English Graduate Gazette

A Publication of the English Graduate Office and GradSEA

This is the first issue of the English Graduate Gazette, which will publish news and information about Purdue English Department graduate students and alumni. It is particularly designed to announce graduate student publications, conference presentations, fellowships and other awards and achievements, along with academic appointments and promotions. Please email to the Director of Graduate Studies or the GradSEA Officers your news items in the format you would like them presented here.

ENGLISH GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS

  • Rob Davidson's short story collection, What we leave behind has been accepted by the University of Missouri Press. It will be published next spring.

  • Stephanie Turner made the presentation "Human Cloning Narratives and the 'NewEugenics'" at the American Studies Association annual meeting in Detroit, October 13.

  • Jessie Moore presented a paper titled, "An Inclusive Classroom: Making Cultural Studies Based Writing Classes Cross-Cultural," at the Symposium on Second Language Writing held here at Purdue on September 15th and 16th.

  • Rebecca Rauve’s review of Information Multiplicity by John Johnston will be published in the January 2001 issue of Postmodern Culture. She has been invited to give a paper on "Death by Dramatization" in the Mysticism & Language session at the 36th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo next May. Her short story "Lessons" won an honorable mention in the Society for the Study of the Short Story's annual contest; she has been invited to read it at their 6th International Conference on the Short Story in English at the University of Iowa this month.

  • Two of the English Department’s Medievalists presented at the Conference of the Medieval Association of the Midwest in Duluth, Minnesota, October 6 and 7. Justin Jackson read "Dis-solving God's Judgment in Genesis B: Adamic Criticism's Ascension to the Throne of God.” James Palmer spoke on "Compunctio and the Heart: Highlighting The Wanderer's Secular and Religious Ambiguities."

  • Neil E. Migan will present a paper called "Content, Form, and Gender in Shakepeare's As You Like It" at the Midwest Conference on British Studies at the University of Cincinnati on October 28, 2000.

  • Matthew Abraham was awarded the English/Philosophy year-long fellowship for the 2000-01 academic year. He will be appearing with Arkady Plotnitsky on a panel entitled "Derrida, Deconstruction and Contemporary Criticism" at the MLA in Washington, D.C., December 28th. His paper is entitled "Affirmative Action as a Deconstructive Strategy Within the Critical Race Theory Project".

ALUMNI NEWS

  • After graduating from Purdue in 1997, Gwen Tarbox was appointed assistant professor of Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature at California State University, Hayward. Currently, she is assistant professor of English at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her book, The Clubwomen's Daughters: Collectivist Impulses in Progressive-era Girls' Fiction, was published by Garland Press this summer.

  • Susan McHugh is Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow of Writing in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her essay on visual constructions of race as species difference appeared in the summer 2000 issue of SOUTH ATLANTIC REVIEW and her essay on “pack aesthetics” in literary dog breeding narratives is forthcoming in the fall 2000 issue of CRITICAL THEORY.

  • Derek Parker Royal was recently appointed as Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Language and Literature, North Georgia College and State University in Dahlonega, Georgia. Among his recent publications are “Rebel with a Cause: Albert Camus and the Politics of Celebrity” forthcoming in Autogedden: A Study of Death by Automobile, edited by Mikita Brottman. St. Martin’s Press. ( 2001); “Texts, Lives, and Bellybuttons: Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and the Postmodern Interplay between Facts and Fictions.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, in press. (35 page manuscript); “Beyond Judgment: Camusian Existentialism in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall.” Modern Drama, 2000, in press. (18 page manuscript); and “Portnoy’s Neglected Siblings: The Case for Postmodern Jewish American Literary Studies,” Re-Viewing Race and Ethnicity in American Literature, edited by David Goldstein-Shirley and Audrey Thacker, in press.

  • Asha Sen is tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She teaches classes in postcolonial literature, world literature, postcolonial feminisms, twentieth-century British literature, and composition. She has articles published in Passages: Journal of Transnational and Transcultural Studies, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and Post-War Literatures in English. She also has an article "Locating South Asian Feminism within the Context of Postcolonial Theory" published as part of the 23rd Women's UW System's Women Studies Conference and has contributed several review essays to MFS. She has read papers at the MMLA and at the Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference hosted by Georgia Southern.

  • Recent Ph.D. graduate Wenxin Li accepted a tenure-track offer from SUNY, at Old Westbury, in August of this year. He is teaching Asian American literature and ESL.

  • Mary C. Olson is teaching at Tuskegge University in Alabama. She is currently serving on the board of the Medieval Association of the Midwest.
  • David Waterman, who defended his dissertation in August 1996, has published Disordered Bodies and Disrupted Borders: Representations of Resistance in Modern British Literature with University Press of America. He and Martine Breillac (who also did doctoral work in English here) live and teach in La Rochelle, France.