Paula Rabinowitz Wins Book History Prize

Professor Paula Rabinowitz's 2014 book American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton) is the co-winner of the 2015 DeLong Book History Book Prize, presented by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). According to the judges, the book "acknowledges the power of pulp paperbacks as a medium which introduced new ideas, genres, themes and forms of reading to large audiences." With more than 1000 members in over 20 countries, SHARP supports the study of book history and print culture. "This lively and surprising book is beautifully written," the judges' statement continues, "making for that rarest of scholarly publications: a book that others will not just want to consult in their own research but read all the way through for the sheer pleasure of it." Professor Rabinowitz received the $1,000 prize at the SHARP conference in Montreal July 7-10. Congratulations!

New English Alumnae/i Magazine

What will retiring Regents Professor Tom Clayton miss about teaching? "Everything," he declares. "What I will most miss is the kind of intellectual stimulation I get from asking questions of students, getting responses, hearing questions, responding, and having my mind in continual process," he continues. "There's no substitute." The new English at Minnesota alumnae/i magazine features newly Emeritus Professor Clayton, along with an interview with another Regents Professor of English, Madelon Sprengnether, who's just published a poetry collection and a memoir. Plus summer reading recommendations, news, and more!

Students Win Top Awards

Yesterday, our Undergraduate Recognition Reception, hosted by Undergraduate Studies Director Dan Philippon, celebrated graduating seniors, honors students, and award winners with praise, cake, and Reddit jokes. Among the honored was senior English major Edward Chappell, who has received a Beinecke Scholarship, one of 20 awarded nationally from 125 undergraduates nominated; he receives $34,000 toward future graduate education. Chappell completed an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project with Professor David Haley entitled "'Till thou applaud the deed': Milton as a Reader of Macbeth." Meanwhile, major Julie Sinn won one of ten CLA 2015-16 Talle Family Scholarships, which provide full-time tuition scholarship support. And major Laura Schmidt won one of 19 2015-16 Selmer Birkelo Scholarships offered through CLA. . . . In other news, three of our PhD graduate students will be supported in 2015-16 by the Graduate School's competitive Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships: Jessica Apolloni, Hyeryung Hwang, and Katie Sisneros. Congratulations to all!

English Majors Win Leadership Award

The University of Minnesota's top student leadership award for undergraduates, the Donald R. Zander Award for Outstanding Student Leadership, is given to two students each year. The 2015 recipients are both English majors: Marina Kuperman and Ian Taylor, Jr. Kuperman (left, with President Eric Kaler) is a peer counselor in our advising office, a UROP participant, and a Community Engagement Scholar; she is enrolled in the College of Education's DirecTrack to Teaching Program. Taylor is the founder of student group Black Men's Forum (winner of the SUA 2014 Rookie Student Group of the Year), a long-time Assistant Admissions Counselor at the U's Admissions Office, and a Harvard Public Policy and Leadership Conference Fellow; he plans to attend law school. Taylor and Kuperman receive $1000 scholarships from the University of Minnesota Alumni Association. Congratulations!

5 X Friday: English Major Mason Nunemaker

Senior English major Mason Nunemaker is a poetry editor for our annual undergraduate literary arts journal Ivory Tower, created by students in a two-semester English magazine production class. According to Nunemaker, this year's content has just been finalized (from over 600 student submissions!). "I'm very excited to see how the pieces all converse with each other," he reports, "especially across the different genres of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art." A poet himself, Nunemaker won a poetry award from the University's Steven J. Schochet Endowment for GLBT Studies awards program, and he's also an officer for USlam, the U's spoken word poetry team. How does he see printed and performance poetry differing? Read on.

Prospective Student Visit

The Department of English welcomes admitted prospective graduate students March 12-13. Events scheduled include a reading by an MFA alumnus, a discussion with current PhD students, class visits, and dinner with graduate students and faculty. We look forward to meeting you!

English Course Coordinator Lauded

Jessica McKenna, course coordinator for the Department of English, has been honored with an Outstanding Service Award from the College of Liberal Arts. These awards celebrate the extraordinary contributions of staff in CLA. Director of Undergraduate Studies Dan Philippon presented McKenna with the honor at a ceremony in McNamara Alumni Center January 21. Congratulations!

Professor Rabinowitz Reviewed in New Yorker

Professor Paula Rabinowitz's 2014 book American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton) is reviewed this week in the January 5 New Yorker print magazine and online. Professor Rabinowitz has also been interviewed frequently about the book, the latest with an Irish radio station (she's on from 35:17 to 48:05).

New English Alumnae/i Magazine

The largest literary conference in North America lands in the Twin Cities April 8-11, and our Creative Writing Program faculty and alums are all over it. English Chair Ellen Messer-Davidow recommends Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century--and a thriller or two. Plus an annotated list of the latest fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from professors, alums, and students, and information about our unique collaboration with Penumbra Theatre in February. Read the winter 2014 e-Quarterly!

5 X Friday: BA Alumnus Mark Mishek

"There continues to be a large segment of the population that believes overcoming addiction is a matter of willpower," says Mark Mishek (summa cum laude BA 1974; JD with honors 1977), CEO and President of the recently merged Hazelden and Betty Ford Foundations. The former, which he's led since 2008, has of course been a pioneer for 65 years in defining addiction not as a crime or character flaw but as a disease. Changing minds is still difficult. "The thing that's helped right now in a sad sort of way," Mishek notes, "is that with the opioid crises affecting young males more than any other population, more parents are realizing that it's not a matter of willpower, it's not a matter of more education, more self-knowledge, and so on. While that stuff's important, it can't get you well in and of itself." How did Mishek come to lead the nation's largest nonprofit addiction treatment provider? Two words: liberal arts. Read more.

Brownell Defense

PhD candidate Eric Brownell will defend his dissertation "Gothic Heroines and Cultural Trauma in 20th Century Literature and Film," as directed by Dr. Lois Cucullu, at 1 pm Friday December 5 in 207A. All are welcome for the public portion of the defense.

New Books by English Professors

Since September, three English professors have published new works. Professor Paula Rabinowitz's American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press) has drawn praise for its passion and acuity. She was invited to write about her favorite post-war pulps in The Wall Street Journal. Fresh from his third appearance in the annual Best American Poetry anthology, Professor Ray Gonzalez published the "vibrant" (according to Booklist) Soul Over Lightning (University of Arizona Press), his 13th poetry collection. Finally, Professor Nabil Matar published his authoritative compendium of research on British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (The Atlantic World, Brill). Congratulations to all!

5 X Friday: MFA Alum Josh Ostergaard

When the New York Times Book Review's thoughtful piece on his book debut described him as "the young author," 37-year-old alumnus Josh Ostergaard (MFA 2011) wasn't about to complain. Just the fact that the august Manhattan newspaper would cover his baseball essay, The Devil's Snake Curve, was thrilling. Especially given that it's a book in which Ostergaard denounces the wealthy, self-confident, and mighty New York Yankees to further, as the reviewer recognized, a larger critique of American hegemony across the globe. The "young" descriptor probably was used to distinguish him from previous baseball writers such as George Will, Ostergaard points out: "Even though I love the game, I'm less reverent." Read on.

5 X Friday: BA Alum Mary Nyquist

For BA alumna Mary Nyquist, entry level lecture classes at the U were large, yes, but also liberating: This small town native experienced anonymity as a refreshing freedom. But she wasn't anonymous for long. Encouraged by her professors, Nyquist went on to graduate school and ultimately became a literature professor at the University of Toronto. There she made a name for herself as a fearless scholar of Milton. These days she thinking and publishing about tyranny through the lens of literature and philosophy, among other interdisciplinary explorations. Read more.

English in The Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Department of English's opportunities to provide hands-on work experience are noted in an article by BA alum Scott Carlson in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Want a College Experience That Matters? Get to Work." Ellen Messer-Davidow, chair of the department, also talks about future plans to expand internships and other ways students can gain workplace experience. Carlson, who wrote articles for The Minnesota Daily as a student, notes that his work experience complemented his literature studies and vice versa--his subsequent career in journalism "wouldn't have been as rich without the literature degree."

Summer e-Quarterly Out Now

Our professors don't just go home and read after class: As our profile details, one competes in high-level competitive ice dancing; another spins African music as a radio deejay. But, yes, they also read: Professor John Watkins describes his latest perusals, including Solzhenitsyn and other Russian novelists. Plus a boatload of great summer books from faculty and alums. Check out the new issue of our alumnae/i newsletter, e-Quarterly.

5 X Friday: Professor John Watkins

Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English John Watkins first studied at England's Oxford University when he was a young man out of Arkansas by way of Indiana University. A Marshall Scholarship recipient, he was tasked to do exactly what he loved: "read like crazy," think, and write. Watkins has been back to Oxford many times since, as an Elizabethan scholar, but is looking forward to three months there this coming academic year, his longest visit in more than 15 years. He's been invited to be a senior research visitor at Oxford's Keble College--one of three honors he won this spring, along with Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. With his parents passed, he says, he doesn't go back to Arkansas; in many ways, Oxford has become his place of origin: "It does feel a lot like home." Read more.

1. You've been working on a book on interdynastic marriage in European peacemaking. What are your goals for your 2014-15 sabbatical year?
I would like to get this manuscript finished. I think everyone going into a sabbatical says that. Where it is now, I've gotten the chapters drafted, but they're very drafty chapters. One of the things that happens when you're writing a book is that by the time you finish drafting those last chapters the first ones don't necessarily fit the book very well anymore--because your central conception of the project has changed. So this is my chance to sit down, start reading--feeling desperately ill and hating everything--and writing a clean manuscript.
[In Oxford] I have all the resources of the Bodleian Library, which is like the Library of Congress: It's a copyright library; they have an incredible manuscript collection. It is one of the best places on the planet to work. The other thing of course is you become part of the senior community there. You're having all your meals in college, which allows lots of fruitful conversation and lots of interdisciplinary exchange. I know people throughout the university--both in English and in history. Keble has a pretty strong Elizabethan faculty now, so it's a good place to end up if you're doing 16th, 17th century, including good diplomatic historians, good social historians, a wonderful literary scholar, Diana Purkiss.
2. Can you give an example of something you discovered while writing this book that you'll need to add to the first chapters?
I realized that there was a Virgilian thread that runs throughout this. At the end of the Aeneid, there is one of the great literary interdynastic marriages of all time. Aeneas the Trojan relocates his people to Italy; he's told by the gods that he will marry the princess of the local tribe; war breaks out, because of course someone else is interested in her; but at the end of the day peace is made, he does marry her. And the fusion of the native Latins with the interloping Trojans creates the basis of the Roman Empire, the Roman people. That myth comes up a lot in tributes to various marriages throughout the European centuries, so I'm going to bring that Virgilian subtext out more. It's fun, because this book circles back and answers questions that I dealt with 20 years ago writing my first book [The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic].
3. What do you appreciate most about Oxford?
Music, music, music. I have a real passion for early British music, modern British music: It's a great place to hear everything. It's the kind of place you can go and have an incredible conversation about Nicholas Maw or Michael Tippett; people know what you're talking about.
I love working in the Bodleian. I swear I write better there. It's a gorgeous 17th-century building with massive windows. Yes, it can get cold in the winter, but you wear gloves. I have some amazingly happy memories of reading [John] Donne's sermons, setting sunlight filtering through the glass at the Bodleian--it was the perfect place to be reading Donne since he's so death-obsessed. I think that was the best educational experience I ever had.
Another thing that I really love about Oxford is that it is walkable. Oxford is a city, but the university is the heart of the historical core, and that's manageable by foot. A lot of faculty either live in college or very close, and that allows conversation to happen. If you're going to a concert, it's a five- or ten-minute walk. I cannot wait to be back to that. You can walk to country villages by foot, with wonderful little pubs and things. If you get on the train, you can be in deep, deep, deep English countryside in no time.
This essay that I'm writing now, it began with a long walk there with a friend who's a Russian historian, and a conversation we had on why so many diplomats end up becoming creative writers--what is the link there? I'm getting an essay out of it; I'll probably end up getting a book out of it.
4. More, please, on that essay?
One of the things that can be often fun about a sabbatical year is you have a little bit of time not to deal with your central project but to think about something else that will sort of keep you going for the future. Increasingly, I'm thinking about international law. There's a standard problem in international law. It's the most basic problem you can have: Does it exist? Putin moves troops past the Eastern border, and Obama screams, "You've violated international law." But what is international law exactly? It's not produced by a legislature. It's not like there's international policing authority that can really do anything. There is the international court, but that's brand new, and it's not at all clear what its jurisdictions are.
What that sounds like to me is that the project of international law is finally a project of the imagination. The second you're saying, "Does it really exist?" you are saying, "Or is it a dream?" The argument I think I want to make is that we will be making better and stronger international law if we realize that its imaginative quality is indeed the best thing it's got going--the fact that it isn't tainted by a political process that creates it (in the way that national legal codes are), that it can actually be a place for free legal speculation.
This is why [16th-century poet] Philip Sidney is becoming important. Sidney's whole defense of poetry is: Poets are being attacked by the Puritans because they are indulging in make believe, writing things that are not true; Sidney's point is that, yes, what we write is not true, but: the historian can give you a brazen world, we can give you a golden one. In the process of imagining golden worlds, with better people in them than you will find in day-to-day experience, we can inspire everyone to be better. One of Sidney's associates was an Italian living in England named Alberico Gentili, who wrote one of the first treatises of international law. He dedicated it to Sidney. Sidney had certainly done diplomatic work. And his Arcadia, this enormous prose romance, is talking a lot about how states relate to each other, and how they relate to each other on a legal basis. So I think this is a good place to start teasing out what the role of the imagination is in the ordering of world systems. It's certainly something to keep me out of trouble.
5. What could get you into trouble in Oxford?
The only drawback is English food. I'm eating in college. Every morning will begin with the three most frightening words in the English language: "full English breakfast." The dangerous thing for me is that I actually like that kind of stuff. But you just cannot do it for three months--the way I did it for two years [while a student at Oxford]. I'm still running 5K a day to make up for what I did to my body when I was 22. Everything has a cream sauce. And the vegetables: If there's a vitamin left, you boil it some more.
It is getting harder, it is getting much harder, to find good country pub food. You know, the classic meat pie with the cold water suet crust. I actually tracked one down last summer by taking a train to Banbury, getting off, and walking five miles into the country. I got the Platonic form of meat pie. But it took work.

5 X Friday: BA Alumnus Tom Rademacher

Minnesota Teacher of the Year Tom Rademacher teaches high school English at the Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resources (FAIR) School in downtown Minneapolis. "[H]e teaches us that our thoughts matter," wrote a student who nominated him, "and that we are capable of anything we want to do with our lives." Rachemacher wins a $6,000 prize and will serve as a teacher ambassador in the state for the next year. On his home page on the FAIR website, he notes, "I know I'm doing my job right when a student says I don't act like a teacher." So what's his classroom like? "On bad days, it's a mess," he admits. "On good days, it's a mess with great questions. I have a rule that I will not try to teach my students anything they could look up on the internet, which means we're often pushing each other towards pretty challenging work and conversations." Read more.

5 X Friday: PhD Candidate Laura Bozeman

PhD candidate--and Army Lieutenant Colonel--Laura Bozeman knew from age nine that she would serve in the military. It helped that she grew up in Colorado Springs, home of the Air Force Academy, and that her dad was career Army before his retirement when Bozeman was two. But, she muses, "I think I was most influenced by the change in law to allow women to attend the military academies. I followed the debate on whether or not women could 'handle' the academies with interest." She was admitted to both West Point and Annapolis but decided to take a four-year Army ROTC scholarship offer to attend Texas Christian University. Many ROTC students of the time ended up serving in the Army Reserve or National Guard, but the Gulf War had happened by the time Bozeman graduated in 1992, and she was commissioned to active duty. Since then, she's served in Germany, South Korea, Alaska, and Afghanistan, among others--and, yes, at West Point, where she taught English for three years after receiving her MA from English at Minnesota in '01. She's returning to West Point to teach after successfully defending her doctoral dissertation this spring. Read more.

1. Your dissertation topic is "The Genteel Frontier: Westward Expansion of Womanly Refinement." Can you briefly describe your focus? How did you become interested in this subject?
I am analyzing the ways [19th century writers] Caroline Kirkland, Eliza Farnham, Margaret Fuller, and Eliza Steele depicted themselves as conforming to established standards of gentility and domesticity (during the years they lived in the Upper Midwest as settlers or the weeks they traveled to the Upper Midwest as tourists), as well as what possible connections exist between their depictions of themselves and what critical things they have to say about the culture of what was then the frontier of the United States.
I have lived all over the world, and I have enjoyed reading classic works of travel literature about the places I've been stationed. I first became interested in travel writing as a research topic when I was working on my MA. I greatly enjoyed the courses I took with Donald Ross, Jr., who is now my adviser. His work establishing the journal Studies in Travel Writing is particularly inspiring to me. I prepared an annotated bibliography on 19th Century Women's Travel Writing in Sub-Sahara Africa as part of my MA coursework. Donald encouraged me to apply for my minor field of study [Composition/Literacy/Rhetoric] and to apply for the PhD program. I appreciate his support and encouragement in my academic endeavors.
2. When you joined the Army were you thinking you would want to earn a PhD in English?
I first considered the goal of a PhD in English when I was an undergraduate at Texas Christian University, but I didn't think I could accomplish it while serving in the Army. I planned to serve four to six years on active duty and to pursue my PhD after. Then I found out that I was not eligible for the GI Bill because I was a four-year Army ROTC scholarship recipient. However, I also learned that the Army had various programs (called advanced civil schooling) where I could earn an MA while on active duty. I was especially interested in teaching English at West Point.
3. What drew you to English at the University of Minnesota?
I was impressed by the department's reputation and its talented faculty. Most of the professors whose classes I took from 1999 to 2001 have since retired, but the faculty members who have arrived since I was last here are equally impressive. I was also drawn to the Twin Cities. It is a great place to live while attending graduate school. I especially love that so many theater productions are staged in the Twin Cities each year, as well as the easy access I have to varied outdoor pursuits, including river kayaking and cross country skiing. I didn't want to attend graduate school right by a military base--I wanted exposure to different ideas and political philosophies. The Twin Cities is far more liberal, politically, than most US Army communities. That is a welcome change, for me. My husband [retired from the Army] and I joined a few "Meet-Ups," including Simply Epicurious, where we dine at various restaurants around the Twin Cities. I really enjoy meeting new people. It's a good thing I'm rather extroverted, since I move every two or three years!
4. What have been your Army roles since you finished basic training? What were your duties in Afghanistan?
I've served as a Human Resources officer for most of my career. My primary specialties are enlisted personnel accessions, operational planning, congressional correspondence, military awards and decorations, and personnel actions. I've been a speechwriter for a three-star general. I also have experience with military protocol, including executive engagements and services (general officer's personal staff).
While deployed in Kabul [July 2011-June 2012], I was assigned to NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, and I advised the Afghan National Army's Inspector General on his core staff functions (inspections, investigations, assistance visits, intelligence oversight, and teaching and training). The general I worked with had been the Inspector General for several years and was highly experienced. My role was to facilitate his staff's continued progress toward independent mission accomplishment. I let the general know that I had every confidence in his abilities and those of his staff officers and that I wanted them to impress me. Given the latitude to exercise initiative, they produced exceptional results, including a quarterly inspector general conference that they planned, coordinated, and executed with minimal input from their international advisers. Toward the end of my year in Afghanistan, NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan awarded the Inspector General a new capabilities milestone rating--the first time the Inspector General attained an improvement in this rating in four years. This achievement really had little to do with me besides my providing the support and motivation. As an added part of my responsibilities, I was also the Officer in Charge for the other inspector general advisors at NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan. These personnel advised the Ministry of Defense Inspector General, the National Military Hospital Inspector General, and their staff chiefs. After redeploying, I was reassigned to Minnesota to complete my PhD studies.
5. What was it like to go from the intense situation in Kabul back to studying English literature here in Minnesota?
The challenge I initially found was putting Afghanistan behind me mentally. At first, I was checking the news each day for information on what was happening in Kabul, and I was in regular contact with the people I served with over there, who had also redeployed home. It was hard on all of us to go from working together seven days a week to dispersing back to our respective duty assignments. By the end of my first semester back in Minnesota, I felt like I was back home mentally, too. I do find I have less patience for complaints about "first world problems" since returning from the combat zone. We have so many opportunities as Americans, and we have such a high quality of life, we often take these things for granted. Just being able to drink water from the tap is something a great many people in the world don't enjoy. My teaching philosophy has become far more pragmatic, too. I've served with some of my former [West Point] students in Korea, Hawaii, and Afghanistan, and I want to prepare my next group of students to excel in complex operational environments.

Creative Writing Program Spring Newsletter

New faculty member Kim Todd is interviewed in the 2014 spring Creative Writing Program newsletter, along with Q & A with award-winning alums Ethan Rutherford and Amanda Coplin. Plus news about publications and awards from faculty, students, and alumnae/i!