Faculty News Winter 2024

Cynthia Camp received a Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award.  These annual awards honor outstanding faculty in Franklin College who have shown a sustained commitment to high-quality instruction.

Josh Cohen’s article, "Superman as the Measure of All Things: Black Gods and White Saviours in Watchmen and Doomsday Clock," was published in Literature and Theology.

Fredric Dolezal delivered this year’s annual invited lecture of the Helsinki Society for Historical Lexicography on May 12, 2023, on his recent discovery of an intriguing copy of John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) in a private library collection which contains voluminous handwritten manuscript notes that show a close reading and engagement with the lexicographic content of the print artifact. Especially interesting is the introduction of illustrative quotations into the Essay from a variety of literary sources – most notably from Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of Tub first printed in 1704 – which most likely precedes this practice in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, and most certainly, the New English Dictionary edited by James Murray. Dr. Dolezal is in the process of writing an article about the discovery and its significance.

Lindsey Harding’s debut novel, PILGRIMS 2.0, was published by Acre Books this fall. She was also awarded an Early Career Contributions to the Field award sponsored by The Association for Writing Across the Curriculum and the WAC Clearinghouse.

LeAnne Howe delivered the 2023  Keynote lecture: “Writing With Film,” at the Georgia Highlands Writers Conference. In May, the Starz Center for Performing Arts, Tampa Bay, Florida, staged a full production of her play, Savage Conversations. Howe and Irish director and playwright Colm Summers were hosted by The Ground Floor: Berkeley Rep’s Center for the Creation and Development of New Work for their new play, The Keening. Howe also hosted the 8th annual AIR Talk (American Indian Returnings) at UGA, a lecture series curated by Howe since 2015.  She also invited National Book Award-nominated Dakota Author Susan Power at UGA on September 2023. Howe was invited to read from her forthcoming novel, 1918 Union Valley Road, set during the 1918 flu pandemic in Oklahoma, at Michigan State University. 

Sujata Iyengar literally had a banner year, honored on the "Jumbotron" at a UGA football game as a new Distinguished Research Professor (which is the highest research honor that the University of Georgia confers). Her most significant publication this year was probably her monograph Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory (Arden Bloomsbury). She also published essays about traditional media (books) and non-traditional media (artworks), in the essay "Books in Space: Early Modern Books and Contemporary Artists' Books" in The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England (OUP) and about Shakespeare’s unexpected connections to fashion, digital fan cultures and streaming video and audio in “Romeo and Juliet and Queer Temporality in Three Twenty-first-century Streaming Web-Series” in Shakespeare on Screen: “Romeo and Juliet” (Cambridge UP) ; and “Queen of Egypt and Queen of the Bey-Hive: Sophie Okonedo's Cleopatra at the National Theatre (2018)” in the journal Shakespeare Bulletin.

Aruni Kashyap was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship 2023 and was shortlisted for the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation for translating Indigenous writer Yeshe Dorje Thongchi’s short stories. He also translated and published an Indian cult classic My Poems Are Not For Your Ad-Campaign (Penguin Random House 2023), by Anuradha Sarma Pujari. He served as a visiting writer to Lander University and Valdosta State University, where he read from his fiction and led workshops and masterclasses. As a Good Thunder Reading Series writer at Minnesota State University, he delivered a talk called “Writing Justice, Writing Truth: Can a Story Change the World?” He was invited to speak at The Translators’ Adda symposium on “Translating Borderlands and Indigeneity” by the Department of Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He also moderated a conversation at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African-American Studies with British writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes. His essay “The Biography of a Cult Classic” was accepted for publication in Margins, a literary magazine published by the Asian American Writers Workshop. He has been invited to deliver the keynote speech at NEXUS-24, the biannual interdisciplinary conference at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the annual “Tagore Lecture in Modern Indian Literature” at Cornell University in 2024.

Elizabeth Kraft, Professor emerita, has an essay forthcoming in Cuadernos Jovellanistas, "Robert Burns and the Creation of Modern Nostalgia."

Christine Lasek-White's short story collection, The Dangerous Lives of Girls and Other Stories, was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize. She also organized a humanities department professional clothing drive for the Student Government Association Clothing Closet and collected 65 articles of clothing.

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms was published on October 31, 2023, edited by Isiah Lavender and three others. Dr. Lavender has been invited to give a lecture in Arles, France at the 3rd edition of the “Realities of Science Fiction Symposium” hosted by LUMA Arles from December 15-17, 2023.

Barbara McCaskill continued her leadership with Drs. Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Mona Narain (TCU) of the multi-institutional, multidisciplinary series “The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters: A Poet and Her Legacies.” They participated in a podcast on the poet for the American Writers Museum in Chicago. With an American Art Grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, she opened “A World Within Worlds: The Visionary Art of Sam Doyle” on September 23 at Penn Center, St. Helena Island, SC. With Dr. Shaundra Walker, Associate Director of Instruction and Research Services, Georgia College, and Dr. Sidonia Serafini (PhD ’22), Assistant Professor of English, Georgia College, she nominated the Black educator and suffragist Adella Hunt Logan (1863-1915) to the Georgia Women of Achievement, cofounded by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. With Dr. Serafini, she completed the first of two invited -African American National Biography- essays on Harlem Renaissance figures Barron and Caroline Wilkins. She was the 2023 Faculty Honoree at the Institute for Women’s Studies Fall reception and received an M. G. Michael Award for her new research project.

Éric Morales-Franceschini has won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association for his book The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation, published by the University of Virginia Press. Read more about this wonderful achievement HERE.

Adam Parkes's new book, Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege, was published by Oxford University Press in July. His article "Erskine Childers and the Sense of Insecurity" also appeared this summer, in the journal Cusp. In November, Parkes gave the Presidential Address at the SAMLA conference on "(In)security" in Atlanta.

Nancee Reeves was awarded the 2023 University of Georgia Award for Excellence in Teaching. She was also inducted into the UGA Teaching Academy. UGA’s Teaching Academy was founded in 1999 with a mission “to promote and celebrate excellence in teaching and to foster learning through inquiry.” 

Esra Mirze Santesso published her second monograph Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State UP, 2023). She gave a talk about her book at the Athens-Clarke County Library and was joined by Aaron Meskin, Professor of Philosophy, to converse about how Muslim comics illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Back in September, she spent a week in Birmingham, UK to attend the Muslim Women's Popular Fiction Conference, which she co-organized with four other collaborators. This event was sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

J.D. Sargan's latest article, "What Could a Trans Book History Look Like? Toward Trans Codicology," is currently available to download open access as part of a special issue of criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (vol. 64, issue 3-4) dedicated to "New Approaches to Critical Bibliography and the Material Text."

Since retiring in May 2022, Fran Teague has finished up several publications, consulted on Irish Research Council post-doctoral grants, and directed Arms and the Man. She is currently working on a book project about historic theatres. 

The “Art is a Form of Freedom” exhibit, envisioned by Caroline Young and brought to reality through collaboration with the women of Whitworth, the Georgia Museum of Art, CGA alumni, and the Department of Corrections, has won the prestigious Silver Medal award from the Southeastern Museums Conference. The SEMC Exhibition Competition showcases the best in the profession and provides benchmarks for regional exhibition efforts in southeastern museums. 

Andrew Zawacki has a new poetry book, These Late Eclipses (Verge Books), due in spring 2025. He recently judged both the Georgia Poetry Prize for UGA Press and the annual chapbook prize at Oversound. He taught a 5-week online course on Clarice Lispector for Hugo House in Seattle this past summer and will direct a sequel to the course this coming spring. The recipient of an LMU-UGA Faculty Exchange Fellowship, Zawacki visited Munich last summer to make photographs of former gravel quarries, now recreational lakes, under the auspices of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany. He is also making photographs for UGA History professor Claudio Saunt's project, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, "The Land Beneath Our Feet: Mapping Cherokee Homesteads in the Early Nineteenth Century." Finally, Zawacki held a fellowship in March to participate in the Charcoal Book Club's annual photobook retreat in Montana, The Chico Review, which brought together 64 emerging photographers. It's considered the most prestigious photobook retreat in the country. He will continue his work on that photography project throughout the calendar year 2024, as one of a dozen fellows in the Penumbra Foundation's Longterm Photobook Project course.

For the 2022-23 academic year, Magdalena Zurawski was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Łódz, in Łódz, Poland, where she conducted archival and field research for her newest book, a creative non-fiction project about her Polish family’s history in WWII. During her time in Poland, she gave literary readings at the Institute of English at the University of Łodz and in the “Wspolny Pokoj” literary series at Dom Ksiegarza in Warsaw, Poland. This past winter she conducted a one-day writing workshop entitled “Living Memory” for an international group of students at American was Corner UŁ. Her poem, “Dog is a Way of Thinking” was published in the New York Times Magazine on February 16, 2023. She also presented a paper on the Polish poet Miron Białoszewski at ASAP/14, the 2023 conference for the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, and had work published in the Texas Review poetry issue. She is currently at work on a creative non-fiction book and translating Białoszewski's prose book, Zawał.