The Quill
spring 09
S a n ta C l a r a U n i v e r s i t y A New Minor in Cinema Studies Beginning as a Pathway in the new Core, the English Department soon hopes to have in place a Minor in Cinema Studies. The Minor in Cinema Studies would involve the critical study of film and video history, theory, and aesthetics, rather than film or video production. Although minors could have the opportunity to do screenwriting and production work, they will primarily engage in the interdisciplinary study of national cinemas, international film movements, major and minor filmmakers in various traditions, film and media theory, the economic, legal, and political forces governing film industry practice, and the relationship between film and the other arts. Ideally, undergraduates would emerge from our program of courses not only knowledgeable about cinema, but also enriched by contact with history, literature, foreign cultures, philosophy, and theology. (In a January survey of 220 English majors, 51% requested more English Department courses in cinema studies, the highestranked category in terms of interest.) Students would be urged to take one introductory course and five other courses, plus two quarters of a weekly, two-unit, film viewing course called “Film Odyssey,” for seven courses in total. A maximum of four courses for Cinema Studies credit would be taken from any one department. In order for a course to be considered for inclusion in the Minor, it would not just use film or video as a form of illustration of a literary or historical text but would Continued back page
New Core, Ready or Not
When I was an undergraduate at St. Louis University one of the professors that I found impressive was Fr. Walter Ong, who taught Renaissance literature. He wrote something that I still find helpful as a teacher: We [Jesuit educators] are called on to cultivate and to communicate to our more mature students an attitude which sees literature not as simply a refuge or solace but as a part of our unfinished world, where the unknown is faced… This point of view demands certain reservations in our attitudes toward Renaissance humanism…[otherwise] literature becomes a means of escape to the golden days of youth and intellectual irresponsibility…The scholar who finds the twentieth century less comprehensible than the sixteenth century understands very little of the sixteenth. Ong’s implication finds an echo in education specialist Henry Giroux, who writes that “essential to a critical pedagogy is the need to affirm the lived reality of difference as the ground on which to pose questions of theory and practice.” This combination of an education that 1) seeks connection with an “unfinished” world, and that 2) recognizes that we’re not all the same goes a long way in explaining the transformations that are
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oming to the typical Santa Clara education next c year. Students entering in fall quarter 2009 will be the first group whose studies will be structured by the new core curriculum, and it has been designed to put in place Fr. Paul Locatelli’s statement some years ago that “a Santa Clara education means inspiring students and graduates to make a difference in the world…We hope our mission of fashioning a better world spreads to corporations, courtrooms, Congress, and beyond.” With graduates Janet Napolitano now heading the Department of Homeland Security, and Leon Panetta heading the CIA, the importance of such learning objectives comes into clear focus. For the English major, one of the most exciting aspects of the new core is its thematic nature, its overriding implied narrativity and sequencing of ideas. No longer is it simply “Composition and Rhetoric.” Now it will be courses such as “The Challenge of Love: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” “Carpe Diem or Memento Mori,” “Confronting the Unknown,” “Technology and the Science Fiction Film,” and “Representations of the Body, Nature and Foreigner in Ages of Empire.” Want to sign up?
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California Legacy Update Spring 2009 The California Legacy Project has made great strides in its goal of maintaining and promoting California history. This year featured the publication of several new books, an exciting grant award, and the continued production of the California Legacy radio series. The California Legacy website has been updated, and the California Legacy Project is still virtually alive in Second Life. This Fall, Wallace Stegner’s West was released as the newest addition to the project’s book series. This single-author reader features a broad range of Wallace Stegner’s short fiction and essays, including several previouslyunpublished pieces, and was edited with an introduction by the author’s son, Page Stegner.
Wallace Stegner founded and directed the creative writing program at Stanford University and devoted his professional career to writing about the West. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and his work reflects the dynamic atmosphere of Northern California in the mid1900s and works to protect the cultural base that he helped create for the region.
This January, the California Legacy Project was awarded a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. This money will be applied to the production of a longer-format radio series entitled Nature Dreaming. The California Legacy Project also continues to produce segments for the Your California
Legacy radio series, which can now be listened to on the California Legacy website in a new user-friendly format. In the coming months, the California Legacy Project’s book series will expand with an anthology of writing on California deserts. http://californialegacy.org/ media_gallery/video_gallery.html
A second collection was also added to the project’s book series this fall. Spring Salmon, Hurry to Me! celebrates the role of the seasons through the eyes of some of California’s best Indian writers and features a literary calendar of the seasons that play such a large role in the lives of California Indians. The book is an expansion on a series from the Heyday Institute’s magazine, and features poems, myths, and personal stories from the Karuk, Shasta, Maidu, Yana,
Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies: A New Area of Study at Santa Clara University by Cynthia Mahamdi
In 2007, SCU gained a new minor, “AIMES,” or Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, allowing students to study Arabic (now offered up to the advanced level), participate in study abroad programs in the Near and Middle East, and take a broad range of courses relating to the Middle East and Islamic world. Seven departments are currently participating in the minor, including English, which offers an advanced literature course, “Studies in the Literatures of the Middle Eastern and Islamic World,” currently focused on contemporary Arabic literature and film. I teach the course in the fall so that students can attend the Cinemayaat, or Arab Film Festival, which is held in October in the Bay Area. Students watch some of the dozens of films screened and often get to meet Arab directors, producers, and actors.
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Wintu, Atsugewi, Nomlaki, Yokuts, and Chumas tribes.
I have also just developed a new course on the historical relationship between the West and the Middle East from the early 19th century to the present. It is hoped that AIMES and the Department of English will continue to expand its offerings in this exciting new field and that our students with an interest in international relations, world literatures, and languages will benefit from the exposure to the ideas, arts, and diverse cultures found in a part of the world that is so often misunderstood. In sharing aspects of my near-Eastern background and close connections to the Arab world, my travels abroad and years spent studying or teaching at European universities with my students, it is my hope that more SCU students will be inspired to take advantage of the many opportunities SCU offers to broaden their horizons and become citizens of a globalized world.
Letter from the Chair I don’t have an avatar or a page on Facebook; I don’t even have an ipod and only have a cellphone because my evenmore ancient father recently gave me one for Christmas. How did I get to be such a fuddy duddy (and only my benighted generation would use such a word) without seeing it happen? Does this mean I’m living in the world of ideas, or just that I’m out of it? Why do I have a growing fascination with photos of times past, with my parents as children, with befores and afters, with babies of all species? Am I turning into Yeats, or just a dirty old man (and maybe Maud Gonne thought the two were the same?). I didn’t used to notice Spring, but now I love it. And just as I’d been warned by the ancients, each John Hawley year seems to go more quickly than the one before. Festina lente! I note that I proclaimed in last year’s Quill that “the ‘life of the mind’ is a wonderful vocation,” neglecting to curb my enthusiasm with some recognition that the mind/body problem hasn’t been solved yet. The cover photo of Dick Osberg, who suddenly died in October of 2007, dramatically underscores the urgency of our lives, an urgency camouflaged by slow days and weeks. I listen at my office doorway and hear down the hallway the creaking joints and lamenting moans of an aging faculty. Well, okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point. Carpe diem! I have to say, though, that that life of the mind bit is more compelling, rather than less, each year. Maybe it’s the Obama effect—hope springs eternal, and all that; the economy’s in crisis, there are horribly complex problems all over the world, but ideas continue to sparkle and beckon. Most recently Terry Beers called my attention to a book he’s using in his composition class, Tim Cresswell’s fascinating Place, and the wholly intriguing notion of social geography. We give meaning to the space in which we find ourself, and in turn are given meaning willy-nilly by being placed somewhere, and it can be a contested meaning (think: graffiti), an objectified meaning (think: museum), etc. I remember V.S. Naipaul’s complicated relationship not only with the native Caribbean that he rejected, but also with the London to which he moved: “I grew to feel,” he writes, “that the grandeur belonged to the past; that I had come to England at the wrong time; that I had come too late to find the England, the heart of empire, which (like a provincial, from a far corner of the empire) I had created in my fantasy.” Naipaul suggests to me the intersection of time and space that we each are, and suddenly the present moment comes into full view. Through our engagement with space, we bring our particular presence, our body thrown through time, into this place now layered with innumerable interpretations and fleeting ownerships. That’s one of the reasons we English majors read—books, yes, but a lot else.
Revisioning American Cultural Studies Two of our Americanists have published remarkable books in recent months. Eileen Elrod’s Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography, from the University of Massachusetts Press, focus on religion in the lives of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England believers, who found themselves marginalized by their race or sex and who therefore relied on their faith to reconcile the tension between the spiritual experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of exclusion and injustice. A very favorable review in the journal Church History notes that Elrod successfully guides the reader through a “thicket of theoretical apparatus” and helps us view these early Americans through a the critical lenses of feminism, border theory, critical race theory, and postcolonialism. According to the critic, in Elrod’s capable hands “the narratives became and remain plain-speaking personal life histories addressed to all people seeking the truth and purpose of God’s saving grace.” Michelle Burnham’s Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System, from Dartmouth College Press, radically refigures traditional portraits of seventeenth-century New England literature and culture by situating colonial writing within the spatial, transnational, and economic contexts that characterized the earlymodern “world system” theorized by Immanuel Wallerstein and others. One prominent critic writes that “this learned book will quickly assume its rightful place on the shelf of anyone interested in early American history and culture,” and another writes that “this book is sure to have a major impact on the literary and historical study of early New England.” This complex argument, from a cultural studies point of view, discusses literature in the contemporaneous contexts of early American commerce, aesthetics, and economics:
Next year, Terry Beers will be chair and Eileen Elrod associate chair of the English Department.
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a heady brew.
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Creative Writing Updates by Rebecca Black
As the new Director of Creative Writing, I have enjoyed getting to know our creative writing student minors. Currently we have –minors, with majors majoring in every discipline from Philosophy to Engineering. This fall, the program sponsored the visit of former Alice James Press editor April Ossmann, who spoke to students about her thirty years in the editing. She read from her first collection of poems, Anxious Music. In February, five Santa Clara Review students received support to attend the Associated Writing Programs annual conference in Chicago. Ron Hansen
and Juan Velasco also attended the conference. They talked to hundreds of poets and writers at their Santa Clara Review booth, and attended panels on a multitude of topics. While we were in Chicago, Jeremy Townley and student Lauren Backes recruited new minors at the major/minor fair.
This spring, biographer and fiction writer Catherine Brady will visit campus. She has recently completed a biography of Elizabeth Blackburn, a molecular biologist and leader in stem-cell research. Brady’s new book of fiction, The Mechanics of Falling, was published this spring.
Also in February, our writer-inresidence, poet Forrest Hamer, gave a reading, an interview, visited classes, and met individually with several aspiring student poets. Hamer is the author of three books of poetry, Call and Response, Middle Ear, and Rift. He spoke at length about his experiences in listening and emotional exploration as a practicing psychotherapist in the East Bay.
Next year, we hope the program will continue to flourish as we develop a new web presence, seek program donors, and continue to create opportunities for students to work closely with visiting writers. Our new classes, like Claudia McIsaac’s Creative Writing and Social Justice course, continue to offer innovative connections to the new core curriculum. We hope to work
From Book To Blog The response to Marc Bousquet’s 2008 book How The University Works has kept him pretty busy. During the spring term, he’ll make several appearances, including at UNC-Chapel Hill, Yale, NYU, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Florida. He was also invited to join the “Brainstorm” group blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he publishes text and video: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm. In the excerpt below, he talks about blogging and the way electronic media is changing academic writing. The complete interview with Jeffrey Williams appears in the minnesota review. Williams Besides your book, you have developed other avenues to talk about the university, notably your blog and your series of video interviews. The blog has become a sort of clearinghouse for progressive issues in higher ed. What do you see as the function of your blog? What are you doing with it? Bousquet While I understood blogging intellectually, I personally was in the habit of writing very long things. And I still had this romantic idea of writing that you bring it to your cave and labor and come out with an incredibly contorted finished product, so I wasn’t at all sure that I was ready for the short form and all the characteristics of blogging—rapid response, finish your thought quickly—that were at variance with my personal habits as a writer. I’m grateful to have had the chance to be at The
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closely in programming with the new Cinema Studies program, as well as the Justice and the Arts initiative, the student writing Hub, the Women’s and Gender Studies program, and the Environmental Studies Institute. The program would like to thank our student assistant, Lauren Silk, for her work on planning events this year. We are grateful for the support of the Office of Multicultural Learning, and the Center for Student Leadership. Members of the current creative writing program committee are professors Diane Dreher, Ron Hansen, Claudia McIsaac, Kirk Glaser, and Jeremy Townley.
Chronicle of Higher Education, in part because they imposed a certain discipline on me. They expected me to post at a certain rate, and without a little bit of editorial pushing I would be one of those people who posts every day for three weeks and then not at all for three months. Williams In a way it clearly follows your interest is participatory culture. Where do you see it going? Bousquet Because it connects to elements of my teaching and research, it has become an opportunity for me to practice what I preach. If I’m asking my students to compose activist video, then it becomes an opportunity for me to figure out what it is I’m asking them to do and how can I guide them best. I don’t say, “Well, they are young people, therefore they know all about Facebook and YouTube.” I see it as an opportunity to get involved and make my own judgments about the best ways to frame pedagogy and help them to achieve their goals in using social media. At another level, I’m very interested in different ways of framing scholarship. I’m very concerned about the future of academic writing, of academic discourse in the context of the electronic mediation of textuality. What would it mean for scholarship to acknowledge the possibilities and engage more fully the possibilities of having scholarship literally interwoven with an archive? People have been exploring just how that would work, but those practices have yet to pervade the profession.
What is Your Vocation? by Diane Dreher
What should I do with my life? Where do I find joy and meaning? For the past few years, I’ve examined these questions, exploring the concept of vocation which flourished during the Renaissance. In what psychologists call the “selffulfilling prophecy,” our expectations dramatically shape our experience. Because they believed that God had given them a unique set of gifts and a personal call to vocation, Renaissance men and women made unprecedented contributions to science, religion, politics, and the arts. In a remarkable parallel, today’s psychological research has found that not only do we each have a unique set of strengths but that using them can make our lives happier, healthier, and more successful. (You can identify your own strengths with the free VIA-IS survey on www.authentichappiness.org.) Each major challenge or change offers us new opportunities to discern our vocations and renew our lives, as I’ve found by conducting empirical studies of people from their late teens through retirement and examining over 100 Renaissance lives—from Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Galileo, and Michelangelo, to St. Ignatius, St. Teresa of Avila, and Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz. My findings have appeared in academic journals and conferences on Renaissance studies, lifelong learning, and clinical psychology. Combining insights from Renaissance lives with research in psychology and neuroscience, my new book, Your Personal Renaissance (Da Capo, 2008), shows how we can discern our vocations throughout the changing seasons of our lives. Since 2003, Santa Clara has affirmed the Ignatian call to vocation in our DISCOVER Program. Funded by a Lilly Endowment grant, DISCOVER offers a series of talks, reflection groups, retreats, immersions, and classes to support ongoing vocational discernment in students, faculty, and staff. As DISCOVER Curriculum Director, I’ve incorporated vocation into my freshman composition courses and senior seminar, developed a new English/Religious Studies course on vocation, and helped faculty develop new courses on vocation in English, Theatre, Communication, Religious Studies, Philosophy, Economics, Sociology, and Law. In our new 2009 University Core Curriculum, students may choose a Vocation Pathway, a series of four courses that help them reflect on this essential theme. The Pathway will offer courses from 12 departments, including writing and literature courses from English Professors Simone Billings, Rebecca Black, Diane Dreher, Judy Dunbar, Claudia McIsaac, and Juan Velasco. Ongoing vocational discernment holds great promise for us today. I’m convinced that our greatest natural resources are our hearts and minds, our personal gifts and creativity. As English majors, we know how creativity brings hope in times of crisis, for we’ve often found consolation in writing and in reading great works of literature. By affirming our own creativity, by renewing our sense of vocation as we confront today’s challenges, we can move forward into a new Renaissance of hope, discovering new possibilities to heal and transform our world.
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Writing Awards: Winners from 2009 Sarah Graham Winner of the Katherine Woodall Prize for her essay: “Desire for Laurie, Jo and the Reader in Little Women” Krystal Wu Winner of the Christiaan Lievestro Prize for her essay “Not so Black and White: The Construction of White Womanhood in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Rachel Wilde Winner of the Shipsey Poetry Prize for her poem: “Rachel Weeping” Nicholas Sanchez Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Tamara Verga Poetry Prize for his poems: “Patter,” “Sales (Fever),” and “enumerate” Randall Holaday Winner of the McCann Short Story Contest for his short story: “Welcome” Khanh Le Vu Trinh First-Year Composition Competition for her essay “Holding onto an Identity in a New Homeland”
Suggested Reading Buddha’s Wife, by Gabriel Constans The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga Forgiveness, by Paula Huston Bread and Fire: Jewish Women Find God in the Everyday, edited by Rivkah Slonim. Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan Grace, Eventually, by Anne Lamott The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan As a Friend: A Novel, by Forrest Gander The Stone Gods, by Jeanette Winterson 2666, by Roberto Bolaño Indignation, by Philip Roth Leaving Tangier: A Novel, by Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Student and Alumni Achievements
For the first time, all LEAD Critical Thinking & Writing II students participated in a two-part Poster Session. Forty-seven students had the opportunity to display their research on a public stage by discussing their projects with a campus-wide audience. This Symposium encouraged students to become active scholars with their own ongoing, original research projects, and several students have plans to pursue these projects further. The projects relate to a variety of fields including art history, film criticism, gender studies, ethnic studies, the sciences, and many more. Krystal Wu and Jill Goodman presented “The Perfect Environment to Teach Students to Write for College” at The 16th Annual California Charter Schools Conference in Long Beach. Catherine Guarente accompanied Simone Billings to the Sigma Tau Delta conference in Minneapolis, where they chaired a session.
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Jessica Jang has been accepted to Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Emory, and Marquette, and is likely going to accept Yale’s offer. She writes: “The faculty member who interviewed me wrote me a personal email, saying that she likes English majors and really values this background. I was pleased to hear this, as I too have truly valued my English studies. I will be entering an accelerated program to earn my Masters as an acute care nurse practitioner. My goal is still to focus on underserved populations and continue work abroad in third world countries.” Brent Colasurdo, at USC’s law school, writes: “We don’t discuss grades in law school. You can imagine how this taboo would be necessary for any friendships to survive subject to a strict curve, desperate job competition, and legal-sized egos.” But he confides that he’s doing well, and writes: “any page of decent writing I emit is a tribute to the quarter I spent as a scared transfer student in ENGL 177… Sometimes I worry that I’m enjoying law school too much— it’s not proper. The build-up to and climax of exams was an interesting experience, it was taxing in an absolute sense (most work I’ve ever done, etc), but because I’m so intrigued by the law the experience was relatively painless. The only damper on my capacity for study was my body, it kept interrupting my good fun with needs for food and sleep, etc. My experience speaks to the advice I heard again and again in undergrad— be sure you want to study law before you apply to law school.
I can’t imagine doing this volume of exhausting drudge-work without being absolutely titillated by the content (as some of my distressed classmates aren’t). “
Peter Taylor, who left the faculty some years ago, is now Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs of the Graduate Division at the University of California, San Francisco
SCU grad and ex-student Neil Ferron has won a George J. Mitchell scholarship (http://us-irelandalliance.org/ wmspage.cfm?parm1=34), one of the 12 awarded nationally, and will use it for working further on his playwriting in Ireland at Trinity College. He writes: “I just found out that in March, one of my ten-minute plays is going to be produced in Dublin by the Painted Filly theatre company as a part of their 100 Minutes festival (www.paintedfilly.com). The play is called We Are Not Blinking (part of a GW Bush quote), and it examines how a pair of American children interpret the global politics and injustices of the day, namely US-sponsored torture. It’s dark, it’s funny, maybe even cute.”
Graduate Joanna Law is now editor of LexisNexis, responsible for several journals.
Graduate Athena ArnotCopenhaver reports that she is completing an M. Phil. in Literary Theory at the University of East Anglia in England. Caroline Bonafede will join Pacific University’s masters in counseling psychology program—a stepping stone to the doctoral program. She writes: “I am so very excited about the opportunity and look forward to the upcoming years. I miss being a student!” Kara Thompson has just about completed her dissertation on “A Romance with Many Reservations: American Indian Figurations and the Globalization of Indigeniety,” and hopes to soon join to professoriate.
Nate Swinton graduated from Georgetown law in May 2007, passed the New York bar exam that summer, and spent last year clerking for a federal magistrate judge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He is now (May 2008) in Memphis clerking for a federal district court judge and next year will also be in Memphis clerking for a judge on the Sixth Circuit. Nate says he very much enjoys clerking: “it’s a great job—but as you can probably guess, obtaining those positions often requires one to be fairly flexible about where one would like to live. I’ve actually enjoyed Memphis and the South in general more than what I expected, and sometimes when I look out on the Mississippi River from my office window, I halfexpect to see Huck Finn floating by on his way down to Louisiana.” Vincent Price, English Major (1979) has been named Provost of the University of Pennsylvania. Brian Hegarty, an English major who graduated in 1996, died unexpectedly; he had been named as the new principal at St. Clare’s elementary school next to campus.
Faculty Achievements Simone Billings will be a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the West Indies in the Fall. Rebecca Black has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for $25,000. Sherry Booth presented a paper on sustainability education in Britain. Phyllis Brown gave a paper at the annual meeting of the Medieval Association of the Pacific on Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s and presented a paper on Hrotsvit at a conference in Cologne, Germany. Stephen Carroll published an essay on ‘The Rhetoric of Teaching (Art History) with Technology,” and another jointly with Andrea Pappas and Dolores LaGuardia, titled, “Angel in the Architecture: Course Management Software and Collaborative Teaching.” Over the past three years he has done a lot of work on the Student Assessment of their Learning Gains project. Juliana Chang and Linda Garber were co-editors of The Aunt Lute Anthology of US Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century. Julie gave a talk on mentoring at a Women of Color Network event and was a discussant for a panel on “Heteronormativity and Racialization in Transnational Asian/America.” Diane Dreher published her new book, Your Personal Renaissance. Marilyn Edelstein has published a chapter in Approaches to Teaching Lolita, another on Nabokov, and a chapter in Critical Perspectives on bell hooks. Eileen Elrod attended a conference on The Indian Ocean and Arab Slave Trades at Yale University. John Farnsworth has been appointed to serve on a task force to develop a common set of student learning outcomes to guidecurriculum development associated with
s ustainability issues. He presented papers on related topics in Vancouver and Raleigh, and traveled to El Salvador this quarter to observe SCU student participation in Casa de Solidaridad. He will be directing the SCU Study Abroad program at University of Stirling this summer.
Texas Tech, chaired a session at a Transgender conference at the Sorbonne, and presented a paper at the University of Cordoba.
Andy Garavel gave a paper on “Land Reform and Irish Writing” at the University of Washington, and received a grant of $3800 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to attend their summer seminar for college and university teachers at the University of Notre Dame to study “AngloIrish Identities.”
Myisha Priest got some wonderful news— she received the very competitive Schomburg Scholars in Residence Fellowship, which comes with a hefty stipend of $30,000! This will take her to New York for some portion of next academic year, to work on a fascinating new project: Focusing on African American communities of the antebellum waterways, the book will function as a corrective (and completing) addition to the metaphor of the Underground Railroad.
Kirk Glaser has had two poems nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has edited the script for Hands Left Behind, a dance/ theater production in Santa Cruz. Jill Gould gave a talk about her class on Holocaust Memoirs at the Oral History Association Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh. In May she spoke on “Bringing Oral History into the Digital Classroom” at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Ron Hansen gave fiction readings at Virginia Commonwealth, Eastern Michigan, Georgetown, St. Mary’s College in Minnesota, the University of Portland, the University of Binghamton, Creighton University, and St. John’s University. In March he gave the talk, “What Would Jesus View?” for a series on Religious Themes in Film at the University of Southern California, and he spoke at Regis University in Denver on “The Catholic Imagination and Film.” A play based on his novel Mariette in Ecstasy collected boffo reviews in its run from February 13th to April 5th at Lifeline Theatre in Chicago. This July he will be teaching at the Tin House Writer’s Conference at Reed College in Portland. John Hawley published a three-volume encyclopedia on LGBTQ America Today, with 250 contributors (Linda Garber among them), and guest edited the annual creative writing issue of the South Asian Review. He was a plenary speaker at a conference on “Migration, Border, and the Nation State” at
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Aparajita Nanda presented a paper on Nawal El Saadawi in Salzburg.
Roseanne Giannini Quinn gave a talk called “The Faces of Domestic Violence” at Saint Mary’s College and two papers at the MLA’s annual meeting. Don Riccomini published two review essays in Technical Communications, and a critical essay in the Journal of Religion and Film. Avantika Rohatgi presented a paper on “The Transformative Power of Terror” at the University of Washington. Jeremy Townley published a review in Harvard Review. Priya Venkatesan presented a paper at the Semiotic Society of America in Houston, and another in Charlotte, NC on “Nanoselves.” Her article, “Making Science Accessible” was recently published in Biosemiotics. An article on Julia Kristeva appears in the Spring issue of L’esprit createur. Fred White has published two books: Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical Currents and Crosscurrents since 1960, and The Daily Writer: 366 Meditations To Cultivate a Productive and Meaningful Writing Life. Fred White has been promoted to Full Professor.
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English Department Santa Clara University 500 El Camino Real Santa Clara, CA 95053-1500
A New Minor in Cinema Studies (Continued from page 1)
devote a least one-third of the classroom cinema itself. Though there would be possible a production component the primary emphasis would be on studies of film and video as literary, cultural, and historical texts. Professors Diane Dreher and John Hawley of the English Department, and Paul Soukup, S.J. and Michael Whalen of Communications, will be members of the Cinema Studies Committee. Professor Ron Hansen will be the program director.
Gender Studies in the Department In the Introduction to his new three-volume encyclopedia, LGBTQ America Today, editor John Hawley writes that his classmates in seventh grade told him that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were “homos.” He didn’t know what that was, but since he did both, he figured he was already in trouble and would have to do a lot of pretending. That, as it turns out, was the inspiration for his latest publication, in which he has orchestrated 250 writers from around the country to describe the sexual revolution of the last 60 years, particularly as it has shaped, and been shaped by, the lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer communities. Part of the overarching theme of the three volumes is the plural nature of those communities, in which there are many competing voices, some alliances, and some broad disagreements. Entries range from androgyny to queer youth groups, from prominent individuals in the various movements, to organizations that have supported the expansion of LGBTQ rights, to marriage, to pride parades, to “outing,” and on and on. Many entries are biographies of wellknown or still-to-be-discovered poets, playwrights, musicians, entrepreneurs, etc. Others are studies of the history of oppression in this country, easily forgotten now that many rights have come to be expected. But the encyclopedia
makes obvious those issues that are still unresolved, such as marriage, adoption, hate laws, the role of trangendered individuals in the work place, etc. Hawley has published earlier related books, including Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, which studies the impact of western notion of gayness in the emerging world. This latest work is less theoretical and more historical, with photos and illustrations of some of the memorable events in this important component of the expansion of human rights in the United States. As an encyclopedia, it is less likely something an individual would purchase, and more likely to be found in school and communities libraries.
FL-08265 6/09 2,000
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