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: Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether

Twenty years ago, Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether wrote and shepherded the proposal for the MFA in Creative Writing through various levels of University approval so the Program could begin granting the degree in 1996. What about the MFA Program is she most proud of? "The accomplishments of our graduates," she answers quickly. "The proof is in the pudding." The growing number of alumnae/i publications parallels the feverish output of Creative Writing Program faculty: This spring, Professor Sprengnether publishes (and reads from--see listing below) both a memoir, Great River Road (New Rivers), and a prose poetry collection, Near Solstice (Holy Cow!). What does this all have to do with lab research on memory? Read on.

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.

5 X Friday: Associate Professor Dan Philippon

In the last three years, Associate Professor Dan Philippon has researched and taught in Germany, Italy, and France, buoyed by a Fulbright and a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. The travel has widened his thinking about food writing and the sustainable food movement, subject of his current research. "Although my specialty will always be American environmental literature, I can't think in isolation anymore," reports Professor Philippon, who serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. "Now, when I think of American writers, it is always in a global context. And when I think of global processes, like climate change, I think of their effects on particular places and particular people--like the Italian rice grower I met, whose paddies depend on meltwater from the Alps." How does that book-in-progress involve Alice Waters, Wendell Berry . . . and a certain Italian rice grower? Read on.

English at the Citrus Bowl!

When Golden Gopher football players take the field against Missouri in the Citrus Bowl, three English majors will be among them, reveling in Minnesota's first New Year's Day bowl game in 50 years. Junior defensive back Eric Murray is a starter who made the coaches' All-Big Ten Second Team. Sophomore wide receiver Drew Wolitarsky played in seven games this fall. Offensive linebacker Luke McAvoy (right) this year won the Gophers' Tony Dungy Character and Community Service Award and was Academic All-Big Ten. In the midst of finals week, we grabbed McAvoy, a senior, for a quick download on the life of a football-playing English major. Read on.

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.

5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Kim Todd

Her work has been called "spellbinding" (by The New Yorker) and "beautifully written" (by Outside magazine). A big welcome to Kim Todd, a new creative nonfiction addition to the Creative Writing Program faculty roster. Todd has written one book about that vagabond Sparrow, another about a female naturalist who, in 1699, voyaged from Amsterdam to South America to study insect metamorphosis (Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis), and her self-explanatory first, Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America. It's no surprise she holds masters in both environmental studies and creative writing (from the University of Montana). What led her there? Read on.

5 X Friday: Professor Julie Schumacher

Intent on figuring out how to construct solid plots, Professor Julie Schumacher wrote her first book for younger readers in 2004, a decade before young adult fiction became so popular it spawned an abstinence movement. Schumacher's third such effort, The Book of One Hundred Truths (2006), won a Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Fiction. This summer she shows off her plot chops with the adult comic novel Dear Committee Members, a book consisting only of fictional letters of recommendation--from a single imagined Creative Writing professor--that nevertheless contains classic (and compelling) exposition, conflict, climax, and denouement. Indeed, as an admiring Slate review points out, what finally happens in the tale "turn[s] the book's theme upside down," revealing the moral weight beneath the undeniably funny characterizations. For Schumacher's favorite novel-in-letters and other revelations, read on.

5 X Friday: English major Marina Kuperman

As a freshman, Marina Kuperman didn't know that experiential learning in college boosts graduates' job prospects. Nevertheless, she chose an English class featuring community volunteer opportunities--and quickly discovered that she loved helping others develop literacy. Convinced now of both her major and her vocation, she applied as a sophomore to become a peer counselor for English majors, a job in which she excelled through her junior year and will continue this fall. Meanwhile, she enrolled in further experiential learning courses, while completing an independent research project on local education practices. An American Literature survey course left Kuperman a fan of Emerson, and these words of his seem appropriate here: "Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood." Why is literacy so important for Kuperman? 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.

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: 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.

Spring e-Quarterly Out Now

What is our new Assistant Professor Amit Yahav reading (besides the 18th century)? What new books are out from faculty, students, and alums? How is English participating in Northrop Auditorium's Grand Reopening? Find out in the new issue of our alumnae/i newsletter, e-Quarterly.

5 X Friday: BA Alum Nadia Hasan

Nadia B. Hasan (BA 2002; JD 2006) braved her father's disappointment when she chose to major in English; he preferred pre-med or engineering. But her degree prepared her for the reading and analytic rigor of the University of Minnesota Law School and nine years thus far of law practice, first with Johnson & Condon, then Hinshaw & Culbertson, and since last summer in the Minneapolis office of Cozen O'Connor. These days, she notes with amusement, her dad claims he was the one who suggested English. Read more.

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.

5 X Friday: BA Alum Shae Moloney

When Shae Moloney (BA) graduated in 2012, she was aiming for a career as an editor and writer, but she hadn't explored where she might find such work. Within three months she had secured a job that included editing and writing. The field was unexpected: human resources. She admits to nervously anticipating beastly labor-management brawls. But these days you can find her waxing cheerfully (and knowledgeably) about Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) policy, surrounded by snarling and growling beasts of the actual, not figurative sort. Read more.

5 X Friday: Regents Professor Patricia Hampl

This past spring, Regents Professor of English Patricia Hampl was honored with the Dr. Matthew Stark Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Faculty Award from the College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes Professor Hampl's distinguished writing, teaching, and service in this area, including her work with the University's Human Rights Program establishing the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship. In 2011, Hampl co-organized an international conference devoted to the relationship between the personal narrative voice and human rights, "My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights." Hampl, of course, is the author of six celebrated memoirs, and she's working on a seventh. What's it about? Read on. . . .

1. Can you talk briefly about the connection you see between human rights and the personal narrative voice? Your book A Romantic Education, about visiting Prague pre-Velvet Revolution, is a classic memoir, but also a moving example of a personal narrative intersecting with a larger story of human rights struggles. What are five other great books that take on this challenge?
It's one of the curiosities of American literature that the first person voice claims special authority for us. We seem to trust the individual voice over the "omniscient" narrator. This is even more true for stories of political trauma and radical human suffering. Why is a little girl's diary the undisputed essential document of the Holocaust? It was written, after all, before she saw and experienced the worst tortures of that genocide. Her voice doesn't embody "the worst," but gives us indelible proof of what we lost when this irreplaceable girl was murdered by the forces of "the worst." So I suppose for me the trust in the relation between the personal voice and the overwhelming crush of human rights violations started with Anne Frank's Diary. My passion for memoirs has always been rooted in a political and historical enterprise, rather than in the psychological how-I-got-to-be-me kind of writing. I think of the first person voice as an instrument, not as a subject in itself. The books that come to mind that remain my models for personally voiced writing contending with the forces of injustice include Hope Against Hope by Nadezdah Mandelstam (about the Soviet terror and the gulag), Native Realm and The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund deWaal, and Joe's War: My Father Decoded by Annette Kobak--to name only a few.
2. You and Human Rights Program Director Barbara Frey created the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship and granted the first one in 2006. Since then, MFA students, in collaboration with Human Rights Program staff/students, have researched and written about current stories from immigrant detention in the Midwest to sex slavery in Cambodia. After seven years, what do you see as the greatest accomplishment of the fellowship?
The fact that the University has a vibrant commitment to human rights and has a dynamic leader in Barbara Frey who saw instantly the connection between narrative writing and human rights--that's the biggest and most enduring accomplishment of the Scribes program and touches students beyond those who have been Scribes themselves. I think it has also been a challenge to all of our Scribes to understand they aren't meant to turn themselves into investigative journalists. Even though that's tempting in the face of some of the horrific cases the Human Rights Program studies and works on. Each Scribe is meant to be whatever writer he or she is--poet, fiction writer, memoirist. I think every Scribe has been humbled by the encounter with harrowing subject matter and has had to recommit to the service of literature and language in the face of experiences that invite silence and turning away. I like to think that each Scribe has not simply become a human rights activist but has reaffirmed a relation with the most vulnerable source of literature--the individual voice.
3. Okay, gotta ask: As a scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his work, what did you think of the Baz Luhrmann Great Gatsby?
Crazy about it! A lot of my friends urged me not to go, as if I would somehow be wounded by seeing the movie. I guess they thought the movie was too down market for oh-so-literary me. But aside from the frame (of Nick Carraway being in a kind of nursing home where he writes The Great Gatsby) which was corny and flat-footed, I thought Baz Luhrmann did a brilliant job of breaking all the hallowed attitudes about the novel and making it live on the screen as no other attempt has managed. The choice of Jay-Z for the music was nothing short of genius. I saw it in 2D and 3D--went twice. I think this is one to see in 3D. And let's hear it for Leonardo DiCaprio who refused to deny Jim Gatz/Jay Gatsby his boyishness in the midst of his famous mystery. Did I mention I was crazy about the movie?
4. Your last memoir, The Florist's Daughter, won a Minnesota Book Award in 2008. What project(s) are you working on currently?
I'm writing a short book that's taking a long time called The Art of the Wasted Day, a riff on the idea of leisure and a homage to the inventor (sort of) of the essay, Michel Montaigne. I see this project (not that anyone else will) as the third in a trilogy of books, each about an art form. My first was Spillville, about Dvorak's 1893 summer in Spillville, Iowa, which was my book about music (I started as a piano performance major at the University), then Blue Arabesque, about visual art whose hero figure is Matisse, and now to literature with this one--and to what I see as literature's most feral form, the essay.
5. What are you reading or what have you read lately that you think is great?
Strange that someone like me is called (and call myself) a "writer." A more accurate label might be "reader" considering the time I spend on other people's work. I'm an omnivore reader--poetry, fiction, nonfiction. And I'm a magazine buff--everything from The New York Review of Books (my favorite literary review) and The New Yorker (I usually find a couple things worth finishing) to cooking magazines (I mourned the loss of Gourmet, a wonderful source of personal essays). I confess to the typical "late style" habits of many writers--re-reading books I've long loved. Recently I returned to Anna Karenina, a book I adored as a 19-year-old romantic, detested with fiery feminist outrage at 30, and now found myself putting down, saying, "OK, that's the greatest novel ever written," as if I were giving out an Academy Award. A more recent novel, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, is an extraordinary evocation of Central Europe between the two wars, based on a family's relation to a Modernist house modeled on one by Mies van der Rohe in Brno. Perhaps the most striking memoir of the last year is the great post-War historian Tony Judt's book, The Memory Chalet. Judt died of ALS before age 60, and wrote this book in the midst of his many losses, including his ability to write or speak. I return often to William Trevor, Alice Munro, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I'm always reading Montaigne these days--partly for my own project, but really because he's irresistible.
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5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Elaine Auyoung

This fall, the Department of English welcomes Dr. Elaine Auyoung as a new assistant professor here at Minnesota. Professor Auyoung received her BA from Stanford in 2005, followed by a PhD in English from Harvard in 2011. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Associate 2011-13 at Rutgers University, where she taught Victorian literature and modern fiction. Auyoung is working on a book about, as she describes, "the surprising way in which nineteenth-century novels cue readers to feel as if vibrant, expansive fictional worlds exist beyond the printed page." At the same time, she notes, readers know that "nothing in the novel exists at all"--resulting in a cognitive dissonance that writers such as Dickens acknowledge and even encourage. More. . .



1. What led you to this research topic?
I've always marveled at how literary artists can seem to bring into being so much more than what appears on the printed page. At Harvard, my quest to get to the bottom of this phenomenon was continually inspired by the Cognitive Theory and the Arts Seminar led by Elaine Scarry, Anna Henchman, and Alan Richardson. This seminar is a haven for anyone fascinated by the deep relationship between artistic creation, aesthetic experience, and the capacities of the human mind. Over the years, I have learned so much from the psychologists, philosophers, art historians, linguists, neuroscientists, musicologists, and literary scholars who have shared their work with this group.
2. What is your favorite work to teach?
One of my favorite texts to teach is Great Expectations, because students tend to be surprised by how much they enjoy it. When students first come into my class, some of them aren't especially excited to be reading Victorian novels. (They're not alone: Henry James called them "loose baggy monsters.") Once we make our way into Dickens, though, these students invariably discover that nineteenth-century fiction is much less intimidating and much more accessible and entertaining than they expected.
3. What was the most interesting/intriguing book/essay/entry you've read this year? What was it about?
A dazzling book that I couldn't put down this summer is Michael Saler's As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Online fan communities that perpetuate the fictional worlds of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings are commonplace today, but Saler, who's a cultural historian, returns us to the moment when English and American readers first began to inhabit imaginary worlds for long periods of time. He argues that participation in large-scale fan communities didn't emerge until the late nineteenth century, when Sherlock Holmes became the world's first "virtual reality" character. Saler's larger claim is that the ironic exercise of belief in imaginary worlds is a means by which we re-enchant modern life.
4. Where did you grow up? Is there anything from there you especially miss?
I grew up in California before moving to Massachusetts for graduate school. Something that I miss about the West Coast (besides the sunshine and the ocean, of course) is the scent of eucalyptus trees, which instantly transports me back to my childhood. I'm eager, though, to get to know the very different kind of natural beauty that surrounds us in Minnesota. I foresee many canoeing and cross-country skiing expeditions in my future.
5. What are you most excited about in joining the English faculty at Minnesota?
What really sets this department apart, I think, is its intrepid spirit. Its deep, longstanding commitment to exploring new ideas and scholarly approaches comes through in the remarkable range of scholarly and creative work pursued by faculty members, in the interdisciplinary projects invented by graduate students, and in the breadth of undergraduate course offerings that cover everything from Aristotle to Zadie Smith and from food writing to hip hop. There's a truly vibrant intellectual environment here that gives students and faculty the freedom to produce their best work.
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