In addition to the awards and honors listed above, our faculty had another productive year as researchers and scholars:
Dr. Thomas Anderson’s book, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton, received strong reviews after its publication last April by Ashgate Press. Dr. Anderson also wrote book reviews for Sixteenth-Century Journal and Seventeenth-Century News. Additionally, he offered a Bettersworth Leadership Lecture on “Shakespeare’s Memory” at Oktibbeha County High School.
Dr. Greg Bentley has been working on a book titled Eroticism and the Short Story; its eight chapters will focus on the works of Faulkner, Welty, Joyce, Kay Boyle, Bobbie Ann Mason, Frank O’Connor, John Updike, and D. H. Lawrence. Dr. Bentley hopes to publish these essays in various scholarly journals before collecting them into the book. He has also submitted two other articles for publication, one on Shakespeare, the other on Elizabeth Spencer.
Dr. Shalyn Claggett has made significant progress on converting her dissertation into a book, which will be titled The Science of Character in Victorian Literature and Culture. She presented a portion of this work at the Narrative Conference in a paper titled “Science and Confessional Discourse in Harriet Martineau’s Rejection of Theism.”
Dr. Susan Cook, one of our newest lecturers, has written high school curriculum units on Gawain and the Green Knight and Ivanhoe for the Center for Learning.
Dr. Pat Creevy has completed several chapters of his manuscript on the poetry of Wordsworth.
Dr. Scott Crossley has published “Metaphorical Considerations in Hip-Hop Music: Toward a Better Understanding of the Hip-Hop Generation” in African American Review. He has also published conference papers in the Proceedings of the 19th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society and the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Additionally, Dr. Crossley presented papers at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse in Minneapolis, at the Second Language Research Forum, and at the 18th Annual International ISHS Humor Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. He also has articles forthcoming in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, the Modern Language Journal, and the English for Specific Purposes Journal.
Dr. Lara Dodds has published “Art and Fallacy or ‘The Naked Offer’? Style and Science in Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica” in Prose Studies. Her article on “Margaret Cavendish’s Domestic Experience” has been accepted for publication in Genre and Innovation in the Life Writings of Early Modern Englishwomen.
Becky Hagenston published her story “The Good News” in The Carolina Quarterly.
Dr. Shirley Hanshaw has a contract with University Press of Mississippi to publish her Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa. She also has a contract with Michigan State University Press to publish her Re-membering and Surviving: Representation of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in African American Fiction. She also presented a paper on “Representation of the Conjure Man/Woman in African American Fiction” at the Conference of the African American Association, Accra, Ghana. Her paper on “Refusal to be Can(n)on Fodder: African American Representation of the Vietnam War and Canon Formation” will be published in the proceedings of the conference on “Thirty Years After: Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, University of Hawaii.
Dr. Nancy Hargrove published “T. S. Eliot’s Year Abroad, 1910-1911: The Visual Arts,” in South Atlantic Review. She also published “T. S. Eliot and Opera in Paris, 1910-1911,” in the Yeats Eliot Review.
Dr. Holly Johnson’s “The Hard Bed of the Cross: Good Friday Preaching and the Seven Deadly Sins” will be published this spring in a collection of essays edited by Richard Newhauser. Last summer, Dr. Johnson presented “Hearing Sermons, Seeing Images: Private Meditation as Public Event” at the Symposium for the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society in Budapest. Additionally, she spoke on “God’s Music-Making: The Cross-Harp Metaphor in Late-Medieval Preaching” at the Southeastern Medieval Association in Oxford at the University of Mississippi.
Dr. Matt Little continues his research on Henry James and William James. Also, his “Bozo—Beau Sot” has been accepted for publication in American Speech.
Dr. Richard Lyons read his poetry in Washington DC as part of the Café Muse Reading Series; he also read his work at the University of Memphis. Additionally, he has published five poems this year, two in Cimarron Review, one each in Crab Orchard Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Subtropics.
Dr. Kelly Marsh has nearly completed her book, In Search of the Mother’s Pleasure: The Motherless Daughter in Literature. She also presented a chapter from her book, “Gender, Narrative, and the Inheritance Problem in The House of Mirth” at the Narrative Conference.
Dr. Meg Murray has nearly completed her revisions of her book Wandering Pilgrim: Sex, Death, and the Soul of Margaret Fuller, which has been accepted for publication with the University of Georgia Press.
Dr. Tennyson O’Donnell presented a paper on “The Leopoldina Journals: Written Knowledge and the Rhetorical Construction of Hawaii” at Rhetoric Society conference in Memphis. He also spoke on “The Rhetorical Construction of Hawaii: What Written Communication Does” at the International Conference on Arts and Humanities; he will speak on a similar topic this spring at the Conference of College Composition and Communication. Additionally, he and five graduate students will speak on “Empowering Student Writers” at the Southeastern Writing Center Association conference.
Dr. Farrell O’Gorman published his novel, Awaiting Orders with Idylls Press. He also published four entries in Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary, as well as “’A Twentieth-First Century Writer’: Richard Rodriguez on Flannery O’Connor” in the Flannery O’Connor Review. Additionally, Dr. O’Gorman presented papers on O’Connor, McCarthy, and Caldwell at conferences in Michigan and Alabama; he was also featured in an interview published in the Flannery O’Connor Newsletter. This coming fall, Dr. O’Gorman will publish four major articles in Critique and other significant journals.
Dr. Richard Patteson has nearly completed his book on the work of Caribbean author Robert Antoni. Also, his article “Resurrecting Rafael: Fictional Incarnations of a Dominican Dictator” appeared in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters.
Beyond his work as editor of The Mississippi Quarterly, Dr. Noel Polk has published his edition of Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust, and The Sound and the Fury, the last volume of Faulkner’s novels published the Library of America.
Dr. Rich Raymond published Teaching American Literature at an East European University: Explicating the Rhetoric of Liberty with Mellen Press.
Ann Spurlock, our Director of Composition, and recent MA graduates Alicia Aiken and Tracey Odom Smith, have published A Guide to Freshman Composition at Mississippi State University with Fountainhead Press.
Dr. Benjamin Torbert published a review of Jack Chambers’ Review of Sociolinguistic Theory in the American Speech. In the book American Voices, he co-authored two articles: “When Linguistic Worlds Collide” and “Islands of Diversity.” Additionally, Dr. Torbert spoke on “The Sociolinguistic Variable as an Anchor for Salience” at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics at Auburn.
Dr. Brad Vice has signed a contract to publish his collection of short stories, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.
Dr. Robert West served as guest editor of Mississippi Quarterly for its special issue on Southern poetry. He also published eight articles on contemporary poets in Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary. Additionally, Dr. West published two poems in Southern Poetry Review and another in Cold Mountain Review, as well reviews of James Applewhite in Southern Cultures and Michael McFee in Appalachian Journal. Further, his previously published article on the poetry of James Sill has been selected for re-publication in a collection of essays on Sill; he has also written an introduction to a forthcoming new edition of George Ella Lyon’s Catalpa.
Dr. Rich Wolf continues his study of various editions of ten Restoration plays, focusing on page and stage changes. He plans a series of articles and ultimately a book on this topic. Dr. Wolf also continues his writing of children’s plays based on literary works: While he submits his play on Beowulf for online publication, Sigma Tau Delta will soon perform his play on Poe.
In addition to the conference papers mentioned above, faculty presented their
scholarship at venues across the nation, including the annual conferences of
the Modern Language Association, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association,
and the Mississippi Philological Association.