For those curious, here are some of the things that some of your MA faculty have been up to/will be up to soon, professionally speaking:

Dr. Miriam Gogol, Professor of Literature, will be participating in the MS Screen Arts and Culture Forum at the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) 2018 Annual Convention in New York City. This session will examine Lois Weber’s newly restored silent film Shoes (1916) in relation to American naturalism, early-twentieth-century consumer culture, the working girl, and sexual mores. Dr. Gogol, editor of and contributor to Working Women: New Essays in American Realisms (forthcoming 2017) will compare the film to depictions of prostitutes and kept women in the American naturalistic fiction of that day (Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets [1893]; Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt [1911]; David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise [1917]; and Rachel Crothers’s Ourselves [1913], the only prostitute play by a woman performed in that era).

Anyone looking for a reason to see New York City and to gain some experience at professional conferences (see the post just below this one for more on why you might want to do that) should look into visiting the MLA conference here during the first week of January 2018 and attending Dr. Gogol’s presentation.

Dr. Celia Reissig-Vasile, Chair of the Dept. of Literature and Language in which the MA program is housed, received sabbatical leave last year to conduct research on historical memory and cultural production in the post-dictatorial period in Argentina and is now in the process of preparing her manuscript for publication. Her book will focus on Argentine film and literature as cultural manifestations of historical memory.

Her most recent publication is a chapter in the book Home: An Imagined Landscape (Solis Press 2016) edited by renowned writer and scholar Dr. Marjorie Agosin. Dr. Reissig-Vasile has also been invited to read her creative work at various events and venues in the past year: e.g. Po’Jazz at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY (May 2016); Art Speak at Blue Door Art Gallery in Yonkers, NY (June 2016); Writing to the Wall at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY (July 2016); Mercy College Writers Corner at Mercy College (March 2017); and as part of Grupo Quetzal at the Stamford CT Library’s International Women’s Day (March 2017).

Cover art for Home (2016) and The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies (2017).

Dr. Boria Sax, who teaches a range of courses in the MA program including his self-designed Animals in Literature and Magic in Literature courses, has had a typically busy and prolific year. Recent articles include “Animals in Folklore” which appears in the prestigious Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies (Oxford University Press, 2017). Also: “Animal Models and Utopias: ‘A Bird of Paris’ by J.J. Grandville, George Sand, and P.J. Stahl” which appears in Anglistik – International Journal of English Studies (27.2, 2017). And: “Zootropia, Kinship, and Alterity in the Work of Roberto Marchesini” which appears in Angelaki (21.1, 2016).

Furthermore, his 2012 book City of Ravens was recently published in Chinese translation (鸦之城:伦敦,伦敦塔与乌鸦的故事 , trans. Weng Jiaruo, Beijing: CITIC Press Corporation, 2016). The Chinese Mythological Society at Normal University in Beijing is just finishing up a translation of his 2013 book The Mythical Zoo. That edition is slated for publication in late 2017 and will be Dr. Sax’s third book translated into Chinese. And his 2003 book Crow has just been reissued by Reaktion Books of London. His next book is Lizard forthcoming from Reaktion Books in October 2017.

Cover Art for the Chinese translation of City of Ravens (2017) and for Cultural Hybrids of (Post)Modernism (2017).

Dr. Christopher Loots’ article “Nada and Sunyata in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place'” was published as a chapter in Cultural Hybrids of (Post)Modernism: Japanese and Western Literature, Art and Philosophy (2017), as part of the Critical Perspectives on English and American Literature, Communication and Culture series. The book is edited by Beatriz Penas-Ibáñez and Akiko Manabe.

Dr. Sean Dugan, who has long had an interest in so-called “mid-brow” literature and media and popular culture, recently presented his research on Edna Ferber, Calder Willingham, and the Earle Stanley Gardener character Perry Mason as represented in the TV series at the South Atlantic MLA (SAMLA) conference as well as the College English Association conference. He is currently working on a paper for SAMLA 2017 on TV Noir and The Twilight Zone episode “Perchance to Dream” by Charles Beaumont. He continues to do research into his other field of interest, linguistics, and in particular accent perception, English grammar, and syntax (some of which he will apply in the 2017-18 year as a Faculty Fellow working with Dr. Miriam Ford of the Mercy College Nursing Dept. on reading comprehension and fluency in first year college students). Dr. Dugan regularly teaches MA courses on Irish Literature, Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, Composition, and Narrative Strategy.