Lecturer Sean Witters announced that both of his chapter submissions from the past year, "The American Novel and the Marketplace" (ed. T. Mueller, de Grutyer, 2017), and "Beyond the Love of Big Brother" (ed. T. Horan, Salem Press 2016), have officially been accepted for publication.
Senior Lecturer Chris Vaccaro is co-editing Tolkien and Alterity with Yvette Kisor (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming 2017).
Senior Lecturer Angela Patten is the 2016 national winner of the Cape Cod Cultural Center poetry competition, for her poem "Tracks.”
Professor Tom Simone has been appointed director of the Integrated Humanities Program. In June he presented a paper on Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and autobiographical memory at the International James Joyce Symposium in London.
Professor Emily Bernard was recently notified that “Black is the Body,” an essay she presented as a Dean’s Lecture at UVM, is a Notable Essay in this year’s Best American Essays. This is her third Notable and her fourth time overall being recognized by BAE. Last year, another essay “Mother on Earth” was also a Notable.
Lecturer Isaac Cates is featured in a Seven Days piece about his children’s comic series Cartozia Tales: http://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/cartozia-tales-siv455/Content?oid=3616797. The Cartozia Tales series was also nominated for a prestigious Ignatz Award:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2016/08/18/small-press-expo-clowes-tomine-and-walden-among-leading-2016-spx-ignatz-award-nominees/?tid=ss_tw-amp
A former UVM English major, Becky Mae Hayes ’14, has written a series of articles for the Huffington Post, most recently in July: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/beckymaehayes-442
Senior Lecturer Jamie Williamson’s book The Evolution of Modern Fantasy won the Mythopoeic Society's 2016 Award for Studies in Myth and Fantasy.
Associate Professor Deb Ellis confirmed that her new film Peace Has No Borders will premiere at the Vermont International Film Foundation’s Vermont Filmmaker’s Showcase, October 22, 2016 at 3:45 at the Main Street Landing Black Box Theatre, 60 Lake Street, 3rd floor, Burlington.
Peace Has No Borders is a feature documentary about a group of Iraq and Afghan War resisters from the US who seek refuge in an increasingly conservative Canada. Caught between two countries, they’ll fight a legal and political battle to win the right to remain in Canada. Ten years in the making, Peace Has No Borders weaves a complicated story about the resisters’ personal struggles against the backdrop of an increasingly conservative Canadian government determined to deport them to the United States where they face certain court martial. For more information about the film: www.peacehasnoborders.com
Geography major Tilden Remerleitch (who is currently in Shanghai on her Boren Scholarship) won the 2016-2017 US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation Scholarship.
There are a number of new directors and faculty involved with GRS this year, including:
They join our current faculty directors:
We also welcome to campus a new faculty member in Middle East Studies Peter Henne (Political Science), who will be teaching International Politics of the Middle East this fall. Timur Hammond (Geography) will also be joining our staff as a lecturer offering Political Geographies of the Middle East.
We will be featuring a number of events and speakers this fall. Unless otherwise indicated, GRS events will take place on Wednesdays from 5:30-6:30 in Lafayette L210. Here is a list of upcoming events:
In May and June Professor Sean Field gave a series of seminars as Professeur Invité at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, on the topic “Les femmes saintes et la cour capétienne.” The ideas developed there will form the core of the book to which he is devoting his 2016-2017 sabbatical, on Holy Women and the Capetian Court.
Associate Professor Felicia Kornbluh recently had an article about ending welfare on the web site Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/23/time-to-end-welfare-as-we-know-it/ She also spoke about welfare reform on the "Counterspin" radio program, which airs on WBAI-FM in New York City, KPFA in San Francisco, and dozens of other Pacifica and otherwise progressive stations around the country. The transcript is here:
http://fair.org/home/its-a-kind-of-original-sin-of-the-modern-democratic-party/
Incoming clinical grad student Alexandra Sullivan received the David and Beverly Barlow Graduate Fellowship Award. The primary purpose of this fellowship (hereafter referred to as “award”), which was established by David H. Barlow (a UVM Ph.D. graduate) and his spouse Beverly A. Barlow, is to facilitate the recruitment of an outstanding graduate student into the University of Vermont Clinical Psychology Program. An applicant will be offered the award and accompanying financial resources (which can be used for professional expenses—research, travel, or any purpose consistent with professional development—at any time during the student’s graduate career at UVM) at the time acceptance into the graduate program is extended. The award and financial resources will be offered to a second (or third) applicant if the first (or second) applicant declines acceptance to the UVM Clinical Psychology Program.
The following criteria will be used by the Clinical Psychology Program faculty in making the decision about to whom to extend the award:
Nomination for the award can be made by any Clinical Psychology Program faculty member, any non-Clinical Program faculty member accepting a clinical student, or current Clinical Psychology student representatives. Each year three applicants will be nominated and rank ordered. Consideration of applicants from underrepresented groups (broadly defined to include race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.) is encouraged in the nomination and selection process. A faculty member cannot have an applicant receive the award two consecutive years. Under exceptional circumstances, a deserving student already in the Clinical program could receive the award.
Justin Parent, a clinical psychology Ph.D student, received three American Psychological Association awards:
Assistant Professor Todne Thomas published “Strangers, Friends, and Kin: Negotiated Recognition in Ethnographic Relationships” in the journal Anthropology and Humanism. In this article, she draws upon feminist, de-colonial and post-modern research methods, as well as her own experience of being reconstituted as a “church sister” by the members of the Afro-West Indian and African-American evangelical association that she studied, to explore the implications of what happens when research participants name the ethnographer as kin.
Assistant Professor Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst co-edited an issue of The Muslim World. This forward-thinking volume is the product of the “Shifting Boundaries” international conference on the relationship between the study of Islam and the Humanities held at UVM in April 2015. The conference was generously sponsored by the Religion Department and the Humanities Center. A link to the issue can be found here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/muwo.2016.106.issue-4/issuetoc.
Professor Kevin Trainor spent four weeks this summer in Sri Lanka. His research focused on the Buddhist pilgrimage sites of Diva Guhava and Seruvila, exploring the political and religious dynamics of contemporary claims about antiquity and the Buddha’s presence. He also investigated examples of 19th- and 20th-century temple paintings with particular attention to representations of women in stories of their enlightenment.
Associate Professor Thomas Borchert organized the international conference “Buddhism, the Humanities, and Ethnographic Methods,” held at UVM in April 2016. This conference was funded in part by the Lattie F. Coor Endowment, through the Humanities Center. The conference was designed to investigate the interface between social science and humanities-based approaches to the study of Buddhism, exploring how ethnographic methods are increasingly being used to expand the field beyond traditional textual analysis.
Catherine Connor-Swietlicki, Professor of Spanish, published an article entitled "Why Autopoiesis and Memory Matter to Cervantes, Don Quixote, and the Humanities" in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, edited by Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon and published in 2016 by Oxford University Press.
Tina Escaja, Professor of Spanish, organized a major conference entitled “Nueva York en Español: Intersecciones Hispánicas en EEUU” at the Instituto Cervantes in New York in June in her role as President of ALDEEU (Spanish Professionals in America). Her hypertext entitled “VeloCity” was included in Volume 3 of the Electronic Literature Collection. It is viewable here: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=velocity
Julie Roberts, Professor of Linguistics, was featured in the first episode of a new Vermont Public Radio podcast: Brave Little State. The topic was the past, present, and future of the Vermont accent. It is available here: http://digital.vpr.net/post/cow-or-ke-ow-past-present-and-future-vermont-accent#stream/0
Maria Alessandra Woolson, Lecturer in Spanish, has recently published a chapter, “From Management to Governance: Rethinking Water Policy and Privatization on Easter Island,” in The Politics of Freshwater. Access, Conflict and Identity, edited by Tamar Mayer and Catherine Ashcraft (Routledge). A second article titled “Voces silenciadas, sabiduría olvidada. Limitaciones discursivas de la representación cultural en la era de la globalización.” (Silenced Voices, Forgotten Wisdom. Discursive Limitations of Cultural Representation in the Era of Globalization) has been published online by Latin American Studies Association Southern Cone Conference Proceedings. In addition, she was an invited speaker at three events, one at the Middlebury College Climate Justice Symposium, a second in Buenos Aires at the Universidad Kennedy for the inauguration of a new degree program in interdisciplinary social sciences, and a third for an international audience gathered at the University of Siena, Italy for the International Sustainable Campus Network annual conference.