The current issue of PMLA features a special (Theories and Methodologies) section co-edited by Rob Tally and Princeton University professor Andrew Cole devoted to the 40th anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s monumental work of literary theory, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. In addition to an introduction co-authored by Cole and Tally, “Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious — Forty Years On,” the section features 11 original essays by leading literary critics from around the world, including Jameson himself, exploring the lasting significance of this landmark 1981 book. Rob Tally’s essay, “On Always Historicizing: The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology Today” also appears in this section. This project began as a roundtable session of the 2021 MLA conference organized by Cole and Tally.
At the College of Liberal Arts’ Fall Faculty Meeting, Rob Tally was a recipient of a Golden Apple Award and a Presidential Distinction Award for Scholarly/Creative Activity, Laura Ellis-Lai was a recipient of a Golden Apple Award and a Presidential Distinction Award for Teaching, and Miriam Williams was a recipient of a Golden Apple Award and a Presidential Distinction Award for Service.
Chris Dayley is the recipient for the 2022 Programmatic Perspectives Research Article Award for his article, “Combatting Embedded Racism in TPC Academic Programs: Recruiting for Diversity Using Student-Informed Practices.” The award citation reads, “This award recognizes important critical and/or analytical insight that contributes something new to program administration in Technical and Professional Communication.” A formal announcement and recognition will take place at the 2022 Council of Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication Annual Conference.
Katie Kapurch is now serving as co-editor of AMP: American Music Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal published by Penn State University Press. In 2022, AMP published her article, “Unvaulting ‘Disney Plus Pop’ in 2021: Romance, Melodrama, and Remembering in Taylor Swift’s All Too Well, McCartney’s Lyrics and The Beatles: Get Back.” She also edited AMP‘s special issue on women and gender in music.
Aimee Roundtree and Felicia Chong (Oakland University) are the recipients of the 2022 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Nell Ann Pickett Award for their article, “Student Recruitment in Technical and Professional Communication Programs.” The Nell Ann Pickett Award is given each year to the best article published in the ATTW journal, Technical Communication Quarterly.
Anne Winchell’s fantasy novel, Rise of the Phoenix, is out now. The novel is about a young woman who survived the execution of her family after the war and now nourishes a need for vengeance—and a phoenix egg.
Cyrus Cassells has been named a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellow by The Academy of American Poets. As part of this honor, Cyrus will receive $50,000, which will help support public poetry programs in the year ahead as presented in his proposal to the Academy.
Idza Luhumyo, a second-year MFA creative writing student, has been awarded the 2022 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. Idza was honored for the short story “Five Years Next Sunday,” which was described by the judges as “an incandescent story.” The award was announced July 18 at a ceremony in London.
Leah Schwebel presented a paper, “Petrarch and Zenobia, Revisited,” at the New Chaucer Society in Durham, UK. Also, this summer graduate students in Leah Schwebel’s Dante seminar created a collaborative, online, English commentary on the Commedia, which they completed in the form of a website. While some students looked at visual representations of Dante’s work, others compiled references to music that Dante mentions, and still others traced biblical and classical allusions, to name a few approaches. You can find the website here: https://sites.google.com/g.comalisd.org/divinecomedyhumanitiesproject/home?authuser=0
Geneva Gano attended the 15th International D.H. Lawrence Conference in Albuquerque and Taos, New Mexico and presented, “Lawrence’s Mozo: Mornings in Mexico and Revolutionary Caricature,” which is from her current book project, “Revolutionary Forms: U.S. Literary Modernism and the Mexican Vogue, 1910-1940.”
Sara A. Ramírez and Geneva Gano participated in the Scholarly Colloquium on the Work and Career of Sandra Cisneros, which was focused on the Chicana author Sandra Cisneros and her vast collection of papers (held at the Wittliff Collections). It brought eight scholars to the Texas State University campus (and two on zoom) to conduct and deliver peer reviews of essays-in-progress for inclusion in the edited volume, “¡Ay Tú! Critical Essays on the Work and Career of Sandra Cisneros,” which is currently under review at UT Press. The participants found this colloquium to be especially generative, offering an opportunity for collaborative, cross-institutional research and helping to seed future research work within the Wittliff and beyond: at conferences, in publications, and in grant proposals.
MA Literature student Bryce Jeter presented a paper titled, “Othermother Realness: Marlon Riggs and the Filmic Embodiment of Queer and Black Alternative Motherhood in the AIDS Epidemic,” at UCLA’s Q-Grad: Queer Graduate Student Research Conference.
MATC graduate Meghalee Das (PhD Candidate in Texas Tech’s Technical Communication & Rhetoric Program) is the recipient of the 2022 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Graduate Research Award and the 2022 ATTW Amplification Award.
Eric Leake presented “Difficult Empathy as Rhetorical Encounter” at the Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference.
Steve Wilson’s poem, “Call It a Kind of Grace,” appears in A Fire to Light Our Tongues: Texas Writers on Spirituality, out now from TCU Press.
First-year MFA poetry student Cathlin Noonan’s “Ghazal with Louse” was named a finalist for Crazyhorse Magazine’s Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. https://crazyhorse.cofc.edu/prizes/2022-crazyhorse-prize-winners-finalists/
Cathlin’s poem “Abortion Made a Road” was a finalist for Ruminate Magazine’s poetry prize; the poem will be published in the September issue. Here is the announcement: https://www.ruminatemagazine.com/blogs/ruminate-magazine/winners-of-the-2022-poetry-prize
Ben Reed’s essay, “On Raking Up the Dead: How the unusual afterlife of a Prussian servant sheds light on social-media comeuppance in the time of COVID-19,” was a finalist for the ‘s Perkoff Prize for new writing on health and medicine. The placement came with a small honorarium and the Missouri Review editors also selected the essay for their online prose feature, BLAST. The work can be found here: https://www.missourireview.com/on-raking-up-the-dead-by-ben-reed/
MFA poetry candidate Melissa M. Huckabay and MFA poetry candidate Rebecca Oxley will have poems published in the Mutabilis Press’ anthology, Chaos Dive Reunion.
Andrew Barton’s piece, “‘But the Planet’s What Matters, Right?’: The Entangled Environmentalism of Three Final Fantasy Remake Communities,” is out in the SFRA Review and is available here: https://sfrareview.org/vol-52-no-3-summer-2022/
Note: Please email your Miscellany items to miscellany@txstate.edu or to Miriam Williams at mfw@txstate.edu .