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!

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 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: Professor Paula Rabinowitz

Professor Paula Rabinowitz stars in our third installment of 5 X Friday, in which we pose five questions to Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, and students. Professor Rabinowitz has been instrumental in bringing Australian National University scholar Ruth Barraclough to speak Monday, October 22, about the image of the factory girl in Korean literature. And Rabinowitz last summer published, with co-editor Cristina Giorcelli, Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II (University of Minnesota Press), part of a four-volume series deciphering how clothing and accessories offer cultural, political, and social meanings. More . . .

1. This summer you published the second volume in your University of Minnesota series on clothing, Habits of Being, which you edit with Italian literary scholar Cristina Giorcelli. Can you talk about the article of yours included in it?
This one is on the covers of lesbian pulp novels and why everyone always has to wear a slip in them ["Slips of the Tongue: Lesbian Pulp Fiction as How-to-Dress Manuals"]. I did research into the role of these books in the forging of an early lesbian subjectivity and culture. But also I found material on lesbian breast-binding in the 1950s and the underwear people were wearing, butch and femme underwear, so . . . you always learn something.
2. This volume also includes an essay by a former advisee, Katalin Medvedev, called "It Is a Garage Sale at Savers Every Day: An Ethnography of the Savers Thrift Department Store in Minneapolis." Medvedev, now an associate professor at the University of Georgia, earned an Apparel PhD at the U. How did you end up directing a dissertation for the College of Design?
Katalin was a professor in Hungary of Russian Literature and a quite famous radio journalist. She decided to get a PhD in women's studies and came to work with me. Then she figured out that it was easier to get a job with a PhD in design than in women's studies. So she redid her prelims and insisted that I remain her dissertation chair, along with Apparel Professor Emerita Joanne Eicher.
She is a dress historian. Her dissertation is on the use of clothing by women during the Soviet period, communist rule in Hungary, and how women subverted the constraints on them. For instance, dye lots were not the same, so in a matching outfit the skirt would be made in Poland and the jacket in East Germany, and they didn't have the same dye lot so the greens would never match. She interviewed all these women about how they redecorated their clothing. It's clothing as a site of semiotic and political dissent and discourse.
Most of the clothes that were owned by these people were burned when Hungary opened up. Apparently there's like five [communist-era] bras left in Hungary, and they're in museums--it's material culture, and it's been wiped out. A lot of her work is looking at news film to see what they were wearing. She's top-notch.
3. Didn't you have other students from Eastern Europe at that time?
Masha [Zavialova, PhD 2008] and Anca [Parvulescu, PhD 2006]; they were this cohort of brilliant women who were my students, so-called . . . all of whom knew way more than I did about everything. Anca was the Romanian translator of Gloria Steinem; Masha translated Alice Walker into Russian. They all ended up in a seminar I was teaching about materialist feminist theory. Basically what they started working on in that class became their dissertations.
4. You got an Imagine grant to bring Ruth Barraclough from Australia to speak next Tuesday Oct 22: what's your connection with her?
She had a post-doc in History and Asian Language and Literature here a few years ago and is a scholar of Korean working-class women's history. She has a terrific new book out, Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea (University of California).
She's one of my co-editors on this project, called Sex Text Comrades, on what's called "red love": the part of the Communist Party that people forget about, which was that it was very sexually risqué in the early times. In fact the communists were supportive of gay rights and abortion in the years before Stalin clamped down. And that was central to the story of modernism and modern female experience.
And then there's the global spread of proletarian writing amongst women, which is based not on 1920s communism but rather on the very different temporalities as different nations industrialized. In Korea, women didn't start working in factories until the 1970s, but it's the same story as my story about the women in America in the 1930s [Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America]. So we have scholars from all these different countries thinking about the connection between desire and proletarianism.
Fifty Shades of Red Love? You just need a good book cover.
That's easy; I have 400 of them.
5. ?
I'm working on a monograph called American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street for Princeton. In a way, that pulp fiction lesbian article was the beginning of this project. It's kind of a sequel to my noir book [Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism]. It's about the paperback revolution and the circulation of high culture as trash--in the way that Faulkner became marketed as a sex novelist after Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road was such a big hit, and they turned all these Southern authors into steamy sex writers. You have to come to my office and see these paperbacks . . . .
Alums, send us your story! Share your announcements, awards, and news.
For other 5 X Friday interviews, go to our home page.

New Book by Professor Rabinowitz

Professor Paula Rabinowitz is the co-editor with Cristina Giorcelli of Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II (University of Minnesota Press), the second volume of a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress and accessories to decipher how materials offer meanings. This particular volume focuses on the "global exchange of material commodities across time and space but also of the ideas, images, colors, and textures related to fashion." Professor Rabinowitz recently blogged about a clothing exchange in the early '70s that still haunts her: the purchase of a couture Molyneux for $25.

Paula Rabinowitz Collaborates with the Walker

In the fourth annual film series collaboration between the Walker Art Center and the University, Professor of English Paula Rabinowitz and Walker film curator Sheryl Mousley organized "And Yet She Moves: Reviewing Feminist Cinema," 15 films screening at the Walker November 4-20.This series was created in light of a broader resurgence of interest in women filmmakers of the '70s, and it includes films by Chantal Akerman, Bette Gordon, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, as well as the Walker's premiere theatrical run of Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution. The students in Professor Rabinowitz's class Reviewing Feminist Cinema are currently writing about the films on the Walker's Film & Video blog.

New Book from Professor Rabinowitz

Professor Paula Rabinowitz is the co-editor with Cristina Giorcelli of Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I (University of Minnesota Press, August), the first volume of a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress and accessories to decipher how materials offer meanings. Professor Rabinowitz recently blogged about the brisk market for fake brand clothing, officially sanctioned or otherwise--the celebration of the "knock-off of the knock-off"--in Shanghai, China, where she taught as a Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer in American Culture at East China Normal University this past spring.

Faculty Promotions and Service

English faculty Tony C. Brown and Siobhan Craig have been promoted with tenure to Associate Professor in recognition of their outstanding research, teaching, and service. Professor Craig last year published Cinema After Fascism: The Shattered Screen (Palgrave Macmillan), and Professor Brown's book The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic is forthcoming. . . . Professor and former English chair Paula Rabinowitz has been elected to the University of Minnesota Senate. Congratulations to all!