Terry Oggel

There is much to note in our review of the 2010–11 academic year:

• six more candidates are eligible to graduate from our interdisciplinary PhD in Media, Art, and Text, co-supported by the School of Mass Communications and the School of the Arts;

• completion of the overhaul of our MA program resulting in the establishment of two new tracks—the MA in English (Literature or Writing & Rhetoric) and the MA in English Research (Literature or Writing & Rhetoric);

• continuing success of the nationally ranked MFA program, with more than a third of alumni publishing significant work in their genres and still others going on for PhDs in creative writing;

• complete revision of our English undergraduate major curriculum in the context of the PhD in MATX program and the college’s and university’s restructured General Education curriculum resulting in 86 new, revised or deleted courses;

• recognition of English department faculty for professionalism and scholarship; over the past seven years, five English department faculty have been awarded the college’s Elske v.P. Smith Distinguished Lecturer Award.

PROGRAMS
In the PhD program, students have been actively promoting their studies through the MATX Student Guild. This past year the Guild supported two high-profile visiting lecturers: Raphael Rosenberg, former editor of the journal Art in America and a distinguished critic, and Alan Bigelow, multi-media web author from New York. During the past year three MATX students secured positions in their fields: Nathan Altice as the Tocqueville Web Developer at University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab, Belinda Haikes as assistant professor for Interaction Design at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, and Jenn Figg as assistant professor for 3-D Foundations at Towson University.

With the MA and MFA programs having 57 and 31 students respectively, and the MATX PhD program, the department now has 136 graduate students to go with its 950 declared undergraduate majors (650 continuing majors). Added to these are 150 undergraduate students pursuing minors in the department—in English, in British Studies, in writing and creative writing, and in American Studies. All in all, in our graduate and undergraduate programs and our General Education instruction, we taught a total of 6,591 students in 239 sections during the 2010–11 academic year.

This past fall, the newly revised MA curriculum went into effect. Students will now have the choice of pursuing an MA (Literature or Writing & Rhetoric track) or an MA/Research (Literature or Writing & Rhetoric with an emphasis on research, criticism and methodology, suitable for students going on for the PhD). Regular workshops on academic and professional topics will be a new component to the program.

This past year, the undergraduate major curriculum underwent a wholesale revision that saw a total of 86 new, deleted or revised courses. The result is a restructuring of our upper-division English courses so as to create a logical path from the gateway ENGL 301 through the capstone ENGL 499. The curriculum now makes a clear difference between 300- and 400-level classes, organizes courses based on theme or origin of literature, and creates courses to assure intellectual balance within the curriculum. The new curriculum will be implemented in the fall of 2012.

The year saw the first Career Weeks for English majors, one held in the fall and the other in the spring semester. Members of the VCU community were recruited to speak on the panels. In another initiative, undergraduates and alumni gathered to discuss the application process for admission into MA, MFA, and PhD programs.

FACULTY
Essential for any research-oriented, graduate-program-intensive department is its published scholarship. This year, English department faculty published 4 books, 7 chapters, 49 articles, poems and essays, 9 reviews and 1 translation. Forty-six more books and articles are in process or in press/forthcoming.

Equally essential is the appointment and advancement of a first-rate faculty. In July, Drs. Joshua Eckhardt and Les Harrison were promoted to Associate Professor. Josh’s book, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry, was nominated by Oxford UP for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book. He is the co-recipient of a Presidential Research Incentive Program on “British Virginia” and has started work on the British Virginia edition of the Virginia Company Sermons. In addition, Josh was awarded a Harris Manchester Summer Research Institute for his Virginia Company Sermons project. Les has published The Temple and the Forum: The Museum and Cultural Authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe and Whitman as well as several articles. Much of his research activity during 2010 was devoted to his collaboration on a digital critical edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His other important scholarly role is that of contributing scholar to the Melville Electronic Library (MEL). When completed, it will contain digital reproductions of all relevant primary and secondary Melville materials, allowing further editorial and critical-historical work.

Three searches took place this past year—two “cluster” searches involving four departments in addition to the English department and a third search for a Coordinator of Undergraduate Advising. The searches resulted in three new hires: Assistant Professor Cristina Stanciu (Ethnic and Immigrant American Literatures; American Studies), Associate Professor John Picker (Theory and History of Media or Film), and Coordinator of Undergraduate Advising Dale Smith.

Once again, Department of English faculty members were the recipients of several university and college awards. Tom De Haven was the recipient of the 2011 Elske v.P. Smith Distinguished Lecturer Award. Tom is the fifth English department faculty member to receive this award in the past seven years. Kathleen Graber was the recipient of the College of Humanities & Sciences’ Excellence in Scholarship award. Along with his co-editor, David Coogan received the Reflections Civic Scholarship Outstanding Book Award, presented annually to writers of a book published in the past two years whose work engages public and/or disciplinary conversations about civic engagement in issues of writing, rhetoric, and literacy in innovative, compelling, and challenging ways.

Joshua Eckhardt’s book, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry, was nominated by Oxford UP for an MLA Best First Book Prize. David Golumbia’s book, The Cultural Logic of Computation, was nominated for an MLA Best First Book Prize by Harvard UP. Kathleen Graber was named a Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Clint McCown served as judge of the 2010 American Fiction Prize. David Wojahn’s poem “Talismanic” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Another of his poems, “Mix Tape To Be Brought To Her in Rehab,” was selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, an annual anthology of outstanding poetry of the previous year.

English department faculty were also very involved in service to the community and to the profession. David Coogan developed a writing module focused on writing personal statements to be used to secure employment for ex-offenders at the District One Parole Office, taking part in Suzanne Schultz’s program, Working with Conviction. Also, David initiated a creative writing workshop for ex-offenders living in House of New Beginnings, a reentry facility in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond; initiated two creative writing workshops for juvenile offenders at Bon Air Correctional Center; initiated three writing workshops at the Richmond City Jail; participated with VCU students in the nonprofit Boaz and Ruth’s annual fundraising event, The Long Walk to Freedom, to raise awareness about prisoner reentry; helped establish a woman’s prison writing workshop at Fluvanna Correctional Center; and helped organize a book drive for residents at the Richmond City Jail.

Susann Cokal served as an Advisory Board Member for James River Writers. Tom De Haven was a member of the Podium Foundation’s Board of Directors as well as its executive committee and, working with Tim Hulsey, dean of the Honors College, developed the T3 (Teaching the Teachers) Academy. Thom Didato served as an Advisory Board member for James River Writers and as a YMCA community volunteer. Joshua Eckhardt worked with Church Hill Activities and Tutoring as a summer mentor. Kathleen Graber designed and implemented a five-day intensive creative writing workshop for 30 Richmond Public Schools teachers in conjunction with RPS, the Podium Foundation and the University Honors College.

Marcel Cornis-Pope currently serves as vice president of the Coordinating Publication Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association, which supervises the publication of a major series of comparative literary histories in European languages. He was co-organizer of the international session on the History of the East-Central European Literary Cultures; is an editor of the Literature and Multimedia in late 20th and 21st Century Europe; member of the Transatlantic University Consortium, contributing to the development of a Transatlantic curriculum in cinema and language; member of the Advisory Board of B.A.S.: British and American Studies, Journal of the Romanian Society of English and American Studies; member of the Advisory Board of World Literature Studies; member of the advisory board of the Analele Universitãþii de vest (West University Annals), Romania; member of the directorial board of the biannual Colocvium and member of the editorial board of Caietul de semiotica, Romania. He also served as an evaluator of manuscripts for MELLUS, College Literature, PMLA,and Ohio UP.

Nicholas Frankel serves on the Executive Committee of the Society for Textual Scholarship and served this past fall on that organization’s Bowers Prize Committee. Elizabeth Hodges judged essays written by juniors in Virginia high schools as part of a National Council of Teachers of English writing contest. David Latané served as Program Committee Chair for the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals’ Annual Meeting at Yale University and is a member of that organization’s Executive Committee, Nominating subcommittee, and Gale Dissertation Fellowship Committee. He serves as Treasurer of the Victorians Institute, is a member of the Advisory Board of Victorian Poetry and Victorian Newsletter, and is the owner and maintainer of websites for Stand Magazine and Victorians Institute.

David Wojahn served as a judge for the Library of Virginia Poetry Awards and Snyder Book Prize (Ashland UP). Rivka Swenson serves on the Executive Committee of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

NEW FEATURES
Electronic submission of theses and dissertations (ETD) became mandatory beginning with the fall 2010 semester, making theses and dissertations available worldwide on the web. As a long-standing member of the Associated Writing Programs, the MFA Program in Creative Writing at VCU and its faculty agreed to the AWP’s recommendation that creative theses shall not be made available electronically. Creative writers must have control over the dissemination of their works. For example, it is critical that writers retain first serial, book, and other rights for the purpose of their works’ first seeing print in literary venues. Therefore, colleges and universities should not mandate as a condition for graduation that creative theses or dissertations be published or broadly disseminated in ways that preclude any student from offering all or any portion of publication rights, including electronic rights, to publishers. This is absolutely critical to the success of creative writers and creative writing programs. If a college or university implements ETDs, students should have an option to file a traditional paper thesis. If creative writing students are required to file ETDs, then such ETDs should not be made available on the World Wide Web, but instead should be available only to the same communities that paper theses and dissertations have been made available to in the past, for instance by password-protected access to the creative thesis or dissertation. This new MFA program policy was approved by unanimous vote of the VCU MFA Committee and was implemented in 2010.

In the fall of 2009, the university replaced the paper-and-pencil student course evaluations with a new electronic system. Initially, this conversion was problematic, which led to the formation of an English department ad hoc committee to revise, reduce and reorder the evaluation questions to make them more appropriate for English department courses. The revised and reordered evaluation questions went into effect in the fall 2011 semester.  

LITERARY AWARDS AND HIGHLIGHTS
Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts entered its tenth year of publication. Blackbird publishes Pulitzer Prize winners, newcomers, and everyone in between in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and the visual and performing arts, allowing students valuable literary editing internships for class credit and résumé-building experience while bringing national and international recognition to the department and the program. Blackbird was singled out for special mention in the Million Writers Award competition organized by storySouth, which recognizes the best online short stories published in a given year.

Nick Lantz’s We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, was chosen as the winner of the 2011 14th Annual Larry Levis reading prize, awarded in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year. In September, a three-day literary conference took place to celebrate the life and writing of poet Larry Levis (1946-1996) and mark the acquisition of his papers by Cabell Library. The event featured a stellar group of poets, editors and literary commentators from around the country who participated in panels and discussions and concluded with a reading by the 2010 Levis Prize winner Peter Campion, author of The Lions.

David Gordon’s novel The Serialist was the winner of the 2011 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. The award, celebrating its tenth year this year, was created to recognize a rising new talent in the literary world who has published a first novel. In 2008, the award was re-titled to acknowledge support from the James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, VCU Graduate School, VCU Honors College, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences. A special 10-year celebration will take place in the fall.

The department’s Visiting Writers series continued its successful run, featuring such eminent writers as A.L. Kennedy, Richard Jackson, David Rivard, Kelly Link, Robert Olen Butler, English department faculty member Kathleen Graber, and VCU alums Michele Young-Stone (MFA/Fiction 2005), Allison Titus (MFA/Poetry 2003) and Mathias Svalina (MFA/Poetry 2002).

The English department majors’ organization, Literati, once again enjoyed record attendance at presentations by English department and University College faculty members Rivka Swenson (“Making Poems Mean More: The Place of Form from Sonnets to Free Verse”); John Brinegar (“H.P. Lovecraft”); Kathy Graber (“Escaping the Self: Poems in the Disciplines”); Jason Coats (“Dumbledore’s Horcrux”); Meriah Crawford (“Hallows and Horcruxes: A Closer Look at Harry’s Quest”); Tim Glenn (discussion on The Big Lebowski); John Brinegar (“‘You Have Known What You Should Not’: American Weird Fiction from Poe to Lovecraft”); Tara Bray (“Poetry in the Making”); Joshua Eckhardt (the British Virginia project and a discussion of some of the sermons of the Virginia Company); Thaddeus Fortnoy (“Comics of Control: Police States in the 1980s in The Dark Knight Returns, V for Vendetta, and Akira”); Catherine MacDonald (poetry workshop "Both Strange and True: Making Metaphor"); Melissa Johnson (poetry workshop "Finding Inspiration through Limitation: the Collaborative Sonnet"); Terry Oggel (“Twain’s Twang:  Dialect Revisions in the Manuscript of Huckleberry Finn”).

The department’s First Friday series continued its fourth successful program with presentations by faculty members Kathy Graber (“In-Dwelling: Stephen Dunn in Deadwood”), Tim Glenn (“Representing Race, Property and Reconstruction in Peter Matthiessen’s Killing Mister Watson”), John Wells (“Samuel  Beckett’s Negations: Tragedy, Comedy, and Subjectivity in Endgame”), Les Harrison (“Textual Fluidity and the Digital Edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin”), David Golumbia (“Reintegrating Philology: Deconstruction, Endangered Languages, and the Second Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics”), and Ece Aykol (“Still Life, Still Alive: The Poetics of Ekphrasis and Sam Taylor-Wood’s Short Films”).

This year marked the fourth year of the long-planned-for Distinguished Visiting Writers Series when Jean Valentine taught poetry writing to a master class of MFA students in the Spring semester.

MATX students have continued to obtain remarkable results over the past academic year, exhibiting their work at important national and regional venues. John Priestley was the co-recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce a Firefox plugin that senses user emotional state and plays sympathetic generative music. Stella Reinhard presented a paper at the International Conference on the Book in St. Gall, Switzerland. Jennifer Smith delivered a paper on reading digital texts at the International Digital Media and Arts Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia.

Among our active MFA students, several were recognized for their writing. Amira Pierce and Audrey Walls received the AWP Intro Journals Project award recognition while Emilia Phillips was selected for the Academy of American Poets’ University & College Poetry Prize sponsored by the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Fund. Emilia was also awarded a Mona Van Duyn Scholarship in poetry for the 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Amira Pierce was awarded Cream City Review‘s 2011 A. David Schwartz Prize for short fiction, judged by Ben Percy.

Several of our poetry students had poems published in creative writing journals. Emilia Phillips has new poems in or forthcoming with Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, diode, Poems & Plays, and Sycamore Review. Ross Losapio has placed poems in The Minnesota Review, The Emerson Review, The Chaffin Journal, Off Line, a 2010 Anthology of New Jersey Poets by the South Mountain Poets, and Milk Money. Lea Marshall’s poem, “Harp” was published in Anderbo.com, an online literary journal noted as one of the top 15 by The Huffington Post. Audrey Walls presented “These Leaden Wings: A Poem in Three Voices” at the 2011 VMFA Insights Symposium.

MFAer Dale Smith had his first scholarly article published in California English in June. The article, “Navigating David Leavitt’s ‘Territory’: Exploring LGBT Experience in a College Classroom” was based on his experience teaching the Leavitt story in ENGL 295 last semester and offered strategies to college instructors who want to teach LGBT-themed literature to undergraduates.
 
MFA fiction students also fared well with their stories. Claire Boswell’s story “Calluses” was published in the October 2010 issue of Blue Crow Magazine, and her story “Dead Baby Jokes” is forthcoming in the Sink/Swim Front Porch Flash Fiction anthology. Katy Resch’s story, “The Fawn Skull” appeared in Pank. The story “The Third Prophecy” is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly and “Kansas, 1935; Again Some Day” and “Phasmid” were in the July issue of LIT Magazine.
 
Academic year 2010–11 once again demonstrated the MA program’s commitment to encouraging students to give presentations at national conferences. Anna Wittel presented at the “Ars Identitatis” conference in Paris, France. Kate Simonsen presented her paper, “I, too, will fight crime–I’ll be a Batwoman!: Whatever Happened to Kathy Kane?” at the PCA/ACA national/SWTX regional conference in San Antonio, TX. Emily Williams presented a paper, “Community Development: Cooper and Hawthorne on Alcohol,” at the Food! The Conference! at CUNY. Closer to home, two of our MA in literature students presented at Making Sense: Thinking & Feeling Texts, the 2010 University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Conference: Nicole Swann’s paper, “The Pleasures of Observation: The Disabled as Spectacle and Spectator in Fanny Burney’s Camilla,” and Angelica Bega-Hart’s presentation, “Revelation Just Within Reach: Tactile Imagery in J. D. Salinger’s ‘Just Before the War with the Eskimos.’” Angelica Bega-Hart and Elizabeth Downing Johnson won a VCU Graduate Student Research Symposium Award. This year sixty abstracts were submitted, and four winners were chosen by a panel of faculty members and postdocs. Angelica and Elizabeth’s submission, titled “Am I Banging My Head Against a Wall?: Creating an Online Repository for Salinger Scholarship,” tied for first place.

As a final note, the department held its third December graduation ceremony on December 11, 2010. English department alumnus Paul Woody, sportswriter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, gave the commencement address. Paul earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from VCU.

Terry Oggel, Chair
21 September 2011

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