This Week in English | March 4 – 10, 2019
Illuminating Manuscripts Project: Seeking Student Volunteers
Assistant Professor Luke Redington is conducting a study—“Illuminating Manuscripts: A Methodology for Creating Annotated Editions of Scholarly Articles in STEM Fields”—that seeks student participants from the Department of English and the College of Engineering. Students are asked to read a scientific article and answer questions about it. Pizza is provided in partial recompense for your valuable time. The text of the official (IRB Approved!) recruitment email is attached. Professor Redington, who is teaching English 301 and 415 this semester, would be much obliged for your help.
Wicks Fellow Paul Eaton Presents on Bob Dylan at NEMLA
Over Spring Break, Wicks Fellow Paul Eaton will be participating in a roundtable discussion on the transnational poetics of Bob Dylan at the 50th anniversary Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Washington, D.C. Eaton will be discussing Dylan’s use of the border as a space that engages issues of memory, place, and myth. Dylan, the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature, performed at the Memorial Gymnasium at the University of Maine on November 8, 1964—a concert, incidentally, at which Paul’s parents were in attendance (John and Linda Eaton, ’66)—and has long expressed fondness for the state. His legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1976, in which he was accompanied by poet Allen Ginsberg, playwright Sam Shepard, as well as musician Joan Baez, included stops in York Harbor, Augusta, Waterville, and Bangor, performances that are treated with religious trepidation by Dylan scholars. Shepard, reflecting on the Bangor concert in his journal of the tour, Rolling Thunder Logbook, writes that “Maine still looks like a State of innocence… Dylan appears with with huge white crosses on his cheeks, coming closer and closer to a Sioux medicine man and further and further from Children of Paradise… His hat is growing yellow flowers now with a sprig of pine shaking like a turkey feather from side to side… What is this strange, haunted environment he creates on stage, on record, on film, on everything he touches? What world is he drawing from and drawing us all into as a result? It’s right there in front of us, but no one can touch it.” As part of his Wicks Fellowship, Eaton is teaching a section of introductory creative writing and serving as a mentor to first-year teaching assistantships.
Greg Howard Reading on Mount Desert Island
This past Saturday evening, fiction writer and Associate Professor Greg Howard read with poet and musician Daniel Hales at the Lompoc Cafe on MDI as part of the Bateau Reading Series. Series organizer and publisher Dan Mahoney writes: “We are so happy to have Greg and Daniel reading for the Bateau/Lompoc Reading Series….These two writers weave wonderful tapestries of lyrical delight, which is exactly what we need in the wind-down of a long, gray winter.” This semester, Howard is teaching the advanced fiction workshop (English 407) and a course on postmodern literature (English 363) and leading the search committee for our tenure-track position in Creative Writing, Fiction.
Deborah Rogers Reviews Susan Gubar Memoir
Deborah Rogers writes regularly for the Times Higher Education website. Her most recent review is of feminist scholar Susan Gubar’s memoir Late-Life Love (which also received a starred review in Publishers Weekly). Registration is required in order to read the review. Professor Rogers is teaching English 280: Introduction to Film this semester and leading the senior-level research seminar on the rise of the novel (English 490).
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