Faculty News Winter 2025

Cynthia Turner Camp was awarded the Franklin College Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023-24. Her students continue to do amazing work on the Hargrett Hours and Southern crime novels (also onInstagram at @ugareadscrime). She also published an essay in the Oxford History of Poetry, and she participated in the inaugural cohort of Humanities Fellows in Franklin College.

Lindsey Harding co-authored an article on faculty writing experiences with Mary Carney (Office of Faculty Affairs). Their paper, “The Black Box of Writing: Faculty Writing in the Academy,” was published in Higher Education this fall.

LeAnne Howe’s work on the Sharing Lands: Reconciliation, Recognition, & Reciprocity continues. The remarkable story of the $172 sent by members of the Choctaw tribe to the starving in Ireland during the Great Famine in 1847 is often told. Despite that fact, both the details surrounding the connection between the Choctaw Nation and the people of Ireland and the gift’s legacy has been greatly understudied. This project will address that gap and will be a transdisciplinary and transatlantic study of the enduring relationship between the Choctaw Nation and Ireland. The "Sharing Lands" project team consists of Dr Padraig Kirwan, Professor LeAnne Howe and Professor Gillian O’Brien. The team are internationally recognized experts in the fields of Indigenous Studies, Literary Studies, Irish Famine Studies and Public History.

Sujata Iyengar hosted research faculty from France and Germany this Spring. Professors Nora Galland and Emmanuelle Peraldo, from Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France, joined Dr. Iyengar, Dr. Cari Goetchus (Environment + Design), Dr. Mario Erasmo (Classics), Dr. Miriam Jacobson (English), and Dr. Iyengar’s Environmental Literature students for a symposium on the Early Modern Environmental Humanities and for a week of visits to UGA’s gardens. She describes her prior pedagogical collaboration with French and American universities and middle schools in an essay co-authored with PhD candidate Mikaela LaFave and alumna Hayden M. Benson (MA 2020), “Existential Shakespeare: Citizenship in the International Service-Learning Classroom,” which appeared in the collection Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major (Palgrave Macmillan). At the end of April, Professor Enno Ruge visited from Ludwig-Maximilian Universität, Munich, Germany, to deliver the annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture and to lead a discussion with Dr. Iyengar’s Shakespeare on Film students.

Miriam Jacobson has published two peer-reviewed articles this semester, one on the early modern Mummy trade and medicinal cannibalism in the English imagination for the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, and another on Shakespeare's rarely read poem "A Lover's Complaint," in Shakespeare Survey.

Aruni Kashyap's American market debut How to Date a Fanatic, will be published by HarperVia in 2026. Additionally, Kashyap’s story collection, The Way You Want To Be Loved was published by Gaudy Boy Press in October. Kashyap's translation of Anuradha Sarma Pujari’s best-selling Assamese novel My Poems Are Not for Your Ad-Campaign was shortlisted for the 2024 Valley of Words Book Awards. He translated and sold another book by Pujar, Ten Love Stories & a Novella of Despair, to Westland Books, due for publication in 2026. He is a visiting professor at Converse University, South Carolina, in January 2025 and an invited speaker at the College of William & Mary in March 2025.

J. R. Mattison, along with Cynthia Turner Camp and J.D. Sargan, won a Centennial Grant from the Medieval Academy of America to support their upcoming Spring Symposium, "Medieval on My Mind: The Past, Present, and Future of Manuscripts in the Deep South." The symposium, which will take place April 4-5, 2025, will examine the South's relationship to the medieval past. The grant helps support local initiatives across the nation that celebrate medieval studies as the Medieval Academy of America enters its second century.

Barbara McCaskill and co-editors Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Mona Nair have received an advance contract from Edinburgh University Press for The Lives, Writings and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters. This eighteen-chapter collection of original essays, an outcome of the 2023 Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters year of hybrid, in-person, and online events which they co-organized, includes chapters by McCaskill and Dr. David Diamond. Her essay titled "Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Ethics of Personal Rest and National Restoration" is forthcoming in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 41.2 (Spring 2025). This January, she has been invited to participate in two MLA conference roundtables: "Making Public Humanities Visible: A Cross-Institutional Project on Phillis Wheatley Peters," which has been included among the presidential sessions on the conference theme, and "Diversifying Biographical Editions."

In June 2024, Richard Menke presented the Wolff Keynote Lecture at the conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) in Sterling, Scotland. His talk, "Victorian Media and the Places of Serial Modernity,” considered how Victorian periodicals not only treated serial print culture as part of what it meant to be modern but also drew on serial publication to imagine the relationship of contemporary life to a future that was bound to appear right on schedule.

David Ingle will be teaching ENGL 3100 at Oxford in the Fall 2026 semester. His course will be titled “Albion’s Psychic Landscape: Arcana and Psychogeography in British Culture.”

Chigozie Obioma’s new novel, The Road to the Country, was named as a best fiction book of the year by The Economist and The Kirkus

Review. It was also named one of the books on the longlist for the Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize for 2025.

Andrew Zawacki recently completed a yearlong fellowship in the Long Term Photobook Program at the Penumbra Foundation. In October, he participated in a colloquium at Université Paris Cité devoted to the work of Anne Portugal, whose latest poetry book, s&lfies, he's currently translating. His new poetry volume, These Late Eclipses, is due in spring.

Adam Parkes gave a lecture titled "Particular Joyce" at Harvard in October. While continuing to work on Joyce, he is also writing pieces on punctuation in D.H. Lawrence, conservatism and insecurity in the spy novelist Len Deighton, and censorship, publication, and war in the modernist period. He is guest editing a special issue of South Atlantic Review on last year's SAMLA conference theme of (in)security. He is also busy organizing next year's international Lawrence conference in Mexico City with colleagues in Mexico and the U.S.

Magdalena Zurawski recently traveled with other UGA faculty in the humanities and the social sciences to the University of Liverpool for a faculty summit. As a result of these meetings, collaborations between UGA’s and UoL’s graduate creative writing programs are being planned, including both short and long-term student and faculty exchanges. Graduate students will soon have new opportunities for study and research abroad in Liverpool. A selection of Dr. Zurawski’s translation of Miron Białoszewski’s Heart Attack appeared in the Michigan Quarterly’s translation issue. She also presented her translations at the fall ALTA conference in Milwaukee.

Faculty News Winter 2025

The Park Hall Monitor

Support English at UGA

Slideshow

Faculty News Winter 2025

The Park Hall Monitor

Support English at UGA