While the students of the UP English Department have been working, interning, or even just relaxing over the summer, our professors have kept themselves busy as well! Here are some reports, directly from our faculty, about their eventful summers:
“Early in the summer I went to a Nature Writing conference in upstate New York, where panelists responded to the question: ‘Is Nature Writing Dead?’ (my answer, by the way, was no!). I spent the rest of the summer taking some brief excursions to gorgeous places in the Northwest and Canada, including Vancouver, Whistler, Victoria, and Crater Lake National Park. We traveled everywhere with our pug, Kawa. I also took advantage of the beautiful weather by doing a lot of reading outdoors. My favorite books this summer were Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and Silent Transformations by Francois Jullien” – Dr. Sarah Weiger
“I remember summer. I remember the tall ships of Francis Scott Key’s inner harbor of Baltimore one sticky June day, and the spray from Whitman’s Brooklyn ferry en route to Governor’s Island. Spent an afternoon in Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes (which became the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, complete with a giant globe sculpture and a football-field sized scale model of NYC – a relic featured in Brian Selznick’s recent graphic narrative Wonderstruck). On the other coast, I remember biking through Oakland’s Jack London Square, walking through John Muir’s glacier-carved Yosemite landscapes, and a tour of Yosemite’s Ahwanee Hotel given by UP English Dept. alumna Erin Callahan who now practically runs the place. Those were the days. ” -Dr. Lars Larson
“For the third time, Fr. Art and I led a group of UP students to Europe for the sole purpose of studying World War I through historical and literary lenses. We went to museums in Vienna, the Kaiservilla in Bad Ischl, battlefields and museums in France and Belgium, and museums in London. So I got to combine two of my favorite things this summer: studying literature and World War I! Being able to take the students to trenches and battle-scarred landscapes helps make the enormity of the event sink in. And, of course, I came back with even more memorabilia of the war, including a French helmet proudly on display in my office.” -Dr. John Orr
“In mid-June, I traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, for the annual conference of the Space Between Society, held this year at Brown University, where I presented a paper on a novel about London in the aftermath of World War Two, The World, my Wilderness. I’ve been involved with this interdisciplinary group of scholars who study “literature and culture between 1914 and 1945” since I first attended the conference in 2005 and found myself among a group of congenial, passionate, and welcoming academics. Two years ago I organized and co-hosted the conference here at UP (with great support and assistance from Dr. Laurie McLary from ILC and Dr. Elise Moentmann from History), and participants have raved to me since about our beautiful campus, smooth organization, and cool city. In addition to serving as Co-President of the Society for a three-year term, I am also currently engaged in co-editing a special issue of the Society’s journal, The Space Between, on “The Middlebrow and Modernism,” scheduled to appear in Fall 2013. The process involves soliciting submissions, evaluating them, comparing notes with my co-editors, and ultimately rejecting some and accepting other essays to build a cohesive and thought-provoking volume.
For more information about the Space Between, visit our website: http://spacebetweensociety.org/” – Dr. Geneviève Brassard
“[I] was on the organizing committee for the New Chaucer Society Congress, a biennial conference that was held in Portland this past July. Along with medieval colleagues from neighboring schools (University of Oregon, PSU, Lewis and Clark, and Oregon State) [I] helped to host and organize events for the more than 300 Chaucerians who descended upon Portland for four days to present papers, attend lectures, and discuss all things Chaucer.” -Dr. Cara Hersh
“Besides working on an essay (almost done) about the unusual power of parentheses in poetry, I did a lot of reading in recent fiction and poetry. And–this is cool–I arranged for our upcoming slate of literary readings in the English Readings & Lectures series. Poet Wayne Miller, whose book The City, Our City I reviewed for The Cincinnati Review (the review came out this May), agreed to visit UP this November. He’s also the editor of one of the best literary magazines in the US, Pleiades. He’s a really interesting poet. Dr. Larson used the title poem from his book to start his city-in-literature class last semester. You can see the whole lineup at the English Readings & Lectures website: http://college.up.edu/english/default.aspx?cid=1436&pid=638. Another highlight this fall will be fiction writer Anna Keesey, who teaches at Linfield College. Her new novel,Little Century, out from Knopf (one of the most prestigious presses in America), has won favorable reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other places. It was fun to arrange these readings, along with the one in the spring by poet and critic James Longenbach, whose book The Art of the Poetic Line, a number of our students have studied. Our spring poetry writing workshop will read that, plus his latest book of poems, The Iron Key. All this arranging took up some of my time this summer, but it will be much fun and very interesting for us all. In addition, I’ve lined up a superb poet for the next academic year, too. We’ll announce her name in the spring, but she’ll be here in ’13-’14.” -Dr. Herman Asarnow