talk: newsletter of the English Department at UT Austin | 2018

Fall 2018 Newsletter

FROM OUR CHAIR:

“The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this.”

- Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

I spent this July and August directing our Oxford Summer Program, which I am happy to say is still going strong after 34 years. Our students were delighted to read Zadie Smith, watch Shakespeare plays, and travel abroad. They were very enterprising! Back in Austin, our English majors are winning research prizes, receiving distinguished graduate awards, and publishing the Hothouse literary magazine.

Meanwhile, our faculty has won more teaching awards than any other department, our Honors Program is the largest in the College, and our new Certificate in Creative Writing is flourishing. We hope you remember your time at UT with pleasure and intellectual satisfaction, and we would love to hear what you are doing now. Our graduates pursue excellent jobs in diverse areas like teaching, administration, and law. A few go on to graduate school. What are you working on now? What do you still value or remember about your degree in English? If you email your replies to texasenglish@utexas.edu, I will pass on responses to the Department. This is my last year as Department Chair, and I want to send my best wishes to you all as I return (happily) to undergraduate teaching.

OFF-CAMPUS

SCHOLARS

... at Oxford

The UT Department of English has sponsored a summer program in Oxford since 1984 for students to enjoy life and literature at the oldest English-speaking university in the world. Program director Elizabeth Cullingford explains the importance of programs like this one for students: “It opens minds, touches hearts, and encourages cultural and intellectual comparisons. We want students to love travel, not tourism, because travel shatters insularity. And reading great books in the context of the places they were written, set, or produced is a thrill like no other.”

This year’s Oxford Shakespeare course was taught by the original founder of the program, Alan Friedman. Students saw Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth at Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare’s birthplace) and three other plays (Hamlet, As You Like It, Othello) staged at the reconstruction of the Globe Theater in London. The summer featured its first course on author Zadie Smith, including tours of places in Smith’s texts and discussions of race, gender, and class in Britain.

Additionally, Professor Minou Arjomand taught a course on War and Literature that included Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh, among others.

Students visited Lawrence’s birthplace, Nottingham, Sherwood Forest, and London’s Tate Gallery for an exhibition of art in the aftermath of WWI.

Above: Students at Oxford, Summer 2018

students on stage

... at Winedale

Shakespeare at Winedale is a program dedicated to exploring Shakespeare’s living art: rich and complex texts activated by play. Established in 1970, the group has grown into a year-round program reaching students from a diverse array of backgrounds. At the end of April, under program director James Loehlin, the spring class staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream as part of a course on “Metatheatrical Shakespeare.”

Students in the summer program dedicate two months to the bard, studying and performing three plays in a 19th-century barn-turned-theatre in the Texas countryside. This year’s summer season included four plays performed by students: Love’s Labour’s Lost, a delightful early comedy; Julius Caesar, a political tragedy; and All’s Well That Ends Well, a sophisticated romantic problem play. Students also performed, for the first time, Arden of Faversham. This darkly funny crime drama has been included in the New Oxford Shakespeare as an early work written with an unknown collaborator. Performances ran July 19-August 12 at the Winedale Historical Complex near Round Top, TX.

Undergraduate Honors At present, 57 students are enrolled in the English Honors Program with 25 ready to graduate this spring.

The following awards were granted for undergraduate scholarship in 2014-2018.

MITCHELL/CO-OP AWARD Luis Cataldo (2017, Top Prize) Nell McKeown (2016, Top Prize) Patrick Naeve (2014, Finalist)

Above: Shakespeare at Winedale presents Twelfth Night at the Contemporary Theatre of Dallas. Below: Students perform King Henry IV at Winedale.

DEAN’S DISTINGUISHED GRADUATES Elizabeth Hamm (2018) David Williams (2018) Dylan Davidson (2017) Jordan Smith (2017) Kendall DeBoer (2016) Michael Esparza (2016) James Fisk (2015) Jane Robbins Miss (2015) Patrick Naeve (2014) Sarah Lusher (2014) BURLESON THESIS AWARDS Delia Davis (2018) Madeleine McQuilling (2018) Tony Cartlidge (2017) Dylan Davidson (2017) Annyston Pennington (2017) Torre Pucket (2017) Kendall DeBoer (2016) Kenneth Harlock (2016) Kaitlyn Ray (2016) Jane Robbins Mize (2015) Nikita Namjoshi (2015) Colin Vanderburg (2015) Ernest Artiz (2014) Sarabeth Flowers (2014) Patrick Naeve (2014)

NEWSLETTER, FALL 2018

Jennifer Wilks,

Associate Professor, received the 2017-2018 Harry

Ransom Center Award for Teaching Excellence

for her commitment to the classroom.

Hannah Wojciehowski, Arthur J. Thaman & Wilhelmina DorĂŠ Thaman Professor of English, was awarded the 2018 Leslie

Waggener Centennial Teaching Fellowship.

Jim Cox was inducted

Chad Bennett,

into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, an association of UT professors chosen to lead improvements to undergraduate education.

Assistant Professor, received COLA's 2018 Raymond

Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching

NEW HIRE

NEW HIRE

Ana Schwartz earned

Tanya Clement is

her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and finished a post-doc at MIT; she joins our faculty this year. Her interests include early American literature; race, empire, and post-colonialism; and transnational literatures.

joining us from UT 's School of Information. With a PhD from the University of Maryland, her research spans digital humanities, data curation, information theory, and visualization.

Douglas S. Bruster,

Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American & English Literature, received a 2017 Minnie Piper Stevens Award.

Jacqueline Henkel

was awarded the student-nominated Silver Spurs Centennial Teaching Award for 2018.

Domino Perez received the 2017 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award recognizing

exemplary teachers of undergraduate coursework.

NEW HIRE Minou Arjomand is one

of the department’s newest hires. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2013; her interests include 20th and 21st century theatre, performance studies, aesthetic, and political philosophy.

Julie A. Minich was

NEW HIRE Samantha Pinto joins UT’s

English faculty this year. Previously of Georgetown University, Pinto focuses on African, African American, postcolonial, and feminist studies. She received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA.

classroom George Christian received the 2017-2018 Chad Oliver Teaching Award for his work with the Plan II Honors program.

recognized with a 20162017 Josefina Paredes Endowed Teaching Award, and also the 2017 Lucia, Jack, and Melissa Gilbert Teaching Award by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Wayne Rebhorn

was granted the 2017 Chad Oliver Teaching Award for his time and dedication to the Plan II Honors program.

Evan Carton

was awarded the 2017 President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award for exemplary instruction.

NEWSLETTER, FALL 2018

Barbara Harlow Barbara Harlow (1948-2017) shaped the fields of Post-Colonial and Feminist Theories. A preeminent translator, Barbara moved ideas across fields and peoples, including thousands of UT students. Throughout her career, Barbara published multiple collections and three books: Resistance Literature; Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention; and After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing. Her contributions encompassed diverse agendas of resistance, human rights, translation, and pedagogy.

Legacies Tom Whitbread Tom Whitbread (1931-2016) studied poetry at Amherst College and Harvard University. He joined UT-Austin in 1959 where he taught poetry for over fifty years. His poems and stories appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies including “Literary Austin." He published three books of award-winning poetry: Four Infinitives, Whomp and Moonshiver, and The Structures Minds Erect.

Tom is remembered for his kindness, wit, and uncanny memory for verse.

Wayne Lesser Wayne Lesser (1949-2017) taught 19th and earlier 20th century literature and literary theory at UT-Austin for forty-two years. He studied American Literature at the University of Chicago and taught internationally in France and Germany among other countries. An obsessive baseball-enthusiast and scholar, Wayne is remembered for his dedication to and enthusiasm for teaching—the spirit of play he brought to the classroom. Wayne was passionate about supporting students, both professionally and personally.

Heather Houser:

PLANET TEXAS 2050 Associate Professor Heather Houser is a member of the founding team for Planet Texas 2050—an interdisciplinary research system across UT-Austin dedicated to tackling the looming threat of deteriorating natural environments and growing human populations. In Texas and elsewhere, the resources we rely on to live—water, energy, dependable infrastructure, and a supportive ecosystem—are in jeopardy. Planet Texas 2050 is the first in a series of university-wide challenges that will tackle some of the most critical problems of our time, proposing programs and policy recommendations to make our communities more resilient and better prepared.

Heather received her PhD from Stanford University in 2010 in English Literary Studies. Her research focuses on how contemporary literature and visual culture contribute to public understanding and response to environmental crises, and on how 21st-century fiction and media experiment with scientific information in order to better grasp the epistemologies that produce environmental “knowledge.”

For more information about—or to contribute to—Planet Texas 2050, visit bridgingbarriers.utexas.edu.

Donna Kornhaber:

BEST PICTURES

Associate Professor Donna Kornhaber was named a 2016 Academy Film Scholar for her research on women writers who shaped the American film industry during the silent era. Established in 1999, the Academy Film Scholars program supports significant new works of film scholarship. The Academy’s Educational Grants Committee awarded Donna a $25,000 grant for her research proposal: the first booklength study of woman writers in early Hollywood. This work follows her prize-winning book on Charlie Chaplin and another about Wes Anderson.

Donna Kornhaber has also received three teaching awards, including the prestigious Regents Award and the President’s Associates. This past year, she was selected by Dean Diehl to submit a proposal for the Crucible Course program: a new initiative in Plan II to create immersive, experiential learning courses across disciplines. Donna’s was chosen as the inaugural course and will start next fall. The course is entitled “Best Pictures” and is designed to thrust students into the world of modern cinema with visits from Academy Film Scholars and access to events like the Austin Film Festival. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the study of film as a living medium, an art form always in the making, engaged in an ongoing process of re-invention.

NEWSLETTER, FALL 2018

Photo: Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, 2015 (East façade) Artist-designed building with installation of colored glass windows, black and white marble panels, and redwood totem 60 ft. x 73 ft. x 26 ft. 4 in. ©Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.

Photo courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin

ELLSWORTH KELLY at the Blanton

To receive the English Department’s latest news, be sure to check out our webpage or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

In January 2015, Ellsworth Kelly gifted the Blanton a design concept for his most monumental work: the first and only building the artist designed, as well as his last project before his death in December 2015.

Opened to the public in February 2018, “Austin” is a 2,715 square foot exploration of motifs that Kelly developed throughout his career. The structure is accompanied by an exploratory exhibition entitled “Form Into Spirit: Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin.”