Faculty News

Diane Christian, “Occasion Poems”, published by BlazeVOX books - Occasion Poems were suggested by colleague, friend, and poet Robert Creeley, who thought it would be a good idea to have poems for various occasions made up as ink stamps, ready to imprint on a postcard and send off for occasions. Unlike occasional poems tied to specific persons and events, they have a broader human reach.

Ken Dauber, “The Logic of Sentiment: Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville”, published by Bloomsbury, a study of sentimentality, a literary mode that aims to answer the question, "What holds us together?" Against the grain of cultural studies, which understands sentimentality as consolidating communities on the basis of material or historical foundations, Kenneth Dauber takes a philosophical approach. He argues that sentimentality is love conceptualized in denial of a skepticism--understood as the problem of people's otherness to each other--that material associations cannot dispel.

Carine Mardorossian, “Death Is But a Dream – Finding Hope and Meaning at Life’s End”, Avery

Christopher Kerr is a hospice doctor. All of his patients die. Yet he has cared for thousands of patients who, in the face of death, speak of love and grace. Beyond the physical realities of dying are unseen processes that are remarkably life-affirming. These include dreams that are unlike any regular dream. Described as “more real than real,” these end-of-life experiences resurrect past relationships, meaningful events and themes of love and forgiveness; they restore life’s meaning and mark the transition from distress to comfort and acceptance.

Joseph Conte, “Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel”, published by Routledge, suggests that literature after September 11, 2001 reflects the shift from bilateral nation-state politics to the multilateralism of transnational politics. While much of the criticism regarding novels of 9/11 tends to approach these works through theories of personal and collective trauma, this book argues for the evolution of a post-9/11 novel that pursues a transversal approach to global conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests.

Myung Mi Kim, “Civil Bound”, published by Omnidawn Publishing - Myung Mi Kim turns a keen ear to language as the mechanism by which society operates. The poems engage multiple methods to make sense of this pervasive tool, its powers, nuances, and influences over the structure of our civilizations. Through investigations of ecology, capitalism, military powers, colonialization, and supremacy, the book uncovers patterns in the ways that language is active in perpetuating inequality and binding its subjects to the will of those in positions of authority

Joseph Valente, “The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature”, Indiana University Press

Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children remain in peril.

Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and 21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage has served to enable such abuse.

Professors Diane Christian and Ken Dauber were recognized for 50 years of service to UB.

Congratulations to Walt Hakala on winning the Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Education by UB's Council on International Studies and Programs!

Myung Mi Kim has been awarded the Graduate School’s 2020-2021 Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award

Jeehyun Lim has been awarded a research grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development (OVPRED) and the Humanities Institute (HI) for her ongoing project on literary representations of the Korean War!

Steven Miller was awarded $3900 as Principal Investigator from the Baldy Research Institute on his project, “World Heritage and the Critique of Violence”

Randy Schiff received the Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship award.

Congratulations to Bill Solomon on winning the UB Graduate School’s annual Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award. He was also awarded the Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship award.

Tanya Shilina-Conte has received the Nuala McGann Dresher Award, which offers her time off to work on her manuscript, "Black Screens, White Frames."

V. Hunter Capps, along with his colleague, Dr. Loïc Bourdeau at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, is co-editing a volume on French AIDS writing that has received interest from Lexington Books. His own chapter, "Raw Writing: AIDS Autofiction and the Construction of Seropositive Subjectivity", passed peer review and was accepted for inclusion and publication. 

Joseph Conte had his chapter, “Cosmopolitanism and Remigration in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” published in Shifting Twenty-First-Century Discourses, Borders, and Identities, ed. Oana Celia Gheorghiu (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 3-22. He also presented a lecture on “Transnational America: The New Global Citizen in the Novels of Laila Lalami and Valeria Luiselli,” in the Feminist Research Alliance Workshop, University at Buffalo Gender Institute, via Zoom, on October 1, 2020.

Jerold C. Frakes published, “Differential Racism: ‘Quadroons,’ Antisemitism, and the Negotiation of Race in Sidonie de La Houssaye’s Les quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans,” French Studies 74.4 (October 2020), 536-53.

Walter Hakala gave a presentation to the Pakistan Society of the United Kingdom. The title of his paper was, "When Did Urdu Become Urdu? The Prehistory of Pakistan’s National Language." He recently published three encyclopedia entries: on the life of the German scholar of Persian and Arabic Francis Joseph Steingass (1825–1902) for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, on the Qaṣīda dar luġāt-i hindī (a 16th-century medical vocabulary) in Perso-Indica, and on Urdu Lexicography in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. His chapter, “Steingass’s Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (1892) and the Rise and Fall of Persian as a Transregional Language,” appeared in Nineteenth-Century Lexicography: Between Science and Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2020). 

Bruce Jackson released three books: Robert Creeley on the Poet’s Work: In Conversation with and photographs by Bruce Jackson (BlazeVox); Deux jours à La Ribaute: A celebration at Atelier Anselm Kiefer (Room With a View Press); and Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian collection (Library of Congress), a 244-page guide to the first half of their collection. His photos continue to be frequently published, used in films, and exhibited. Bruce took part in podcasts on his work in “Six Feet Photography Project” and “Northern Exposure.” Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson took part in a podcast on their collaborations in teaching, books, films, and public presentations on “Six Feet Photography Project.” He is working with New York’s Wooster Group on a second play, a follow-up to The B-Side, which the New York Times named one of the ten best plays of 2018.

Laura Marris, who teaches Creative Writing, published an essay in the New York Times on the task of translating Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague) during the pandemic, in April: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/books/review/the-plague-albert-camus-coronavirus.html

Hunter Capps.  Hunter defended his dissertation in Comparative Literature in May of 2020. For the fall 2020 semester, he taught 3 sections of ENG 105 and will be teaching 3 sections of Writing for Change in Spring 2021. Hunter's research interests include queer theory, French & American AIDS writing, and critical race theory.

Hannah Fogarty.  Hannah received her Ph.D. from the Department of English in 2020. Her research focuses on representations of touch in Victorian literature and psychology. She’s currently teaching ENG 105 and will teach Writing about Literature in the Spring.

Martin Goffeney.  Martin defended his dissertation in July 2020. His research centers on science fiction, science studies, and environmental rhetoric. He taught ENG 105 in the fall, and will be teaching ENG 205: Writing For Change in the spring semester.

Charles Michael Pawluk.  Michael took his Ph.D. in the English department in August 2020, where he teaches first-year and professional writing. His work is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

Barbara Bono

After many years of dedicated service to the department, the university, the profession, the Buffalo community, and most of all her students, Barbara Bono retired in June 2020. Having done her doctoral work at Brown University, and after an initial stint teaching at the University of Michigan, Barbara arrived at UB in 1984. She is the author of Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragedy (University of California Press, 1984), as well as articles on Shakespearean performance and adaptation. In recognition of her consistently legendary mentoring,

Barbara received the SUNY Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award (1989), the Milton Plesur Undergraduate Student Association Award for Excellence in Teaching (1993, 2002), and the President Emeritus and Mrs. Martin Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award (2016). Of her many efforts to engage UB in its home city, one need only point to “Buffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Since Shakespeare,” the year-long series of public humanities events she organized that included lectures, readings, performances, and exhibitions. Like so much of her work, this series embodied her singular devotion to care and mentorship in the name of greater access. At the time of her retirement, Barbara was also a faculty member in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies. All best wishes to her!