Undergraduate Awards
| Gabriella Buckner | Gabriella won first place for poetry in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. |
| Isaac Flores | Isaac was named runner up for fiction in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. |
| Michael Gonzalez | Michael recently presented a poster at the Undergraduate Research Conference on campus, which looked at whether Freshmen and Sophomore students in English writing classes seek feedback and/or help, and whether Communication Apprehension plays a factor in students' ability to seek feedback and/or help. |
| Jacqueline Gordon | Jacqueline won first place in the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Department of English Essay Contest for “Shamela as an Antidote to Emulation Anxiety.” |
| Dylan Hendrickson | Dylan won first place in the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction for “Perfect Refraction.” |
| Kristin Hogue | Kristin Hogue was awarded the Susan F. Regan Award by the Prytanean Honor Society of UC Davis, which honors a woman's academic achievement, leadership, and service to the community. Additionally, Kristin was awarded the Carbon Neutrality Initiative Fellowship by the UC Office of the President. Recently, Kristin was chosen by the 17th Annual California Higher Education and Sustainability Conference (CHESC) to receive their "Best Practice Award" in Academics for the creation and teaching of her Spring 2018 student-led course, ENL 198F: Discourses of Climate Change in the Humanities. This fall, Kristin will attend graduate school at Columbia University in New York City. |
| Emma Hoppough | Emma was awarded an honorable mention in the Elliot Gilbert Award for Best Critical Honors Thesis for “Silent Talk – Transforming Private Pain and Public Healing in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.” |
| Nama Ju | Nama was awarded an honorable mention in the Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize. |
| Alana Kugelman | In Fall 2017, Alana was awarded the Lawrence J. Andrews Award, which is given annually to one undergraduate student entering the senior year in the College of Letters and Sciences based on academic and extracurricular success. |
| Sofia Molodanof | Sophia won the Campus-wide Department of English Outstanding Graduating Senior Award. |
| Kelsey Owen | Kelsey won first place for fiction in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. |
| Hosanna Rubio | Hosanna was awarded runner up for poetry in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. |
| Amanda Shores | Amanda was awarded an honorable mention in the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Department of English Outstanding Graduating Senior Award. |
| Emily Stack | Emily won second place in the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Department of English Essay Prize “Keeps you Reminded: Sex/Gender Instability and Puritan Criticism in ‘As You Like It.’” |
| Marissa Trujillo | Marissa was awarded an honorable mention in the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Department of English Outstanding Graduating Senior Award. |
| Megan West | Megan won the Elliot Gilbert Award for Best Critical Honors Thesis for “Bertha Mason and the Politics of Feeling.” |
| Brittany Wilson | Brittany was awarded an honorable mention in the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction for “Sugarcane.” |
| Cheyenne Wiseman | Cheyenne was awarded an honorable mention in the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction for “Wax Heart.” |
Graduate Student Awards, Publications, and Projects
| Simon Abramowitsch | In April 2018, Simon spoke on the "Stories from the Field" panel at the Humanists @ Work Graduate Student Workshop, held in Berkeley. This was the final event of Humanists @ Work, a UC Humanities Research Institute initiative that aimed to help prepare graduate students in the humanities for a variety of career pathways. A former member of the Humanists @ Work grad student advisory committee, Simon spoke about his experience transitioning into and working as full-time instructor in a California community college. In addition, Simon's article, "The Black Communications Movement," is forthcoming in African American Review in winter 2018. |
| Sophia Bamert | Sophia's first two publications both came out this year: an article, "Miasmas in Eden: Atmosphere, History, and Narrative in The House of the Seven Gables and 'Rappaccini's Daughter'" in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and the chapter "New Directions in Ecocriticism," co-authored with Janet Fiskio (Oberlin College), in the edited collection American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010. She also published an essay about a document from the Newberry Library archives in an online exhibit that emerged from the NEH institute she participated in last summer; you can find the exhibit, "Making Modernism: Literature and Culture in 20th-Century Chicago, 1893-1955," on the Newberry's website. Sophia is thrilled to be heading to Germany in the fall as our department's next Mainz Exchange student. She will be teaching the BA-level Intro to American Studies and MA-level Theory and Methodology courses at the University of Mainz during the 2018-19 academic year. |
| Katherine Buse | Katherine was awarded a UCHRI grant with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal for putting together a Multicampus Graduate Student Working Group, "Science/Fiction, Science/Media: Re-theorizing STS’s Cultural Landscape." Katherine and Ranjodh were also awarded a grant by Davis Humanities Institute for running a "Technoscience + Speculative Media" research cluster in the year 2018-19. |
| Cristina Fries | Cristina Fries was awarded the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, a national award given annually to 12 emerging fiction writers for their debut short story published in a literary magazine or cultural website. Her story "New Years in La Calera," which was first published in EPOCH Magazine in September 2017, will appear in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, forthcoming in August. She is also a recipient of the 2018 Margrit Mondavi Graduate Fellowship for her documentary-style creative writing project that will take place in Colombia. |
| Kristin George Bagdanov | This year, Kristin presented papers at ASAP, ACLA and ALA. She was elected graduate student liaison for ASLE and is helping plan the biannual conference at UC Davis in 2019. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Boston Review, Colorado Review, Puerto Del Sol, Zone 3, Superstition Review, and Grist Journal. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Fossils in the Making, was accepted for publication by Black Ocean and will be published in 2019. And, finally, she won first place in the Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize. |
| Madeline Gobbo | Madeline wrote and produced season 3 of SFMOMA's podcast Raw Material with reporter Jessica Placzek, examining the intersection of land and art in California with episodes on underground homes, motorcycle drawings, petroglyphs, smoke art, Disneyland design and a lost Bay Area DIY sculpture garden. Her short fiction was published in Wolfman New Life Quarterly and Cosmonauts Avenue. |
| Rebecca Hogue | Rebecca has been named a 2018-19 Professors for the Future Fellow. She has also been awarded a 2018 Margrit Mondavi Fellowship, which she will use to complete research for her dissertation project by traveling this summer to archives in Hawai’i, Australia, and New Zealand. |
| William Lee Hughes | William presented at two conferences this year. Most recently, he presented “Impersonal Serial Forms and the Feeling of The Turn of the Screw” at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association conference in San Francisco. The paper he presented at the Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association in Honolulu is now a forthcoming article in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, entitled “Impersonal Grief: Charles Dickens and Serial Forms of Affect.” He was also awarded a a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. |
| Annette Hulbert | Annette was awarded a a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. |
| Scott Hunter | Scott Hunter was admitted to the Phd program in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. |
| Katja Jylkka | Katja had an article published in the April 2018 issue of Configurations titled "'Witness the Plesiosaurus': Geological Traces and the Loch Ness Monster Narrative." |
| Sawyer K. Kemp | Sawyer was awarded one of ten Mellon Public Scholars Fellowships from the DHI to produce and direct a trans-inclusive theatre project in Sacramento this summer. They were also one of five Next Generation Plenary speakers (the only plenary platform for graduate students) at the Shakespeare Association of America. Sawyer has a forthcoming article in a special journal issue on Trans Historicity edited by Simone Chess, Will Fisher, and Colby Gordon and a chapter in "Shakespeare and the Pedagogies of Justice," an edited collection by Wendy Beth Hyman and Hillary Eklund, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. |
| Kelsey Lepperd | Kelsey is the recipient of a 2018 Margrit Mondavi Graduate Fellowship, which is generously provided by DHI in order to support students as they work towards completion of their graduate thesis. |
| Katie Leveling | Katie has been awarded a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. Her first article, "Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Subject-System Identity," is forthcoming in the Fall 2018 special issue of College Literature, entitled "Lively Words: The Politics and Poetics of Experimental Writing." |
| Margaret Ann Miller | Margaret A. Miller and Professor Matthew Vernon have a co-written publication, titled: "Navigating Wonder: The Medieval Geographies of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant" that has been accepted by the journal Arthuriana. |
| Bethany E. Qualls | Bethany was awarded a 2018–19 Lewis Walpole Library Visiting Research Fellowship from Yale University and will be spending a month working in their archive this summer doing dissertation research on eighteenth-century materials related to gossip and visual culture. She presented new archival findings on the "celebrated" prostitute Sally Salisbury at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies and American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conferences this spring. She is also working for the Broadview Anthology of British Literature as a general textual editor and proofreader, most recently for The Age of Romanticism volume (3rd edition). |
| Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal | Ranjodh was awarded a UCHRI grant with Katherine Buse for putting together a Multicampus Graduate Student Working Group, "Science/Fiction, Science/Media: Re-theorizing STS’s Cultural Landscape." Ranjodh and Katherine were also awarded a grant by Davis Humanities Institute for running a "Technoscience + Speculative Media" research cluster in the year 2018-19. And, finally, Ranjodh will be one of two graduate students representing UC Davis in the Dahlem Humanities Center’s Global Humanities Summer School at the Free University of Berlin. |
| Ashley Sarpong | Ashley was awarded a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. |
| Samantha Snively | Samantha has published an essay in Studies in English Literature, titled "As You Like It's Political, Critical Animals," and a feature story for the food history website Gastro Obscura, titled "How 17th-Century Women Replicated Nature on the Table." |
| Bethany Williams | Bethany published the first edition of the feminist zine "Disparate Housewives." |
| Melissa Wills | Melissa welcomed her second baby, a boy, and also published an article, "Are Clusters Races? A Discussion of the Rhetorical Appropriation of Rosenberg et al.’s 'Genetic Structure of Human Populations,' in Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology. |
Faculty Awards, Publications, and Projects
| Gina Bloom | Gina’s book Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater has been published by the University Michigan Press in their Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. She has spent much of this past year working with faculty and students (including many English majors) in the ModLab to complete development of Play the Knave and creating a program that brings the game into K-12 schools. She was invited to exhibit Play the Knave and present her research on it in a keynote lecture in Melbourne, Australia for the Australia New Zealand Shakespeare Association and at a Digital Literature Festival in Pennsylvania. |
| Seeta Chaganti | Seeta published her second monograph, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago 2018). She was also elected as a trustee of the New Chaucer Society for the period 2018-2022 and has continued to work as a Steering Committee member of the Medievalists of Color. |
| Lucy Corin | Lucy will be the Blackburn Visiting Scholar in Creative Writing at Duke University for fall semester, 2018. Recent creative work appears in Ploughshares, Hunger Mountain, and Harper's. |
| Frances E. Dolan | Fran is proud that her essay, "Time, Gender, and the Mystery of English Wine," appeared in a cluster on "Temporality and Materiality" with an essay by three UCD grad students and alums (including Elizabeth Crachiolo and Dyani Taff from English) in the collection Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World. She also welcomed and learned from the opportunity to collaborate with Samantha Snively on editing two of 17thc writer Hester Pulter's poems for The Pulter Project, a digital edition. This year, she published several other essays, including "The Blood of the Grape" and "Toast and the Familiar in Children's Literature." |
| Elizabeth Freeman | Beth had two articles and an Afterward published this year: “Queer Temporality,” solicited for Time, a volume of Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender. New York: Macmillan, 2018; “Timing Sex in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Gerard & Kelly’s Kisses," in Manuela Rossini and Mike Toggweiler, eds. New Formations 92 (2018), special issue “Posthuman Temporalities”: 25-40, and “Afterward," in Kent Brintnall and Joseph Marchal, eds. Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, Fordham University Press, 2017, 315-19. |
| Pam Houston | During the past school year, Pam completed the autobiographical essay collection Deep Creek, which will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2019. Her essay “Some Kind of Calling” was chosen for Best American Travel Writing, and her essay “What Has Irony Done For Us Lately” received a Pushcart Prize. |
| Hsuan L. Hsu | Hsuan was awarded an Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation for 2018, and his research on olfactory aesthetics received grants from the UC Davis Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the UC President's Faculty Fellowship. He also prepared an edition of John Rollin Ridge's novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (Penguin, 2018). |
| Mark Jerng | Mark is the recipient of two teaching awards this year: 1) the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate Education; 2) the GSA Award For Excellence in Service to Graduate Students. He also has his second book, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction, published in 2018 by Fordham University Press. |
| Alessa Johns | Alessa was invited to speak on “German and German-American Feminism around 1800: Promoting Mary Wollstonecraft” at the German Studies Colloquium, UC Davis, in February 2018 as well as at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Orlando, Florida, in March. She was also invited to present a paper on “Austen’s Persuasion,” at the conference “Persuasion after Rhetoric,” held at UC Davis in April 2018. On sabbatical this coming fall she will speak on “Striving Sisters: Philippine Charlotte of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and Wilhelmine of Bayreuth” at a conference in October celebrating the 275th anniversary of the co-founding by the Margravine Wilhelmine von Bayreuth of the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg. Alessa will also lead the London Quarter Abroad program in Spring 2019, teaching a course on "Dark London: Reading the City from Nightlife to Nightmares," which will explore representations of the city as magical, mysterious, and macabre: Dark Magic, Crime, Death, Fog, Night Walks, Slavery, Dark Verse, Disguise, and Dark Drinks (Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate). |
| John Marx | John co-authored a book with Mark Garrett Cooper called Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped Higher Education. It comes out this August from Columbia University Press. He was also named an ACE Fellow for 2018-2019, which is an award given annually by the American Council on Education to promote and train emerging college and university leaders. |
| Tobias Menley | Tobias edited and introduced the new book Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (Penn State UP). He also published a chapter, “Commodify,” in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (U of Minnesota P), and another chapter, “Ecologies of Time,” in Time and Literature, ed. Thomas Allen (Cambridge UP). |
| Elizabeth Miller | Liz has been working on three books: a monograph titled Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, 1830s-1930s; a co-edited collection on teaching William Morris; and an edited edition of George Bernard Shaw's major political writings for Oxford World Classics. She is also guest editing a special issue of Victorian Studies on the topic of "Climate Change and Victorian Studies," due out this fall. Last November she presented a keynote lecture taken from her extraction project at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference, and an article version of that talk is forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture as “Drill Baby Drill: Extraction Ecologies, Open Temporalities, and Reproductive Futurity in the Provincial Realist Novel.” She also has articles coming out this fall in three edited volumes: Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century, and The Routledge Companion to William Morris. |
| Margaret Ronda | Margaret’s critical book, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End, was published in the Post*45 Series from Stanford University Press. A critical piece, "Obsolesce," also appeared in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking (University of Minnesota Press). |
| Tiffany J Werth | In the fall of 2017, Tiffany received an Erasmus + mobility grant for travel as part of a faculty exchange to University College, Dublin. As of January 2018, she assumed the role of President for the International Spenser Society (2018-2020) and was pleased to serve on the Program Committee for the 2019 Shakespeare Association of America Conference, which will be held in Washington, DC. She also has a forthcoming publication in English Literary Renaissance of a never-before-published academic drama that she co-edited with her Ph.D. student, Nathan Szymanski, entitled "The Converted Robber or Stonehenge, a Pastoral (1635)" |
Emeriti Awards, Publications, and Projects
| Peter L. Hays | Peter is chairing a panel at the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco in May and one at the 18th International Hemingway Conference in Paris in July, where he will also deliver a paper. Also attending the latter is a student from his fall 2017 First-Year Seminar, now a sophomore, who has a paper begun in the seminar accepted at the conference and for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. He has a book chapter in press and two accepted articles, two submitted articles; and "Reading the 'Old Man and the Sea,'" a line-by-line annotation, which he co-wrote with two others, will be published by Kent State Press this summer. |