English Faculty Activities

Roger W. Hecht gave two poetry readings in October. On Oct. 1, he was the featured reader at the Lodi Whittier Library in Lodi, NY, where he read work from his latest book, Witness Report, and led a workshop titled “Poetry Lost & Found: Making Found Poetry from Forgotten Texts.” On Oct. 13, he was the featured reader for Hartwick College’s Visiting Writer Series.

Amie Doughty presented the paper “Royalty in Children’s and YA Lit 1950-1999” at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference, held virtually, on Oct. 23. The paper presents a typology of royalty in children’s and YA books in the last half of the twentieth century and shows how the various categories act set the stage for twenty-first century royal characters.

Amie Doughty presented the paper “Ruling Classes: The Tradition of Royalty in Children’s and YA Literature,” at the National Popular Culture Association Conference, held virtually, on Thursday, June 3. The paper examines “The Light Princess” and “Little Daylight” by George MacDonald and The Lame Little Prince by Dinah Maria Craik and argues that these Victorian pieces of children’s literature subvert expectations of royalty in a way that anticipates more modern children’s and YA literature featuring royals.

On May 22, George Hovis presented an overview of Randall Kenan’s literary career at the annual Thomas Wolfe Society meeting (online), with special emphasis on Kenan’s 1999 Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.

Jonathan Sadow published a review essay of Margaret L. King’s Enlightenment Thought: An Anthology of Sources in the latest issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, vol. 54 no. 2, 2021, pp. 478-482). The essay considers the difficulties of presenting the Enlightenment while comparing a new anthology to its alternatives. Read the essay.

Mark S. Ferrara published a peer-reviewed article titled “The Lone Hut: Migration, Identity, and Twinship in Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers” in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas (Johns Hopkins University Press):

Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once described The Swamp Dwellers as an exploration of economic displacement and cultural disruption resulting from the pillage of natural resources by colonial governments and international corporations. Soyinka set his play deep in the Niger Delta, a place of dense mangrove swamps and the folkloric Mami Wata—a half-human, half-fish seductress, to highlight the environmental degradation and lost livelihoods of the Yoruba, Ogoni, and other indigenous peoples. By focusing on a handful of characters who inhabit or pass through a small hut built by Makuri and Alu, an impoverished elderly couple eking out an existence in the heart of the swamp, Soyinka reveals how migration and acculturation erode traditional values and reshape identity in ways that encourage avarice and self-interest over family and community, promote political and economic corruption, and accelerate the replacement of indigenous belief systems with the depersonalized transactional values of commerce and trade.

Amie Doughty presented the paper “Defense v. Utopia: Royals of Color in Children’s and YA Lit” at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference, hosted virtually by Southern New Hampshire University, on Oct. 24. Her paper categorizes children’s and YA books featuring royal characters of color and explores the relationship between genre and presentations of racial utopias and defenses of characters of color being royal.

George Hovis presented an online workshop in writing literary fantasy for Charlotte’s Center for Literary Arts (10/1/20) and repackaged his novel The Skin Artist as microfiction for CharlotteLit’s LitBits.

Mark Ferrara has published the article “Peak-experience and the Entheogenic Use of Cannabis in World Religions” in the peer-reviewed, open-source Journal of Psychedelic Studies.

This paper demonstrates that cannabis can evoke “peak-experiences”—the name psychologist Abraham Maslow gave to fleeting moments of expanded perception indicative of self-transcendence—when used alongside more traditional religious practices such as meditation, fasting, contemplative prayer and sacramental ritual. For that reason, religious seekers around the globe have deployed cannabis as a deliberate psychoactive to trigger the peak-experiences that stir feelings of ecstasy, wonder, and awe and resolve the “dichotomies, polarities, and conflicts of life.” As such, peak-experiences exemplify a form of spiritual revelation that has played a pivotal role in the history of religion, and because of its ability to elicit unitive consciousness at the heart of mystical insight, cannabis has been utilized as a mild entheogen across culture and tradition for millennia.

Robert Bensen contributed five essays to the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize-winning book, “Literary Geography: An Encyclopedia of Real and Imagined Settings.” The essays include a general study, “Place in Poetry,” and geographic surveys of individual poets: “The Geography of Paradise: Derek Walcott’s Islands,” “The Geography of Home: Seamus Heaney’s Ireland,” “The Geography of Travel: Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South America,” “The Geography of Then and Now: Richard Hugo’s West.” The volume was conceived and edited by Lynn-Marie Houston, who is a former student of Dr. Bensen.

Roger Hecht has just published a chapbook collection of poems, Witness Report, with Finishing Line Press. Poet Bertha Rogers calls the collection “a little book of horrors that can’t be put down,” and describes Hecht as “a poet unafraid to look everyday life in the eye and tell the truth about it.” Poet Robert Bensen says of the book, “No poem-a-day soundbites here.” The book can be purchased directly from Finishing Line Press.

George Hovis is featured in the 2020 issue of North Carolina Literary Review Online. View a review of his 2019 novel, The Skin Artist, and an author interview. This weekend at the Amelia Island Book Festival, he will be presenting a workshop titled “Vivid Landscapes, Unpredictable Characters, Unforgettable Stories.”

Amie Doughty presented the paper “‘Ordinary’ Royals in E.D. Baker’s Children’s Fantasy” at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference in Portsmouth, NH, on November 15, 2019. The paper examines Baker’s Tales of the Frog Princess and Tales of the Wide-Awake Princess series and argues that despite initially presenting strong princesses who challenge the stereotypes of princess characters, the series undercut the strength of these princesses by falling into the same pattern of reproductive heterosexuality for its teenage characters as the princess stories from which they are trying to separate themselves.

Robert Bensen (Lecturer in English) will be interviewed on “Out of Bounds” hosted by Tish Pearlman on Sunday, November 10. He will be discussing and reading from his sixth collection of poems, titled “Before,” at 9:30 p.m. on WSKG-FM (91.7). The 30-minute program will also be live streamed at WSKG.org, and available as a podcast after the broadcast.

In addition to teaching at SUNY Oneonta, Bensen is also Emeritus professor of English at Hartwick College, where he directed the writing programs from 1978-2017. He conducts an intensive poetry workshop at Bright Hill Literary Center in Treadwell, NY.

The Skin Artist, a debut novel by Dr. George Hovis, has been nominated for the 2019 Sir Walter Raleigh Award, administered by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, in recognition of the best book of fiction by a North Carolina writer.

Roger W. Hecht has a new poem published on the website of Puerto del Sol, the literary journal of New Mexico State University. “Notable Eggo Shortages” is a four-part satirical poem that could be said to track the history of capitalism as embodied by Eggo waffles.

Mark Ferrara has published New Seeds of Profit: Business Heroes, Corporate Villains, and the Future of American Capitalism with Lexington Books:
“This book offers a historically rich, deep and highly welcomed critical study of the history of American business. Drawing upon a vast range of different sources, Dr. Ferrara helps us solve the puzzle of why so many Americans came to worship a corporate America that privileges the few at the expense of the many.” (Christian Olaf Christiansen, author of Progressive Business, Oxford University Press)
“Ranging back and forth through several centuries Mark Ferrara explains the deep causes of a profit-driven business culture in the United States. This timely and many-faceted history also makes the much-needed case for a new type of ‘business hero’ who puts people before profits, is environmentally conscientious, ‘and yet grows rich.’ As economic inequality continues to grow, New Seeds of Profit offers a remedy for reversing its seemingly inevitable advance.” (Ronald Formisano, author of Plutocracy in America, Johns Hopkins University Press)

Racheal Fest, adjunct faculty in English, organized a panel and presented a paper at the American Literature Association’s 2019 conference. The panel, “US Women Writers and Economic Forms, C19-C21,” explored how women writing across the tradition respond to the changing economic conditions, discourses, and values that define their moments. Fest’s talk, titled “H.D. and the Entrepreneurial Imagination,” put modernist theories of imagination in conversation with early neoliberal conceptions of culture. View panel and presentation abstracts.

Roger Hecht recently had five poems published in the on-line journal The Piltdown Review. Hecht is honored to have been selected as a Feature Poet for the month of May by The Piltdown Review's editors. Every Friday a poem by Hecht was posted on the site. The poems include: "Portrait", "Summer, 2016" … Continue reading

Mark Ferrara has published an op-ed piece on higher education with History News Network (George Washington University): The Chinese Threat to American Higher Education.

Amie Doughty has received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Roger W. Hecht has four poems published in The Basil O’Flaherty, a new literary arts website. His poems include two sonnets, a free verse poem, and a sestina based on the seven words the Trump administration reportedly banned the Center for Disease Control from using in its budget and documents, including “science-based” and “transgender.” Read the poems.

Amie Doughty has been elected a Trustee at Large for the Governing Board of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA), an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the research and study of all aspects of popular culture. She has been a member of PCA since 2002 and Area Chair of the Children’s and YA Literature and Culture area since 2013. As a Trustee at Large, she will help make decisions involving the running of the organization, including its annual conference.

Racheal Fest adjunct faculty in the English department at SUNY Oneonta, has been selected as a 2019 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Scholar. In June, Fest will attend the faculty seminar “Writing and Democracy in Western New York,” a two -week program held at Cornell University and directed by Professors Sandra Gustafson and Shirley Samuels.

The Endowment is a federal agency that, each summer, supports enrichment opportunities at colleges, universities, and cultural institutions, so faculty can work in collaboration and study with experts in humanities disciplines. The approximately 222 NEH Summer Scholars who participate in these programs of study will teach over 29,000 American students the following year.

Jonathan Sadow presented the paper “Eliza Kirham Mathew’s What Has Been and the Anti-Marriage Plot” at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ annual conference in Denver on March 23 as part of the panel “Marriage Rites and Marriage Wrongs: Feminist Thinking on Marriage during the Long Eighteenth Century.” This paper discusses the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on a little-known feminist 1801 novel about a woman writer stymied by the callousness of the wealthy and her marriage to an allegedly-progressive husband.

On March 21, he also presented the short paper “Satirizing ‘Satire’ and Haywood’s Eovaai” as part of the roundtable “Recovering Women’s Satiric Voices; or, A Feminist’s Work is Never Done.” This paper examines the way Eliza Haywood’s 1736 novel Eovaii appropriates techniques like fake footnotes—used in a misogynist way against writers like Haywood by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift—to mock and modify the satirical genre used against her.

Roger W. Hecht had an article published in Broadening Critical Boundaries in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture, published by Cambridge Scholars Press. His article, “‘To See with Eyes Unclouded by Hate:’ Environmental Ethics and the Art of Seeing in the Films of Hayao Miyazaki,” examines how the famed animated film director develops an “environmental gaze” in his films as a major tool toward cultivating an environmental ethic in his audiences.

Roger W. Hecht had his poem, “Villanelle,” published in Issue VI of the online literary journal Bracken.

Robert Bensen (Adjunct in English) has recently published three poems: “Assassination Nation” on the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Piltdown Review (online), and in La Presa (online) the poems “1959” and “Acres of Birds for Santa” on his uncle, a veteran of World War I. Three critical essays appear in Geography in Literature from ABC-Clio, including the introductory piece, “Poetry and Place, The Word and the World,” and essays on two poets: “The Geography of Travel: Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South America,” and “The Geography of Paradise: Derek Walcott’s Caribbean.”

The journal The Fourth River has nominated a short story by George Hovis for a Pushcart Prize. The story, “Old Folks and White People,” was published in the journal’s March 2018 issue

Roger W. Hecht had an article published in Broadening Critical Boundaries in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture, published by Cambridge Scholars Press. His article, “‘To See with Eyes Unclouded by Hate:’ Environmental Ethics and the Art of Seeing in the Films of Hayao Miyazaki,” examines how the famed animated film director develops an “environmental gaze” in his films as a major tool toward cultivating an environmental ethic in his audiences.

Amie Doughty presented the paper “Reluctant Royals: Reading Royalty in YA Fantasy” at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference at Worcester State University on Oct. 20.

The paper examines male royal figures in young adult fantasy who are reluctant to be royal and argues that whether the royal figure accepts his position or abdicates it, he does not have to compromise. This lack of compromise is a hallmark of children’s and young adult literature according to Natalie Babbitt, and contrasts with adult literary fiction, in which the happy ending often includes some kind of compromise.

Amie Doughty has edited a collection of essays called Broadening Critical Boundaries in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

The collection contains a variety of essays about children’s and YA literature ranging from an analysis of an ABC monster board book and explorations of race and gender in various children’s and YA books to an examination of environmentalism in animated film and an analysis of the history and role of youth librarians to an exploration of the role of popular video games in the middle and high school classroom.

Doughty’s essay “‘Don’t ever forget the art’: Syncretism, Intersectionality, and Markedness in The Summer Prince” from the collection examines the YA dystopian novel The Summer Prince and argues that the theory of markedness allows for a better understanding of how syncretism functions in the novel.

Mark S. Ferrara presented the paper “Serpents in the Mire: Migration, Acculturation, and Identity in Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers” at the International Conference of the World Confederation of Institutes and Libraries for Chinese Overseas Studies held at Cornell University.

Roger W. Hecht published a poem, “Fullness of Wind,” in the online journal A-Minor. The poem is one of a series of poems called “Liner Notes” that uses record album liner notes as found texts.

Amie Doughty presented the paper “‘I Don’t Want to Be the Princess’: Rejecting the Crown in Children’s and YA Literature” at the national Popular Culture Association Conference in Indianapolis on March 29. The paper analyzes several children’s and YA texts and argues that though audiences expect characters who reject the crown to be presenting a feminist message, the message is instead often not feminist. Doughty serves as the Area Chair for the Children’s and YA Literature and Culture area of the PCA, which entails reviewing submissions, organizing panels, and troubleshooting for the area before and during the conference.

Jonathan Sadow recently presented two papers in Orlando, Florida at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ (ASECS) annual conference. On March 23, 2018, he presented the paper “Genre and Salvage” as part of the panel “New Theories and Histories of Eighteenth-Century Genre.” This paper explores the application of network theorists like Wai-Chee Dimock and Bruno Latour in understanding novels of the 1790s that seem related to many different genres.

On March 24, Sadow presented a paper titled “The Count de Hoensdern and Not-So-Bad Romances” as part of the panel “Bad Romances in the Eighteenth Century.” This paper examines Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins’ 1792 The Count de Hoensdern as an example of a work that uses conventional plotting to produce a novel with a complex aesthetic perspective, homoeroticism, reflections on gender, and moral hypocrisy; in this work, the narrator self-consciously reflects on the merits of historical romance vs. the novel of sensibility.

Roger Hecht had a poem "And on this day," published in the anthology Like Light: 25 years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Writers.

Amie Doughty presented the paper "Madness and Mixed-Bloods: Racial Metaphors in Seanan McGuire's October Daye Series" at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on October 28. The paper argues that the way in which the fae of the series present race and madness parallels late 19th and early 20th century theories of race and madness, particularly with the use of polygenesis to explain the way different races experience madness. The paper further argues that this ideology is informed by the experiences and magical abilities of the main character, making her unable to see past the ideology even as she resists other aspects of racism in the society.

Robert Bensen was invited by the Consul General of St. Lucia to speak at the April 7, 2017, memorial service for St. Lucian poet and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. The text of the speech, with photographs, has been published in Berfrois.com. Bensen tells stories about Walcott’s sense of humor, which often crosses the taboos of race, taken from a nearly forty-year friendship:
Reflections at A Celebration of Sir Derek Alton Walcott

Daniel Payne attended a prestigious national professional development conference in Washington, D.C., July 19-20, 2017. The ACE Leadership Academy for Department Chairs is a 2-day workshop that prepares department chairs for their roles as institutional leaders who can advance their programs and contribute to the larger mission of their colleges or universities. Under the guidance of experienced college and university leaders, participants explore best practices for leading departments in times of change. The format includes case studies, tabletop discussions, simulations on key leadership issues, and peer-to-peer sharing about achieving departmental success.

Roger W. Hecht published a book through the Delaware County Historical Association. Freemen Awake!: Rally Songs & Poems from New York’s Anti-Rent Movement is an edited collection of nearly three dozen songs and poems written by farmers and their supporters during New York’s Anti-Rent War in the 1840s. The Anti-Rent War was a seven-year-long rent-strike staged by tenant farmers against the state’s most powerful landholding families. The poems, culled from Anti-Rent newspapers, offer insights into the emotional and imaginative foundation of the Anti-Rent movement. Professor Hecht edited the collection and wrote the historical/critical introduction.

Richard Lee published a book chapter in George Saunders: Critical Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: pp. 77-104): "Hanging by a Thread in the Homeland: The Four Institutional Monologues of George Saunders". Lee also gave two national conference presentations on Saunders this spring at the College English Association (CEA) in Hilton Head (April) and the American Literature Association (ALA, May) in Boston, where he also served as panel chair/discussant. The first of those two presentations, "George Saunders’ ‘Floating Island(s)': The Four Institutional Monologues as Sequence and Exemplary Lens" He was awarded the Best in Section Presentation Award and has been solicited for publication in their journal, The CEA Critic.

Mark S. Ferrara published the peer-reviewed article “(Re)Reading, Reflexivity, and Peak-Experiences in Cao Xueqin’s Honglou Meng” in Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory, and Culture (Oxford University Press).

Amie Doughty presented the paper “‘Don’t ever forget the art’: Opposition, Intersectionality, and Syncretism in The Summer Prince” at the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in San Diego, CA, on April 14, 2017. She argues in the paper that the interest in ongoing cultural syncretism by characters is determined by how they are treated along the intersections of race, class, gender, and age, and she uses the linguistic theory of markedness to articulate how intersectionality works in the culture of the novel. In addition to presenting her paper, Doughty, as area chair of the Children’s and YA Literature and Culture area, organized and oversaw the five panels for the area.

Jonathan Sadow presented two papers in Minneapolis at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ annual conference. On March 30, 2017 he presented the paper “Legal Skepticism in The Parrot” as part of the panel “Eliza Haywood and the Law.” This paper examines Eliza Haywood’s dissection of injustices encoded into legal practice in her 1746 periodical that pretends to be narrated by a parrot and observes developments, trials, executions, and property seizures associated with the War of Austrian Succession. On March 31, 2017, he presented a shorter paper entitled “Dumplings, Puddings, and Genres: Henry Carey’s Learned Dissertation” as part of the roundtable “Generic Mixes: Eighteenth-Century Hybrids.” This paper examines the mockery of the debasement of formal understanding in the satirical treatise A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling, Its Dignity, Antiquity, and Excellence with a Word upon Pudding. And Many other Useful Discoveries, of great Benefit to the Publick (1726) that pretends to track the history and development of pudding in England.

Dr. Roger W. Hecht (English) has had five poems published in Poetry WTF!?, an on-line journal of experimental re-mix poetry. The five poems are selections from a series called Liner Notes. These are found poems whose source texts are taken from the liner notes of classic jazz and rock record albums.

Jonathan Sadow published a peer-reviewed book chapter entitled “Moral and Generic Corruption in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy” in Didactic Novels and British Women’s Writing, 1790-1820, ed. Hillary Havens (Routledge, 2017).The essay focuses on the relationship between Eliza Fenwick’s complex novel Secresy (1795)-a didactic novel in epistolary form about women’s education that is also a gothic-and her friend Mary Wollstonecraft’s critical essays about the morality of novels. Despite Secresy’s eccentricities (the heroine wanders through the forest at night with her fawn and meets a being who claims to be from another world), Sadow argues that both Fenwick and Wollstonecraft’s work possesses a nuanced understanding of the potential of fiction as a literary genre for women that is mediated through a critical re-evaluation of Rousseau as both novelist and social theorist.

Roger W. Hecht has published several poems in anthologies and on-line journals. "The Ornery Orrery”" was published in Shortest Day, Longest Night: Stories and Poems from the Solstice Shorts Festival (Arachne Press). His story will be performed by actors in London on Solstice night. Two poems-"Witness Report” and "Sky Burial" were published in From the Finger Lakes: A Poetry Anthology (Cayuga Lakes Books). Four haiku poems were published in Undertow Tanka Review 9.

Akira Yatsuhashi has been selected to serve on the Society for Classical Studies' (SCS) newly formed Committee on the Diversity in the Profession. Yatsuhashi has already served a three year term on the SCS's Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups from which the new committee was formed. The Society for Classical Studies, formerly the American Philological Association, is the principal learned society in North America for the study of ancient Greek and Roman languages, literatures, and civilizations.

On November 15th, Akira Yatsuhashi, gave a talk entitled, "Nishiwaki Junzaburo’s Ambarvalia: Imagining a Classical World through a Modernist Lens," at the invitation of Tufts University's Classics department. The talk reassessed the translatory work of one of Japan's foremost Modernist poets and theorists, Nishiwaki, whose first major poetic collection had a classical focus with translations of the Roman poets, Catullus and Tibullus.

George Hovis presented a paper entitled "Race Change and Revolution in Clyde Edgerton's The Night Train" at the 88th annual conference of the South Atlantic Modern Languages Association, Nov. 4-6, in Jacksonville, Florida. Dr. Hovis's paper applied Critical Race Theory, especially Derrick Bell’s theory of Interest Convergence, to Edgerton's novel, which addresses civil rights conflict in North Carolina in 1963.

Amie Doughty presented the paper "Franken-faeries, or the Conflation of Creator and Created in the October Daye and Merry Gentry Series" at the Northeast Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association in Keene, NH on October 22. The paper compares the way in which the creature and his creator Victor Frankenstein are conflated with similar parent-child conflation in the October Day and Merry Gentry urban fantasy series and argues that just as the main characters are created (and recreated) by their parental figures, they become creators themselves and in the process act to recreate their parents.

Mark S. Ferrara publishes a new book entitled Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis (Rowman & Littlefield).
"With scholarly acumen and attunement to the pulses of social evolution, Mark Ferrara guides us through centuries of respectful cannabis use within diverse world religions, and he thoughtfully explores its potential to contribute to the spiritual awakening so urgently needed in the early twenty-first century. This book is a critical, invaluable, and timely 'missing link' in the literature on marijuana and on how certain non-ordinary states of awareness may contribute to psychological and spiritual development."(William A. Richards, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, author of Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences)

On September 20, 2016, Daniel G. Payne gave a tour of John Burroughs' writing cabin, Slabsides, to Professor Cheng Hong, the wife of Li Keqiang, Premier of the People's Republic of China. Professor Cheng is a scholar of American nature writing and has translated several classics of American nature writing into Chinese, including John Burroughs' "Wake-Robin" and Henry Beston's "The Outermost House," copies of which she presented to Dr. Payne at Slabsides.

Earlier in September, Fred Barbash of The Washington Post interviewed Bambi Lobdell on her ancestor, Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell. The recent presence of transgender lives, identities, and issues in current news and pop culture drove Barbash to investigate who the first transgender person in America might have been. Lobdell told him there was no way to know such a thing as what is now called transgender identity and gender non-conforming identities have always existed, and especially in North America before it was America. However, Barbash interviewed Lobdell on her ancestor's transition in the nineteenth century, which brought him much notoriety and trouble, as he ended up spending the last 32 years of his life in insane asylums for persistently presenting as a man and claiming manhood. Bambi will be speaking on this ancestor on October 12th at 5:30 in the Catskill Room in Hunt Union. Read The Washington Post article.

Daniel G. Payne gave book talks on his new biography "Orion on the Dune: A Biography of Henry Beston" on September 16, 2016 at the Osterville Public Library and on September 17, 2016 at the Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Cape Cod. On Monday, September 19, 2016, he was interviewed by Robby McQueeney of WOMR Radio in Provincetown. Download the podcast for the interview.

Orion on the Dunes: A Biography of Henry Beston by Daniel G. Payne, was published on September 1, 2016. A book launch was held on September 3 at Henry Beston's Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, Maine, with about eighty people in attendance, including the publisher, David R. Godine and several Maine writers including Gary Lawless and Franklin Burroughs.

On August 6, 2016, Daniel G. Payne, took a delegation of diplomats from the People's Republic of China on a tour of John Burroughs' writing cabin, Slabsides, in West Park, New York. The delegation included 23 diplomats from the Chines Consulate in New York City, the United Nations, and visitors from Beijing on the tour.

Amie Doughty has published an edited collection of essays called Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture: A Mosaic of Criticism with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The essays, based on 2015 presentations from the Children's Literature and Culture area of the Popular Culture Association, represent a range of topics in children's and young adult literature and culture. Topics include fairy tales and fairy tale revisions, intersectionality in African American Girls sports literature and in YA dystopian fiction, religion in Harry Potter (and Snape as a Judas figure), bullying in picture books, and the popularity of YA fiction with adults. The collection includes an essay by Doughty about environmentalism in Rick Riordan's Heroes of Olympus series.

Mark S. Ferrara was interviewed about his new book, Palace of Ashes: China and the Decline of American Higher Education (2015), on May 30, 2016 by Ta Kung Pao, the oldest active Chinese language newspaper in China.

Mark S. Ferrara writes an article for History News Network on international higher education.

Roger W. Hecht published an article, "Only Yesterday: Ecological and Psychological Recovery" in Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities. The essay is included in a review cluster of essays investigating the environmental issues addressed in the films of Studio Ghibli, Japan's famed animation studio. Hecht's essay discusses the film's critique of modern urban Japan and the main character's efforts to find personal fulfillment and authenticity in the working agrarian landscape of Yamagata.

Roger W. Hecht presented a paper, "To See With Eyes Unclouded By Hate: Environmental Ethics and the Art of Seeing in the films of Hayao Miyazaki," at the Popular Culture Association national conference in Seattle on March 23. He also chaired the Anime panel. His paper defined the"environmental gaze" and described its role in cultivating environmental ethics in audiences in three of Miyazaki's films: "Nausicaa, the Valley of the Wind," "My Neighbor Totoro," and "Princess Mononoke."

Amie Doughty presented the paper "Unsustainable Hunger: An Examination of Sustainability in YA Dystopian Fiction" at the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in Seattle, WA, on March 22, 2016. The paper explores how sustainability is represented in two young adult dystopian novels, The Hunger Games and The Summer Prince, and argues that sustainability in these novels and other similar dystopian texts does not revolve around past environmental disasters but around the problematic social structures put in place to cope with those environmental disasters. This paper was inspired in part by the Sustainable Susquehanna Curriculum Workshop in which she participated in Summer 2015 and the texts that she is teaching in Children's Literature this spring. In addition to presenting her paper, as Area Chair of the Children's Literature and Culture area of the Popular Culture Association, she organized nine panels (31 panelists) at the conference.

Mark Ferrara was interviewed by The China Daily newspaper, about his book Palace of Ashes: China and the Decline of American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

Mark Ferrara Interviewed by "Inside Higher Ed", November 17th, 2015
Inside Higher Ed interviews Mark Ferrara, department of English, about his new book Palace of Ashes: China and the Decline of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Amie Doughty presented the paper "Safe at Last in the Wood outside the Garden’: Classic Animal Fantasy and the Environment" at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference in New London, NH, on October 31. The paper explores the way in which Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit stories employ wild and cultivated places and argues that Potter's more realistic approaches to nature causes a reversal of the traditional nature tropes in the European folklore and literary traditions.

Bianca Tredennick published a chapter in Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fin de Siecle to the Millenium. (Ed. Sharla Hutchison and Rebecca A. Brown. McFarland, 2015). Her chapter "'I think I am a monster': Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching and the Postmodern Gothic," examines the way in which the paratexts of the 2009 novel act to transform the text itself into a kind of Gothic monster.

Richard Lee has an article, "Flashy-y Fictions: The Implications and Constraints of Short Short Fiction," in a conference anthology recently published under the auspices of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. Unbraiding the Short Story: Selected Program Articles includes an expanded and revised version of Lee's 2014 conference presentation, one of "twenty three articles selected from the many that were presented at the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held at the University of Vienna, July 16-19 2014," according to the collection's editor.

Mark S. Ferrara publishes in the peer-reviewed journal Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory (Penn State University Press). In his essay "Bao-yu and the Second Self," Ferrara demonstrates that numerous instances of pairing, mirroring, and doubling around protagonist Jia Bao-yu (in the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber) serve to highlight a philosophical view of mutability grounded in Ying-Yang theory and Daoism, emphasize the dynamic process of acquiring self-knowledge, and subvert and problematize dualistic classification (truth/fiction, right/wrong, real/unreal).

Akira Yatsuhashi spent three months over summer break as an invited Senior Fellow and Guest Researcher at Excellence Cluster TOPOI: The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations. Topoi is a research network which draws on the strengths and resources of six universities and research institutions in Berlin, including two of Germany's top universities, Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin. Akira Yatsuhashi was part of the Research Group which examines the epistemic networks through which the ancient world was transregionally connected. While in residence, he participated in several workshops, presented his research to the broader faculty and graduate students in residence, and continued his research on the Library of Alexandria, primarily working on his book project that links the creation of Alexandrian academic knowledge to new ways of performing Greekness.

Andrea Denekamp, Ph.D., Adjunct lecturer in the English department, published a chapter, "'Transform stalwart trees': Sylvan Biocentrism in The Lord of the Rings" in Representations of Nature in Middle-earth. The book, which offers considerations of how Tolkien portrays the natural world, was published by Walking Tree Publishers in 2015. Dr. Denekamp's contribution delves into post-war deforestation and forestry science and examines how Ents, being neither trees nor Men, demonstrate the biocentrism of the biotic Other as central components of Tolkien's model of ethical stewardship. The chapter further argues that, as separation of place and culture is a cornerstone of his mythos, Tolkien portrays Ents as a sustainable cultural community-one that cares less for humanity than the biotic and ecological environments.

Richard Lee and Fida Mohammad, Sociology, co-authored a recently published, peer-reviewed article: "Evidentiary Standards for Sexual Offenses in Islam" appears in the Pakistan Journal of Criminology, Volume 7.1 (Jan. 2015), pp. 29-44.

Akira Yatsuhashi has been invited to be a Senior Fellow and Guest Researcher at Excellence Cluster TOPOI: The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations. Topoi is a research network which draws on the strengths and resources of six universities and research institutions in Berlin, including Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin. Akira Yatsuhashi will be part of the Research Group D-5 which examines the epistemic networks through which the ancient world was transregionally connected. While in residence, he plans to continue his research on the Library of Alexandria, linking the creation of Alexandrian academic knowledge to new ways of performing Greekness.

Daniel G. Payne hosted the 89th annual John Burroughs Association Literary Awards Celebration at the American Museum of Natural History on April 6, 2015. The John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing in Book Form is the nation's oldest and most prestigious award for nature writing, and over the past eighty-nine years has been presented to such writers as Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Anne Zwinger, Peter Matthiessen, and Barry Lopez. This year's John Burroughs Medal winner was Sherry Simpson for her book Dominion of Bears: Living With Wildlife in Alaska (University Press of Kansas, 2013).

Bambi Lobdell, adjunct faculty from the Women's & Gender Studies/English Department, gave a lecture titled "Claiming Manhood: The Transgender Journey of Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell" on Thursday, April 23, 2015 in Milne Library. The Alden Scholar Series celebrates SUNY Oneonta faculty members who have published scholarly books or produced book-length projects within the last five years.

Amie Doughty presented the paper "Gaea's Last Stand: Rick Riordan's The Heroes of Olympus and Environmentalism" on April 1, 2015, at the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in New Orleans. The paper argues that the uneasy ending of the series reflects the uneasiness of the environmental message being presented. In addition to presenting her paper, Dr. Doughty, Children's Literature and Culture Area Chair, oversaw fifteen panels in the area.

Jonathan Sadow presented the paper "Marivaux's Pharsamon and Cervantick Exhaustion" on March 21st at the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies' annual conference in Los Angeles. Sadow investigates the vexed relationship that early eighteenth-century self-conscious fiction had to revivals of Don Quixote, both repeating Cervantes' own anxieties and embodying the exhaustion inherent in being a parody of a parody. Pharsamon sets the stage for more well-known works by Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot.

Mark S. Ferrara publishes a book chapter in the new edited collection entitled The Individual and Utopia: A Multidisciplinary Study of Humanity and Perfection (Ashgate, 2015). In his contribution, Ferrara argues for a mental utopia in literature that finds focus around the inner experiences of fictional characters. These experiences are focalized in order to convey to the reader the centrality and immanence of the lived moment as something ultimately divine. An analysis of literary texts from the Western and world traditions confirms the perennial and universal nature of the mental utopia in literature.

Richard Lee has had an article reprinted by Infobase Publishing. The article, "Narrative Point of View, Irony and Cultural Criticism in Selected Short Fiction by George Saunders", was originally published in 2010, and is now included as a chapter in the e-book George Saunders, part of the Bloom's Literary Criticism series. Lee has also been invited to contribute a chapter to the first book-length treatment of contemporary American writer Saunders's work: George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Palgrave/Macmillan), scheduled for publication in 2016.

Mark S. Ferrara has been appointed Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, Ferrara is penning a third monograph about the religious, ceremonial, and medicinal uses of cannabis in world cultures. He explores that central role in Hindu asceticism, Sufi Islam, traditional Chinese pharmacology-as well as in African dagga cults, the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, and the Rastafari movement. A cultural critique of literary works by Western pioneers of consciousness-from Crowley to Yeats, Ginsberg to DeLillo-brings his book to a close.

Daniel G. Payne presented a paper entitled "Children of the Mist: Crossing the Border between the Wild and the Civilized in Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century American and English Fiction" on November 6, 2014 at the Western Literature Association's Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, and another entitled "Friends in High Places: John Burroughs, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt and the Value of Indirect Persuasion in American Nature Writing" on November 8, 2014 at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference in Atlanta Georgia. The SAMLA panel, "Teaching Sustainability/Doing Environmental Activism," was organized by George Hovis, Department of English, who chaired the panel and delivered a paper entitled "No Fracking Way: Encouraging Political Engagement in Lit 101."

Amie Doughty presented the paper "'You're a trickster singular, Rachel Morgan': Collective and Individual Magic in Kim Harrison's The Hollows Series" at the Northeast Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference at Providence College on October 24. The paper examines how the different types of magic used by the main character of the series underscores the Otherness of the character.

Amie Doughty has been named the Area Chair for the Children's Literature and Culture Area of the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. As area chair, she is responsible for soliciting and reviewing presentation proposals about children's literature and culture for the annual conference, as well as organizing panels for the conference.

Richard Lee was interviewed by Radio Austria (ORF) while in Vienna to participate in the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English from July 16-20, 2014. Lee moderated a panel, "Short Short Fiction," and presented an invited paper, "Flash-y Fictions: The Implications and Constraints of Short Short Fiction." Scholars and writers from 30 countries came together, hosted by the University of Vienna, for this biennial event, which this year included readings by Bharati Mukherjee, Sandra Cisneros, Robert Olen Butler, Kelly Cherry, Thomas Kennedy, Clark Blaise, Marjorie Kantor, Tamas Dobozy and many other established and rising stars in the field.

Daniel Payne delivered the 2014 Roxbury Burroughs Lecture The multi-media presentation on "John Burroughs' Wild Places: The Catskills and Adirondacks" was given at the Historic Masonic Hall in Roxbury. Dr. Payne is a trustee of John Burroughs' Woodchuck Lodge, which sponsored the program. Those in attendance who made a free-will donation for the maintenance and upkeep of historic Woodchuck Lodge received a signed copy of Dr. Payne's Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics. In the week prior to the lecture Professor, Payne gave two interviews on John Burroughs which were aired on Roxbury's Public Radio Station WIOX. In April, Professor Payne was also named a member of the Board of Trustees of the John Burroughs Association, which was founded in 1921 to commemorate the life and work of John Burroughs (1837-1921). The JBA is headquartered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Mark Ferrara was interviewed by the China Daily newspaper regarding the 18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng). Ferrara has penned five peer-reviewed articles on the novel, and is co-editor of the book Between Noble and Humble, a biography of Cao Xueqin.

Amie Doughty presented the paper "Gaea Gone Bad: Mother Earth as Antagonist in Rick Riordan's The Heroes of Olympus" at the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in Chicago on April 18. The paper argues that though Gaea is presented as an antagonist, if the Riordan's series is read as a continuation of his Percy Jackson & the Olympians series and Gaea is seen through the lens of James Lovelock's Gaia Theory, The Heroes of Olympus presents a strong message about the need for cooperation to protect the environment.

Akira Yatsuhashi was an invited participant at a workshop in Berlin on Ancient Greek and Roman Scientific, Medical and Technical Texts on March 21 and 22, 2014. The workshop was hosted by TOPOI Excellence Cluster and sponsored by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. Participants included scholars from Cambridge, St. Andrews, Mainz, Stanford, and Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Topoi is a research network with a focus on the study of the ancient world affiliated with the Berliner Antike-Kolleg. At Topoi, over 200 researchers from diverse disciplines investigate how space and knowledge were formed and transformed in ancient civilizations.

Roger Hecht published a book chapter, "'Mighty Lordships in the Heart of the Republic:' the Anti-Rent Subtext to Pierre," in A Political Companion to Herman Melville (University Press of Kentucky). The chapter examines the way Melville uses references to the Anti-Rent conflict as a platform to attack the emergence of aristocracy in antebellum America.

Richard Lee published a book review of Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Viorica Patea, ed.) in the journal Short Story (20.1: pp. 81-4).

Daniel G. Payne recently published a new book, Why Read Thoreau's Walden with New Street Communications. The book examines why Walden is widely considered to be one of the greatest works in American literary history, Henry Thoreau's role in the development of modern environmentalism, and the relevance that Walden still has for modern readers. Jill Sisson Quinn, author of Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan, writes of the book, "Just as Henry David Thoreau was not the hermit in the woods he is sometimes made out to be, nor does the first-time reader need navigate Thoreau's Walden alone. Dan Payne's accessible, delightful companion to Thoreau's classic puts Thoreau's work in a cultural, historical, literary, and philosophical context. Sometimes personal, always informative, and often profound, Why Read Thoreau's WALDEN? is the perfect guide for the 21st century student of Thoreau.

Jonathan Sadow published the article "The Puppet Show Conundrum: Haywood and the 'Fittest Entertainment for the Present Age.'" This article examines satirical reaction by Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding to the rise of "debased" forms of entertainment such as puppet shows and novels in the 1730s and 1740s. Despite their condemnations in The Female Spectator and The Author's Farce, both writers display a subtle ambivalence about their own participation in commercial media; Haywood wrote popular novels and Fielding secretly ran a puppet theater. The piece appears in the "Public Intellectualism" issue of the refereed journal Digital Defoe (5:1, Fall 2013) alongside contributions by John Richetti and Maximillian Novak.

Jonathan Sadow published the co-authored article "Dialogue, Selection, Subversion: Three Approaches to Teaching Women Writers" in volume 32 of the refereed Lumen, the journal of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. This piece, written with Martha Bowden and Karen Gevirtz, examines methods for incorporating recent scholarship on eighteenth-century women writers-work that has changed our understanding of the literary and cultural history of the period-into university teaching while providing intellectually coherent and useful courses for non-specialist students.

Amie Doughty has published her second book, Throw the Book Away: Reading versus Experience in Children's Fantasy. The book, published by McFarland & Company, explores the role of books, readers, and reading in children's and young adult fantasy books and film and argues that books play a secondary role to first-hand experience because children and young adults must move beyond the safety of adults, who are represented by books.

Mark Ferrara publishes the book Barack Obama and the Rhetoric of Hope with McFarland, a small North Carolina press. It traces the historical and literary antecedents of the President's campaign rhetoric to the utopian traditions of the Western world. The "rhetoric of hope" is a form of political discourse characterized by a forward-looking vision of social progress brought about by collective effort and adherence to shared values (including discipline, temperance, a strong work ethic, self-reliance and service to the community).
By combining his own personal story (as the biracial son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya) with national mythologies like the American Dream, Obama creates a persona that embodies the moral values and cultural mythos of his implied audience. In doing so, he draws upon the Classical world, Judeo-Christianity, the European Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, the presidencies of Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR, slave narratives, the Black church, the civil rights movement and even popular culture.

Mark Ferrara taught a two-week intensive course in South Korea for students who will matriculate to a SUNY campus in the spring as part of a "3+1" exchange program with Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS). Seven of his 54 students will attend SUNY Oneonta.

Roger W. Hecht was recently invited to be a featured presenter for an NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop, Clinton's Ditch: the Erie Canal in Western New York, held at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse on July 23 and August 6. Dr. Hecht's presentation, "Nature, Nation, Tourism: The Erie Canal and the Quest for America," discussed the role the Erie Canal played in the formation of national identity during the early republic, as reflected in travel writing and tourist guides.

On May 8, 2013, Daniel G. Payne, delivered a presentation entitled "John Burroughs's Wild Places: The Catskills and the Adirondacks" at the Kelly Adirondack Center at Union College. The lecture was part of a week-long series on the Adirondacks held annually at Union College.

Jonathan Sadow presented a paper entitled "The Puppet Show Conundrum: Haywood and the 'Fittest Entertainment for the Present Age'" at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies' annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio on April 4, 2013. This talk discussed the ways that popular entertainment like puppet shows and joke books held a mirror up to 1740s London and served as a model for the state of contemporary culture. On April 6, 2013, at the same conference, he chaired a panel entitled "Unromantic Charlotte Smith". This panel focused on aspects of Charlotte Smith's poetry of the 1790s-usually viewed as Romantic-that were rooted in eighteenth-century ideas.

Kathryn Finin recently presented her paper "Gendered Displays: Lady Macbeth, Politics, and American Culture" at the national Popular Culture Association Conference (March 25-28, 2013) in Washington D.C. Finin examines how American popular culture (mis)uses Lady Macbeth to render female power and ambition as always already problematic, even malevolent. Where powerful women are concerned, then, our supposedly "postfeminist" 21st century harnesses Shakespeare's iconic status to authorize our own gendered stereotypes, limit female subjectivities and circumscribe female agency.

Amie Doughty presented the paper "'Mud People Had a Lot to Answer For': Environmental Messages in Children's Fantasy" at the national Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in Washington, DC, on March 28. The paper examines three children's fantasy series, Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, Percy Jackson & the Olympians by Rick Riordan, and Gaia Girls by Lee Welles. Doughty argues that environmental problems in the series are most effectively challenged through realistic rather than magical means and that the use of magic to solve environmental problems undermines the message that normal children can make a contribution to helping the environment.

Roger Hecht presented a paper at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association conference in Albuquerque, N.M., in February. "Mei and Satsuki's Excellent Adventure: The Hybrid Pastoral in Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro" examines the way the famed Japanese director fuses elements of western pastoral tradition with Japanese spiritual and folk traditions to create a hybrid aesthetic and narrative structure to construct his environmentalist ethos. Hecht also recently published an entry, "American Pastoral," in the just-issued Encyclopedia of the Environment in American Literature, Ed. Brian Jones and Geoff Hamilton (McFarland 2013).

Daniel G. Payne presented a paper entitled "Finding a Place for the Humanities in an Environmental Sciences Program" at the 128th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), held in Boston, Massachusetts from January 3-6, 2013. His paper was presented as part of a panel on "English and the Humanities in an Age of Accountability: Notes from the Small College Department," chaired by Dr. Mark Long of Keene State College in New Hampshire.

Amie Doughty presented the paper "Itchy Witch and Big Al: Kim Harrison's Demonic Mythology" at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference in Durham, NC, on November 11. The paper examines Kim Harrison's urban fantasy series The Hollows and argues that the protagonist Rachel Morgan, like many female-centered urban fantasy main characters, represents a merging of the innocent heroine and monstrous Other from the Gothic literary tradition.

Mark Ferrara presented the paper "'Distinguishing Truth and Fiction: Jia Bao-yu and Zhen Bao-yu in Dream of the Red Chamber" at the Society of Utopian Studies Conference held in Toronto, Canada. In it, Ferrara argues that the protagonist Bao-yu's encounter with his second self is decidedly utopian in terms of his drive toward Daoist-Buddhist salvation over Confucian social obligation. Jia Bao-yu and Zhen Bao-yu therefore represent competing indigenous worldviews with very different ways of imagining a better way of being.

Roger W. Hecht published an article, "'Rouse, Ye Anti-Renters:' Poetry and Politics in the Anti-Rent Press," in the Spring 2012 issue of the Hudson River Valley Review. The article discusses how tenant-farmers engaged in the Anti-Rent War of the 1840s employed poetry and song to make sense of their relationship to the landlords and their own economic positions, and to persuade others to join their cause.

Richard Lee moderated a panel and presented a paper at the 12th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held in North Little Rock, Arkansas, June 26th-30th, 2012. Participants at the conference hailed from twenty-six countries and almost thirty states. The panel, "Anglophone African Currents in Contemporary Short Fiction," included panelists' presentations and an open-forum discussion on current practitioners of the short-story form in, especially, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria. Lee's paper, "East African Short Fiction in English: Implications for Short-Story Genre Theory," focuses on several exemplary writers who are working/publishing within changing market dynamics in Uganda and Kenya. In particular, he noted several interesting recent opportunities for "new" writers, especially women writers, as they attempt to break into local, regional and international markets. His paper was solicited for inclusion in a forthcoming anthology.

Amie Doughty has published the article "Finding the Fit: The Minutiae of the Academic Job Search" in Attaining an Academic Appointment by Bill McHenry, S. Kent Butler, and Jim McHenry (Atwood Publishing, 2012). The article is a personal reflection on the academic job search and the intangibles that go into the search process for both the job candidate and the college/university.

Kathryn Finin recently attended the Shakespeare Association of America's annual conference
(April 5-7, 2012), where she presented her paper "'What means this my lord?': Ophelia, Love, and Ethics." As part of her ongoing research on gender and ethics in Shakespeare's tragedies, Dr. Finin's paper examines the layered complexities among which Shakespeare has situated Ophelia, especially her engagement with the key ethical questions of responsiveness and responsibility. The paper argues that Ophelia engages in a subversive kind of ventroliquizing and that her continual response to the call of the other marks her as a rare moral agent in this play.

Jonathan Sadow presented a paper entitled "Moral and Generic Corruption in Eliza Fenwick's Secresy" at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies' annual conference in San Antonio Texas on March 22, 2012. This talk suggested links between the sentimental novels of the early eighteenth century and the didactic novels written by women in the 1790s. Many of those didactic novels, often about the subject of women's education, were more artistically nuanced and culturally savvy than they are given credit for.

Roger W. Hecht has published a new collection of poetry, Talking Pictures, by Cervena Barva Press. Talking Pictures is a collection of formal, free-verse, and prose poetry that has been praised by poet Michael Burkard as a "vivid book" with "personal and impersonal worlds and factors that impinge on all of us." Novelist Michael Martone calls it "a vocal and evocative collection." To promote the release of the Talking Pictures Professor Hecht held a book-signing event a poetry reading at the Associated Writing Programs annual conference in Chicago on March 1. Talking Pictures will soon be available at local bookstores and through Cervena Barva Press.

Bianca Tredennick co-chaired a seminar session at the Northeast Modern Language Association's annual conference. The panel, entitled "The Undead," focused on there surgence of interest, in literature and popular culture, in zombies, vampires and other such "undead" creatures.

Richard Lee published "Reflection as a Revision Technique," a learning module (pedagogical chapter) included in print and online versions of Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs. Wadsworth/Cengage Press, 2011.

Amie Doughty presented the paper "'You Are Not Allowed in This Story!': Reader-Character Roles and Attitudes about Reading in Children's Fantasy" at the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in Boston, MA, on April 12. The paper examines the apparent messages about reading in children's fantasy texts in which characters enter into books.

Amie Doughty presented the paper “’Close This Book Right Now’: The Writer-Character in Children’s Fantasy” on November 12, 2011 at the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Conference at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Connecticut. The paper examines the way that metafictional techniques in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians and The Kane Chronicles series serves to make the fantastic elements appear realistic.

Mark Ferrara published the essay "Rustic Fiction Indeed!”: Reading Jia Yu-cun in Dream of the Red Chamber" in the peer-reviewed New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 13.1 (2011). In that work, Ferrara argues that to interpret Jia Yu-cun as a stock depiction of the corrupt Mandarin in Chinese literature is to overlook his multivarious roles in the narrative. Like Wang Xi-feng who is too often regarded as a stereotypical shrew, Yu-cun is a complex and carefully developed character woven philosophically and typologically into the patterns of meaning in the novel.

Jonathan Sadow published the essay "Bagels and Genres" in the peer-reviewed Journal of New York Folklore (37:1-2, Summer 2011). This essay is a contribution to the study of material culture in the fields of folklore and ethnography. It suggests that "genre" is a subject that represents cultural discussions about objects, not objects in themselves. Genre rules--such as the distinction between a "real" and "fake" bagel--are best seen as a kind of enforcement of ethnicity, place, and nation. Bagels are a genre in distress, but it is primarily the distressed nature of a traditional genre that establishes something as a genre in the first place. In other words, the concern for bagels' "traditional" form only becomes important when cultural assimilation becomes objectionable rather than desired.

Amie Doughty presented the paper “Living Characters and Life behind the Scenes in Roderick Townley’s The Sylvie Cycle” at the joint National Popular Culture Association/American Association and Southwest Texas PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio, Texas, on April 21, 2011. The paper examines the role of Reader, Author, and Writer in Townley’s trilogy and argues that Readers’ role in the trilogy is to pass on stories and keep characters alive.

Jonathan Sadow presented the paper "'Hunted by Dogs and Men': Bird Migration in Charlotte Smith's "Beachy Head" and Oliver Goldsmith's History of the Earth and Animated Nature at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies' annual conference on March 18, 2011 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. This paper addressed the connections between conceptions of natural history and poetics in the late eighteenth century. He also chaired a panel entitled "Critical Misidentifications" at the same conference on March 19, 2011 investigating the affective links between scholars and their subjects.

Bianca Tredennick published Victorian Transformations: Genre, Nationalism and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Literature this Spring. It is an edited collection for which she served as editor (Ashgate) and "Some Collections of Mortality: Dickens, the Paris Morgue and the Material Corpse" (Victorian Review). She also presented at the Northeast Modern Languages Association conference as part of a composition roundtable entitled "Image as Argument." Her presentation was "‘What Would You Want with a Rabbit?': Teaching Gender and Sexuality through 'The Rabbit of Seville.'"

Mark Ferrara published the essay "Blake's Jerusalem as Perennial Utopia" in the peer-reviewed journal Utopian Studies (22.1). In addition to giving us a new way to understand the well-documented distinctiveness of William Blake’s religious message, the Perennial paradigm shows Blake’s soteriology in the poem Jerusalem to be utopian rather than Salvationist (that is to say, individual-religious as opposed to collective-political). In Jerusalem Blake does not rally the reader towards some “ensuing peaceful millennium,” but rather to find enlightenment in the eternal moment.

Amie Doughty has published the article "'I Think You Are Not Telling Me All of This Story': Storytelling, Fate, and Self-Determination in Robin McKinley's Folktale Revisions" in Susan Redington Bobby's collection Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings published by McFarland, Fall 2009. The essay examines several of Robin McKinley's novels and argues that there is a parallel between how closely the novels conform to the folktales upon which they are based and how self-reliant the main characters are. The more McKinley deviates from the traditional folktales, the more self-reliant her characters are.

Mark Ferrara co-edited the book Between Noble and Humble: Cao Xueqin and the Dream of the Red Chamber, a scholarly work by the famous mainland Chinese critic Zhou Ruchang. Written for the Western reader, it historicizes the life and times of the Chinese novelist Cao Xueqin (c. 1715-1763) and comprehensively introduces the origins of the novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng). This translation is unique because it offers the first book-length biography of Cao Xueqin in English, and in it Zhou also offers controversial theories about Honglou meng based on decades of careful research, for instance, that the famous commentator Red Inkstone was in fact a female relative of Cao Xueqin. This book appears as volume sixty-two in Peter Lang's Asian Thought and Culture Series.