The VCU Department of English hosts a lecture by Professor Catherine Ingrassia as a part on its ongoing “First Friday” lecture series. The lecture will take place Friday, November 4th at 3:30pm in Hibbs 308. Topic: “‘By a Woman Writt’: Women, Poetry, and Print Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century.” All First Friday events are free and open to the public.

English faculty presented papers in Summer 2011 at a number of international conferences, and were actively researching abroad as well.

At the invitation of the Romanian Cultural Institute and the Soros Foundation, Marcel Cornis-Pope lectured on multiethnic literatures in Central Europe and his recently completed project (History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, 4 vols., John Benjamins Press, 2006-2010) at the Cultural Center in Jimbolia (May 22), University of Timisoara (May 23), the Writers’ Association of Timisoara (May 23), and the University of Oradea (May 24). As Vice President of the Coordinating Publication Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association, he also attended the committee meeting in Lisbon, Portugal (June 6) and gave a paper and chaired a session on Literature and Multimedia at the University of Lisbon (June 8).

Josh Eckhardt was a Summer Research Institute Visiting Fellow at University of Oxford’s Harris Manchester College, conducting research into seventeenth-century manuscript holdings at the Bodleian Library.

Nick Frankel worked at the British Library, London, on his forthcoming edition of the “Annotated Oscar Wilde.”

Les Harrison presented ““Barbarian at the Gate: Billy Budd and Melville’s Rome” at the 8th Annual International Melville Conference, “Melville and Rome: Empire – Democracy – Belief – Art” held at the Center for American Studies in Rome 22-26 June.

David Latané attended the 43rd meeting of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, “Work and Leisure,” held at Canterbury Christ Church University in England 22-23 July, where he served on the organization’s Council and presented “Night and Day; or, Why Journalists Must get Drunk.”

Charlotte Morse conducted research on the influence of Chaucer on some nineteenth century British women writers at the British Library in London.

Rivka Swenson presented “After the Seven Years War: Identity and Recovery in Humphry Clinker” at the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, 7-10 July, at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, as well as presented “Crusoe: The Sequel” at the Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society, “The Culture of Grub Street,” held at the University of Worcester, England, 14-16 July, at which she was also chaired a panel and was elected to the Executive Board of the Society.

Professor Rivka Swenson’s latest article, “Optics, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Gaze: Looking at Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela,” can be read in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 51.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 27-43.
Swenson has also been invited to talk later this month at Columbia University as apart of a roundtable (New Directions in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Natural Philosophy) for their Faculty Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture.

Professor Katherine Bassard has published a new essay, “The King James Bible and African American literature,” in a new collection, The King James Bible after 400 Years (Cambridge UP, 2010).
The essay focuses attention on the use of the King James Bible to unite races and times. Bassard begins by noting the parallel between Barak Obama’s use of the Lincoln Bible for his swearing-in ceremony in 2009 and Sojourner Truth’s visit to the White House in 1864 when she praised the KJB that had been given to Lincoln by the colored people of Baltimore. She goes on to recount black writers during the intervening time who have used the KJB to unite rather than divide races and time periods in America.

Professor Kathy Bassard’s new book, Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible (University of Georgia Press, 2010 is a first of its kind–it’s the first systematic analysis of the use of Biblical characters, tropes, and themes in the literature written by African American women. As the title suggests, Bassard’s book emphasizes the active role that black women took in their encounter with the Bible, “transforming” it by challenging and reshaping white culture’s use of the Bible to gain racial and gender domination. The roster of authors she draws upon is impressively large, ranging from Mary Stewart and Harriet Jacobs to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. Although Bassard includes substantial material on important black male writers, too, her argument is that women writers often moved deeper in dealing with scriptural stories than their black male counterparts. Especially strong is the chapter on nineteenth-century black women’s use of biblical material to rebut the era’s biblical defense of slavery. As commentators and reviewers have already pointed out, Bassard’s book will redefine such areas of inquiry as feminist literary study, African American literature, and religion and literature.