|
After a long winter that saw snowfall well into April, a
beautiful and sunny May day provided a particularly appropriate setting for the
Humanities Department's first annual Spring Reception and Recognition Ceremony.
To accompaniment of music provided by senior English major Levi Galloway,
students and faculty gathered in the lobby of the Education Center to celebrate
the (at long last) arrival of spring and to both recognize and celebrate the
multiple accomplishments of our students during 2006/07 school year.
Professor (and master of ceremonies) Christine Darrohn
opened the ceremony by welcoming special guests, Robert Lively, Dean of
Arts and Sciences, Jay Hoar (Emeritus Professor of English), and Allen
Flint (Emeritus Professor of English). We were also pleased to recognize and
to offer congratulations to five graduating seniors on being accepted to
graduate school: Tabitha Clark (Carnegie Mellon), Bernadette James
(Chatham College), Joe Normandin (Emerson College), Mark Rice (New
York University), Cyndi Woodworth (Chatham College).
We also recognized the Humanities students who were among
the inaugural group of Wilson Scholars: Mallory Cyr (sponsored by
Patricia O'Donnell), Meghan Dzyak (Stephan Pane), Chelsea Goulart
(Jeffrey Thomson), Michael Hughes (Jonathan Cohen), Danielle Leblanc
(Jeffrey Thomson), Nate Rawson (Paul Outka), and Deborah Scammon
(Christine Darrohn and Sylvie Charon). The Wilson Scholars in attendance at the
ceremony spoke briefly about their winning projects and were introduced by their
faculty sponsors.
The Sandy River Review,
UMF's creative writing publication, also announced the two students who won
awards for best poem and best prose piece published in the Spring 2007 issue:
Tim Berry and Erika Hoddinott.
The ceremony closed with the announcement of the winners of
two scholarships awarded by the Humanities Department, the Wood Scholarship and
the Maud Parks Award, and with the recognition of all the members of the small
group of nominees (selected from the 100 or so students eligible for the awards)
for these highly competitive awards. To make the list of finalists, each student
had to be nominated by at least two Humanities Department faculty members. The
2007 finalists were: Andrea Bechen, Erin Bilodeau,
Mattie Bowden, Ashley Crosby, Maria Kovacs, Danielle LeBlanc, Dara Maguire,
Caroline Pirri, Anna Plisova, and
Margaret Reid.
The Maude Parks award, the department's oldest award, was
established before 1900, when UMF was still a woman's normal school. Joining
over a hundred years of scholarship winners was Margaret Reid, the 2007
Maude Parks winner.
The Eleanor Wood Scholarship, named in memory of an English professor who
retired in the 1970s, was awarded to Erin Bilodeau.
|
|
Apropos Winners: The 2006-2007 edition of Apropos,
the UMF journal that showcases the best student writing in the Humanities, Arts,
Social Sciences, Sciences, and Honors, included the work of several Humanities
students: Caleb Collins, Danielle LeBlanc, Elizabeth Montville,
Jon St. Peter, Joe Normandin, and Lars Farabee. French
psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan did well also, as his theories informed
two of the prize-winning essays, Caleb Collins’ reading of the novel House of
Leaves (which was selected as the top essay) and Elizabeth Montville’s
discussion of children’s fantasy films (which earned third place). In her
second-place essay, Danielle LeBlanc applied the work of gender studies theorist
Judith Butler (whose writing is nearly as abstract and difficult as Lacan’s) to
her interpretation of the character Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Misty Beck presented a paper entitled "Common
Objects and the Poetry of Labor" as part of "The Romantic Machine" panel at the
ICR 2007 Conference on "Romantic Objects" in October in Baltimore, where she
also chaired a panel on "The Objects of Nature and the Nature of Objects."
Additionally, she has been working as a contributing editor for The Routledge
Annotated Bibliography of English Studies, a selective database highlighting
the most significant publications each year in literary studies. As editor to
the Romantics area, she writes short annotations highlighting the usefulness of
the work to scholars, students, and other researchers. The works include
primary sources (from standards like John Clare: Major Works to topical
anthologies like Writings of the Luddites and The Poetry of Slavery)
and a range of critical articles and monographs. She has written annotations on
articles on Joanna Baillie, Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith, and on books on
landscape, imperialism and travel writing.
The anthology that Eric
Brown recently edited, Insect Poetics, was featured in the two most
recent issues of the on-line journal Antennae: The Journal of Nature in
Visual Culture (3.1 and 3.2). An interview with Professor Brown is featured
in issue 3.1 (http://www.antennae.org.uk/).
His review of Charlotte Sleigh's A Cultural History of Myrmecology is
forthcoming in Anthrozoös. Awarded a Fulbright to Norway for 2007-08, he
is currently teaching in Bergen, Norway, and he reports that "the mountains and
fjords are the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen. In Bergen, the local
open-air fish market also sells wolf pelts, whale meat, and troll dolls, and it
rains (or threatens to) perhaps 90% of the time. We live in a small apartment
on the block between Henrik Ibsen's National Theatre and the new-fangled Cinema.
The students at the university have been generally excellent especially because
they have forgiven my inability to pronounce a single one of their name's
correctly. Griffin now speaks more Norwegian than I do."
Michael Burke has been offered a contract from a
Boston publisher for a book of essays about Maine. His recently published memoir
The Same River Twice was named as an honorable mention for the
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment's first annual ASLE
Award for creative writing. He is also editing an anthology of criticism on
Maine's Place in the Environmental Imagination.
In September Amy Clary's article "TechnoNature:
Wilderness and Simulation on the 'Last Frontier'" appeared in Technoculture,
a special issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities, published by the
National Association for Humanities Education. She also presented the paper
"Wild Images: Simulation and Scopophilia on the 'Last Frontier'" at the Society
for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference in Portland in November.
Jonathan Cohen's book has been accepted for
publication by Prometheus Books under their Humanity
Books imprint. It should come out in their Fall 2008/Winter 2009 catalog. The
tentative title is Science, Culture, and Free Spirits: A Study of Nietzsche’s
Human, All-Too-Human. The book seeks to give a reading of Human,
All-Too-Human (1878) as the watershed of Nietzsche’s philosophical
development.
Tara Gagnon,
creative writing major, has been named a Michael D. Wilson Scholar for 2007. Her
faculty sponsor is Patricia O'Donnell. Her project involves writing a
short story based on the historical flooding in 1949-50 of several Maine towns
to make way for a new hydro-electric dam.
Katharine Gergosian,
secondary education English major, was selected as a George J. Mitchell Peace
Scholar, a scholarship sponsored yearly by the University of Maine System. The
scholarship will cover her costs for attending one semester at the University
College, Cork, Ireland.
Michael Johnson
recently published three articles: "Looking for the Big Picture: Percival
Everett's Western Fiction" in Western American Literature (Spring 2007);"Teaching Toni Morrison’s
Paradise: Race, Justice, Violence, and the American West" in the anthology
The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and
Identity, edited by Jami Carlacio; and "Traumatic Experience and the
Representation of Nature in the Novel and Film of The Pawnbroker" in
Literature/Film Quarterly (Fall 2007). Over the summer, he was invited to
speak at the Meagher County Book Festival in White Sulphur Springs, Montana,
where he gave a presentation on his work in progress: "Taylor and Rose Gordon: A
Biography of Harlem and Montana."
Gretchen Legler's On
the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica was
named the best book of environmental creative writing published in 2005-2006 by
the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. At ASLE's
Seventh Biennial Conference in Spartanburg, South Caroline, June 2007, Professor
Legler was presented with the inaugural ASLE Award in creative writing. For more
details, see the ASLE website:
http://www.asle.umn.edu/pubs/awards/2007awards.pdf.
George Miller
delivered a paper ("Existential and Social Justice in Emerson's Theory of
Compensation") at the Northern New England Philosophy Association conference in
Dartmouth, Massachusetts, on October 12. He also reports that Joseph
Stephenson, a recent UMF Philosophy graduate, was there also, delivering a
paper in the student session ("Nietzsche and the Un-free Self Creator: A
Reconciliation of Nietzschean Free Will and Determinism"), and observes: "I
attended the student session, which had (I thought) the best discussions of the
whole conference. All three papers were excellent, but Joe's was, of course, the
best. He really did shine. He didn't just read the paper, as the others did; he
stood up and spoke extemporaneously, consulting note cards from time to time,
and he handled the questions afterward very well, too."
Jennifer Reid’s book on
Louis Riehl has been accepted by the University of New Mexico Press.
Margaret Reid,
creative writing major, has been named a Michael D. Wilson Scholar for 2007. Her
award will help fund a trip to Nashville, which will also be the subject of a
personal essay about songwriting. Patricia O'Donnell is her faculty
sponsor.
Penelope Schwartz Robinson's
essay collection Slippery Men has won the
Stonecoast Book Award and will be published by New Rivers Press in October,
2008.
Jeffrey Thomson has two
books coming out, Many Ways to Dig a Tunnel, translations from the
Spanish of Juan Carlos Flores, with Marta Hernandez Salvan, in late fall
2008 from Green Integer Books, and Have you Heard? Poems From the Fishouse,
co-edited with Matt O'Donnell and Camille Dungy in early 2009 from Persea
Books. Also, he was awarded the 2008 Individual Arts Fellowship in the Literary
Arts by the Maine Arts Commission.
Frank Underkuffler
attended a program of lectures, seminars, and conversations presented by Oxford
University scholars and distinguished alumni on topics ranging from medieval
philosophy to supervolcanoes. He reports, “Dutifully, I attended the law and the
philosophy presentations so I missed the more dramatic stuff. ‘Meeting Minds’
was the first-ever University-wide reunion weekend. And it didn't rain once.”
Jan Watson-Hein
reports that her novel, entitled The Dubious Gift of Empty Spaces, has
been signed by Tin House Books (www.tinhouse.com).
The novel will be promoted as a featured title of their New Voice Series and is
tentatively slated for publication in late 2008.
|
|
Jennifer Baum is working at Downeast
Magazine.
Peter Biello, BFA
Creative Writing, made his debut recently as a radio journalist on National
Public Radio. He attributes his getting a foot in the door in radio to Gretchen
Legler’s “radio essay” project in ENG 312. Peter says “I
hope you are all doing well. I have some interesting news. Some of you are
regular listeners to NPR. . . and some of you heard me talk about this story as
it was being researched and edited. It aired on NPR's 'Day to Day' and is now
archived:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15512602."
A former Creative Writing
major, Kaorlyn Buotte, is now chair of the English Department at Leavitt
High School.
Mallory
Cyr is working for the HRTW National
Resource Center as an advocate for youth with disabilities or illnesses.
David Disarro is in
the PhD Program in Rhetoric and Composition at Ball State University.
Julianne
LaMay is a marketing copywriting at a Boston law
firm.
Darcie Moore, who graduated with a BFA degree in
Creative Writing in 2003, writes to say hello from her new job as a journalist:
“I've been working almost since I graduated as a reporter at a small newspaper
in Brunswick called The Times Record. I started out as an intern and soon
an entry level position opened here (which is rare given the funding
difficulties of small newspapers). The only thing I've written for the paper so
far in first person was about my flight the summer before last with The Blue
Angels. However, people here haven't forgotten it since it details my getting
sick from the spins.”
Erin Nichols, BA in
English, is attending Simmons College in Library and Information Science.
Mark Rice writes from New York, where he is getting
an MFA in Creative Writing: “I wanted to speak to you about my workshop with
Sharon Olds...Firstly, I love it. But it's structured in a way that was a shock
to me. We workshop the poems on the same day they are due. We don't get to read
the poems to ourselves and prepare for the workshop like we do at
Farmington….I've got just one other class. It's a lit crit course that's
sucking up most of my time and energy. We're reading people I've never heard of
before: Derrida, Lacan, Bakhtin, etc. It's super hard but that's what I get for
being in grad school. Brooklyn's great. I'm in Williamsburg on the northern
coast. I can see the Manhattan skyline from my porch. I love my roommates.
Emily Whittenhagen (BFA grad) is living south of me. She'll be in
my neighborhood tonight, so I'll catch up with her. It's great to have a
Farmingtonian around when I need one. Miss you tons, tell everyone I say
hello!!"
Rachel
Ingrid Robbins got her MFA from Stonecoast
and is now an English teacher at Winslow High School.
James Ryan, who got his BFA in Creative Writing in
2002, is now part-time faculty at California State University Fullerton where he
teaches upper-level composition courses for the Childhood and Adolescent Studies
Department. He’s been up to a lot since he left UMF: Masters of Theological
Studies (2005) from Boston University School of Theology; author of
Rebuilding our Spirits: Recovery from Destructive Spirituality, forthcoming
from Intervarsity Press; editor, STEPS Magazine (2003-Present), a
publication of the National Association of Christian Recovery.
Rachel
Sasseen is a copyeditor at Penny Press.
Sarah
Seveney is teaching English to preschoolers
in Seoul, South Korea.
Tryfon
Tolides, whose book of poetry was published
in 2005, will read at UMF in the spring.
Brendan Veayo is in
a PhD program in Houston.
|
