Just a reminder here for our graduate community that Dr. Horton will be discussing her current book project, “‘Don’t You Fuck With My Energy’: The Occult, Intersectional Spirituality, and Religious Appropriation in Hip Hop Culture,” today (12/8) on zoom starting at 2pm.

Students and alumni are strongly encouraged to attend. In order to do so please complete the rsvp form linked here. And then at 2pm today click here to open the zoom link. In case you’re new to Zoom, know that you don’t have to actually be on camera, so you can watch the event with your camera and mic off if you prefer. Any questions contact cloots@mercy.edu.

Dr. Dana Horton’s book Gender, Genre, and Race in Post-Neo-Slave Narratives is now in print. As well, Dr. Horton will be hosting an online-zoom talk regarding her next book project on Thursday December 8, at 2pm, as a part of Mercy College’s Research Salon Series. More information about both the book and the event are as follows:

Gender, Genre, and Race in Post-Neo-Slave Narratives provides an innovative conceptual framework for describing representations of slavery in twenty-first century American cultural productions. Covering a broad range of narrative forms ranging from novels like The Known World to films like 12 Years a Slave and the music of Missy Elliott, Dr. Dana Renee Horton engages with post-neo-slave narratives, a genre she defines as literary and visual texts that mesh conventions of postmodernity with the neo-slave narrative. Focusing on the characterization of black women in these texts, Dr. Horton argues that they are portrayed as commodities who commodify enslaved people, a fluid and complex characterization that is a foundational aspect of postmodern identity and emphasizes how postmodern identity restructures the conception of slave-owners.

Students and alumni are strongly encouraged to check out the book, and to attend Dr. Horton’s upcoming research discussion based on her next book project, and titled: “‘Don’t You Fuck With My Energy’: The Occult, Intersectional Spirituality, and Religious Appropriation in Hip Hop Culture.” The project uses a Black Feminist theoretical framework to analyze how rappers, such as Princess Nokia, Gangsta Boo, and La Chat, assemble a diverse array of spiritual, religious, and occult symbols to construct their rap personas. Dr. Horton argues that rappers engage in sampling, a common Hip Hop practice, as a way to construct an inclusive identity that challenges patriarchal structures; ironically, by participating in religious appropriation, these artists reinforce the structures that they are attempting to thwart. In addition to lyrical/visual analysis and rap music, Dr. Horton’s presentation will discuss what Hip Hop culture teaches us about our individual and collective spiritual practices.

The zoom event will run from 2:00 – 4:00pm on 12/8. To attend, please complete the rsvp form linked here. And then, to join the zoom meeting, click here to open the zoom link at the appropriate day and time. Any questions contact cloots@mercy.edu.

I am thrilled to share with our graduate community that Dr. Boria Sax has been awarded the Eisenstein Award for Best Essay of the Year by the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS). The Eisenstein prize is awarded annually for the best academic journal article or book chapter published by a member of the NCIS. The essay must have been published in a peer reviewed journal or edited academic book to qualify. Dr. Sax’s essay is “When Adam and Eve Were Monkeys: Anthropomorphism, Zoomorphism and Other Ways of Looking at Animals,” published in The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History, edited by Hilda Kean and Philip Howell (London, 2019). For the record, this is the second time that Dr. Sax’s writing has been so recognized by the NCIS and he is the only person to have been awarded this distinction twice.

Your MA faculty are constantly engaged in all sorts of scholarly activities. Such recent scholarship includes presentations, such as Dr. Dugan’s “An Interdisciplinary Bridge to Improved Reading Comprehension and Academic Success,” given at the 2018 convention for the College English Association; and “Perchance to Dream” delivered at the Southeast MLA conference in 2017. Notable recent publications by MA faculty include:

Working Women in American Literature, 1865-1950, edited and with an introduction by Dr. Miriam Gogol, and The State of the Field: Ideologies, Identities and Initiatives, edited and with an introduction by Dr. David Kilpatrick.

Working Women in American Literature, 1865–1950 examines how the American working woman has been presented, misrepresented, and underrepresented in American realistic and naturalistic literature (1865–1930), and by later authors influenced by realism and naturalism. Points explored include: the historical vocational realities of working women (e.g., factory workers, seamstresses, maids, teachers, writers, prostitutes, etc.); the distortions in literary representations of female work; the ways in which these representations still inform the lives of working women today; and new perspectives from queer theory, feminist theory, immigrant studies, and race and class analyses.

The State of the Field: Ideologies, Identities and Initiatives provides a comprehensive view of the emerging field of the study of association football. The diversity of approaches in this collection range from theory to pedagogy to historical and sociological engagements with the game at all levels, from the grassroots to the grand spectacle of the World Cup; while the collection’s international roster of authors is testimony to the game’s global reach. The State of the Field altogether offers a view of current critical inquiry into the field of soccer studies as well as a road map for further exploration.

Dr. Kilpatrick as well saw a paper of his published in translation: “El Arsenal de Nietzsche,” translated by Juliana Solórzano y Viviana Casablanco, El Malpensante, 197, Junio 2018. And his article “The Messianic Manager in Novels by David Peace” was published in The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer, edited by Ridvan Askin, Catherine Diederich, and Aline Bieri.

The always prolific Dr. Sax has been up to a number of things. His book Lizard will be published this October, in just a few days. This book demonstrates how the story of lizards is interwoven with the history of the human imagination. In the book Dr. Sax describes the diversity of lizards and traces their representation in many cultures, including those of pre-conquest Australia, the Quiché Maya, Mughal India, China, Central Africa, Europe and America.

Dr. Sax’s earlier publication The Mythical Zoo was recently translated and published in Chinese (his third Book in Chinese translation). And his book Dinomania: Why We Love, Fear and Are Utterly Enchanted by Dinosaurs will be coming out later this October. Additionally, you can still read his guest blog for the Oxford University Press titled “Not Finding Bigfoot: Cryptids and Big Nostalgia.”

Finally, Dr. Kristen Keckler invested a tremendous amount of time and energy over the past year to make real her vision of a Mercy College journal showcasing the creative efforts of Mercy College students. As creator and senior editor of the Red Hyacinth journal, Dr. Keckler took responsibility for all aspects of the process. As a result of her dedication a number of our college’s students, including some graduate students from our MA program, were able to see their works published.

Some of you reading this may remember the call for submissions for the journal advertised here on the program blog last fall. The Red Hyacinth journal is once again accepting submissions for the 2017-18 edition. I will be making another blog post soon dedicated just to this call for submissions, but if you’re interested in sending in a creative work for consideration you should look into the journal’s FAQ and submission guidelines here on the journal’s website.