Faculty News (Archive)

Spring 2019 Updates

Orianne Smith

  • Smith will be presenting a paper entitled, “#MeToo: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Gender and the Political Performative,” on a panel sponsored by the Keats-Shelley Association of America at the 2019 Modern Language Association Convention.

Summer 2018 Updates

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley will be presenting a paper entitled, “Stewes, Southwark, and the Tabard Inn: The Opening Dinner in the Canterbury Tales,” at the Fourth International Convention on Food History and Cultures in France from June 6-8, 2018.

Orianne Smith

  • Smith will be presenting a paper entitled, “Open to Interpretation: Romantic Women Writers and the ‘Spirit’ of Translation,” at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference at Brown University from June 22-25, 2018.
  • Smith will be presenting a paper entitled, “Gender and Supernatural Alliance in Scott’s The Bride of Lamermoor and Baillie’s Witchcraft,” at the Eleventh Annual Walter Scott Conference in Paris on July 11, 2018.

Spring 2018 Updates

Maleda Belilgne

  • Belilgne has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for AY 18-19.

Jessica Berman

  • Berman served as editor for Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim (2018) by Iqbalunnisa Hussain. It contains an introduction and extensive explanatory notes by Berman as well as three essays by other scholars.

Christopher Corbett

  • A word Corbett invented was a clue on the March 9, 2018 episode of Jeopardy. The word was autotonsorialist–one who cuts his own hair or looks as if he cuts his own hair. Corbett notes that this was for a book by Jack Hitt, In a Word, which was an anthology of invented words.

Margie Burns

  • Burns has two book talks with author signings scheduled in local businesses hosting discussions of her book, Firearms Regulation in the Bill of Rights: Eighteenth-Century English Language and the U.S. Constitution. The first is for March 30, 2018 at the Shortcake Bakery in Hyattsville, MD. The second is for April 14, 2018 at Green Owl Design in Hyattsville, MD.
  • Burns has an article, “A Third Advertisement for Susan Found: Why Didn’t Crosby Publish Jane Austen?” forthcoming in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal in May.
  • Burns presented a paper entitled, “Then and now: the adjunct phenomenon, updated, 19[91] – now,” at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in April.

Mike Fallon

  • Fallon’s poems, “High,” “A Saturday Morning in June,” “Among Mourning Doves,” and “Long Needle Pine,” were accepted by the Loch Raven Review for their spring issue.
  • Fallon’s non-fiction essay, “Madman Among the Fireflies,” and his poem, “June Field with Fireflies,” have been accepted by Razor Magazine. They will be featured with another short essay on the creative process that explains how they came to be written.
  • Fallon’s poems, “Four Horses” and “Shrinking Island,” have been published on Narrative Northeast‘s website.
  • Fallon’s comic essay, “Red Ferry, Blue Ferry,” is a featured essay on the Broad Street Literary Review website; it focuses on his trip to the Aran Islands in Ireland.
  • Fallon’s poem, “The Music of What Happens,” was accepted for publication by Crosswinds Poetry Journal.

Drew Holladay

  • Holladay presented a paper entitled, “Institutional ‘Misfits’: Acceptable Discrimination and (Mental) Disability Diversity,” at the Towson University Communication Studies Symposium on April 27, 2018.
  • Holladay presented a paper entitled, “Diagnostic Interruption: Social Justice, Autism Advocacy, and Technical Communication,” at the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing 2018 Conference in Kansas City.
  • Holladay participated on a panel at the Humanities Teaching Lab entitled, “Digital Humanities and Difference in Research and Teaching,” as part of the Dresher Center for the Humanities’ Inclusion Imperative Program on March 8, 2018.

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley was invited to present a lecture on her book on Chaucer and Boccaccio in the lecture series of the Grellet & Dorothy C. Simpson Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA, in March 2018.

Shane Moritz

  • Moritz’s poem, “Whoop,” was accepted for the April 2018 issue of Baltimore Style.
  • Mortiz’s poem, “Spring,” was accepted for publication in Ramingo’s Porch.

Orianne Smith

  • Smith’s essay on “Rational Dissent” is forthcoming in 2019 with Routledge in an edited collection entitled, The Wollstonecraftian Mind.

Winter 2018 Updates

Maleda Belilgne

  • Belilgne chaired a panel entitled, “James Baldwin’s Speculative Imaginary,” at the Modern Language Association Convention in January. She also presented a paper entitled, “Nobody Escapes Anything: Proleptic Sound in ‘Sonny’s Blues.'”

Jessica Berman

  • In January, Berman presided at a roundtable, “Memory and the Archive,” at the Modern Language Association Convention.
  • In December, Berman presented the closing keynote address, “The Case for a Transnational Critical Optic, Now,” to the Literature and the World: Theories, Concepts, Databases Symposium at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Lindsay DiCuirci

  • DiCuirci presented a paper entitled, “‘A’ is for Archive: (Un)Dead Things in Hawthorne’s Custom House,” as part of the “Hawthorne and Things” panel at the Modern Language Association Convention in January.

Jean Fernandez

  • Fernandez delivered a lecture entitled, “Revisiting the Bronte Sisters,” in honor of their bicentennial anniversary at Montgomery College in December as part of their Adults Seeking Knowledge guest lecture series.

Fall 2017 Updates

Margie Burns

  • Burns has an article, “The Mystery of Pinckney’s Draft Revisited,” forthcoming in the South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 117, no. 3. The material relates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and Burns’ discovery of a transcription of the missing text of delegate Charles Pickney’s constitutional proposal.

Lindsay DiCuirci

  • DiCuirci delivered a talk entitled, “Serials Cataloging and Alternative Access in the Classroom, or the Making of Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print,” with Dr. Molly Hardy (Digital Curator at the American Antiquarian Society) at the Rare Books School conference on Bibliography Among the Disciplines in Philadelphia on October 14, 2017.

Mike Fallon

  • Fallon was announced the winner of the Judd’s Hill Winery of California fall contest for the best poem about wine. His three poems have been published online and he was the recipient of a three-liter bottle of their Cabernet.
  • Fallon’s poem, “A Litany of Dusty,” appeared in Illuminations.
  • Fallon’s poem, “Dream of Exile,” appeared in the fall issue of the Crosswinds Poetry Journal.
  • Fallon’s poem, “Henge,” appeared in the UMBC Magazine. The poem was inspired by the Thomas Sayre sculpture, “Forum,” outside of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building.
  • Fallon’s essay, “Red Ferry, Blue Ferry,” was accepted by the Broad Street Literary Journal and will be the featured essay on its website this fall.
  • Fallon’s essay, “The Woman in the Window,” was accepted by the Concho River Review.
  • Fallon’s poem, “Skate,” was selected for publication in The Connecticut River Review for its Fall 2017 issue.

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley’s essay, “Ampullae and Badges: Pilgrim Paraphernalia in Late Medieval England,” will be published in the festschrift, Materiality, the History of Ideas, and Later Medieval Literature, edited by Brian Castle and Erick Kelemen (Newark: University of Delaware Press), this December. She received a small grant from the Dresher Center for the Humanities to help cover image-related costs.
  • McKinley presented a paper, “The Survival Table in Boaccaccio’s Decameron 5.9,” at the 4th annual Conference on Food History and Culture to be held at the Centre of Classical and Humanistic Studies/Food Heritage/DIAITA, University of Coimbra, Portugal from October 25-27th.

Shane Moritz

  • Moritz’s short story, “The Unfinished Girl,’ is forthcoming with The Borfski Press.

Tim Nelson

  • Six of Nelson’s poems were featured this October in the literary journal, Cholla Needles, a California-based print publication.

Tanya Olson

  • YesYes Books will publish Olson’s next book, Stay, in March 2019.

Lia Purpura

  • A broadside of Purpura’s Pushcart Prize-winning essay, “Scream, or Never-Minding,” was issued in October from Washington College, where she gave a reading.
  • Purpura recently performed with the Poulenc Trio at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

Sally Shivnan

  • Shivnan has accepted an offer from The Short Story Project to purchase the foreign translation, digital, and audio rights for her short story collection, Piranhas & Quicksand & Love.
  • Shivnan’s book review of the novel The Crows of Beara appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books in September.

Summer 2017 Updates

Jessica Berman

  • In July, Berman gave a paper on “Resourcing Modernism Today: Handbooks, Companions, Guides” on a panel on “Packaging Modernism Today” at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Amsterdam.
  • On July 1st, Berman organized and took part in a roundtable on “Woolf by the Book: Reflecting on Woolf Editions and Companions” at the 27th annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at the University of Reading, UK.
  • On June 26th, Berman gave a lecture, “Trans Reading and Comparative Modernism,” at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Christopher Corbett

  • Corbett was the subject of a column in the San Francisco Chronicle celebrating the role of the Pony Express in linking California with the rest of the nation in the early 1860s.
  • Corbett was a panelist in June in Kansas City on a panel discussion about Mark Twain in the 19th-century West sponsored by the Western Writers of America’s annual meeting that also featured the writer William Least-Heat Moon, author of “Blue Highways.”

Lindsay DiCuirci

  • DiCuirci presented a paper at the annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing in British Columbia in June. Her paper is entitled, “‘A copy among rubish’: Cataloguing and Recovery Work in the Early U.S. Archive.”

Ben Kingsley

  • In July, Kingsley won two book contests–one selected by Ross Gay and the other by Bob Hicok– and has two books forthcoming.
  • Kingsley was a Kundiman fellow, a Tin House Summer Workshop scholar, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s conference.
  • Over the summer, Kingsley has had work selected for publication by Narrative, Sugar House Review, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Water-Stone Review, TAB, the International Journal of Indigenous Literature, and Tin House.

Shane Moritz

Lia Purpura

  • Purpura was on faculty in Summer 2017 at the Chautauqua Writing Festival.
  • Purpura is under contract for a new collection of essays (as yet untitled) due out in 2019 with Sarabande Books.
  • Purpura’s poetry and essays appeared in Agni and Tin House.
  • Haystack School of Crafts recently published Purpura’s monograph, “In the Presence of Makers,” which included a photograph by UMBC student Jane Lee.

Spring 2017 Updates

Maleda Belilgne

  • Belilgne delivered a talk, “Acoustic Afterlives: Sounding Geography in Black Text,” as part of the Sound Studies Faculty Working Group Symposium on May 5, 2017.
  • Belilgne chaired and organized a panel entitled, “Why Afrofuturism, Why Now?,” for the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in March. She also presented a paper entitled, “Speculations in Black: Livable Space, Conditional Futures.”

Jessica Berman

  • Berman’s article, “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender,” was published in the April volume of Modernism/Modernity.
  • Under her Berman’s direction, the Dresher Center for the Humanities was awarded a $750,000 five-year grant from the Mellon Foundation for new programs in support of diversity in the humanities.
  • On February 3-4, Berman was a keynote speaker at the “BBC & the World Service: Debts and Legacies” Symposium organized by King’s College London.

Lindsay DiCuirci

  • DiCuirci presented a paper at the semi-annual Society of Early Americanists Conference in Tulsa, OK, in March. Her paper was entitled, “‘Never Broken’: Penn’s Treaty in Material and Myth.”
  • DiCuirci’s book, tentatively titled History’s Imprints: The Afterlives of Colonial Books in Nineteenth-Century America, is now under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press’ Material Texts Series.

Piotr Gwiazda

  • Gwiazda published book reviews of Robert Archambeau’s The Kafka Stura in Chicago Review and Zofia Nalkowska’s Boundary in the TLS.
  • Gwiazda has published his translation of Zero Visibility: New Poems by Grzegorz Wroblewski (Phoneme Media) with the support of the Dresher Center for the Humanities and the CAHSS Dean’s Research Fund.

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley participated in the CARA Workshop for Directors of Medieval Studies Programs at the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in Toronto in April.

Lia Purpura

  • Purpura was the recipient of a Dresher Center Scholarly Completion grant.
  • Pupura’s essay, “Walk with Snowy Things,” is forthcoming in Agni magazine.
  • Purpura delivered readings at Marietta College and Ohio State University, where she conducted a weekend-long workshop and seminar in the MFA program.
  • Purpura’s first “artist’s book,” entitled First Adventures in Beauty, was publish by See Double Books.
  • Purpura’s essay, “All the Fierce Tethers” was published in the New England Review.
  • Purpura delivered readings at SUNY Stony Brook and Hofstra University.
  • Purpura was invited to speak to physics students on creativity at the UMD College Park’s “Creativity Forum,” sponsored by the Department of Physics.

Deborah Rudacille

  • On March 29, 2017, Rudacille published “The twenty-something free fall” on SPECTRUM News–a site devoted to autism research.
  • Rudacille received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Science Writing to pursue a new writing project on addiction tentatively titled, “The Family Disease: Alcoholism, Addiction, and Inheritance.”

Sally Shivnan

  • Shivnan was invited to participate in National Short Story Month (May 2017) as a guest blogger for the Emerging Writers Network.

Fall 2016 Updates

Maleda Belilgne

  • Belilgne presented “The Quest for Livable Space: Futurity and Sonority in Early Twentieth-Century Black Narrative” as part of the Dresher Center for the Humanities’ CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now talks. She examined Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self, published in serial format between 1902 and 1903 and one of the earliest examples of black speculative writing.

Michael Fallon

  • Fallon’s essay, Drawing Circles with Time, was published in the Loch Raven Review‘s Fall 2016 issue.
  • Fallon’s book review of Face Half-Illuminated, a book of poems by Danuta Kosk-Kosicka, was published in the Potomac: A Journal of Poetry and Politics. 

Jean Fernandez

  • Fernandez’ essay, “‘Some great wear’: The Aga Jenkyns and the Repression of History in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford,” was published in The Gaskell Journal 30.

Piotr Gwiazda

  • In October, Gwiazda presented papers at the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers Conference at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and Outside-In/Inside-Out: A Symposium & Poetry Festival on Outside and Subterranean Poetry at the University of Glasgow.
  • Gwiazda book, U.S. Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979-2012, was the focus of David Lau’s review essay on “poetic resistance” in New Left Review.
  • Gwiazda’s translations of poetry by Grzegorz Wróblewski appeared this summer in Copper Nickel (with commentary), Granta, Mantis, 6×6 Magazine, and Dwarf Stars: The Best Very Short Speculative Poems (Science Fiction Poetry Association, 2016).
  • Gwiazda’s poem, “Extraordinary Renditions,” appeared in the latest issue of Antioch Review. 

Tanya Olson

  • Olson read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ in October.

Michele Osherow

  • Osherow has been invited by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to serve as a guest lecturer for its educational outreach series: Shakespeare Teaches.

Lia Purpura

  • Purpura read at the Vermont Literary Festival with Yusef Komunyakka in October.
  • Purpura’s essay, “Metaphor Studies” was named a notable essay in Best American Essays 2015.
  • Purpura’s work appeared in Post Road, Plume, and 1966.
  • Purpura’s poem, “Resolution,” was featured on the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” site on August 8th.
  • Purpura’s essay, “Scream, or Never Minding,” originally published in The Georgia Review, was awarded a 2016 Pushcart Prize.
  • Purpura was named “Best Poet” in Baltimore Magazine‘s 2016 “Best of” issue, which appeared in August.
  • Purpura’s work appeared in Ecotone and The New England Review.

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley chaired the panel, “Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Acts of Translation and Appropriation,” at the Third Triennial Conference of the American Boccaccio Association at Duke University from September 30 to October 2, 2016.

Sally Shivnan

  • Renowned travel writer Rolf Potts conducted a recent interview with Shivnan that appears in his “Travel Writers Interview” series at RolfPotts.com.
  • Shivnan has been invited to the University of Wales’ 2017 summer creative writing program to give a reading and conduct a one-day fiction workshop.
  • Shivnan presented “A Reading and Discussion: Writing and Publishing Short Stories” at the Annapolis Bookshop on Friday, December 7, 2016, at 7:00 PM.
  • Shivnan read at the Creative Alliance as part of the Open Circle Reading Series on October 19, 2016 at 7:30 PM.
  • Shivnan’s book review of Christine Sneed’s The Virginity of Famous Men was published in the Washington Independent Review of Books.
  • Shivnan’s short fiction collection, Piranhas & Quicksand & Love, was published in September by Press 53.

Orianne Smith

  • Smith was invited to attend the “Placing Charlotte Smith” conference at Chawton House in Chawton, Alton, Hampshire (UK) in October. Her paper is entitled, “Placing Charlotte Smith in Jamaica: The Politics of Gender and ‘Black’ Magic in The Story of Henrietta.”

Summer 2016 Updates

Christopher Corbett

  • Corbett’s op-ed piece for the British new service Reuters appeared in many forums, including Fortune magazine. In this piece, he commented on the collapse of the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore.

Michael Fallon

  • Fallon’s review of Face Half-Illuminated, a book of poems by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, was published in The Potomac, a Journal of Poetry and Politics.

Lia Purpura

  • In June, Purpura served as the Writer in Residence at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine.

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley presented a paper at the New Chaucer Society Congress in London from July 10 to July 15, 2016. The paper is entitled, “Troilus and Criseyde Book 2: Speech, Property, and Late Medieval Widowhood.”

Nicole Pekarske

  • Pekarske has published two poems in the June issue of Southern Poetry Review.
  • Pekarske also has published an essay in an upcoming edition of Masque & Spectacle.

Spring 2016 Updates

Jessica Berman

  • Berman’s edited volume, A Companion to Virginia Woolf, was published by Wiley. With thirty-three essays by pre-eminent scholars on the life, work, and contexts of Woolf’s writing, it also includes her essay on Woolf’s Three Guineas. 

Steph Ceraso

  • Ceraso was invited to be a featured speaker at the 2016 Rutgers-Camden Archive of Digital Ephemera (R-CADE) Symposium in April.
  • Ceraso gave invited research talks at Georgia State University and the University of Pittsburgh in February.
  • Ceraso presented a paper entitled, “Sounding Composition: Teaching Multimodal Listening,” as part of a special session on sound at the MLA Convention in Austin this January.

Lindsay DiCuirci

  • DiCuirci presented a paper at the Early American Material Texts conference hosted by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in May. Her paper is entitled, “Lost and Found: Antiquarianism and Historical Reprinting in the Early Republic.”
  • DiCuirci co-organized a panel for the C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists conference in March. The panel is entitled,”Unearthing Remains: Recovering American Histories.”
  • DiCuirci presented a paper at the C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists conference in March. Her paper is entitled, “Rags, Bones, and Books.”
  • DiCuirci’s English 448 students’ digital exhibition, Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print, was launched on Thursday, January 28th. It will be a permanent digital exhibition at the American Antiquarian Society.

Mike Fallon

  • Fallon read some of his poetic works at the Creative Alliance in the Patterson theater on April 20 at 7:30 PM.

Jean Fernandez

  • Fernandez was named a CAHSS Research Fellow for 2016-17.

Piotr Gwiazda

  • After years of hard work and continued service to the department and university, Gwiazda was recently promoted to Full Professor.
  • Gwiazda’s review of Magdalena Kay’s In Gratitude for All the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of the Journal of European Studies.
  • Gwiazda’s English translation of a poem by Grzegorz Wróblewski appeared in the sixth issue of Inventory, a journal published by the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
  • In March, Gwiazda attended a residency at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden. While there, he and Grzegorz Wróblewski gave a reading from their forthcoming book, Zero Visibility.
  • In February, Gwiazda gave a talk on translation for the local group of the American Literary Translators Association (DC-ALT Group) in Washington, D.C.

Phil Hiotis

  • Hiotis presented part of his thesis at the George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute’s Graduate Student Symposium on February 23, 2016. His paper is entitled, “Heckling: Disorder in Shakespeare’s Play within a Play.”

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley received a Dresher Center Scholarly Project Completion Fund award to support archival research on Boccaccio manuscripts in Florence, Italy for her book on Chaucer and Boccaccio.
  • McKinley’s book, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular in the House of Fame, will be published in 2016 by the University of Toronto’s Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press.

Tanya Olson

  • On April 5th, Olson gave a reading alongside Lia Purpura at the Enoch Pratt Free Library as part of their Poetry & Conversation series.

Gail Orgelfinger

  • Orgelfinger’s book review of Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinki’s The Strange Case of Emine de Reims: A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints has been published in Digital Philology 5.1 (Spring 2016): 127-30.

Michele Osherow

  • Osherow’s play, The Mathematics of Being Human, created along with Mathematics professor Manil Suri, was produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Heyman Theatre from March 30th to April 2nd.
  • Osherow was invited to present her research on conversion and The Merchant of Venice at a conference celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the Venetian Jewish Ghetto sponsored by the Medici Project and Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

Nicole Pekarske

  • Pekarske’s poem, “Aubade,” was selected as one of eight finalists for the 2016 Orlando Prize given by the A Room of Her Own foundation.
  • Pekarske’s poem, “Monet’s Waterloo Bridge,” was accepted for publication by Alaska Quarterly Review. 

Lia Purpura

  • Purpura’s essay, “Scream, or Never-ending” appeared in the recent issue of the Georgia Review.
  • Purpura’s recent publications included essays in the anthologies Insane Devotions: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press), Serious Daring (Oxford University Press), and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (Georgia University Press).
  • Purpura’s work was recently featured on the websites of the Academy of American Poets and The Poetry Society of America.
  • Purpura has held recently readings in Seattle; Portland; Washington, D.C.; and Kentucky.
  • On April 5th, Purpura gave a reading alongside Tanya Olson at the Enoch Pratt Free Library as part of their Poetry & Conversation series.
  • On March 1st, Purpura gave a reading from her latest collection of poetry, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful, as part of the Humanities Forum.
  • In January, Purpura was Visiting Distinguished Writer at the University of Idaho’s MFA program.

Deborah Rudacille

  • Rudacille’s piece, “Living Between Genders,” was published in Spectrum on April 13 and republished on April 27 in Curve Magazine.
  • Rudacille was interviewed by Dion Lim, anchor/reporter for WTSP-TV/CBS Tampa Bay in April for her story on the drug DES and its possible association with gender variance in children of women who took the drug during pregnancy.
  • As part of the CityLit Festival, Rudacille co-hosted the New Mercury readings, including Mary Valle and Mia Loving.
  • At 3:00 PM on Saturday, April 16th, Rudacille read some of her work alongside other noted writers as part of The Loch Raven Review showcase for the CityLit Festival.

Anissa Sorokin

  • Sorokin gave a presentation entitled, “Bridge, Telephone, Window: Viewing the Writing Center through an Interpreting Studies Lens,” at the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association’s annual conference in Philadelphia this March. Four Writing Center tutors (Michael Raup, Kelly Purtell, David Gleyzer, and Rachel Albert) attended with her and presented their work.
  • On Saturday, January 30th, the UMBC Writing Center, directed by Professor Sorokin, hosted a mini-regional conference featuring interactive workshops on a variety of topics, including strategies for helping tutors work with graduate students and ELLs. The event was funded through a five hundred dollar grant from the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association and was attended by over fifty writing center administrators and tutors representing more than twelve local institutions.

Fall 2015 Updates

Jessica Berman
  • Berman was invited to give a lecture at a symposium at Uppsala University, Sweden, in October on “Intimate Modernism.” Her talk, entitled “Radio Relations and Transnational Listening,” discussed the situation of listening in the early days of radio in India.
  • Berman was an invited speaker at the October 6, 2015, symposium at Haverford College on “Three Guineas, Pacifist Activism, and the Event of Total War.” The panel will precede the opening of an exhibition, “Testimonies in Art & Action: Igniting Pacifism in the Face of Total War” in the Phillips Wing of Magill Library.
Steph Ceraso
  • Ceraso recently published a co-authored article on “Composing with Sound” in Composition Studies 43.2 (2015).
Christopher Corbett
  • Corbett was invited by the British news service Reuters to write a year-end wrap-up published December 31, 2015 about Baltimore’s social upheaval in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death.
  • Corbett was the keynote speaker on September 12, 2015, in St. Joseph, Missouri, at the annual meeting of the National Pony Express Association.
Lindsay DiCuirci
  • DiCuirci presented a paper at the 23rd annual international conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing in Montreal, Quebec in October. Her paper was entitled, “Antiquarianism as Reanimation in Washington Irving’s Sketchbook.“

Michael Fallon

  • Fallon’s essay, “The Other Side of Silence,” was accepted by the New England Review and was published in its winter issue available in December.

Piotr Gwiazda

  • Gwiazda’s new book of poems, Aspects of Strangers, was published by Moria Books. It was included among the “six best books of world poetry published in 2015” by Scroll magazine.
  • Gwiazda’s translations of and commentary on Grzegorz Wróblewski’s poetry appeared in November as part of a special feature on Tadeusz Różewicz  in Jacket2.
  • In October, Gwiazda participated in a panel entitled, “Teaching Translation to Monolingual Students,” at the American Literary Translators Association Conference in Tucson, Arizona. He also read his translations of Grzegroz Wróblewski’s poetry at the conference.

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley received a five thousand dollar CAHSS Dean’s Research Fund award.

Tanya Olson

  • Olson delivered a talk, “txt me im board: The Long Poem in Contemporary American Poetry,” as part of the Dresher Center for the Humanities’ CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now talks on November 18, 2015.
  • Olson read at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda on Sunday, October 4, 2015, at 2 PM.

Michele Osherow

  • Osherow presented at President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C., with Michael Anderegg on Lincoln, Shakespeare, and the nineteenth century stage.
  • Osherow presented at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., on storytelling in Shakespeare’s Pericles. 

Nicole Pekarske

  • Pekarske published a poem in the next issue of Poet Lore.

Lia Purpura

  • Purpura’s essay, “Scream, or Neverminding” was published this fall in the Georgia Review. 
  • Purpura’s essay, “On Prayer,” appeared in the anthology, After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays, published by University of Georgia Press.
  • Purpura’s essay, “On Looking Away: A Panoramic,” appeared in the anthology, Serious Daring, published by Oxford University Press.
  • Purpura’s essay, “Metaphor Studies,” was named a “notable essay” In Best American Essays 2015.
  • Purpura recently read at the Ivy Bookstore and at the Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason University.
  • Purpura’s new poetry collection, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful, was published by Penguin in September. Her book launch was held at the Ivy Bookstore on October 6, 2015, at 7:00 PM.

Deborah Rudacille

  • The Baltimore City Historical Society honored Rudacille at their 15th Annual Mayor’s Reception and History Honors Event on October 24, 2015, for Roots of Steel, which they called “a very readable account of the rise and fall of one of Baltimore’s great industrial enterprises . . . a fine study.”

Jody Shipka

  • Shipka’s 2013 publication, “Including, but not Limited to, the Digital,” was translated into Spanish and published in the academic journal Enunciación.

Sally Shivnan

  • Shivnan presented the results of the audio-comment project as part of the Hrabowski Innovation Fund at the Provost’s 2nd annual Teaching and Learning Symposium on Friday, September 25, 2015, on two panels.
  • Shivnan participated in a panel for a Faculty Development Center presentation on September 15, 2015, entitled “Beyond the Knee-Jerk Response.” She discussed the topic of “guiding students to do peer review/critique.”
  • The Baltimore Sun composed an article on the audio-comment project spearheaded by Shivnan last year as part of the Hrabowski Innovation Fund and interviewed UMBC students about the initiative.

Orianne Smith

  • Smith won the biennial First Book Prize for Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy (Cambridge 2013) from the British Association of Romantic Studies. She traveled to Cardiff, Wales, to accept the award in mid-July.

Summer 2015 Updates

Ryan Bloom
  • Bloom served as guest editor for the June issue of Smokelong Quarterly.
  • Bloom recently published a short story, “Oh, The Places You Will Go!” in Guernica in July. 
  • Bloom also published a short story in PEN America. 
Steph Ceraso
  • Ceraso received the 2015 Richard Ohmann Award for Outstanding Article, which “recognizes the outstanding refereed article in the past volume year of College English that makes a significant contribution to the field of English studies.”
  • Ceraso was selected to attend a week-long seminar on “Rhetoric and Sensation” at the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, which will take place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, this June.

Christopher Corbett

  • Partisans Pictures interviewed Corbett in July at the Museum of the Chinese in America in New York’s Chinatown for a three-part documentary film series on the story of the Chinese in the American West at the time of the Gold Rush. The documentary film, Gold Mountain, is being made for CCTV-9 in China and focuses on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century West.
  • Corbett also wrote another piece, “Baltimore: It’s so much worse than you think,” in July for the British news service Reuters about the aftermath of the Baltimore riot and its long-term impact on the city.

Piotr Gwiazda

  • Gwiazda published creative work in several magazines including Barzakh, Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), Laurel Review, and Mount Hope.
  • Gwiazda’s translations of Grzegorz Wroblewski’s poetry appeared in Lost Angeles Review, The Nation, and Pleiades. 
  • Gwiazda also offered a residency at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden.

Lia Purpura

  • Purpura was invited to join the advisory board for the Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction.
  • Purpura’s essay, “Dot,” was a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2015.

Spring 2015 Updates

Maleda Belilgne
  • Belilgne’s proposal, along with Steph Ceraso, to fund a Sound Studies Faculty Working Group was approved by the Dresher Center for next year.
  • Belilgne gave a talk as part of the New Faculty Micro-Talk series on April 21 at 5:30 in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.
  • Belilgne presented a paper and chaired a panel, Performing Freedom, Troubling Race, at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in April. The paper is entitled, “Flexing for Freedom: Afrofuturist Bodies and Spatial Narrative.”

Margie Burns

  • Burned served as a judge in the Rice University Graduate Student 90-Second Thesis competition on Friday, March 13.

Steph Ceraso

  • Ceraso’s proposal, along with Maleda Belilgne, to fund a Sound Studies Faculty Working Group was approved by the Dresher Center for next year.
  • Ceraso was invited to present a paper at UCLA’s Inertia Conference, the first major conference on sound and digital humanities.
  • Ceraso gave an invited talk on “Writing with Sound” in the University of Virginia’s English Department in April.
  • Ceraso gave a talk as part of the New Faculty Micro-Talk series on April 21 at 5:30 in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.
  • Ceraso chaired a panel and presented a paper at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on March 9. The panel is entitled “Sensory Rhetorics: Bodily Experiences in Ambient Environments.”
  • Ceraso gave an invited talk on “Making Sense of Sound: Learning to Listen in the 21st Century” at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute.
  • Ceraso’s project, “A Tale of Two Soundscapes: The Story of My Listening Body,” was recently published in Provoke!–a collection on digital sound studies sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.
Christopher Corbett
  • The British news service Reuters asked Corbett to write a piece on the civil unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. The piece was distributed to its clients worldwide.
Jean Fernandez
  • Fernandez’ article, “‘A Quaint House in an Old Quarter’: Gendered Spaces of Empire in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters” was published in Nineteenth Century Gender Studies. 
  • Fernandez was an invited panelist at the Baltimore Museum of Arts’ “Ten Chairs” program where a national panel of experts from a variety of disciplines addressed one specific chair in the exhibition through the lens of his/her discipline.
  • Fernandez was an invited panelist for a discussion of Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” as part of Everyman Theater’s The World of the Play Series, hosted by Marc Steiner and broadcast as part of The Marc Steiner Show.
Piotr Gwiazda
  • Gwiazda received a Dresher Center Summer Faculty Research Fellowship and an award from the CAHSS Dean’s Research Fund to work on his translation project, Zero Visibility: Poems by Grzegorz Wroblewski.
  • Gwiazda’s essay on poetry and bilingualism, entitled, “Like a Bear Playing a Flute,” has been published in Others Will Enter the Gate: An Anthology of Essays by Immigrant Poets by Black Lawrence Press.
  • Gwiazda’s new book, U.S. Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979-2012, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. A brief excerpt appears in Prelude.

Kathryn McKinley

  • McKinley presented a paper on the American Boccaccio Association’s panel, “Lectura Boccaccii I,” at the annual conference of the American Association of Italian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on March 26. The paper is entitled, “Decameron 5.9: Falcon and Famine.”
Tanya Olson
  • Olson was recognized on April 27th by the National Residence Hall Honorary for her support and mentorship of students in her Composition classes.
  • Olson’s poem, “54 Prince” was chosen by Sherman Alexie for inclusion in the anthology, Best American Poetry 2015.
  • Olson was granted an Emerging Writer Fellowship by the Writer’s Center in Bethesda.

Michelle Osherow

  • Osherow was invited to present on The Merchant of Venice at the Shakespeare and Philosophy Symposium at SUNY Purchase in April.
  • Osherow’s play The Mathematics of Being Human was performed at MoMath (the Museum of Mathematics) in New York City in early March and received a reading and workshop at the Comparative Literature Conference in Baltimore on March 26.
  • Osherow’s article, “Wives, Fears and Foreskins: Early Modern Readings of Zipporah and Michal,” appeared in Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture, 1550-1700 with Manchester University Press.

Nicole Pekarske

  • Perkarske gave a poetry reading with her mother on May 9 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM as part of the Evil Grin Poetry Series at Ahh Coffee in Annapolis.

Lia Purpura

  • Purpura was invited to join the editorial board of the University of Georgia’s new literary non-fiction series.
  • Purpura’s essay, “My Eagles,” was published in Orion 34.2 (2015).
  • Purpura recently read and delivered two craft talks at Texas A&M University.
  • Purpura’s collection of essays, Increase, has gone into its second printing.
  • Purpura’s craft essay, “Problems in Constructing a Narrator: Step Away from the Self,” was published in TriQuarterly in April.

Deborah Rudacille

  • Rudacille’s article, “A Lethal Nostalgia,” was published by Aeon on April 23.

Jody Shipka

  • Shipka was one of the selected speakers for the “Digital Rhetoric: Perspectives and Definitions” Symposium at Indiana University in April.
 Sally Shivnan
  • Shivnan presented a paper at the AWP Conference in April. The panel is entitled, “A World of Travel Writing Beyond Travel Magazines,” and it is about the migration of literary travel writing away from mainstream magazines and toward literary journals and long-form-friendly websites.

Anissa Sorokin

  • Sorokin presented on a panel alongside Writing Center tutors and English Department Writing Fellows Rachel Garcia, Michelle Mattern, Disha Patel, and Kelly Purtell at the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association’s annual conference. The panel was entitled “Writing Tutor/Writing Fellow: Navigating Shared Roles and Responsibility.” The group was awarded a MAWCA merit scholarship for its contribution to the conference.

Rachel Wilkinson

  • Wilkinson was invited to present at the Ecojustice and Activism conference at Eastern Michigan University on March 21. The talk is entitled, “Women and the Land: Applying an Ecofeminist Lens to Three Pre-Modern Works.”

Fall 2014 Updates

Ryan Bloom
  • Bloom was recently awarded the 2014 Eli Cantor Residency for Writers–a fellowship through Yaddo. This position was recently held by such writers as Alan Hollingburst and Eugenia Kim.
Margie Burns
  • Burns was elected to the UMBC Adjunct Faculty Advisory Committee (AFAC) as a representative from the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
  • Burns had an article that was recently accepted for publication in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, published by the Jane Austen Society of North America. The title of the article is “Jane Austen’s Short Lexicon of Fine Names.”
Steph Ceraso
  • Ceraso’s article, “(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences,” was chosen as the open access feature of College English 77.2 (2014).
  • Ceraso was invited to discuss her in-progress book project, Sounding, Composition, Composing Sound, at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park, on October 7. Click here for the video of her talk.
Lindsay DiCuirci
  • DiCuirci’s book review of Patricia Roylance’s Eclipse of Empires: World History in 19th-century U.S. Literature and Culture appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Common-Place, an online journal for early American studies.
Piotr Gwiazda
  • Gwiazda’s poems and translations appeared in Anomalous and Diode.
  • Gwiazda’s translations of new poems by Grzegroz Wroblewski appeared in Asymptote and Poetry Wales. 
  • Gwiazda took part in the XXIII Ars Cameralis Festival in Katowice, Poland, on November 15, 2014. While in Poland, he also gave a talk, “Dreams of a Common Language: On Contemporary US Poetry,” at the University of Silesia.
  • Gwiazda’s interview with Polish writer Grzegroz Wroblewski, “The Passenger Syndrome,” was published in Jacket2. 
Susan Harrell
  • Harrell was the recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Presidential Staff Award in recognition of her “outstanding commitment and dedication to the mission and values of UMBC through the excellence of her contributions to the English Department.” The reception for this event will be held on April 1, 2015.
Tanya Olson
  • Olson’s book Boyishly was a winner at the Thirty-Fifth Annual American Book Awards. She attended the awards ceremony in San Francisco on October 26.
Michele Osherow
  • Osherow was awarded a College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Fellowship for Spring 2016.
  • Osherow’s play/project, The Mathematics of Being Human with Manil Suri from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as well as Alan Kreizenbeck from the Theater Department, received funding from CIRCA’s InterArts Program.
  • Osherow was featured in the United States premiere of Conor McPhearson’s The Veil at Quotidian Theatre Co, Bethesda, MD.
  • Osherow was invited to deliver the keynote address at a conference at Gallaudet University on staging Shakespearean imagery.
  • Osherow continued as Folger’s Resident Dramaturg for the 2014/2015 season.
Lia Purpura
  • Purpura’s essay, “In The Despoiled and Radiant Now,” appeared in the November/December issue of Orion Magazine.
  • Purpura’s poem, “Study with Melon,” appeared in the November 24th issue of The New Yorker.
  • As part of the English Department’s Fall Colloquium Series, Purpura gave a talk entitled, “It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful,” on November 19. The talk examined the challenges of integrating a lyric sensibility with overt concerns about our increasingly complex relationship to the environment.
  • Purpura had several poems and essays published in Orion, Iowa Review, and TriQuarterly.
  • Purpura had several readings at the University of West Georgia, George Mason University’s festival “Fall for the Book,” Washington College, and the University of Iowa.
  • Purpura taught a master class on “The Art of the Lyric Essay” at Columbia University in September.
Deborah Rudacille
  • As part of the English Department’s Fall Colloquium Series, Rudacille gave a talk entitled, “Disrupted Healing,” on October 15. The talk examined the disruptive and disrupted healing of transformative grassroots activism.
Sally Shivnan
  • Shivnan’s book review of Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s Panic in a Suitcase was published in the Washington Independent Review of Books in September.
Dorothy Stachowiak
  • Stachowiak chaired a panel and presented a paper at the Film & History Conference in Madison, WI, on October 31. The panel is entitled, “Fan Cultures II: Speaking the language, creating the language–memes, fan fiction, and other derivative works.”