Undergraduate Awards
| Arianna Barzman-Grennan | Arianna won second place in the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Essay Contest for “The Textuality of the Subject/Other Dichotomy in Othello.” |
| Alannah Clark | Alannah was named runner up for fiction in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. |
| Irina Haack | Irina won the Elliot Gilbert Award for the Best Creative Writing Honors Project for Conversations with Sam. Her Project advisor was Pam Houston. |
| Eavan Huth | Eavan won the University-wide Outstanding Senior Award. |
| Daniel Langford | Daniel was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction for “Fixing the Fence.” |
| Aimee Lim | Aimee was named runner up for fiction in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. She was also awarded an Honorable Mention in the Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize, and third place in the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction for “What Ails Thee, Charlotte Wan?” |
| Roy Magat | Roy was chosen as a finalist for the state and campus-wide competitions of the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Memorial Prize. |
| Emily Masuda | Emily won the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg English Department Outstanding Senior Award. She also won the Leon H. Mayhew award, which is given each year to a single UC Davis senior majoring in music, art, or literature, and emphasizes academic and extracurricular excellence. And, finally, she was awarded first place for fiction in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. |
| Robert Ohlstrom | Robert was awarded first place for poetry in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. |
| Kelsey Owen | Kelsey was awarded first place in the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction for “The Elephant” and “Let Me Show You Where It Hurts.” |
| Loretta Pesola | Loretta was awarded second place in the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction for “Checking Out.” |
| Jordan Ranft | Jordan was named runner up for poetry in the Pamela Maus Contest in Creative Writing. |
| Arvind Reddy | Arvind was chosen as a finalist for the state and campus-wide competitions of the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Memorial Prize. |
| Lauren Rudewicz | Lauren won the Elliot Gilbert Award for the Best Critical Honors Thesis for “Glorious Creatures: Sympathy and the Aestheticization of Suffering in Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Her thesis advisors were Professors Seeta Chaganti and Anna Uhlig. |
| Janet Son | Janet was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction for “Prometheus Underground,” “Tête-à- Tête,” and “In the Waiting Room.” |
| Emily Stack | Emily won first place in the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Essay Contest for “Came From a Woman, Got Our Name From a Woman: Female Bodies as Sites of Identity, History, and Narrative in Absalom, Absalom!” |
Graduate Student Awards, Publications, and Projects
| Lindsay Baltus | Lindsay won the Graduate Student Career Development Award from the POD Network in Higher Education, which was presented to her at their annual conference on improving professional development for faculty and graduate student teachers. She also worked in Winter and Spring quarters as the director of the Davis Feminist Film Festival, leading an impressively talented and motivated group of undergraduate interns in a reading group on feminism and film, and then working with those interns to curate and organize the festival. She’s been hired on to organize the festival again next year. |
| Sophia Bamert | This June, Sophia will be attending an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers at the Newberry Library, called "Making Modernism: Literature and Culture in Twentieth-Century Chicago, 1893-1955." She is thrilled about getting the opportunity to begin her dissertation research in this setting. |
| Kristin George Bagdanov | Kristin George Bagdanov’s review of Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton was published in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. Poems and short essays also appeared in Omniverse, The V21 Collective’s blog, and Ninth Letter. This summer she will present her paper “The Ecology of the Referent” at ASLE. She will also be spending a month at the Vermont Studio Center as the 2016 Henry David Thoreau fellow. |
| Chelsea Bryan | Chelsea had a short cross-genre work published in The Rumpus, "The Living Wound." She also received recognition as a Wha Zha Zhe Woman Artist by her tribal museum, the Osage Nation Museum. |
| Elizabeth Crachiolo | Elizabeth has two publications forthcoming: "Queen Bees, Queen Bess, and the Gender Politics of Butler's Feminine Monarchie," to be published in Sixteenth Century Journal and "Time, Gender, and Nonhuman Worlds," co-written with Dyani Johns Taff and Emily Kuffner, to be published in Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, ed. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. She also received a Bilinski fellowship for 2017-18. |
| Jessica Hanselman Gray | Jessica and her son were in a play (The Diary of Anne Frank at Woodland Opera House), and she attended a discussion after one of the performances with Solano Community College's MESA-TRIO students (first generation college students studying STEM fields). |
| William Hughes | Will has an article entitled “How Anxiety Became Ordinary: Middlemarch, Feeling, and Serial Form” forthcoming in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature. |
| Annette Hulbert | Annette spent the month of April researching at the William Andrews Clark Library as an ASECS-Clark Fellow through the UCLA Center for 17th-&18th-Century Studies. Her research was supported by the English Department's Walter Harrison Fund. She also won a departmental Dissertation Quarter Fellowship. And, finally, with the help of DHI collaboration group funding award, she and Jennifer Tinonga-Valle launched the Annotations literary podcast, available here: https://annotationspodcast.wordpress.com/ |
| Dyani Johns Taff | Dyani has a publication forthcoming: Nonhuman Worlds," co-written with Elizabeth Crachiolo and Emily Kuffner, to be published in Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, ed. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. |
| Rebecca Kling | Rebecca won a Bilinski Fellowship for 2017-2018, along with a departmental Dissertation Quarter Fellowship. |
| Jamil Kochai | Jamil had an excerpt of his novel, 99 Nights in Logar, published in the magazine A Public Space. He was also accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was awarded First Place for the Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize. |
| Emily Kuffner | Emily has a publication forthcoming: Nonhuman Worlds," co-written with Elizabeth Crachiolo and Dyani Johns Taff, to be published in Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, ed. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. |
| Katherine Leveling | Katherine was awarded an Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award from the Office of Graduate Studies. She also won a departmental Dissertation Quarter Fellowship. |
| Margaret Miller | Margaret was selected as this year’s recipient of the David Noel Miller Award Miller Essay Prize, which is awarded for the best critical essay submitted each year by an English Department graduate student. |
| Molly Montgomery | Molly was awarded the Elliot Gilbert Prize in fiction for The Boarders. |
| Laura Rivera Rodriquez | Laura was was awarded the Elliot Gilbert Prize in poetry for White Noise Search. |
| Jennifer Tinonga-Valle | Jennifer was awarded an Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award from the Office of Graduate Studies. She was also selected to join this year's cohort of Mellon Public Scholars for a research and digital mapping project with California Humanities called "California Humanities: Mapping the Field." And, finally, with the help of DHI collaboration group funding award, she and Annette Hulbert launched the Annotations literary podcast, available here: https://annotationspodcast.wordpress.com/ |
| Melissa Wills | Melissa won a Bilinski Fellowship for 2017-2018, along with a departmental Dissertation Quarter Fellowship. |
MA Recipients
| Chelsea Bryan | Thesis: Echo |
| Diana Chan | Thesis: Leaf Bright Night: Stories |
| Ryan Horner | Thesis: The Complete: A Novel |
| Zachary Kennedy-Lopez | Thesis: The Bodies of Men |
| Jamil Kochai | Thesis: 99 Nights in Logar |
| Laura Rivera Rodriguez | Thesis: Fiber Optics |
| Cody Stetzel | Thesis: What You Damn Well Have To See |
| Emma Train | Thesis: Of Love, Maybe |
| Nicholas Yingling | Thesis: Litany of an Only Child |
PhD Recipients
| Simon Abramowitsch | Dissertation: "Under the Sign of the Rainbow: The Production of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the San Francisco Bay Area from the 1960s to the 1990s" |
| Ian Afflerbach | Dissertation: “The Fictions of American Liberalism: Modernism between Crisis and Consensus” |
| Treena Balds | Dissertation: Beckett's Calculus of the Subject |
| Jordan Carroll | Dissertation: “Publishing the Unpublishable: Obscenity and Editorship in U.S. Literary Culture” |
| Angela Lewandowski | Dissertation: “Lyric Interiors: The Contemporary Ecological Imagination in American Women’s Poetry” |
| Sara Petrosillo | Dissertation: “Pluck off Her Bells and Let Her Fly: Falconry as Medieval Reading Practice” |
| Cordelia Ross | |
| Leilani Serafin | Dissertation: “Attention Span and Writing Process in Victorian Sensation Novels and Their Theatrical Adaptations” |
| Danielle Shaw | Dissertation: “Mad Men, Playboys, and Hipsters: White Masculinity in Postwar U.S. Film and Literature” |
| Cara Shipe | Dissertation: “Bodies Beholden: Intersections of Race and Disability in Literature of the Long Nineteenth- Century U.S.” |
| Meg Sparling | Dissertation: “The Literature that Slave Labor Made: Methodologies of Slave Labor's Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” |
| George Thomas | Dissertation: “Telling Time: The Temporal Novels of William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison” |
| Bryan Yazell | Dissertation: “Vagrant Narratives: Governing the Welfare Subject in the US and Britain, 1880-1940” |
Job Placements
| Simon Abramowitsch | Simon has accepted a tenure-track position as an English Instructor at Chabot College, a community college in Hayward, CA. |
| Ian Afflerbach | Ian has accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of 20th century American literature at the University of North Georgia. |
| Valerie Billing | Valerie is moving from a visiting position to a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor of early modern literature at Central College in Pella, Iowa. |
| John Garrison | John is moving from a tenured position at Carroll University to become a tenured Associate Professor at Grinnell College. |
| Angela Hume Lewandowski | Angie has accepted a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Environmental Literature at the University of Minnesota, Morris. |
| Sara Petrosillo | Sara has accepted a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College. |
| Cordelia Ross | Starting in the fall, Cordelia will be joining the English department at the University of Alabama at its flagship campus in Tuscaloosa as a full-time Instructor. |
| Danielle Shaw | Danielle has accepted a tenure-track position in the English Department at West Valley College, Saratoga. |
| Bryan Yazell | Recent PhD Lecturer Bryan Yazell has accepted a postdoctoral researcher position at the Centre for Uses of Literature (University of Southern Denmark). Bryan will join an interdisciplinary cohort researching "The Social Dimensions of Literature" under the auspices of the Danish National Research Foundation. |
Faculty Awards, Publications, and Projects
| Katherine J. Anderson | Katherine published “Trauma and the Torturer: Of Monsters and Military Men at Morant Bay,” forthcoming in Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature. She also presented several papers: “The Banality of Empire: Forms of Torture, 1855” at the Dickens Universe Conference on Form and Reform; “Status Update: ‘I’m being Stabbed,’ or, the Post-Human Masturbatory Gaze in Horror,” at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference; and “Antisocial Citizens: Vigilante Terrorism in Late-Nineteenth Century Colonial Fiction” at the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference. |
| Gina Bloom | Gina Bloom exhibited Play the Knave, the Shakespeare video game she helped create with ModLab colleagues, at about a dozen institutions and events—thanks, in part, to a digital humanities grant she received from the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She co-wrote with English PhD student Sawyer Kemp and two other graduate students in the ModLab an article entitled “‘A Whole Theatre of Others’: Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave,” which has just been published in Shakespeare Quarterly as part of a special issue, “#Bard.” She also published the essay “Time to Cheat: Chess and The Tempest’s Performative History of Dynastic Marriage,” in A Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford University Press, 2016). |
| Elizabeth Freeman | Beth taught a master class at the University of Southern Denmark in March 2017, and will be giving a keynote address at the Australia/New Zealand American Studies Association Annual Conference in June. |
| Mark Jerng | Mark will be co-directing a new Mellon Initiative with History Professor Justin Leroy. |
| Alessa Johns | Alessa has two articles forthcoming: “German Women’s Writing in British Magazines, 1760-1820,” which will appear in Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain: 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, Volume 1 of The Edinburgh History of Women's Periodical Culture in Britain, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Manushag Powell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, anticipated 2017); and “Bluestocking Studies 2011-2017: The Transnational Turn,” which will appear soon in Literature Compass. She was also invited to deliver the keynote address at the annual Jane Austen birthday celebration of the Jane Austen Society of North America, Sacramento Region, in December 2016; the title of her talk was “Jane Austen’s ‘Elastic Cheerfulness’.” |
| Desirée Martín | Desirée published “‘Santísima Muerte, Vístete de Negro, Santísima Muerte, Vístete de Blanco’: La Santa Muerte’s Illegal Marginalizations” in Religions. |
| Tobias Menley | Tobias published “Late Holocene Poetics: Genre and Geohistory in Beach Head” in the European Romantic Review 27.3. |
| Colin Milburn | Colin was selected as a recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate and Professional Teaching. |
| Elizabeth Miller | Liz hosted the first conference for the Vcologies working group, a special caucus within the North American Victorian Studies Association that is dedicated to the study of ecologies, at UC Davis in September 2016. English faculty members Kathleen Frederickson, Tobias Menely, and Mike Ziser all presented work at the conference. After the success of this first conference, the University of Houston will be hosting Vcologies 2 in September 2017, and the University of British Columbia will host Vcologies 3 in September 2018. Liz also spent 6 months in England during 2017, where she taught the UC Davis London Quarter Abroad and held a Visiting Fellow appointment at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. During her stay, she participated in a "Vcologies UK" symposium hosted by the University of Southampton in June 2017. While in England, Liz also shared a stage with Kathleen Frederickson at the University of Warwick, which organized a symposium on Victorian Global Finance featuring lectures by Kathleen and Liz. In Fall 2017, Liz will give a keynote address at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in Banff, Canada, presenting work from her current project on nineteenth-century extraction ecologies. |
| Sara Petrosillo | Sara filed her dissertation in September, and has since worked at UC Davis as a lecturer. She has an article entitled "Predatory Poetics: Reading Weight in Thirteenth-Century Falconry Treatises" forthcoming in the medieval and renaissance studies journal Exemplaria (29.3). An essay she presented at the Medieval Association of the Pacific Conference won a Founders' Award and she has been awarded a BABEL Paxson Memorial Travel Grant to present at the International Congress on Medieval Studies this May. She has also enjoyed sponsoring student presentations moderating at UCD's Undergraduate Research Conference. |
| Scott Shershow | Scott published The Love of Ruins: Letters On Lovecraft, co-authored with Scott Michaelsen, from SUNY Press. |
| Matthew Stratton | Matthew was selected as a recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching. |
| Jacinda Townsend | Jacinda was selected as a Truth Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She was also awarded the Hellman Fellowship from UC Davis for 2017-18. |
| Claire Waters | Claire’s edition and translation of Marie de France's 12th-century Lais--the first secular text by a named European woman author--will be coming out from Broadview Press early next year. She’s also co-organizing the 2018 New Chaucer Society conference, which will take place in Toronto; this is the major field conference for scholars of later medieval English literature. |
| Naomi Williams | Naomi and fellow UCD creative writing alum and current lecturer Elise Winn Pollard (MA '09) are about to conclude their first year as the new co-directors for the popular local literary series, Stories on Stage Davis. Naomi presented a paper at the "Fictive Histories, Historical Fictions" conference at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. The paper is entitled "Dancing through the Alternative Facts: Cannibal Stories, Hagiographies, and Fictionalizing the Lapérouse Expedition." The first weekend in June she’ll be on a panel to discuss the short story at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, CA. She was also awarded her second residency at the Hedgebrook Writers Residency Program on Whidbey Island, WA, and she’ll be doing a month-long residency this coming fall with the Djerassi Artists Program. |
Emeriti Awards, Publications, and Projects
| Lynn Freed | Lynn published a novel, The Last Laugh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July, 2017) and a collection of essays, The Romance of Elsewhere (Counterpoint, October, 2017). |
| Peter Hays | Reading The Old Man and the Sea is now at Kent State University Press. A line-by-line annotation of the novella, it is the fourth in Kent State's Reading Hemingway Series. The book was begun by Bickford Sylvester, who died two years ago, and completed by Larry Grimes and Peter. He attended and delivered a paper at the 17th International Hemingway Conference last summer in Oak Park, IL, participated in a discussion at the Sacramento Public Library in July, and will give a paper at a Hemingway Conference in Cuba this June. “‘Now I Lay Me,’ Prayer, and The Fisher King,” is forthcoming in The Hemingway Review (2017), and “Hemingway and Wharton: Both Modernists,” Wharton and Hemingway: Gender and the Advent of Modernism, edited by Lisa Tyler is also forthcoming. He continues to edit the News and Notes column for the Fitzgerald Newsletter, and this will be his last year as secretary for the Executive Committee of the UCD Emeriti Association. |
| Linda Morris | With her French colleague, Professor Ronald Jenn, Linda received a France-Berkeley Fund grant to support research on the French and English sources of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. The UC Davis Office of Research and the Dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies co-sponsored the grant. The Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley contains the original authoritative texts Twain annotated as he prepared to write his historical romance. The results of this study have been published in the Mark Twain Journal, Spring/Fall 2017. In addition, as part of the grant, she will give a lecture on Twain’s Joan of Arc in Rouen, France, in June, and her colleague and she will present papers on that subject at the Elmira Conference on Mark Twain Studies, Elmira College, in August. In addition she has published two additional essays about Mark Twain: “Gender Bending as Childs’ Play,” in Mark Twain and Youth, Ed. by Kevin MacDonnell and R. Kent Rasmussen, Bloomsbury Press and “Identity Switching in Huckleberry Finn,” in Critical Insights: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ed. by R. Kent Rasmussen, Salem Press. Finally, she has an essay in press:“Roz Chast: From Whimsy to Transgression,” in Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers, Ed. by Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Palgrave Macmillan. |
| Gary Snyder | Gary Snyder recently contributed a new poem to the Center for Humans and Nature's latest publication, Wildness: Relations of People and Place. Published by University of Chicago Press, the new anthology features essays and poems that explore the spectrum of wildness found in wilderness areas, on working landscapes, and in urban communities. The book merges culturally diverse voices to delve into the evolution of "wildness," including Gary Snyder, Vandana Shiva, Robert Michael Pyle, Robin Kimmerer, and Winona LaDuke. |
| Alan Williamson | The Living Theater: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, co-translated with Jeanne Foster, will be out from BOA in fall 2017. And Alan’s first new book of poetry in more than a decade, Franciscan Notes, is scheduled for publication by Tupelo Press early in 2019. |