Faculty Highlights (June 2023 - September 2023)

Victoria Bond secured a book deal from Scholastic this summer. It's a ghost story mostly set in 1851, working title The Escaped Girl. Way to go! 

Al Coppola published “‘I am emailing to inform you that another member of my family has passed away’: A Response to Restoration’s Special Issue on COVID/Defoe.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 45, no. 2 (2021): 77-88.

This essay is a response to a special issue collection, but it is really a reflection on what my students went through in the first COVID semester. You can read it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NLTEEi_s7IMlcZnRTL4UsYEz_6hZEmqf/view?usp=sharing

And, “Enlightenolatry from Peter Gay to Steven Pinker: Mass Marketing Enlightenment and the Thick Eighteenth Century.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 62, no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2021): 355-383.

Read it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11eyuo6rzDyJW9n2ihDCgWFLso2BRGYoT/view?usp=drive_link

He was also the recipient of the following fellowships and research support:  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, The Library Company of Philadelphia.  2030-2024. This is a residential fellowship that will house me at the library in October 2023. And,  Albert M. Greenfield Research Fellowship, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. 2023-2024.  These funds will underwrite research trips to Yale, Harvard, MIT, University of Toronto, University of Kansas, and the Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology.  The Greenfield Fellowship is one of two named fellowships that are awarded annually by the Consortium to outstanding research projects; AND,

PSC-CUNY Research Award Cycle 54.  Course release and research travel to the UK.

 Al also presented the follow paper: “Enlightenolatry and the Promotion of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the United States” on the final-day Presidential Plenary panel at the 16th Congress of the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Rome, Italy.  3-7 July 2023.

Maria Grewe was a participant on book panel on Valentina Glajar’s The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Mueller: A "File Story" of Cold War Surveillance. Council for European Studies 29th International Conference of Europeanists: Europe’s Past, Present, and Future: Utopias and Dystopias. University of Iceland, Reykjavik, June 27 – 29, 2023

She was also a moderator and discussant on the panel: “The Mirage of the West: Cold War Utopian Dreams” at Council for European Studies 29th International Conference of Europeanists: Europe’s Past, Present, and Future: Utopias and Dystopias. University of Iceland, Reykjavik, June 27 – 29, 2023

Veronica Hendrick attended the first of a multi-year summer institute (funded by the Henry Luce Foundation) “Modern China in Three Keys: History, Culture and Social Change.”  Hendrick is looking for colleagues who would like join next summer’s seminar focused on Southeast Asia.
And…it is in Honolulu!

Ann Huse gave a talk called "Plague and Patronage: Milton at Horton" for the International Milton Symposium at the University of Toronto this past June. I worked with Urban Explorers to confirm that Berkyn Manor, the rented house where Milton wrote Lycidas and some other works from his 1645 Poems, remains standing at the rear of the Victorian house. Ann also had the pleasure of hearing John Staines give a great talk on the queer sublime in Milton.

Helen Kapstein published "Power Failures: The Public Poetics of Eskom and Energy" in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. You can read it here online; print version to come 2025.

Kim Liao published an interview with Jimin Han about her novel The Apology in Electric Literature: 
https://electricliterature.com/jimin-han-novel-interview-the-apology/

John Matteson was in Rome, in June, for the 13th International Whitman Week. His paper at the symposium was titled “‘Death Itself Has Lost All Its Terrors’: Whitman, Washington, and the Embrace of Mortality.”

In July, John Matteson spoke by invitation at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Lenox, MA, on “Making It Sing; Making It Work: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Writing about the Alcotts.”
John also addressed a joint session of the Thoreau Society’s Annual Gathering and the Orchard House Summer Conversation Series in Concord, MA, on “A Discipline on the Brink: The Humanities in Crisis.”
He was also the focus of “A Conversation with John Matteson,” an invited event of the Summer Conversation Series that took place via Zoom.

In August, John Matteson’s screen adaptation (co-written with Scott Halvorson) of his book Eden’s Outcasts, has been tapped as a quarter finalist for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship for Screenwriting.

Jean Mills opened a bookstore called Blue Heron Books, dedicated to your right to read. You can find the details at www.blueheronbooksny.com

Nathaniel G. Nesmith’s review of Patti Hartigan’s biography August Wilson: A Life.
https://www.americantheatre.org/2023/08/16/a-man-in-full-august-wilson-and-his-plays-in-all-their-complexity/
American Theatre, A Man in Full: August Wilson and His Plays, in All Their Complexity

Caroline Reitz is proud to announce the birth of the Oxford World’s Classics The Sign of the Four, which she edited and for which she wrote the Introduction. She also gave a keynote address, “Structures of Seething: Female Anger and the Failure of Democracy,” at the Crime Fiction in Democracy conference in Paris in June.

John Staines ended his year-long sabbatical with a wild, weird, wonderful summer. June began with public service as I joined the riders of AIDS/LifeCycle and bike from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise awareness about issues in health justice and to support the work of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center. He rode the full 545 miles and raised over $5000. He was thankful for getting the support of so many of my John Jay colleagues.

In July, he presented a paper on “Milton’s Raptures and the Queer Sublime” at the International Milton Symposium at the University of Toronto. It was an intellectually exciting week, as exhausting as a week spent on a bike, as my fellow attendee Ann Huse can attest.

Less than two weeks later, he was back in the Toronto suburbs to celebrate the birth of his grandson Magnus Owen Morrison-Staines.

Anya Taylor published "Romantic Energy," The Wordsworth Circle, 14, 2, Spring 2023, 250-270. (This is a long version of a paper I gave at The Coleridge Conference, Kilve, UK, July, 2022.) and "Coleridge's Magnetism," The Coleridge Bulletin 60, Winter 2022, 9-13. (This article has a lot about my life at John Jay.)  

Her last book, Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law against Divorce (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) was surprisingly reissued in hardback and paperback in Spring, 2023. 

Alan Winson had some interesting podcast programming this summer. See below for links: