On December 2nd, the English Department welcomed guest speakers to “Careers in Teaching,” a conference designed to inform graduate students about career possibilities in independent high schools and community colleges. The day was attended by more than 60 people from 15 different Stanford departments, including English, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), biology, anthropology, the school of education, and earth sciences. The occasion was full of energy and optimism. Capturing in a word the spirit of the event, Eric Chandler of the Kent Denver School described it as "inspiring."
The panelists came from some of the best private schools and community colleges in the country, including the Branson School in Marin County, the Castilleja School in Palo Alto, the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Horace Mann in New York, Kent Denver in Colorado, and the Menlo School in Menlo Park. They also included the president of the Association of Departments of English, Tom Hurley, and Jonathan Ball, the director of school services for the leading independent school recruitment firm, Carney, Sandoe, & Associates in Boston.
In the first session, Stanford Ph.D. alumni spoke frankly about the deliberations that led them to their current positions. In the second, four panelists, all with Ph.D.s in the humanities, explained the day-to-day experience of teaching in an independent school or community college. The third session focused on logistical matters, providing insight into how to apply and make oneself competitive for such positions. All of the panels involved full and vibrant discussion sessions. The participants were also able to speak with the panelists at greater length during the afternoon “breakout” session.
"Careers in Teaching" was funded by a SCORE grant from the Vice Provost for Graduate Education.
Video of the conference is available on the conference website under the "Pages" section of the right sidebar: http://careersinteaching.stanford.edu
The 2011 Alden Dissertation Prize of $2500 is awarded each year to the Ph.D. student in English whose dissertation shows the greatest promise of scholarly achievement. The joint winners for dissertations finished between June 2010 and March 2011 are Ema Vyroubalova and Natalie Phillips.
Ema’s dissertation, written under the direction of Roland Greene, is entitled "’These Confusions of Lewd Tongues’: Linguistic Diversity in Early Modern England, 1509-1625”. Ema is currently an assistant professor at the University of Haifa in Israel.
Natalie’s dissertation, written under the co-direction of Denise Gigante and John Bender, is entitled “Narrating Distraction: Problems of Focus in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 1750-1820”. Natalie has just completed a one-year post-doctoral fellowship and is joining the faculty of Michigan State University in the fall.
Congratulations to both Ema and Natalie.
The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the English department congratulate Jennifer Harford Vargas for winning the Ernesto Galarza Prize for Graduate Research for "The People of Paper in The Borderlands of Dictatorship."
Jennifer is a CCSRE Graduate Dissertation Fellow and also holds a DARE Fellowship (Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence). She also co-coordinates the TransAmerican Studies Working Group at the Humanities Center and is a Graduate Scholar-in-Residence at El Centro Chicano. Her dissertation, entitled “Dictating Form: Authoritarian Power in the Latina/o American Novel,” identifies and examines a corpus of contemporary U.S. Caribbean and Latina/o novels that expands the formal and geo-political contours of the Latin American dictator novel. She joins the faculty of the English Department at Bryn Mawr College as an assistant professor this fall.
Congratulations to Emily Kopley, 4th year PhD candidate, who was recently awarded the $1,000 second place prize in the 2011 Wreden Prize Contest for her essay "'Scraps, orts and fragments': Collecting Virginia Woolf".
The Byra J. and William P. Wreden Prize for Collecting Books and Related Materials, open to all Stanford students and usually awarded every two years, was created as an endowment in memory of two lifelong book collectors and supporters of the Stanford University Libraries. William P. Wreden, Class of ’34, led a distinguished career as a Bay Area antiquarian bookseller, and maintained long friendships with Nathan van Patten and subsequent Stanford librarians. Byra J. Wreden, a lifetime collector of the works of Kate Greenaway, was a founding director of the Associates of the Stanford University Libraries in 1973.
Sarah Perkins and Stephen Osadetz will receive Fliegelman Archival Research Awards for 2011.
Sarah will use the award to travel to conduct archival research at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University, whose special collections house an extensive archive on the Fugitive Poets, best known for their 1930 manifesto, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition . This research will help Sarah shape the individual arguments and debates of the Fugitive Poets involving the role of the South in American literary culture as she develops her own theories about "Dixie" in her dissertation-in-progress " "Dixie" in the Making of American Literature" .
Stephen will research archival material for two chapters of his dissertation-in-progress "On Principle: Newton to Coleridge" in libraries in England and Scotland. This material will include the Francis Hutcheson papers at the University of Glasgow and in the archives of the Masonic Grand Lodges in Edinburgh and London; the notebooks of Jean Desaguliers and Benjamin Martin in the archives of the British Library; and Godwin's diaries and notebooks in the Abinger Collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Congratulations to both Sarah and Stephen!
PhD candidates Hannah Doherty and James Wood have received the Fliegelman Archival Research Awards for 2010.
Hannah will use the award to travel to the New York Public Library to study the materials available in the Pforzheimer and Berg Collections and then on to Harvard's Houghton Library to read specifically an 1808 novel The English-Woman and to look at generally collections on other Minerva authors - research for her dissertation-in-progress "The Myth of Minerva: Publishing, Popular Fiction and Romanticism, 1790-1820".
James too will travel to the Houghton Library to consult the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of material relating to Samuel Johnson in preparation for the fifth and final chapter of his dissertation-in-progress "Anecdote and Enlightenment, 1700-1800".
Congratulations to both Hannah and James!
Congratulations to Jillian Hess who was the first-place winner of the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize in 2009. Jillian's essay “This Living Hand: Commonplacing Keats” is to be published in Keats-Shelley Review 2010, issue No 23.
Initially the brain-child of Caroline Wu and the late Quentin Crewe, The Keats-Shelley Prize was inaugurated in 1998 to reward excellence in writing on Romantic themes. The underlying purpose of the Prize was and remains to encourage people of all ages, but particularly the young, to respond personally to the emotions aroused in them by the work of the Romantics through rising to the challenge of writing their own poem or essay. Entries are invited annually in two categories: poems, on a theme chosen by the judges, and essays on any aspect of the work or life of Keats or Shelley.
The judges' panel consists of two practising poets, Matthew Sweeney, who is also a KSMA Trustee, and John Hartley Williams, and of two Romantic scholars who assess the essays. A distinguished literary figure with an interest in the Romantics is chosen as Prize Chairman each year. There are £3,000 of prizes, awarded in each category to a winner and a runner-up. The winners have the additional bonus of being published in the Keats-Shelley Review.
An Awards Ceremony takes place each year in London, to which all Friends and Competition entrants are invited. Former Prize Chairmen have included the poets and biographers Andrew Motion, Claire Tomalin, Tom Paulin, Grevel Lindop, Miranda Seymour, Ian Gilmour, James Fenton, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Keates, A.N.Wilson and Ann Wroe.
The Prize was sponsored for its first four years by The Folio Society, and thereafter by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the John S.Cohen Foundation. It was sponsored in 2007 by Barclays Wealth, The Department of English, University of St Andrews, and The Cowley Foundation.
Congratulations to 4th-year PhD student, Elda Maria Roman, who was recently announced the winner of the Ernesto Galarza Prize for Excellence in Graduate Student Research. Elda Maria received a plaque and a check for $500 for the paper she submitted entitled "Putting the Go in Gomez: The Movement Towards Wider Class Diversity in Chicana/o Popular Culture".
This annual prize was initiated in 1986 to pay tribute to the pioneering scholarly work published by Dr. Ernesto Galarza, a Stanford alumnus who is generally regarded as the Dean of Chicano Studies. Through his research and activism on behalf of Chicanas/os that spanned five decades, Dr. Galarza inspired others to write about the condition of Latina/o people in the U.S. and his example inspired others to follow in his footsteps to promote social justice and equality. The Galarza Prizes are awarded to Stanford undergraduates and graduate students whose research reflects the spirit of Dr. Galarza.
Congratulations to current PhD student, Lee Konstantinou, who has just had his first novel published. Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire is a political satire about celebrity, pop culture, and the End of the World. It was recently published by Ecco/Harper Perennial.
This playful and witty novel takes our celebrity-obsessed and media-hijacked culture, mixes in geopolitics and a dash of cyberpunk dystopia to create an intelligent and blistering what-if.
–Publishers Weekly
Abusing the future to make hash of the present, Lee Konstantinou has fashioned one hell of a satire, one hell of a world. The writing is stunning, every sentence so packed with knowledge and wit that one’s laughter can barely catch up with the story. Konstantinou has shown us the future, and it doesn’t work. But this novel sure does.
–Roger Rosenblatt, author of Lapham Rising and Beet
“There’s a good deal of rattle and a certain amount of hum in this novel; rattle in the hailstorm of cool ideas, plot twists and one liners… [A] mighty impressive debut: I’m envious. In a good way.”
–Adam Roberts, author of On and Yellow Blue Tibia
Randy Johnson, Ryan Zurowski, Garth Kimbrell and Bridget Whearty , graduate students in Professor Stephen Orgel's "History of the Book" seminar compare the group's newly published editions of the Book of Sports and Sundry Horrible Conspiracies with copies of the originals in the Special Collections Room of the Green Library.