This Week in English | March 27-April 3, 2022
Choosing Classes for the Fall
English majors, minors, and master’s students are invited to consult the course descriptions for the fall semester of 2022 that were shared with academic advisors last week. In the document, which is structured to mirror major requirements, you will find links to catalog descriptions and to instructors as well as amplified descriptions of specific courses. Undergraduates who have not yet met with their academic advisor are strongly encouraged to meet with them to help plan a semester to look forward to!
Internship Funding Opportunities
There are two exciting opportunities that English students can apply for that offer financial support for students to pursue an internship. You do not have to already have an internship lined up to apply for these opportunities. Please email Dr. Katie Swacha (kathryn.swacha@maine.edu) to let her know if you plan to apply for either of these opportunities, and she can help you with your application and with finding an internship!
- Stephen E. King Internship Fellowships are competitive fellowships that provide undergraduate English majors and minors up to $2500 for internships that would otherwise be unpaid. Students can apply by filling out the following application. Applications are due May 1 for summer internships and September 1 for fall internships.
- Maine Career Catalyst’s Equity in Internships program offers $1,000 stipends specifically to black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) students who face financial barriers to pursuing an internship. Application deadline is April 15th and students can apply here!
Friedlander to Introduce Afternoon Event
Gregory Jones-Katz will present on “Deconstruction in the Classroom: The Yale School and the post-Golden Age of American Higher Education” as part of the UMaine History Symposium series this afternoon starting at 3:15pm (ET) via Zoom. Benjamin Friedlander served on Jones-Katz’s MA thesis committee when he was a student at UMaine and will introduce the event this afternoon. Majors who have taken English 271: The Act of Interpretation and master’s students are especially encouraged to attend.
Fogler Library’s LGBTQ+ Challenge
Fogler Library offers its LGBTQ+ Challenge all this week. They write:
Join us April 4-8 for the LGBTQ+ Learning & Affirming Challenge! Each day, for five days, you’ll receive an email with brief tasks designed to learn, share information, and take action in order to create LGBTQ+ affirming learning experiences. We’ll reflect on notions of normativity, dig into intersectionality, and design a personalized plan of action for our work beyond the Challenge.
And next week, it’s the Research Impact Challenge for faculty members:
Interested in taking control of your online scholarly presence and better understanding and communicating the impact of your research? Join us April 11-15 from the comfort of your home, office, or wherever you have an Internet-enabled device, for the Research Impact Challenge! Each day for 5 days, you will receive an email with brief tasks designed to build and curate your scholarly profile, measure the impact of your research, and promote your work to reach new audiences. RSVP to join us! Anyone is welcome to participate – this program may be especially resonant for faculty, staff, and graduate students.
Neiman and Glueck Present at National Conference
Associate Professor Elizabeth Neiman and English major Molly Glueck were in Baltimore this past weekend to present at the American Society for 18th-Century Studies’s annual conference. As Neiman writes:
Molly and I co-authored a paper about my spring 2021 course on “Race and Romanticism” at the virtual Black Studies & Romanticism conference at Mount Holyoke last June—an exceptional conference electric with the sense of possibility. Contributors of color spoke passionately of the continued appeal but also painful failure of the radical Romantic promise for freedom (both as a politics and aesthetics) and presented Black Studies as a site that may provide tools to better actualize this promise than Romantic studies as currently practiced. A Romanticism revised would be as centered on Black voices and experiences as now-canonical voices—and would retain (albeit in new ways) an emphasis on freedom and the imagination.
Here is the paragraph from Glueck’s presentation at ASECS:
Black Studies scholars Christina Sharpe and Saidya Hartman’s emphasis on their own nearness to a painful past got me thinking about whether “distance” is necessary to the sublime, not as something that one is on either side of, but a sort of “space” which one might exist within—not quite removed from their pain, but instead using it directly to create instead of retrospectively. I see this in connection to white female authors in the Romantic period who are often presented as “plagued” by over-exerted feminine sensibilities. Their lack of distance from their emotions should render them senseless to the sublime and its possible power in their writing, and yet, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters suggests differently. In letter XIX she writes: “most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel” (107). The strength of these unique narratives lie in what is initially viewed as a limitation, but read differently, become an asset.
Upcoming Poetry Events
Kathleen Ellis calls our attention to two events celebrating the art of poetry next week. On April 10th at 4pm (ET) Ecopoetry: Voices for the Future will take place via Zoom. It features an intergenerational mix of five Maine poets who will read poems related to the theme and invite the audience into a lively conversation afterward. On April 12th, beginning at 4:30pm (ET) and also via Zoom, the twentieth annual Poets/Speak! takes place. Organized by Ellis and sponsored by the Bangor Public Library, the event features poetry by current English majors and alumni as well as poets with new collections this spring.
Morgan Talty at The Telling Room on April 6
Part-time faculty member Morgan Talty will take part in The Telling Room’s Show and Tell event on April 6th. For the event, Talty wrote a short nonfiction piece that he then turned into a film in collaboration with a filmmaker. As the Portland Press Herald reports:
Talty lives in Levant but grew up on Indian Island, north of Bangor, which is home to the state’s Penobscot Nation. His stories are often rooted in his heritage.
“I feel it’s important because a lot of things non-Natives see about Indigenous culture is presented in a way that’s colorful, right, but a safe distance away,” he said. “Indigenous people have been defined by white western culture for a long time, but there is an opportunity to broaden our view.”
Talty, 31, had no prior experience with [the Telling Room], but learned about it when he attended the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast creative writing graduate program. He’s been working with a local filmmaker to create a short film based on one of his stories.
And as the publication date for Night of the Living Rez approaches, Good Housekeeping has included it in a list of twenty great books for summer.
Advancing UMaine Humanities Scholarship and Creative Work for a Decade
The McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. Since 2012, the center has bolstered humanities research and creative works from students and faculty by funding and supporting fellowships, lectures, symposia, panels, performances and exhibitions. The center will host a reception to commemorate its 10th anniversary, the first of its celebrations for the milestone, on April 10th during Maine Impact Week. Faculty from the English Department have been active in the Center since its inception, and both Jennifer Moxley and Margo Lukens have served as directors. As many previous bulletins have attested, English majors have earned recognition and support for their projects through Undergraduate Fellowships. One fellow, English major Sarah Penney (Class of 2021), recently became the first alumna of the program to join the center’s Advisory Board in 2022. And part-time faculty member in English Brian Jansen has just been appointed as the Humanities Specialist at the Center.
Maine Food Waste Solutions Summit on April 15
Hannah Mathieu is a double major in English (with a focus on Professional and Technical Writing) and Ecology and Environmental Sciences. She is also a student Intern at the Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, which will host a Maine Food Waste Solutions Summit on April 15 via Zoom.
This Week in English 124 was sent to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of the department on Monday, April 4, 2022. If you would rather not receive these weekly bulletins, please reply with <unsubscribe> in your subject line. Earlier installments are archived on our website. If you’re on Facebook, please consider joining the newly formed English Department Group.
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