendations for basic information from the best study spots to how to find a good dentist in the area. This page will continue to evolve for a while, and any suggestions from those of us who are more familiar with the Syracuse area would be much appreciated. For EGO members we will also be adding a new listserv that will allow students in the department to contact each other when looking for a specific book that has been checked out of the library. We hope that all of these changes will make the EGO website more dynamic and useful for current and prospective students.

Spring Speaker Series: Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree and Wai Chee Dimock

The English Graduate Organization's Speaker Series has two exciting speakers lined up for this spring, with talks by Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree, Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont, and Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University.

Dr. Murphree's talk, "Reading Cinema Globally: A cinema of failure," will be held this Friday, April 3rd, in Hall of Languages room 207, at 3:30 pm. A screening of Jia Zhang Ke's film Still Life will be included in the presentation.



Dr. Dimock's talk, "Three Wars: Henry James and Others," is scheduled for Monday, April 13 at 5:00 pm in the Killian Room (Hall of Languages 500).

Recent Negotiations

There have been a number of Negotiations meetings for graduate students to read papers since the last update. On April 18 Corinne Martin and Rachel Collins read papers. Corinne's was titled "'Gifted with All Lore': Lydia Maria Child and the Construction of American Legend," and Rachel's was "'Where all the ground is friendly': Reading Space in Willa Cather's My Antonia."

On September 29 Rachel Collins read "Representing Capital as Landscape: The Naturalization of Corporate Practice in The Octopus" and C.J. Dosch read "A Greenleaf Revolution: Flannery O'Connor's 'Greenleaf' and the New Agricultural South." The flyer appears below.


On October 24 Laurel Ahnert, Mike Dwyer, and Chuck Robinson read papers. Laurel read "Third Cinema Clash: The Politics of Hybridity in Wend Kunni," Mike read "More than a Feeling: Nostalgia and The Historicity of Affect," and Chuck read "Global Designs and Global Desires from Mark Twain to Matt Harding." In November Steven Doles and Ryan McClure read papers. Flyer and titles forthcoming.

Collection for Tammy

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, MA Tammy Bluewolf-Kennedy was in a serious car accident a few weeks ago. In an effort to support her and her family, we've taken up a collection for her. Please give whatever you can to help. The box is in Terri's office.

Negotiations - February 29

The February Negotiations panel is scheduled for Friday, February 29 at 2:30 pm in 421 HL. Drinks and food at Faegan's to follow.

Negotiations is both a showcase for new scholarship produced by graduate students in the department, and a workshop that offers feedback and criticism for graduate student work in its early stages. Please attend, ask questions, and support the work of your colleagues and your department.


Michael Dwyer will be reading from his work, "Back to the Future and the Fantasy Return to the Fifties", which attempts to understand the role of a particular understanding of "the Fifties" in the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s.

Chuck Robinson's "The Country and the City (and the Zombie)" uses Raymond Williams' foundational text to inquire into the ambiguous, and ambivalent, place of "the zombie" in contemporary film & culture.

Rounding out the panel will be Ivy Kleinbart, who will read from her paper "'Church-bells beyond the stars heard': Reading Form and Structure in George Herbert's The Temple".

See you all there!

Professional Development Seminar

"Dissertation" Is Not a Four-Letter-Word: Managing the Doctoral Life

The prospect of writing a dissertation can be overwhelming. Can you get through the process successfully - and maintain your sanity too? Nisha Gupta, PhD in Cultural Foundations of Education, will lead this interactive workshop in which we will discuss ways of navigating the dissertation process and time line as well as methods for completion. Come prepared to participate! A video tape of this seminar will be made available in 423 Bowne Hall for those unable to attend.

Date: Thursday, February 28, 2008
Time: 12:30 - 1:30 PM
Location: Bowne Hall 111

Presenter: Dr. Nisha Gupta, Associate Director of Professional Development, Instructor in Women's Studies and Cultural Foundations of Education

RSVP for this seminar to Corrie Burdick

New Links

Hey everyone. You might want to check out two links I just added to the sidebar:

• Drek's Tips for First-Year Graduate Students

• Orgtheory.net: Grad School Rulz

Some of that stuff seems like common sense to me now, but I think it's good to have that stuff available to you in black and white as soon as possible.

Spring Semester Updates

It's already turning out to be a very busy spring semester, and we still have quite a bit of winter ahead of us. Here are some upcoming events to keep an eye out for:

• First, congratulations to Cristina Stasia, whose lecture "Mrs. Croft: Angelina Jolie & the Straightening of the Female Action Genre" was, by all accounts, a successful start for the spring colloquium lineup.

• Hearts of Westcott, the English Dept soccer team, has its first match of the indoor season on Monday night.

• PhD admit Eve Eisenberg is headed our way this Wednesday to have lunch with graduate students and sit in on a graduate seminar. Please make her feel welcome. More PhD & MA admits will be visiting this term, and will be announced soon.

• Thursday the department will be hosting prospective senior hire Sarah Projansky, who is currently in the Gender & Women's Studies program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If you would like to attend the lunch with Professor Projansky, or the teaching talk, please contact Mike Dwyer.

• Ben Jonson's Head, the Department's Trivia team, is firmly entrenched in the peleton, but needs help to make the push to the top of the rankings. Trivia starts at 9pm at the Inn Complete.

• This month's Negotiations panel will be held on February 29th.

• Finally, we're trying to get a ego website together that is a little more comprehensive & appealing. Feel free to check out the new Syracuse English Graduate Organization homepage and tell us what you think.
  
  As a part of this, we'd like to put together a backlog of abstracts of Negotiations panels, so if you have abstracts for papers you've given, you can send those along as well.
  
  But the thing we need the MOST help with is the "Guide to Syracuse" section. We just want to give people a sense of what kind of resources might be available to them as a grad student in Syracuse. If you want to see a model, you can check out the Univ of Florida's EGO site here.
  
  So, I'll ask two things, respond to me at mddwyer (at) syr.edu.
  
  1) List up to three favorites in any categories you have opinions on.
  2) Write up (at least) one very brief description for any one of your choices. 100-200 words, tops.

Thanks!
Mike

Congratulations, Tristan!

It was just announced that Tristan Sipley (MA 05), currently in the PhD program at the University of Oregon was elected regional delegate to the MLA assembly. Congratulations, Tristan!

FSS - Jean Howard

The final lecture in this year's EGO Fall Speaker Series will be delivered on Thursday, December 6 by Professor Jean Howard. Professor Howard began her career at Syracuse and we are thrilled to sponsor her return! Please plan to attend the final event of the semester.

"Beatrice's Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London
Comedy."

In this piece I consider the consequences for early modern
spectators of the staging of exotic objects in plays that deal with
contemporary London. My starting point will be the moment in Eastward Ho
when Beatrice, a maid, comes on stage with a monkey. What is both the
representational consequence of that action, given the considerable symbolic
freight attached to monkey and apes in the early modern imagination, and
what is the presentational consequence, that is, the effect of having a
non-human "actor" from an exotic clime have a role in a play set in 1604
London? Probably, the monkey would have been imported from Africa, brought
back on a ship engaged in trade along the West African coast. How, then, can
we think about this creature's appearance on the public stage, and what
larger implications does it have for understanding how the stage functioned
to domesticate the exotic and to mask the larger economic and political
forces that enabled monkeys to become figures in stories of London life.



Jean E. Howard is William B. Ransford Professor of English and Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives at Columbia University. Professor Howard’s specializations are Renaissance literature, history of drama, feminism, new historicism and Marxism. Her publications include Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited with Marion O'Connor (1987), The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994), With Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997), Co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997), and Marxist Shakespeares, edited with Scott Shershow (2000).

FSS - Shirley Samuels

Professor Shirley Samuels will deliver the second lecture in this year's Fall Speaker Series on October 23rd at 5pm in the Killian Room. Samuels' presentation, "Women, Blood, and Contract", will focus on the issues of land contracts, womens' bodies, and fears of interracial sexuality in historical novels of the 19th century – Hobomok, Hope Leslie, and The Last of the Mohicans. This paper will not only consider the colonial American period to which the narratives refer, but the immediate context in which they were published, a period in which land claims, citizenship, suffrage and slavery were all contested issues in the formulation of the Early Republic's national identity.

FSS - Amy Villarejo

The first lecture in this year's EGO Fall Speaker Series will be delivered by Amy Villarejo from Cornell University. This event, held on Tuesday September 25 at 5pm in the Killian Room (500 HL) will inaugurate Professor Villarejo's lecture is entitled "Tales of the City: Television and Queer Urbanity" and explores the role of television in constructing social spaces for the queer denizens of contemporary cities. A small reception will immediately follow the lecture. Save the date and support your grad student colleagues who've made this series such a success in recent years!

The EGO Fall Speaker Series is designed to foster new connections between the Syracuse English Department and other esteemed programs in the region, to showcase our graduate program in English, and to provide an opportunity for members of the SU community to engage with accomplished scholars working outside our own university.

The series is sponsored, planned, organized and funded entirely by our graduate students, which makes it a very exciting and valuable learning experience for all involved. If you haven't already, please get in contact with us to lend a hand!

Meeting Minutes, etc

The minutes from our last meeting can be viewed here.

In the continuing efforts to keep better records and make our decision making processes more transparent, we've attached a Google Documents account to the EGO Blog, which will allow us to easily save documents, letters, correspondence, and interesting items of department history.

Our next meeting's agenda should include discussion on policies regarding this storage system (who should be able to access it, what sort of password protection and/or editing priveleges should be arranged, etc). In the short term, anyone wishing to access this account can email me for the password (mddwyer at syr dot edu).

All Expenses Paid trip to Rochester Conference

As part of the University's partnership with Cornell and the University of Rochester to create a
"humanities corridor" in Central New York, funded by the Mellon Foundation, the college has
access to funds to send graduate students to the upcoming interdisciplinary conference at
Rochester next weekend, paying for lodging, travel, and sponsoring a reception Friday night to
allow Syracuse and Rochester grads to begin building connections between departments. If you
are interested in attending, please let me know via email: mddwyer (at) syr.edu.

I'm attaching the conference announcement beneath.
m-

The English Department and the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester present  
An Interdisciplinary Conference, held as part of The Humanities Project:

The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive

The conference will take place on Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7, 2007 and will include a roundtable discussion
on the future of the archive (with an opening address by Johnathan Massey, Assistant Professor of Architecture at
Syracuse University, along with a roundtable made up of faculty, librarians and graduate students) and an
opening reception on Friday, which will showcase Marsha Kinder's digital and interactive *Labyrinth Project*.
Saturday's events include a keynote address by Marsha Kinder, Professor of Cinema, Comparative Literature
and Spanish, at the University of Southern California, as well as 12 presentations by an interdisciplinary and
international group of graduate students on topics as diverse as Popular Culture and New Media,
Politics and Society, Visual Culture, and History, Revision and Memory.  

Please see
http://www.rochester.edu/College/humanities/projects/?archive
http://www.rochester.edu/College/humanities/projects/?archive&conference 
for more information (including specific times and paper topics) and to REGISTER. 
 
This conference, including Friday's reception and Saturday's lunch, is FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do
ask, however, that you register using the form on the website so we have a sense of how many people to expect.


Please free to contact the organizers at futureofthearchive@gmail.com with any questions or comments.

Negotiations February

The February Negotiations panel is scheduled for Friday, February 23 at 2pm in 421 HL.

Negotiations is designed as both a showcase for ongoing work produced by graduate students, and a workshop for papers that go on to be presented and published in the academic community. For this reason, it's important for everyone to attend, to make sure that the papers that have "Syracuse University English Department" attached to them are the very best that they can be. Mark your calendars!

Meghan Boyle will be presenting from her paper "From Nanook of the North to Survivor: The Entertainment of Imperialism."

Rachel Collins will contribute a presentation entitled "'Living was an ache': Authorial Distance and Indentification in Experiments of Class Transvestism".

Finally Soumitree Gupta will read from her "Resignifying Female Desire: Regulation and Resistance in Post-War Psychiatric Melodramas on the Mad Woman".

See you all there!