Awards, Publications, & Projects - 2020

Faculty

Bloom, Gina

Gina Bloom's recent book Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theatre was named Runner Up for the The Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Outstanding Book Award; was a Finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association (TLA); and received Honorable Mention for the David Bevington Prize, Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. The Shakespeare video game Play the Knave that she developed with Colin Milburn and other colleagues in the ModLab was released to the public in January. Bloom has spent her sabbatical year in South Africa, where she is collaborating with teachers and an artist to bring Play the Knave to high schools, whose curriculum includes four of Shakespeare’s most violent plays. By providing opportunities for South African youths to play with Shakespeare's texts, in both formal and informal educational contexts, the project hopes to shape their perspectives on and responses to violence. She is also the recipient of two UC Davis grants to support her collaboration with a theater artist, teachers, and administrators in the Western Cape region of South Africa to explore the impact of Play the Knave in South African high schools: the New Research Initiatives and Interdisciplinary Research grant from the Committee on Research for $14,000 and a DHI Network-Collaboration fellowship for $5,000. She also won a 2020 UC Davis Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research.

Chaganti, Seeta

Seeta Chaganti was the winner of the Modern Language Association's twenty-seventh annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies for her book Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages, awarded at the 2020 annual meeting.

Freeman, Elizabeth

Beth Freeman's book Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American 19th Century was published by Duke UP in September 2019. It was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the most prestigious award in LGBTQ letters. She is at work on three new projects: a guest-edited special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on "Crip Temporalities" with Ellen Samuels; an edited collection titled Queer Kinship: Erotic Affinities and the Politics of Belonging with Tyler Bradway; and a fourth monograph on the reading methods that emerge in situations of caretaking and caring labor. This last project is immersing her in the archives of medical BSDM, children's literature, and middlebrow fiction, among others, because strange juxtapositions are how she rolls.

Houston, Pam

Pam Houston won the Reading The West Advocacy Award, given by the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association for her memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country. Deep Creek also won a 2020 Colorado Book Award in narrative nonfiction. Perhaps more excitingly, she had a book accepted for publication with Torrey House Press with the writer and environmental activist Amy Irvine called Air Mail: Letters on Politics, Pandemics, and Place. The book is being rushed through the publication process so that it can come out a month before the 2020 election. She also won a UC Davis 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate and Professional Teaching, awarded by the UC Davis Academic Senate. 

Martín, Desirée

Desirée Martín published “Translating the Eastside: Embodied Translation in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them” in MELUS in March 2020.

Milburn, Colin 

Colin Milburn was the inaugural recipient of the UC Davis Dean's Prize for Distinguished Contributions to the Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Miller, Elizabeth

This year Liz Miller published an article titled “Drill Baby Drill: Extraction Ecologies, Open Temporalities, and Reproductive Futurity in the Provincial Realist Novel,” which came out in a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture in January 2020, and she co-edited a volume titled Teaching William Morris, which came out in Fall 2019. Liz has also been busy completing her monograph, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, 1830s to 1930s, which is now under contract and which she hopes will be out in 2021. She also edited the first major collection of George Bernard Shaw's political writings; this volume, titled Major Political Writings is in press with Oxford and due out in the coming year.

Stahmer, Carl G.

Carl Stahmer received a $360,000 National Endowment for the Humanities award to continue work on the English Broadside Ballad Archive in collaboration with his colleagues at UC Santa Barbara. This award, which represents the largest cash award offered by the NEH, will fund a two year Postdoctoral scholar as well as an undergraduate research assistant to continue development of the archive.

Taylor, Tess

Tess Taylor published Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, poems retracing Dorothea Lange's travels through California. The work was also part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition she published Rift Zone, a book of poems from Red Hen Press this spring. The Los Angeles Times called it "brilliant."

Wenderoth, Joe

Joe Wenderoth guest edited the forthcoming Seneca Review. Also, Ann Cotten published a book of Wenderoth's poems translated into German, Das Einzige, Was Passiert: Selected Poems of Joe Wenderoth.

Werth, Tiffany

Tiffany Werth and her two co-investigators, Bronwen Wilson (Professor of Art History, UCLA) and Lyle Massey (Associate Professor of Art History, UC Irvine) were awarded a University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Multicampus Faculty Working Group Grant for "Sea: An Environmental Humanities Network" for 2020/2021.

Graduate Students

Arkenberg, Megan

Megan Arkenberg won the Sally Mitchell Prize for best graduate student paper presented at the annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association. Her fiction appeared in The Dark, Kaleidotrope, and Asimov's Science Fiction.

Arumugam, Mangai 

Mangai Arumugam was awarded the Elliott Gilbert Prize for Graduate Creative Writing in Fiction for “Nishad.”

Bamert, Sophia

Sophia Bamert has two publications forthcoming later this year: a chapter co-authored with Hsuan Hsu, "The Spatial Turn and Critical Race Studies," in the Cambridge UP collection The City in American Literature and Culture and a book review of Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper in the journal The Space Between. She also organized a panel called "Photo-Texts and the Mapping of American Lives" that was accepted for the American Literature Association conference, which, however, had to be canceled.

Dhaliwal, Ranjodh Singh

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal won the UC Davis Provost’s Dissertation Year Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the UCHRI Graduate Student Dissertation Support Award, and the Linda Hall Library Travel Fellowship.

Dietering, Averyl

Averyl Dietering was a 2019-2020 Bilinski Fellow. Her paper, "Abject Black Flesh, White Fear, and Anatomy," was accepted to the Shakespeare Association of America's 2020 Next Generation Plenary (postponed to 2021). She has upcoming publications in the journal Shakespeare Studies and in the edited collection Race and/as Affect in Early Modern Literature.

Ford, Kelsey 

Kelsey Ford received an honorable mention Elliott Gilbert Prize for Graduate Creative Writing in Fiction for "Ghost Baby."

Frater, Laura

Laura Frater (incoming PhD Literature student, Fall 2020) published "Poetry Makes Something Happen: Poetry as Captions in Memorial Museums," in the peer-reviewed journal, The Museum Review, which can be found here: http://articles.themuseumreview.org/tmr_vol5no1_frater

Hachimi, Yasmine

Yasmine Hachimi’s first publication, “A Seat at the Table,” is a public-facing piece about her experience at the Race Before Race 2 symposium and why we should rethink the way we refer to Indigenous North Africans. She has two forthcoming publications, “‘I have perused her well’: Popular Culture’s Hypersexualization of Anne Boleyn” in Shakespeare at the Intersection of Performance and Appropriation (edited by Louise Geddes, Kathryn Santos, and Geoffrey Way) and “‘You would never have taken her for an Englishwoman’: Anne Boleyn and the Politics of Race in 16th Century Europe” in Race-ing Queens, a Special Issue of The Scholar and the Feminist Online (Guest Edited by Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Treva B. Lindsey, and Sonja Drimmer; Afterword by Kim F. Hall). Yasmine recently shared her work, “Bring Up The Bodies: Erotic Tudor Fanfiction and the Digital Archive,” in the Public Shakespeares and New Media seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America conference (conducted virtually).

Herndon, Meredith 

Meredith Herndon won the first place Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize for her poem "On Monday there were Consequences."

Hogue, Rebecca

Rebecca Hogue was a 2019-2020 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow and published an article in Modern Fiction Studies this spring. She is also the co-editor of a special forum on "Transnational Nuclear Imperialisms" forthcoming in Winter 2020 in The Journal of Transnational American Studies. After graduating this June, she will begin a three-year position as a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. Rebecca will miss everyone in Davis very much, and encourages everyone to reach out if they are ever in the Boston area. :)

Keramati, Saba 

Saba Keramati was awarded the Elliott Gilbert Prize for Graduate Creative Writing in Poetry and received a Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize honorable mention, both for her poem "Feast."

Krzeminski, Jessica

Jess Krzeminski completed her 2019-20 Professors for the Future fellowship project—a new resource landing page for humanities graduate students will be live on the DHI website by fall and is very excited to begin her tenure as a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski fellow for the 2020-2021 school year.

Mlekoday, Michael

Michael Mlekoday had poems published (or which are soon forthcoming) in The Southampton Review, Third Coast, The Journal, Hunger Mountain, and Sonora Review. One of Mlekoday's poems was also translated and published in the Polish journal, Kontent Kwartalnik.

Qualls, Bethany

Bethany Qualls received a 2019-20 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award from UC Davis Graduate Studies after being nominated by students in her ENL 3 classes. She also gave an invited talk, “Who Spilled the Tea? Gossip, Tea Tables, and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture,” at San Francisco State University to a standing-room only crowd of English literature fans right before COVID-19 made such things impossible.

Radocay, Jonathan

Jonathan Radocay has a forthcoming article, titled "Winnemem Wintu Geographies and Lyric Modernity," coming out in Modernism/modernity Print Plus.

Tinonga, Jennifer

Alongside her work at UC Davis, Jennifer Tinonga-Valle has been teaching composition and literature courses at Notre Dame de Namur University. She presented a paper on Sherlock Holmes at the BAVS conference in Dundee, Scotland, and will be presenting at the #Dickens150 conference in June. In December, her article on Emily Dickinson appeared in Nineteenth-Century Studies (vol. 30). She also received a 2019 graduate essay award from the Jane Austen Society and a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year.

Weber, Breanne

Breanne is the new Theater Review Editor for the Marlowe Society of America Newsletter and co-edits the Oecologies Blog. She is co-convener of the DHI-funded Book History and Material Culture working group with Ally Fulton. Her book review of Deats and Logan's Christopher Marlowe at 450 was recently published in the MSA Newsletter, and her article about book arts institutions in San Francisco is forthcoming in Contingent Magazine.

Emeriti

Abbott, Don

Don Abbot's published “‘The Artful Woman’: Mrs. Ellis and the Domestication of Elocution,” Rhetoric Review (2020) and has two chapters in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Rhetoric, “Rhetoric of the Americas” and “Jesuit Rhetoric in the New World.” 

Freed, Lynn

Lynn Freed published "Carrying On: My First Years in America" in Harper's Magazine, May, 2020

Hays, Peter

Peter Hays published two book chapters, ”Hemingway and Wharton: Both Modernists,” in Wharton and Hemingway: and the Advent of Modernism (2019) and “First Things: Teaching Indian Camp,” Hemingway’s Short Stories (2019). He also published two articles (in The Hemingway Review and The Steinbeck Review) as well as reviews of Vol. 4 of Hemingway's Letters in The Hemingway Review and Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life in Resources for American Literary Study.

Morris, Linda

Linda Morris received UC Davis's Distinguished Emeritus Professor Award for 2020. She gave a virtual presentation to the UC Davis Retiree and Alumni Associations in May entitled "Who Knew? Mark Twain's Joan of Arc." She was awarded a residential fellowship at the Center for Mark Twain Studies in Elmiar, NY, and delivered a paper in their Trouble Begins at Eight Series on "Sex in Mark Twain." She published "Gender Issues: Sexuality" in Mark Twain in Context edited by Jon Bird, Cambridge University Press. She is co-author, with Kate Morris, of "Camping Out with Miss Chief: Humor and Irony in the Art of Kent Monkman," Studies in American Humor for a special issue on Native American Humor, currently in press.

Murphy, James J. "Jerry"

James J. Murphy co-edited A Short History of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to The Modern United States with Christopher Thaiss, published by Routledge in April 2020.

Osborn, Marijane

Marijane Osborn recently had an article published in Traditio.

Williamson, Alan

Alan Williamson’s sixth book of poems, Franciscan Notes, was published by Tupelo in October 2019.

Zender, Karl

Karl Zender has the book, Shakespeare and Faulkner: Selves and Others, forthcoming in 2021 at LSU Press. He read a chapter of the book at a meeting of the International Association of University Professors of English in Poznan, Poland in August 2019.

Undergraduate

Cadigan-Carranza, Hannah

Hannah Cadigan-Carranza tied as the winner of the Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Critical Thesis for “‘As If It Were Myself’: Unnatural Narratology and Utopian Affects in News from Nowhere,” under the direction of Elizabeth Miller.

DiCarlo, Anthony

Anthony DiCarlo was an Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize UC Davis finalist and then won first place in the Ina Coolbrith Multi-Campus Memorial Poetry Prize Contest for the poems “Catch me coming south, darling,” “Poem #90,” “Something for your hands,” “Consider me one of the delighted,” and “Poem about bees, 2 AM, summer night with wind.”

Dow, Mikaela

Mikaela Dow won the second place Diana Lynn Bogart Fiction Prize for the short stories “Infestation” and “Dredge.”

Esau, Jumana

Jumana Esau was awarded the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Department of English Outstanding Graduating Senior Award. She was also awarded the University Medal, an honor given to the top graduating senior at UC Davis. The winner of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship for postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge, she will use this full-ride scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in English studies: criticism and culture with a focus on climate fiction starting in fall 2020. 

Fleury-Masterman, Bonnie

Bonnie Fleury-Masterman won an honorable mention Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Department of English Outstanding Graduating Senior Award.

Henderson, Alyssa

Alyssa Henderson won an honorable mention for the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Department of English Outstanding Graduating Senior Award. She also tied as the winner of the Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Creative Writing Project for “A Note From a Hoarder,” under the direction of Pam Houston.

Hwang-Finkelman, Lauren

Lauren Hwang-Finkelman won first place in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing for Fiction for the collection of short stories “On the Table,” "Science Says Love Makes Us Crazy," and “When I Said We Should Sleep with Other People.”

Johnson, Jakob

Jakob Johnson tied for third place in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing for Fiction with the short story “The Repeat Bar.”

LaGrandeur, Aimee

Aimee LaGrandeur won the second place Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Essay Prize for the essay “Witches of Britannia: Nationalism and the White Cliffs of Dover in White is for Witching.” She also won an honorable mention Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Department of English Outstanding Graduating Senior Award.

Lalonde, Timothy

Timothy Lalonde won the first place Diana Lynn Bogart Fiction Prize for the short stories "The Bobcat Fire" and "Theory of Patrick."

Manuel, Melanie

Melanie Manuel tied for third place in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing for Poetry for the poems “We are made of broken tongues” and “dandelion.”

Moseidjord, Anna Kristina

Anna Kristina Moseidjord won second place in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing for Poetry with the poem “hundred dollar whore.”

Nabor, Joseph

Joseph Nabor was a Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize UC Davis finalist for "A Walk in the Sonoran Desert."

Poynor-Haas, Michaela

Michaela Poynor-Haas was a Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize UC Davis finalist for “Harmony of a Farmer’s Market,” “So Beautiful to Forget,” “Love As: Understanding,” “Mama Takes Baby out of Alabama,” and “Animal Instinct.”

Pimley, Matthew

Matthew Pimley won second place in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing for Fiction for the short story “The Gleaners.”

Qin, Mary

Mary Qin tied as the winner of the Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Creative Writing Project for “MY STORY IN ODI ET AMO,” under the direction of Katie Peterson.

Rago, Nicolas

Nicolas Rago tied for third place in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing for Fiction for the short story “When Old Men Tell of Generations.”

Realyvasquez, Isabel

Isabel Realyvasquez tied as the winner of the Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Critical Thesis for “Georgic Scale-Shifting: Cultivating Climate Knowledge in John Philips’s Cyder,” under the direction of Tobias Menely.

Sterns, Ian

Ian Sterns won second place in Diana Lynn Bogart Fiction Prize with the novel chapter “Lavender Masks for Breathing in Haze.”

Swanlund, Perrin

Perrin Swanlund won the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Essay Prize for the essay “It’s a Cuck-Cuck-Cuck World.”

Varela, Luis

Luis Varela tied for third place in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing for Poetry for the poem “The Collective Madness.”

Woodall, Caitlyn

Caitlyn Woodall won first place in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing for Poetry for the poem “movie date.”