Department News

NEWS OF FACULTY

Dr. Eric Smith publishes book Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope. This new book explores the aesthetic and historical conditions that inform the recent convergence of the seemingly incommensurable domains of the postcolonial Third World and the genre of SF, particularly as expressed in the recent phenomenon of visionary SF narratives originating from postcolonial national cultures. Read more

Dr. David Neff received the CLA Outstanding Faculty Award (2013). “’Invisible Hands’: Paltock, Milton, and the Critique of Providence in Frankenstein” was published in ANQ 25.2 (2012): 103-08.

Dr. Eric Smith's essay "'Fictions Where a Man Could Live': Worldlessness, Utopia, and the Void in Rushdie'sGrimus" is published in the current issue of Twentieth-Century Literature 58.2 (2012): 267-295.

Dr. Joseph Taylor's article "Centralization, Resistance, and the Bare Life of the Greenwood in A Gest of Robyn Hode" appeared in the Spring issue of Modern Philology 110.3 (2013): 313-339. Also, Dr. Taylor's article "Sovereignty, Oath, and the Profane Life in the Avowing of Arthur" was published in the Spring issue of the medieval and early modern studies journal Exemplaria 25.1 (2013): 37-58.

Dr. Chad Thomas gave a lecture to the Gay/Straight Alliance titled "Queering Cleopatra; or Queer Shakespeare at the Citz' circa 1972" in March. He also presented a paper at the Shakespeare Association of America titled "The Comedy of (Qu)errors: A Study in Queering Campus Shakespeare" in April.

Dr. Angela Balla received a Humanities Center Faculty Research Grant for her project "Awakening to Tolerance: The Revelation of Mystical Community in Thomas Traherne's Verse." Dr. Balla will conduct research this summer at Lambeth Palace Library, London (the archive for the Church of England) and at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Dr. Laurel Bollinger’s essay “Narrating Racial Identity and Transgression in Faulkner’s ‘That Evening Sun’” appeared in College Literature. 39.2 [Spring 2012]: 53-72. Dr. Bollinger includes in the essay a note of gratitude to former students and a current colleague: "I would like to thank my Spring 2009 EH 631 students, who asked the right questions; the students in my 2009 Faulkner course, for letting me try out this interpretation on them; and D. S. Neff, who has been invaluable as a first reader."

Andrea Word and Department of Education Professor Jason O'Brien have been awarded a $1.1 million grant by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of English Language Acquisition.  The grant will support second language instruction training for Huntsville City School teachers and administrators over the next five years.