SUMMER 2014 VOLUME III
Days from now, I go back to the department ranks after a year in the Chair’s Hot Seat (aka the Siege Perilous), to which James will be returning, relaxed and tanned, after his year in California. Thanks are due! I thank all of you for your support this year. I also thank all of you who have been working for the department in many different capacities. I’m well aware that our undergraduate program owes a very great deal to graduate students, who give their time, expertise, and passion to teaching our students, whether as teaching fellows, junior tutorial leaders, or senior thesis co-advisors. Our program and courses continue to get outstanding reviews from our students, and a large part of the reason for this is you. The department could not run without its graduate instructors. I specifically thank Margaret Rennix, our Departmental Teaching Fellow, Martin Greenup, our Departmental Writing Fellow and all of you who serve in the houses as Resident Deans or in other capacities. I thank those of you who helped with the Seamus Heaney Memorial in November, and at other special events through the year. In the graduate program itself, of course I thank our wonderful staff, Gwen Urdang-Brown and Shayna Cummings, who make all our lives possible, and always do what they do constructively and in ways that actually cheer up the day. I thank the faculty Placement Officers from last year, Marjorie Garber and Leah Whittington, and thank in advance their replacements for the coming year, Deidre Lynch and Derek Miller. And I reserve particular thanks for your graduate colloquium coordinators. Most of you regularly attend a colloquium; those of you who do not almost certainly should; and a small but hard-working group among you manage these colloquia, usually as unsung heroes, doing a great deal of organizing and taking a significant amount of responsibility on the part of your peers, and of the department. Our colloquia are in many ways the life-blood of the graduate program. They provide a place for you to develop your intellectual and professional lives outside the confines of the classroom, discuss what matters in your field, or in literary studies as a whole, hear speakers doing important work in that field, within Harvard and beyond, and have the opportunity to engage intensively with what they have to say. Those who run these colloquia deserve all our thanks, and I give it here, on behalf of the faculty, staff, and graduate students of the department. - Nicholas Watson
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Margaret Gram “Matters of State: American Literature in the Civil Rights Era” Elizabeth Maynes-Aminzade “Macrorealism: Fiction for a Networked World” Matthew Sussman: “Stylistic Virtue in Nineteenth-Century Fiction”
Kristen Roupenian “Dodging the Question: Language, Politics, and the Life of a Kenyan Literary Magazine” Laura Wang “Natural Law and the Law of Nature in Early British Beast Literature”
Nicholas Donofrio: “The Vanishing Freelancer: A Literary History of the Postwar Culture Industries” Leonard Neidorf: “The Origins of Beowulf: Studies in Textual Criticism and Literary History” Cassandra Nelson: “Age of Miracles: Religion and Screen Media in Postwar American Fiction” Jesse Raber: “Progressivism’s Aesthetic Education: The Bildungsroman and the Struggle for the American School, 1890-1920″ Jacob Risinger: “Confirmed Tranquility: The Stoic Impulse in Transatlantic Romanticism”
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Benjamin Woodring: “Oft Have I Heard of Sanctuary Men: Fictions of Refuge in Early Shakespeare”
Margaret Doherty, Preceptor in Expository Writing Margaret Gram, Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellowship Martin Greenup, Preceptor in Expository Writing Leonard Neidorf, Harvard Society of Fellows Margaret Rennix, Preceptor in Expository Writing Jacob Risinger, Ohio State University Steve Rozenski, Humboldt Research Fellowship & University of Rochester Matthew Sussman, University of Sydney Laura Wang, Harvard College Fellow in English Kaye Wierzbicki, Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship
The Certificate of Distinction in Teaching is awarded to teaching fellows, teaching assistants, and course assistants who have achieved an overall rating of 4.5 or above on the Q Evaluation’s 5-point scale.
Heather Brink-Roby (English 192)
Taylor Cowdery (English 40)
Carra Glatt (English 60)
Margaret Doherty (English 166)
Seth Herbst (English 131)
Marissa Grunes (English 60)
Ari Hoffman (English 170a)
Rebecca Kastleman (English 199a)
Joey McMullen (English 103g)
Joey McMullen (English 102b, Celtic 103)
Calista McRae (AIU 20)
David Nee (AIU 56)
David Nee (AIU 20)
Margaret Rennix (English 157)
Leonard Neidorf (CB 45)
Julia Tejblum (English 54)
John Radway (CB 45)
Daniel Williams (English 157)
Jacob Risinger (CB 55) Adam Scheffler (English 55) Misha Teramura (English 57) Stella Wang (English 115b) Kaye Wierzbicki (USW 34) Daniel Williams (AIU 20) Annie Wyman (English 168d)
Before taking over as interim DGS I already had a high opinion of the graduate program, but now after witnessing its inner workings over the course of an academic year, I come away even more impressed because of the people who animate the program: the staff, the professors, and especially the students themselves. For the second year in a row our rising G2s aced their General Exams, and our G3s completed a successful round of Field Exams as they move toward their dissertations. While such benchmarks are important for the smooth functioning of the program, they only hint at our program’s vital intellectual energy—energy that can also be measured in seminar papers, articles accepted for publication, course sections, junior tutorials, conference talks, job talks, graduate colloquia meetings, and more. For example, Erica Weaver and Joey McMullen co-organized a three-day conference in September on “The Legacy of Boethius in the Middle Ages,” complete with a manuscript exhibition in the Houghton Library. Our program’s comings and goings are another measure of its vitality. Thanks in no small part to the recruiting efforts of our own grad cohort, we will welcome a strong and diverse group of eleven G1s in the fall. In a nice symmetry at the other end of the program, eleven students received their PhDs this past academic year. Many thanks to our placement officers Leah Whittington and Marjorie Garber for their tireless and successful efforts in guiding this group. In response to a recommendation by the recent visiting committee, Nicholas Watson and I led an effort to create greater coordination among the various graduate colloquia. Key to this effort is the creation of a new position, the Lead Coordinator, who will perform an array of tasks, everything from ordering plastic cups to organizing an annual Symposium. Each individual colloquium will continue to enjoy autonomy in plan-
ning its annual schedule, but there will be greater opportunities for collaboration and fewer inadvertent conflicts. As Nicholas mentions elsewhere in this newsletter, we are delighted that Maria Devlin has agreed to take on the duties of the Lead Coordinator for next year, and she has already begun the planning for a Symposium in September. As Lead Coordinator Maria will also oversee the Graduate Advisory Committee. We are confident this restructuring will add even more vigor to our already successful graduate colloquia. We are delighted to announce that this spring the graduate program was awarded an $11,000 grant from the Gochman Fund administered by GSAS. Some of the funds will support the Lead Coordinator position, while the remainder will be used for alumni outreach and recruitment efforts. The funds will enable us, among other things, to sponsor a low-key social gathering at the MLA convention and to subsidize the travel costs of newly-admitted students for campus visits. Before beginning my duties as interim DGS in the Fall, I looked forward to growing better acquainted with individual graduate students, and I now leave convinced more than ever what a talented and delightful group they are. Since I had the chance to meet each of the G1s and G2s for advising, I especially look forward to following their progress through the program in the years ahead. As a novice DGS, I relied on the expertise of Anna McDonald and Nicholas Watson for advice and reminders and more advice. It is a pleasure for me to acknowledge how grateful I am to them. And I close with heart-felt thanks to Gwen Urdang-Brown and Shayna Cummings for their patience, knowledge, and good humor as they directed the interim director in the right direction. - Daniel Donoghue
Michael Allen
Hannah Rosefield
George Washington U (BA, 2010) Oxford (M.St., 2013)
Oxford (BA, 2010) U. Glasgow (M.Litt, 2011)
Interests: 20th C. British
Interests: 19th C British, 20th C British and American
Sam Berstler Harvard (AB, 2014) Interests: Old English, Old Norse
Chris Schlegel Princeton (BA, 2009) U Iowa (MFA, 2013) Interests: 20th C. American
Phoebe Braithwaite Oxford (BA, 2014) Interests: 19th and 20th century British poetry & criticism
Michelle Taylor Yale (BA, 2013) Interests: 20th C. British, Modernism, Poetry
Alex Creighton Williams (BA, 2010) Johns Hopkins U (MFA, 2013) Interests: 20th C. American Anna Kelner Columbia (BA, 2012) Interests: Medieval Nicholas Rinehart Harvard (AB, 2014) Interests: African American literature, comparative literature, ethnicity, social and labor history
Francisco Unger Princeton (BA, 2012) Interests: Emerson, Whitman, and Melville; 20th Century American Poetry Emile Young NYU (BA, 2013) Interests: Medieval
Misha Teramura, GSAS Merit Term-Time Fellowship Calista McRae, GSAS Merit Term-Time Fellowship David Nee, Winthrop Sargent Prize Term-Time Fellowship Ari Hoffman, Dexter Term-Time Fellowship Annie Wyman, Dexter Term-Time Fellowship
Matt Franks, GSAS Summer Pre-Dissertation Fellowship Julia Tejblum, GSAS Summer Pre-Dissertation Fellowship
Alison Chapman
Laura Johnson
Michelle De Groot
Nicholas Nardini
Carra Glatt
Craig Plunges
Seth Herbst
Kathryn Roberts
Rhema Hokama
Adam Scheffler
Daniel Williams, Whiting Dissertation Completion Fellowship Jacob Stulberg, Center for European Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Matthew Franks, William Harris Arnold and Gertrude Weld Arnold Prize Margaret Gram, Helen Choate Bell Dissertation Prize for “Matters of State: American Literature in the Civil Rights Era” Elizabeth Phillips, Helen Choate Bell Prize (Essay) Margaret Rennix, Francis James Child Prize for Excellence in Teaching, for her tutorial “Austen and Woolf” Jacob Risinger, Howard Mumford Jones Prize, for “Confirmed Tranquility: The Stoic Impulse in Transatlantic Romanticism” Kathryn Roberts, Francis James Child Prize for Excellence in Teaching, for her tutorial “Gertrude Stein & F. Scott Fitzgerald: Case Studies in American Modernism” Stephen Tardif, Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essays in the English Language Kathryn Roberts and concentrator Nora Wilkinson, ‘15
The graduate program was extremely fortunate to have been placed in the very capable hands of Daniel Donoghue as the interim Director of Graduate Studies this past year. He deserves sincere thanks for stepping (or should I say, diving head first!) into the role with great care and concern for the graduate program and its constituents. In this interim period, not even the most optimistic among us could have envisioned the vast number and variety of successes the graduate program would enjoy by year’s end. Thanks also to Nicholas Watson, interim Chair, for his tireless support of the graduate program and for the major role he played in many of this year’s achievements. And, finally, a great many thanks and deepest gratitude, as always, to Shayna Cummings for continuing to work her magic every day in so many ways. Happy summer to all! - Gwen Urdang-Brown
Aug 18
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GSAS Registration Begins
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GSAS Residence Halls open
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9:00a International Student Orientation
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Registration Ends
9a-5p General Exams (G2s)
10a Departmental Orientation for G1s
9:30a GSAS Orientation for First Year Students
Sep 1
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LABOR DAY
First Day of Classes
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2-4p Language Exams
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5 (Time TBD) Library Orientation for G1s & G2s
4p Dept. Welcome Reception
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Study Card Day
11 Dissertation Deadline for November Degrees
For updates, subscribe to our Google Calendar → Photo Credits: P. 1 Henry Vega Ortiz, Cassandra Nelson, Gwen Urdang-Brown; P.2 Shayna Cummings; P. 3 Cassandra Nelson, Laura Wang; P.5 Henry Vega Ortiz; P.6 Gwen Urdang-Brown; P.7 Henry Vega Ortiz; P. 8 Shayna Cummings
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