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English Department faculty are active in a variety of research areas, as described below.
Laurel Bollinger – science fiction
Attitudes toward symbiosis in Science Fiction, particularly SF novels that respond to Lynn Margulis's ideas on mitochondria as formerly free-living cellular organisms, now in symbiotic relationships with nucleated cells.
Holly Flint: Ethnic American Fiction, Especially Ideas of Citizenship
· "J. M. Coetzee's Foe: An Antipastoral Novel for the New South Africa."
· "Cultural Citizenship in the American Empire: Thinking Beyond the Imperial Way of Life in Ethnic American Fiction."
· "On the Off the Rez: Representations of Cultural Citizenship in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues."
Kathleen E. Kennedy: Medieval Literature
Palgrave Macmillan has offered Dr. Kennedy a contract for her first book, Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature, to be published in the prestigious New Middle Ages series. The book explores how authors and other contemporary observers struggled to describe and critique a major social institution through discussions of the analogous relationship of marriage and the developing notion of an impartial legal profession. Her recent
publications include "Retaining Men (and a Retaining Woman) in Piers Plowman," Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2006); "Hoccleve's Dangerous Game of Draughts," Notes and Queries N.S. 53 (2006): 410-14; and "The John Day Collection" 17 Feb. 2005. The Ohio State University Libraries- Rare Books and Manuscripts. ed. and rev. Mark Rankin. The Ohio State University.
Jerry Mebane: Religion, Warfare, and Henry V
In a recently published article, Dr. Mebane argues that the dramatic form and artistic strategies of Shakespeare’s history plays--especially Henry V--undercut the plays’ heroic speeches by emphasizing the fear that all warfare is, from a Christian perspective, evil. He is exploring additional articles and a subsequent book on pacifism and principles of justice in warfare in the Renaissance and in subsequent periods of history.
"'Impious War': Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in Henry V," Studies in Philology, 104.2 (Spring 2007): 250-266.
Jeff Nelson
· Translations of some Neo-Latin lullabies by Giovanni Gioviano Pontanto (1429-1503)
· Greed and Justice in Narratives of the Spanish Conquest of the New World
Rose Norman: Technical Writing and American Women's Autobiography
Dr. Norman is collaborating on a book project about the relationship of theoretical and practical issues in technical communication. She also has in preparation several collaborative projects with graduate students, including one on designing college course Websites for technical and business writing, and another on why NSF grants succeed or fail.
Her literary specialty is American women's autobiography, for which she has received several grants to travel to special collections. Her current research focuses on autobiographies of contemporary Southern women writers.
Eric Smith, Postmodern and Postcolonial Studies
Dr. Smith has several recent publications:
"The Ghost Machine: Spiritualism, Anachronism, and Alterior Acoustics in Erna Brodber's Louisiana." The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies (in press).
"A Voyage to Future Pasts: The Vengeance of Other Time in Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance." Critique 48 (2006): 58-70.
"Robert Antoni." Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics. Ed. M. Keith Booker et al. Greenwood, 2005.
"Caught Straddling a Border:" A Novelistic Reading of Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land." JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory (forthcoming).
Dr. Smith's most recently completed article is "'The Only Way Out is Through': Space, Narrative, and Utopia in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber." He will present a version of this at the Society
for Utopian Studies Conference in Toronto in early October 2007.
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