English Graduate Program Newsletter
INSIDE:
V O L U M E
A Letter from 1 your DGS Prize and Fellowship Winners
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Bok Teaching Award Winners
2
Degree Recipients
3
Placements
3
Remarks from 4 the GAC Incoming Class Roster
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GAC Follies Recap
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Calendar & Notes from the Graduate Office
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V I
J U N E
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A Letter from Your DGS The academic year 2011-2012 saw many of the initiatives and events that make up the rhythm of the academic year, including the much-needed teaching colloquium, led by Elisa New, the flurry of activity surrounding the job market, presided over by Andrew Warren and Amanda Claybaugh, and the visit of the new admits, as well as all the wonderful lectures and workshops organized by the graduate student colloquia throughout the year. There were a few unusual events as well. The admissions process was conducted electronically for the first time and without any glitches, thanks to Shayna Cummings’s excellent skills in the online world (welcome, Shayna, to the department!). The semester concluded with our first dissertation defense, successfully undertaken by Adena Spingarn, who inaugurated what will become standard operating procedure for all students who entered in or after 2007-08. Behind the scenes, the General Exam Committee took it upon itself to revise the reading list. Fortunately, no canon wars erupted and although there was a certain amount of jostling and lobbying, the
result was a more balanced list, which the incoming class will be the first to use. Gwen Urdang-Brown, as always, guided us through all of these and many other treacherous waters with a steady hand. Finally, we had two professionalization and publication workshops. The first, on turning dissertations into books, was conducted by Bill Germano, from whose engaging presentation we will all remember the snow globe conceit. The dissertation is like a snow globe, he declared, a small, protected environment. In order to become a publishable book, this miniature world must be exposed to the air. What to do? Smash the snow globe, Bill Germano counseled. Ouch. This lesson in shock therapy was followed by a workshop conducted, in a somewhat less dramatic register, by our own Luke Menand, who let us in on the secrets of good writing for a general audience and imparted much sought-after advice about book reviewing and other forms of publication. Fortunately, we didn’t have to smash anything and instead were sent fishing, equipped with hooks and other implements to help us catch something in the crosscurrents of the intellectual world. Among other things, this seems like excellent advice for the summer, which otherwise would be spent exclusively preparing for exams, writing prospectuses and dissertation chapters, and getting ready for the next term. - Martin Puchner
PAGE This is an annual publication of the Department of English, Harvard University Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
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CONGRATULATIONS! Fellowship and Prize Winners Whiting/Eliot Dissertation Completion Fellowship Margaret Rennix The Mahindra Humanities Center Dissertation Completion Fellowship Ben Woodring
Dexter Term-Time Fellowship William Baldwin Matthew Ocheltree Kathryn Roberts Stephen Tardif David Weimer
GSAS Graduate Society Dissertation Completion Fellowship Maggie Doherty Maggie Gram Martin Greenup R.J. Jenkins Marcella Manoharan Jesse Raber Seth Rosenbaum Kristen Roupenian Laura Wang
Winthrop Sargeant Prize Term-Time Fellowship Joanna Grossman Catherine Woodring
Knox Traveling Fellowship Alexis Becker
Boston Ruskin Prize Daniel Williams
GSAS Merit/Term-Time Fellowship Heather Brink-Roby Sara Gorman
Winthrop Sargeant Prize Suparna Roychoudhury
Helen Choate Bell Prize Term-Time Fellowship Kaye Wierzbicki
Francis James Child Prize for Excellence in Teaching Stephen Tardif (Fall) Martin Greenup (Spring) Howard Mumford Jones Prize Adena Spingarn
William Harris Arnold and Gertrude Weld Arnold Prize Cassandra Nelson
Bok Center Teaching Awards, 2011 Spring 2011
Fall 2011
AIU 20: Stephen Tardif
AIU15: Jake Risinger, Daniel Williams
AIU 42: Matthew Ocheltree
AIU 38: Stephen Tardif
ENGL 151: Margaret Rennix
ENGL 125: Seth Herbst
ENGL 178: Margaret Doherty, Kathryn Roberts, Nikki Skillman, Kaye Wierzbicki
ENGL 151: Heather Brink-Roby
ENGL 186: Seth Rosenbaum ENGL 198: Chris Barrett, Katy Woodring USW 23: Nick Donofrio, RJ Jenkins, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, John Radway
ENGLISH
GRADUATE
PRO GRAM
ENGL 154: Martin Greenup, RJ Jenkins, John Radway, Katy Woodring ENGL 157: Laura Johnson, Joshua Rothman, Kaye Wierzbicki ENGL 56: Alison Chapman
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November 2011 Degree Recipients Suparna Roychoudhury Shakesperean Phantasms: Theories of Imagination in English Renaissance Culture Yulia Ryzhik Donne’s Spenser and Spenser’s Donne
May 2012 Degree Recipients Chris Barrett Navigating Time: Cartographic Narratives in Early Modern English Literature Pelagia Horgan Partial Narrow Shapes: Poetics and Problems of Detail in the Postwar Novel Adena Spingarn Uncle Tom in the American Imagination: A Cultural Biography Rikita Tyson Good Fooling: Modality and Linguistic Action in Shakespeare’s Comedies
2011-12 Placements Chris Barrett- Louisiana State University Sam Foster- Temple University Pelagia Horgan- McKinsey & Company Richard Johnston- West Point Suparna Roychoudhury- Mount Holyoke College Steve Rozenski- Harvard College Fellow, English Department Yulia Ryzhik- Princeton Society of Fellows Nikki Skillman- University of Indiana—Bloomington PAGE
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Adena Spingarn- Stanford University Post-Doctoral Fellowship
Remarks from the GAC 1. Long before Harvard felt the pinch of the financial crisis, grad students in our department secured a cushy grant from GSAS that would enable the department to put on an annual grad student symposium for years to come. For the past two years, the GAC has made it a top priority to revive this flagging symposium program. In the past, these events involved tapping into the vast intellectual fecundity of our graduate program to share work in progress across centuries and fields. This year, amidst a busy slate of job talks and colloquia events, Annie Wyman brilliantly proposed that we take ourselves less seriously and eschew academic conversation in favor of a magnificent assemblage of literary follies. Thanks to the resourcefulness of Giselle Ty, we were able to have Club Oberon to ourselves for a night. Liz Maynes-Aminzade, David Nee, and Jack Hamilton and others provided fantastic musical entertainment for the evening. Among many other great readings, Will Baldwin read “The Kracken” more times in one night than most Victorians had occasion to read it in their entire lives. It was a great event, and a fine exhibit of our departmental camaraderie. Perhaps our more serious symposia will forever be interspersed with future incarnations of this alternative mode? 2. Lamenting the void that consumes most of our time between the annual welcome reception in September and the end-of-the-year departmental shindig in May, the GAC decided to experiment with weekly happy hours. We once mustered a crowd of 25 upstairs at Daedalus, but attendance was more variable. Is this a worthwhile venture, or is life too consistently busy for a Friday afternoon drink? Would another locale or day of the week be more suitable? What about a biweekly schedule? All input would be most welcome. 3. There’s more to this than sociability, though, and we’ve continued to discuss how we can facilitate communication and look after graduate student interests in the program. As we kick off a new year, all ideas for improving grad student life in the department would be most welcome. In particular, the GAC is in particular need of enthusiastic participants from the early years of the program. Feel free to pass along your ideas at any point to: EnglishGAC@gmail.com. - Jake Risinger
ENGLISH
GRADUATE
PRO GRAM
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Welcome to the Incoming Class of 2012-13! Amanda Auerbach Duke University (BA ’12) Interests: 19th C. British, the novel, modernism Helen Cushman University of Virginia (BA ’12) Interests: medieval, lyric poetry, religious drama, theology, medieval exegesis, heterodoxy, animals in literature Dena Fehrenbacher University of California at Berkeley (BA ’10) Interests: Critical Theory, Global English Elizabeth Phillips University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (BA ’10) Interests: 20th C. British, drama Adrienne Raphel Princeton University (BA ’10), University of Iowa (MFA ‘12) Interests: History and Structure of the English Language Teresa Trout University of Rochester (BA ’09) Interests: British Modernism; the Bloomsbury Group; classical reception Emmy Waldman Yale University (BA ’11) Unspecified Program Erica Weaver Columbia University (BA ’12) Interests: Old English language and literature, early Middle English, the Alliterative Revival, multilingualism, manuscript studies, and poetry & poetic theory of all periods. Porter White Princeton University (BA ‘08), University of Edinburgh (MSc ‘10) Interests: 19th C. and Essays. Janet Zong Brown University (BA ’11) Interests: Critical theory; transnational East Asian and Anglophone literature; postcolonial literature narrative and memory; literature and political economy.
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GAC Follies: a delight!
This May marked the first annual GAC Follies, held May 16th at Oberon in Harvard Square. The evening was an unqualified success: in the midst of grading and writing final papers, more than fifty graduates and friends showed up to celebrate our work, our interests, and each other. We laughed, we danced, we sang and—luckily if not surprisingly—we met the bar minimum. So I write to offer our thanks to all who participated and who joined us, both for posterity and to rejoice in their volunteerism and talent and charisma one last time. Thanks to Adam Scheffler and Daniel Williams for their dramatic reading of James Tate; to the latter especially for playing first Santa Claus and then a gorilla. To Kathryn Roberts and Jake Risinger, for their whiskey-wet reading of the correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. To the polyvocal professional Stephen Squibb, for his (that is, our) trash-canned performance of Beckett. To Calista McRae, who showed us Auden in his most reflective posture, and to Misha Teramura, her teammate for subsequent readings. To Matt Sussmann, who jumped up on the stage and declaimed some Yeats in an overcoat and then jumped back down again. To Stephen Tardif, who finally told us all the jokes he’s been wasting on his sections. More than thanks to Will Baldwin, who will be forced to repeat “The Kracken” twice as many times next year, bringing his lifetime Follies total to nine. To Dave Weimer, who made the CFP magic happen repeatedly, and with a xylophone. To Jacob Stulberg, who delivered a hilariously whelming love story in prose. Rousing gratitude to Steve Rozenski, for stepping up with Beowulf and the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales—the latter of which snowballed into a collective chant at least twenty voices strong. PAGE
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Seven cheers to friends who led us in other kinds of melodye (no sic!): to Liz Maynes-Aminzade on the drums and David Nee on guitar and bass—to Whale Party, our house band, with James Brandt from Philosophy and Jimmy Potter of the School of Public Health. To Jack Hamilton from American Civilization and to Abbie Barrett of the Abbie Barrett Band, both of whom sang and played all night long on a last-minute invitation. To the brave Nick Donofrio, for guesting on guitar. To the ingenious Seth Herbst, who delivered a hairscorchingly virtuosic performance on a keyboard with too few keys. And astonished gratitude to our Shakespeareans, who enchanted us with the liveliest, silliest, winning-est rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: through their cleverness a thicket of cabaret tables was transformed into a veritable green world. To Madeline Weinstein and Rebecca Kastleman, neither dwarf nor painted maypole but excellent maidens both; to Misha Teramura and David Nee, noble youths of Athens; and to Professor Gordon Teskey, a perfect Oberon. We remain in Anna McDonald’s debt, and Professor James Simpson’s. Professor Martin Puchner and Professor Amanda Claybaugh celebrated with us the whole evening and provided the most spirited support. And our thanks also to Giselle Ty, and to Shayna Cummings, Kristin Lambert, and Gwen Urdang -Brown, for their company and friendship and wonderful work. The inimitable Chris Barrett was good enough to pass along the photos included here. At the end of such an unspeaking list—studded with highlights, still inadequate—I close by sending warmth and strength of heart to all our fellow graduates, to each name tacked beneath a Barker Center pigeonhole up those two very familiar flights of stairs. May each of us enjoy a productive and lighthearted summer. As (one of the) Shakespeare(s) wrote: Take pains, be perfect, adieu. Oh, and—be thinking, somewhere in your heads, of even better ideas for our second Follies. We'd like a larger crowd, an even brighter evening. And it’s coming quickly, in Spring 2013. For the GAC, - Annie Wyman
Academic Calendar 2012-13 Mon 8/20: Registration opens Fri 8/24: GSAS Residence halls open Wed 8/29: Registration ends
AUG-SEPT 2012
Wed 8/29: GSAS Orientation Thu 8/30: General Exams (10-5) Fri 8/31: Departmental Orientation for First Year Students (10-11, Barker 269)
Mon 20
Tue 21
Wed 22
Thu 23
Reg. opens
Fri 8/31: Language Exams (3-5, Barker 269)
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Mon 9/3: HOLIDAY—Labor Day
Fri 24 GSAS residence halls open
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Reg. ends GSAS orientation
General Exams
Dept Orientation Language Exams
3 4 LABOR DAY First day of
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Thu 9/6: Dan Aaron reading (5:00,Thompson Room)
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12
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Tue 9/11: Study Card Day
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Tues 9/4: First day of classes
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Aaron Reading
classes
11 Study card day Reception
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Tue 9/11: Departmental Welcome Reception (5:30, Thompson Room)
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You can review the 2012-13 Course Listings online now!
Notes from the Graduate Office First and foremost, I would like to say how supremely happy I am to welcome Shayna Cummings to Team Grad Program! In just a few short months, she has made a major impact not only on the way we do things, but on the way we think about doing things. We are so lucky to have her! As I am sure everyone has noticed, Shayna is helping us move seamlessly towards an on-line model for most things, with more great ideas to come. We are also working on redesigning the English Department website and welcome your suggestions. (We hope that all of the graduate students will join us in this march towards the future by creating their own personal web pages!) Finally, Martin Puchner deserves sincere thanks and recognition for all he does as DGS, much of which is “behind the scenes” (yes, a little nod to drama), but all of which is essential to the well-being of the graduate program and its constituents. Happy summer to all! - Gwen Urdang-Brown
Photo credits: p. 1,5,7: Shayna Cummings; p. 3: Chris Barrett and Shayna Cummings; p. 5: graduates’ own; p. 6: Chris Barrett
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