James Reeves’ book, Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism, is now under contract with Cambridge University Press and should be released in 2020. In July, James attended the NEH Summer Seminar on “Religion, Secularism, and the Novel” at the University of Iowa, where he presented research from his book manuscript and revised an article on “Antislavery Literature and the Decline of Hell.”
Writers for Hillviews recently interviewed Katie Kapurch about her Beatles research: https://news.txstate.edu/research-and-innovation/2019/-study-of-literature-and-rhetoric-leads-professor-on-long-and-winding-road-to-the-beatles.html. Katie and Jon Marc Smith recently co-authored “A Fear So Real: Film Noir’s Fallen Man in Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and the David Lynch Oeuvre,” published in the journal, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Penn State UP). The article appears in a 2019 special issue focused on Springsteen.
Kitty Ledbetter’s essay titled “Periodical Poetry” has been published in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Issue 15.2 of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, guest-edited by Kitty Ledbetter, has been published online at https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue152/issue152. The special issue is focused on “Women and Leisure” and includes an introduction to the issue by Kitty and her essay titled “Rinkualism, Punch, and Women on Wheels.”
Jon Marc Smith is mentioned in this article from the Austin Chronicle discussing Roky Erickson, Doug Sahm, and the blueprint for punk rock: https://www.austinchronicle.com/music/2019-08-09/how-a-collaboration-between-roky-erickson-and-doug-sahm-became-part-of-the-blueprint-for-punk-rock/
Julie McCormick Weng published Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse University Press) with Kathryn Conrad and Coílín Parsons. She also published “A Reconsideration of Joyce’s Non-Fiction,” a review of Katherine Ebury’s and James Alexander Fraser’s Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: “Outside his Jurisfiction” in James Joyce Literary Supplement.
Steve Wilson new book of poetry, The Reaches, is now open for pre-publication orders at this link: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-reaches-by-steve-wilson/. The book is due for release in November.
Cyrus Cassell’s poem “More Than Watchmen at Daybreak,” first published in Agni, appeared as the poem of the day on August 23 at Poetry Daily: https://poems.com/poem/more-than-watchmen-at-daybreak/
Department Chair Victoria Smith was interviewed for a Time article on the new movie about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: https://time.com/5655270/virginia-woolf-vita-sackville-west-relationship/?fbclid=IwAR13UqGehwAAq9WIShD3xOachSD3qkVhRg_gxa-gHMOp9mnoiRfpZR6GCKw
In June Leah Schwebel presented ‘“Oon seyde that Omer made lyes’: Chaucer’s Intertextual Poetics” at the biennial London Chaucer Conference.” She also spent time working with manuscripts at the Oxford Bodleian Library and the British Library in London, research supported by an REP grant.
In June, Geneva Gano travelled to Shenandoah University in Virginia to deliver a paper at the Willa Cather International Seminar: “UnAmerican Activities: The Sexual Lives of Hired Girls, or, Cather’s Critique of Capitalism.” Following that, she spent a week at the University of Maryland researching Texas author Katherine Anne Porter’s connections to Mexico. She received a Research Enhancement Grant from the University to conduct this research, which will be part of her book project on the influence of the Mexican Revolution on U.S. Modernism.
Ben Reed’s panel proposal for the AWP 2020 in San Antonio has been accepted. The title is “Space Is the Place: Literary Spatialities and New Approaches to Placemaking.” He will be joined by Kelli Jo Ford, Angela Palm, Ito Romo, and Texas State MFA alumnus Ali Haider. In July he attended the MLA International Symposium in Lisbon, Portugal, where he read “Genealogy: A Dream Within a Dream,” which is an excerpt from a planned book on littoral spatialities in discourse and experience. Earlier this summer he taught his second writing workshop for veterans through VSA Texas, the state organization on arts and disability; and moderated a panel at the Writers League of Texas Agents & Editors Conference : “Discovering Your Book’s Voice, Tone, and Style,” with Christopher Brown, Mark Dery, and Charlotte Gullick.