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KAREN BABINE Assistant Professor of English
AARON SHAHEEN George C. Conner Professor of American Literature
All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, winner of the Minnesota Book Award for memoir/ creative nonfiction, was written throughout her mother’s battle with cancer and is a narrative of food and illness and loss. Cooking comforting meals for her mother gave Babine purpose, she says. She fed her mother mashed potatoes “spiked with as much butter and heavy cream” as she could manage, nourishing with a complete protein after a chemo treatment when her mother wanted to eat only the blandest of foods.
Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture was written by Shaheen, the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature. He specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century literature. His teaching and research interests include disability and gender studies, Southern literature and World War I.
“In those days, I was really trying to work through how I was feeling about cancer and this really mirrored cancer and her treatment and things that should not exist. It was nice to know that A plus B equals C if I do this in a recipe. At least I had something tangible in my hands to work with.”
“The book helps to explain how our current reliance on technology dates back to World War I, when prosthetists developed the idea that the prosthetic device should be an extension of a person’s soul or ‘personality.’ These ideas were then reflected in much of the war-related literature produced during the 1920s and ‘30s. At the practical level, this meant designing prostheses with an eye for physical compatibility. It also implied a more sophisticated rapprochement between humans and machines.”
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FALL 2021
