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Faculty Teaching & Mentoring Awards
The department's faculty have won such awards as the Chapman Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the James M. Johnston Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and the department's Association of Graduate Students Mentoring Awards.
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Faculty and graduate students in the Department of English & Comparative Literature are invited to apply for fellowships, symposia and workshops offered through the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies. For further information, please see the consortium website ( http://www.newberry.org/newberry-consortium-american-indian-studies) and talk with UNC’s consortium liaison, Professor Daniel Cobb in the Department of American Studies.
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Presented by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 21, 2012 at the Paul Green Theater.
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Athol Fugard will visit the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the 2012 Morgan Writer-in-Residence from March 19-23. Mr. Fugard will give a public talk, “Milestones of a Literary Journey,” as the 2012 Morgan Writer-in-Residence Reading on Wednesday, March 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the Paul Green Theatre in the Center for Dramatic Art. For more information on events in celebration of Mr. Fugard's artistic and literary achievements, visit fugard.web.unc.edu -
Ruth von Bernuth's Furst Forum lecture traces the origins of "Eastern European Jewry's favorite folk tradition" to German folly literature.
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A graduate student conference jointly sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and King’s College London.
March 29-31, 2012
To learn more or to register for the conference, visit shakespeareconference.web.unc.edu.
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Last November, several UNC Graduate Students collaborated with Duke Graduate Students and Faculty to co-host "One Makes Many: A Conference of Poetic Interactions." The two-day conference saw panels convened across both campuses, featuring local, national, and international scholars. Discussions pushed poetry to the very limit of disciplinarity, mapping contemporary poetry's trespass into disciplines as various as religious studies, multimodal composition technologies, and pedagogical practice.
The SITES lab's own Adam Engel captured Saturday's panels, held at UNC's Campus YMCA, which are available for your viewing pleasure here. For video of Friday's events, held at Duke's Franklin Humanities Institute, as well as more information on panel topics and scholar bios, visit the conference website at http://onemakesmany.siteslab.org/.
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John Ribó, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, gives a talk entitled "Ground Zeroes, New Worlds: 'Race' and Post-Apocalyptic Mutants in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." January 25, 2012. Film by the SITES Lab.
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Click here to see the Fall/Winter 2011 Newsletter for the Comparative Literature Program!
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The UniVarsity Film Series began last evening with a screening of The Last Wave at 7pm. This was the first of nine fantastic films that the department will be showing, in their original and glorious cinematographic format, over the course of the semester at the Varsity Theater. All of the films in the series are free and open to the public--so, please, come, bring friends and colleagues, etc. You won't be disappointed! For more information about upcoming films and screenings, please follow the link below.
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The Department of English and Comparative Literature recently honored Dr. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher with its Graduate Student Mentoring Award, recognizing her commitment to guiding and directing the professional development of its graduate students. Dr. Fisher, while describing some of the tasks she performs as a mentor, discussed editing dissertation chapters and articles for publication; guiding graduate students toward appropriate venues for the publication of their research; writing letters of recommendation for a wide range of fellowships, awards, and job placements; and helping graduate students locate and apply for funding.
When asked to describe her secrets to being a successful mentor, Dr. Fisher observed that mentoring is an essential part of her graduate teaching, one that requires a substantial time commitment. “My students are on a deadline just as I am,” says Fisher, acknowledging that she frequently privileges the work of her students over her own demands and deadlines in order to provide them with timely feedback. Dr. Fisher’s intention in offering this diligent attention is to help graduate students discover their unique voices as writers, to highlight their original ideas as researchers and thinkers, and to develop their professionalism and collegiality, empowering them to participate respectfully and meaningfully in discursive scholarly communities.
Perhaps Dr. Fisher’s greatest secret to being a successful mentor is that she remains actively engaged in her own discursive communities even as she dedicates time to the work of her students. She has recently completed a manuscript of her new book Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Being in African American Literature, to be published by the State University of New York Press in their philosophy and race series. Her article, "The Poetics of Belonging in the Age of Enlightenment: Spiritual Metaphors of Being in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative” will appear in a special issue of Early American Studies, dedicated to the study of empire. She will also contribute an essay to South American Quarterly (SAQ) in a special issue focusing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935). Dr. Fisher’s commitment to making critical contributions to her field enables her to advise her students about the most recent trends in scholarship, allowing them to become current, informed professionals. Dr. Fisher’s generosity, her kind professionalism, and her commitment to serving students not only make her a worthy recipient of the Graduate Student Mentoring Award but also an invaluable resource to her mentees and an asset to the university.
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The Comparative Literature Program hosted its first annual Welcome Back Reception to tremendous success on October 6th in the Anne Queen Room of the Y-Building. Students from both the graduate and undergraduate colleges mingled with faculty members over a decadent array of autumnal foods. Numbering nearly eighty in all, the assembled faculty and students created the largest gathering of comparatists since the university hosted the ACLA in 2001. Of the Comparative Literature faculty, Professors Inger Brodey, Marsha Collins, Rebecka Fisher, Shayne Legassie, Diane Leonard, Erika Lindemann, Federico Luisetti, John McGowan, William Race, and Alicia Rivero were all in attendance. Toward the end of the evening, the Comparative Literature Program presented the prizes for the best graduate and undergraduate essays and unveiled its course list for spring 2012. The evening’s company and conversation combined with its ceremony to make the whole event a pleasure and a success.
Please visit the CMPL facebook page to see more images from the event.
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The Department of English and Comparative Literature congratulates Elizabeth Benninger and Anna Levett on winning this year’s essay prizes in comparative literature. Benninger received the award for Best Undergraduate Essay for her "Reliving Ancient Greece in Antarctica: Myth and Politics in Oresteia and Orestiada de los pingüinos," which she composed for Inger Brodey’s CMPL 250 course Approaches to Comparative Literature offered in the Fall of 2010. Anna Levett received the prize for Best Graduate Essay in Comparative Literature for her essay entitled "The Function of Beauty in Neoplatonism and Sufism," which she composed for two classes in combination: Dr. Eric Downing's CMPL 841 course Ancient Literary Criticism and Dr. Omid Safi's RELI 480 course Modern Muslim Literatures offered in the Spring of 2011.
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The Department of English and Comparative Literature congratulates Sara Morris and Elizabeth Benninger on their recent inductions into Phi Beta Kappa. Morris, a double major in Spanish and Comparative Literature, was inducted into the prestigious organization in the Fall of 2011, shortly after receiving a grant from the university to pursue research for her honors thesis. For Benninger, a Comparative Literature major, her induction into the society in the Spring of 2011 follows a series of undergraduate awards, which include the award for best Undergraduate Essay in Comparative Literature in the Fall of 2011 and a competitive scholarship to participate in the Carolina Southeast Asia Summer Program, which she received in the in the summer following her first year at UNC.
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Ted Scheinman, graduate student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, published Monday, August 22 on Slate.com describes his experience speaking Latin saying "I boarded a plane to Rome this summer to join the small network of scholars dedicated to preserving the language by actually speaking it. I found myself in the company of 16 other twentysomethings, puttering about the center of the ancient world chattering not in English or in Italian but —ecce!—in Latin."
Read the full article here -
Samantha Michele Riley was invited to participate in the Future Faculty Fellowship Program (FFFP) this academic year. Through the support of the Center for Faculty Excellence and the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Samantha will be teaching a film course independently under the guidance of Dr. Gregory Flaxman.
The Future Faculty Fellowship Program (FFFP) is a 5-day intensive interdisciplinary program held each year in May and August for senior-level graduate students developed through collaboration with Student Government, the Graduate and Professional Student Federation, the Office of the Provost and the Graduate School. The FFFP serves to establish a strong pedagogical foundation for graduate students by improving the instructional planning and teaching skills of graduate students who are assigned to teach undergraduate courses at UNC-Chapel Hill independently, as well as prepare them to meet their future faculty responsibilities in research, service, and leadership. For more information, visit: http://cfe.unc.edu/teaching/fffp/index.html
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By Victoria Cook | The Daily Tar Heel - Updated: 04/20/11
Sarah Booker started her honors thesis at UNC. But unlike many comparative literature honors theses, it took her well beyond a book list and Wilson Library.Instead, it landed the UNC senior 2,400 miles away in Otavalo, Ecuador.
Last summer, Booker traveled to Ecuador for Inti Raymi, or the Sun Festival, to study indigenous music as a form of resistance.
Eric Downing, Booker’s thesis adviser, said students who write an honors thesis in comparative literature usually work off of a summer book list. But Booker wanted to pursue her project in the field.
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And he said Booker excelled at it.
“She’s extraordinary,” he said. “She really pulled it off — one of the most accomplished workers and thinkers that I’ve had the pleasure of working with here at Carolina.”
Booker said her interest in travel and alternative forms of literature inspired her to pursue the project.
By attending the festival, which is centered around the music of the indigenous people, she was able to observe indigenous music firsthand.
“The music is very much the way that they define themselves, way more than we see here,” she said.
“It was amazing,” she added. “It was totally different than anything else I’ve ever experienced.”
Her thesis compared the work of a theater and its performances, which reacted to the Argentinian government’s Dirty War of 1976-83, to the use of indigenous music as a form of resistance in present-day Ecuador.
“They’re not necessarily trying to stop outside influence,” she said. “They’re just trying to maintain their own roots as well.”
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, Booker’s faculty adviser and an anthropology professor, said he’s glad Booker was able to reach outside of Chapel Hill for her research.
“It was a great collaboration, and it really is the model that anthropological research tries to follow,” he said.
Booker said she applied for many grants and received four, including a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) for $3,500.
Downing said Booker presented him with five new pages each week, along with revisions. Her final thesis totaled more than 100 pages.
“She’s a very mature, motivated and conscientious scholar,” he said. “It was her project. It was what she wanted to do, and she did it.”
Booker will graduate in May with a double major in Spanish and comparative literature. In September, she will travel to Spain to teach English for a year. She then wants to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa and work for a Masters of Fine Arts in literary translation.
“We’ll see where I end up going with it,” she said.
Booker said undergraduates should look into research opportunities.
“UNC has a lot of opportunities and a lot of funding for people to do a lot of worthwhile, neat things to learn outside of the classroom, to travel wherever,” she said.
“I don’t think people take advantage of it enough, and I think that they should.”
Colloredo-Mansfeld agreed and said students should find something that interests them and pursue it.
“(Booker) shows you how far you can go with a good idea, a lot of work and a little luck,” he said.
Story originally published in The Daily Tarheel. Contact the University Editor at university@dailytarheel.com.
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The Carolina Parents Council has recognized the People, Ideas, and Things (PIT) Journal for its contributions to student learning, awarding the journal a grant to fund the project’s continuing expansion during 2011-2012.UNC sophomore Sydney Stegall, along with Ph.D. student Ashley Hall, Prof. Dan Anderson, sophomore Ben Whitley, and junior Joe Albernaz, developed the successful grant application, which earned high praise from the Council:
The Committee was impressed with the efforts of those involved with the PIT Journal and with the opportunities for scholarship and publication for our students. This project is an excellent example of a student responding to the mission of the Chancellor’s Innovation Campaign. [ . . . ] The Parents Council is excited about your proposal and the value it places on student learning and the opportunity to engage in serious scholarship and is looking forward to receiving feedback from this program.
The People, Ideas, and Things (PIT) Journal is a scholarly, peer-reviewed, online journal run by and for University of North Carolina students.The broad lenses of people, ideas, and things are intended to offer undergraduates three flexible entry points for sharing scholarship about virtually any topic that is relevant to the UNC community. The PIT Journal invites submissions that take full opportunity of the affordances offered by publishing electronically on the Web including web texts, video essays, audio projects, visual projects, and mixed media projects. Navigate to http://pitjournal.unc.edu to learn more and browse the first issue of PIT.
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Caitlin Donovan, a senior English/ Medieval and Early Modern Studies double major, has been awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to teach in South Korea during the 2011-2012 academic year before attending graduate school at Stanford. Her experience will focus on cultural exchange and teaching English to high school students.The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” With this goal as a starting point, the Fulbright Program has provided almost 300,000 participants—chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential — with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.
Caitlin is a UNC Teaching Fellow and Public Service Scholar. She recently wrote and successfully defended her Honors thesis with Dr. Jessica Wolfe titled, "Britomart's Mind: Reading and Thinking as Disambiguating Arts in Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene." Caitlin will graduate Phi Beta Kappa and with highest distinction in May 2011.
For more information about the Fulbright Scholarship, click here.
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The First Annual UNC FOOD CULTURES Student Symposium took place March 24 and 25, 2011 at UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Department of American Studies, and the Honors Program at UNC sponsored the symposium. The event began with a keynote lecture delivered by Molly O’Neill, New York Times columnist and renowned food writer, followed by a day of presentations from UNC and Duke undergraduates and graduate students, representing a broad variety of disciplines.
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Thursday evening’s lecture, attended by students and faculty as well as community members, gave us a taste of Molly O’Neill’s fascinating experiences researching her new book, One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking (Simon & Schuster, 2010). O’Neill’s lecture was illustrated with contemporary and historic images that captured her culinary journey to every corner of the United States. These images also introduced the audience to the culturally and ethnically diverse home cooks who shared recipes and oral histories with O’Neill. After her lecture, O’Neill took questions about industrial agriculture, vegetarianism, immigration trends, and the profession of food writing.Friday’s symposium panels included both UNC and Duke undergraduate and graduate students from the departments of Chemistry, Anthropology, American Studies, Art History, English and Comparative Literature, Environmental Health Sciences, Folklore, Global Studies, Nutrition, Public Health, and Religious Studies. Each panel included three to four ten-minute presentations and a period for questions and discussion. The faculty committee for the symposium, Marcie Cohen Ferris (AMST, UNC), Inger Brodey (English-Comparative Lit, UNC), Kelly Alexander (Duke Center for Documentary Studies), Bernie Herman (AMST, UNC), and Danille Elise Christensen (Visiting Faculty, AMST, UNC), each served as chair for one of the panels.
The award for best graduate paper was presented to Courtney Lewis, (Anthropology, UNC) for her paper, “The Great Frybread Uprising,” from her dissertation, "Set Your Navigation to Authentic: Recursive Impacts of American Indian Small Businesses on the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians,” directed by Dr. Valerie Lambert. The undergraduate award was presented to Caitlin Nettleton (Anthropology, UNC) for her paper, “Edible Women in Atwood and Flaubert,” a paper she developed in Inger Brodey’s Comparative Literature course “The Feast in Philosophy, Film and Fiction.”
Three English/Comparative Literature students presented papers: Jessica Martell (PhD student, English), Austin Cooper (first-year undergraduate, Comparative Literature), and Corynn Loebs (senior undergraduate, Comparative Literature).
The day closed with a discussion led by Elaine Maisner, Senior Executive Editor at UNC Press. Chapel Hill Town Council Member and caterer, Penny Rich, catered a delicious vegetarian lunch.
For more information about UNC Food Cultures, see http://foodcultures.web.unc.edu/, and area food studies, Triangle University Food Studies http://sites.duke.edu/womenst194_03_s2010/. Please visit these websites to join listservs for both organizations.
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The Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Special Collections Library has announced the winners of the inaugural Parker-Dooley Award for Undergraduate Research in Southern Studies.
Rachel Shope, of Marshall, N.C., received the first-place award for her paper “All the Writing Ladies: Three Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century.” She is majoring in English and Comparative Literature at UNC.
Katie Womble, of Cary, N.C., received an honorable mention for “Myra Page: Her Childhood and Self Actualization.” She is a student in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences.Shope and Womble are members of the class of 2013. They will be honored at a reception on the fourth floor of Wilson Library on Friday, Oct. 8, 2010, at 3 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public.
The Parker-Dooley Award, funded by the Dooley family of Charlotte, N.C., recognizes exceptional undergraduate research papers in which the authors have made substantial use of the resources held in the Southern Historical Collection. The winner receives $500; up to two runners-up receive $250 each.
Papers must be nominated by a UNC faculty member or instructor.
The Southern Historical Collection is now accepting nominations for the 2010 Parker-Dooley Award. Visit the award page for information or contact Laura Clark Brown, ljcb@email.unc.edu, (919) 962-1345. The deadline is Feb. 4, 2011.
Parker-Dooley Awards for Undergraduate Research in Southern Studies
Original news item posted on UNC Library website: http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/news/index.php/2010/10/parker-dooley-award/.
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Kevin Kritsch, a PhD candidate concentrating on Anglo-Saxon and medieval Celtic literatures, is one of the 2010 recipients of the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship. The Liebmann Fellowship “support[s] students with outstanding character and ability who hold promise for achievement and distinction in their chosen fields of study.” Kevin's 2010 fellowship follows in the footsteps of Dr. Bryan Carella and other UNC medievalists who have won this award. -
The Department's Darryl J. Gless is featured in a spotlight article on the UNC homepage. Dr. Gless is celebrated for his outstanding contributions to undergraduate education and the intellectual climate of the university. Some of his many accomplishments highlighted in the article include co-authoring the Robertson Scholars Program proposal and guiding the development of the First Year Seminar Program. -
The UNC "Food Cultures" cluster has been approved to start this academic year (2010-11). Please see the description of the cluster, as well as the list of courses included in it at this link: http://www.unc.edu/depts/uc/clusterfood.html. Like other cluster programs, it functions as one of the two means of satisfying UNC's junior- and senior-level Supplemental Education requirements. Co-coordinated by Marcie Cohen Ferris (American Studies) and Inger S.B. Brodey (English and Comparative Literature), both of whom teach courses related to food-, this cluster offers courses from the humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and natural sciences, including an internship. Depending on the student’s major, the core course can be taken in either the humanities (AMST 375) or the social and behavioral sciences (GEOG 232).
The full list of courses in the cluster are as follows:
AMST 375, Cooking Up a Storm: Food in American Culture (Core course) [HM]
GEOG 232, Agriculture, Food, and Society (Core course) [SS]
AMST 390, American Studies Seminar: No Place Like Home: Material Culture of the American South [HM]
ANTH 252, Prehistoric Foodways [SS]
CMPL 255, The Feast in Philosophy, Film, and Fiction [HM]
ENST 330, Principles of Sustainability [NS]
GEOG 434, Cultural Ecology of Agriculture, Urbanization, and Disease [SS]
HNRS 352, Is There Dinner? Toward Understanding an Endangered Species [SS]Food is embedded in many areas of study and can be examined from many disciplinary perspectives. Long the subject of cultural studies, the processes associated with food—production, regulation, representation, identity, and consumption—are central to such topics as agriculture, animal sciences, civil rights, decorative arts, economy, geography, horticulture, hunger, malnutrition, obesity, pottery, poverty, property, reform, segregation, slavery, sustenance, terroir, trade, weather, and wealth. Food is omnipresent, entangled in forces that have shaped world history and culture for centuries. When we study food, we unveil a web of social relations defined by race, class, ethnicity, gender, and shifting economic forces.
Ferris and Brodey have several events planned for the 2010-2011 academic year: an inaugural Fall Harvest Supper to be held at The Love House and Hutchins Forum in October, a student symposium on Food Studies in Spring 2011, a major guest speaker, and a spring "Dinner on the Porch," also at the Love House. The Cluster is underwritten by the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the American Studies Department, and the Honors Program.
For more information, please contact: Marcie Cohen Ferris ferrism@email.unc.edu or Inger S. B. Brodey brodey@email.unc.edu
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Minrose Gwin will deliver the Lamar Memorial Lecture Series in U.S. southern history and culture at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia Oct. 18-20. The three lectures are entitled "Remembering Medgar Evers: Aesthetics, Justice, and the Long Civil Rights Movement." The lectures and other chapters on writings and songs about Medgar Evers will be published by the University of Georgia Press. Professor Gwin will also read from her novel, The Queen of Palmyra, while on campus and visit classes.
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Joe Viscomi received a three-year Scholarly Editions and Translation Grant from the NEH (2010-13) for the William Blake Archive's Phase IV development. This will support the Archive team's five ambitious goals to: (1) completely redesign the user interface with new features and tools; (2) incorporate Blake’s complex manuscripts into the production schedule; (3) acquire 500 images from 30 collections (22 of which are new); (4) deeply encode Archive images to make precise searches function across all categories; and (5) incorporate Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (1968-present).
