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English Faculty News - Scholarship in Action

Title page of Milton's Paradise Lost

Associate Professor of English Claire Seiler and Associate Professor of Russian Alyssa DeBlasio received a $350,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their proposal “Beyond the New Normal: Disability, Literature and Reimagining Social Justice.”  Professor Seiler also recently had a chapter published in The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English, May 31, 2023, entitled “On or about 1945."

Siobhan Phillips, Associate Professor of English, has published her first novel entitled Benefit, Bellevue Literary Press, April 19, 2022. Benefit is a vivid debut novel of personal awakening that offers a withering critique of toxic philanthropy and the American meritocracy.

Assistant Professor Sarah Kersh and Pearl Chaozon Bauer published an article entitled "Queer temporality in Victorian love and marriage poems" in the Nineteeth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, 2022, pp. 193-210.

Associate Professor of English and Film Studies Greg Steirer has co-authored a book with Alisa Perren entitled The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood by the British Film Institute released on July 1, 2021.

Assistant Professor Chelsea Skalak published "The Unwilling Wife: Marital Rape in the Canterbury Tales," in The Chaucer Review, vol. 55, no. 2, 2020, published by Penn State University Press.

Assistant Professor of English Sheela Jane Menon published an essay in The New Mandala entitled "The digital turn in Southeast Asian theatre: new routes through a global pandemic" (Jan. 18, 2021). She also authored "Time to Embrace, Not Shun, Malaysia's Migrant Community," (May 7, 2020) which was published in The Diplomat. Professor Menon published an article entitled "Diagnosing Malaysian Multiculturalism: Jo Kukathas and The 1Malaysia Virus," in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 37-48, published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Jacob Sider Jost, Associate Professor of English, published Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano by University of Virginia Press, December 31, 2020. Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life.

Associate Professor of English Claire Seiler's book "Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II" was released on August 11, 2020 by Columbia University Press. In addition Professor Seiler published an essay entitled "The Matter of Elizabeth Bishop's Professionalism" in Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive, edited by Bethany Hickok, Lever Press, 2020, pp. 303-18.

Professor of English Wendy Moffat wrote the afterword in "Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies" by Sam See, edited by Christopher Looby and Michael North, contributor(s) Scott Herring and Heather Love. Professor Moffat also published an essay entitled "The Archival 'I': Forster, Isherwood, and the Future of Queer Biography" in Isherwood in Transit editors James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, Spring 2020.

Professor of English Wendy Moffaestablished a Dickinson scholarship in memory of her father, acclaimed actor Donald Moffat. The Donald Moffat Scholarship Fund will benefit students with financial need who demonstrate an interest in the literary or dramatic arts, whether through coursework or oncampus activities, such as Mermaid Players. An award will be made when gifts to the fund reach $50K.