Faculty Receive Awards

Assistant professor Elaine Auyoung, who joined the department this past fall, has been named a Institute of Advanced Study fall 2014 Residential Fellow. Fellows work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas at the IAS offices. Auyoung's project is entitled "Missing Fiction: The Feeling of Realism." . . . Five English professors have received Imagine Fund Annual Faculty Awards, which support innovative research in the arts, design, and humanities. The professors and their projects are as follows: Dan Philippon, "Ideal Meals: Ecology, Morality, and Pleasure in the Sustainable Food Movement"; Paula Rabinowitz, "Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald"; Jani Scandura, "Proximity: A Case Study"; Katherine Scheil, "The Shakespeare Circle and Anne Hathaway Shakespeare"; and John Wright, "The Worlds of James McCune Smith: Science, Race Elevation, and the Brotherhood of Chess." Congratulations to all!

5 X Friday: BA Alumna Naomi Ko

How many first-time screen actors get to go to Sundance Film Festival with one of the buzziest films in competition? Naomi Ko (BA 2011) was busy January in Park City, Utah, with press interviews, brunches, luncheons, and parties around the acclaimed feature Dear White People (which was filmed on the U campus). Since graduating, Ko has acted and written for such local theaters as Mixed Blood, Theatre in the Round, Mu Performing Arts, and Bedlam. Last August, Ko heard from a theater producer she'd worked with, Jamil Jude, about movie auditions taking place the next day. Ko went, and she was the only cast member to win a principal role without an agent. The film follows four African American students at an East Coast private college. According to its director, Justin Simien, the film is "about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be." Though the Asian American experience has been well-represented in theater, says Ko, there's as yet no Asian American film equivalent to DWP. "I'm working on one," she promises. Read more.

Katherine Scheil Named Scholar of College

English professor Katherine Scheil has been named 2014 CLA Scholar of the College, an annual award celebrating outstanding achievement by faculty in the College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes professors who have taken intellectual risks and whose work has had a significant impact on their field; Scholars of the College receive a stipend totaling $10,000 per year for three years to support their research or creative work. Scheil's most recent publication is She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America. She is working on a book about Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway. Congratulations!

Promotions for Scheil and Campion

The Department of English is pleased to announce the promotion of two of our faculty members: Peter Campion to Associate Professor with tenure, and Katherine Scheil to Professor. Campion will publish his third collection of poetry, El Dorado, this October with the University of Chicago Press. Scheil published her second monograph, She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press) last fall, and has a third, The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway, in progress. Congratulations!

New Faculty Books

Start your summer reading now! Associate Professor Katherine Scheil this spring published She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press, 2012), a fascinating look at how book clubs provided encouragement for female literary education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and a path into public life. This is Professor Scheil's third book. In May, Professor Julie Schumacher publishes her fifth book for younger readers, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (Delacorte, 2012). She won a 2007 Minnesota Book Award for her novel The Book of One Hundred Truths.