Live Performance: International Theater Festival Immersion

This past summer, after a two-year pandemic-related hiatus, the Department of English ran its study-abroad course “Live Performance: International Theatre Festival Immersion” in Edinburgh, Scotland. This was the 13th year that the department has run the course, which is now organized in collaboration with the University of New Mexico. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the world’s largest arts festival featuring more than 3,500 performances each day of the month of August, spread across 400 different venues. Several other festivals run concurrently throughout the city, including an international Book Festival and Arts Festival. The pandemic forced the cancellation of the city’s programming in 2020 and 2021, so 2022 marked a significant return to form. This year’s edition featured roughly 80% as many events as the peak year prior to the pandemic—more than enough to fill the two weeks of the studyabroad course. Professor Daniel Sack co-directed this year’s course with Professor Dominika Laster of the University of New Mexico. Fourteen undergraduate students, roughly half of whom hailed from UMass, joined three graduate students and one continuing education participant from the Amherst community. The group attended 20 performances together— including work from Australia, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States—leaving time for participants to see additional work on their own. (One member of the group managed to see 57 different performances, a record for the program and surely one that will stand for a long time coming.) The festival was a powerful reminder of the resilience of artists around the world, many of whom could not produce their work during the crisis of the past two years. We look forward to returning for next year’s program.

—Daniel Sack, Program Advisor, Live Performance: International Theater Festival Immersion

The group attended 20 performances together—including works from Australia, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States—leaving time for participants to see additional works on their own.

By Faculty

Abigail Chabitnoy. In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful. Wesleyan University Press; Bilingual edition, November 1, 2022.

“This remarkable book undertakes a kind of geological exploration of the hidden-in-plain-sight strata making up the world around us and our lives within it: raspberries against graves against glaciers; disappeared women alongside disappearing rivers; mythic transformations next to anonymous martyrdoms.”

Lisa Olstein, author of L ate Empire

“In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful will sweep you up and subdue you. Chabitnoy powerfully and lyrically addresses the crisis of violence against Indigenous women, giving voice to those who have been silenced. This is a timeless and important work.”

Rena Priest , Washington State Poet Laureate, 2021–2023

Stephen Clingman. Catalogue of the William Kentridge Exhibition. Royal Academy of Arts, Sept–Dec 2022. A series of essays: “Liberating Vision” and Six Meditations.

In a brilliant exposition of Kentridge’s work, Stephen Clingman undertakes a series of enquiries, of walks around the artist and his practice, through the various layers and linkages, crossings and connections of his art. As he proceeds, he considers Kentridge’s themes, explores them and moves by association to others. Along the way, overlaps, thoughtcollages, allusions and assemblages come together to create a connective, dimensional way of thinking inspired by Kentridge’s own habits of creation.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt. Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage. Oxford University Press, 2022.

How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about the allcontrolling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency? Globalizing Fortune addresses these questions by demonstrating how English economic expansion and global transformation produced a new philosophy of fortune oriented around discerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities.

Gretchen Gerzina. Black England: A Forgotten History. Revised with a new introduction by Zadie Smith. John Murray Publishers, 2022.

“When considering the history of the African diaspora I always feel we are very lucky to be able to draw on an epistemological principle born of that same diaspora, specifically from the Akan peoples of Ghana: the Sankofa. Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri. Literal translation: “It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”

Gerzina takes that principle seriously, bringing back to us what we are always perilously close to losing, through ignorance, neglect, amnesia, willful manipulation and, yes, taboo.”

Zadie Smith The Guardian

“Black England taught me more history than I ever learned at school. This book helped me to understand the history that my generation are making now. To say that it is groundbreaking is stating the obvious. Black England is part of our canon. With books like this to guide us, we are unstoppable. Gretchen Gerzina tells it as it was, so we know how it is. Black England is a book that will be relevant forever.”

Benjamin Zephaniah

Peter Gizzi.

A User’s Guide to The Invisible World: Selected Interviews.

Edited and with an Introduction by Zoe Tuck. Poetry And Poetics Series, Volume 2. Free Poetry Press, 2022.

Gizzi’s honors include the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets as well as fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rex Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Edie Meidav. Another Love Discourse. Terra Nova Press, 2022

“An alchemist of empathy, of nuanced observation and unexpected truths, Edie Meidav is a writer whose every magical story probes human experience from triumphs to tragedies and all the terrain between.”

Bradford Morrow

“Edie Meidav is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and this is her best book. It’s open, wounded, true.”

Rick Moody

“Another Love Discourse is an uncategorizable triumph, and a gesture of radical intimacy with the reader, one of which Barthes would be proud.”

Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest

“A lush plunge into the sensorium: marriage, divorce, discovery. Meidav turns her fierce intellect to timeless questions of love, its attendant ecstasy and delicious pain. This book will unlock you.”"

Margot Douaihy author of Scorched Cross

By Faculty

Mazen

Memoirs of Juliette Elmir Sa'adeh. Syrian Social nationalist, Reformer, Political Prisoner. Folios Limited, London and Beirut, 2022.

This is the first English translation of the memoirs of Juliette Elmir Sa´adeh (1909–1976), the iconic Syrian social nationalist, activist, and reformer, and the first woman political prisoner in Syria. This translation is an important resource for the political history of Lebanon and Syria in the twentieth century.

Elmir Sa´adeh’s life was replete with adventure, intrigue, and episodes of political upheaval that resulted in her unjust imprisonment for over eight years (1955–1963). Her memoirs serve both as a blueprint for and a cautionary tale about women in politics. Few early to mid-twentieth-century works by Lebanese and Syrian women have seen publication, and Elmir Sa´adeh’s memoirs fill a historical gap and provide a detailed account of earlier periods of political turmoil from a woman’s perspective.

By Alumni

The following represent recently published books written or edited by graduates of the PhD Program.

A

History of Irish Literature

and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland’s island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic—this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature.

Ocean Vuong. Time Is a Mother. Penguin Press; 1st edition, April 5, 2022

“In this highly anticipated second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong ruminates on time. It becomes a character of its own, both an obstacle and motherly, something that can nurture and hold. Written in the aftermath of his mother’s death, Vuong’s poems are raw with grief and darkness, but there are radical moments of joy and resilience even through that. Through these poems, Vuong sings loud and clear of everything worth living for and discovering—just as vividly as he did in his critically acclaimed titles On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Night Sky With Exit Wounds.” NPR , “Books We Love”

Jessica Ouellette, et. al., (ed.) Feminist Connections: Rhetoric and Activism across Time, Space, and Place

Tom Nealon. Food Fights & Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste

Paul Theroux. The Bad Angel Brothers: A Novel

The following represent recently published books written or edited by graduates of the MFA Program.

Sarena Brown. I Am Thankful for Feeling & for the First Time on Earth. Big Lucks, 2022.

Gion Davis. Too Much. Birdcoat, 2022.

Karen Donovan. Monad+Monadnock. Wet Cement Press, 2022.

Sadie Dupuis. Cry Perfume. Black Ocean, 2022.

Joy Ladin. Shekhinah Speaks. selva oscura press, 2022.

Helena Minton. Paris Paint Box: New and Selected Poems. Loom Press, 2022.

Leigh Newman. Nobody Gets Out Alive. Scribner, 2022.

Lisa Olstein. (Co-authored with Julie Car) Climate. Essay Press, 2022.

Hilary Plum. Hole Studies. Fonograf Editions, 2022.

Kamila Shamsie. Best of Friends. Riverhead, 2022.

Susan Straight. Mecca. Macmillan, 2022.

Xu Xi. Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations. Signal 8 Press, 2022.

Matthew Zapruder (guest editor).

The Best American Poetry 2022. Simon and Schuster, 2022.