UC Davis English Department News

Professor Frances Dolan has won a “Distinguished Teaching Award” for undergraduate teaching from the Academic Senate and the Academic Federation. Teaching is central in Professor Dolan’s work and in her own scholarship. Describing her as a “dazzling lecturer” and mentor for students, English professor Margaret Ferguson said: “Whether teaching a course of 200 or mentoring a single MURALS (Mentorships for Undergraduate Research in Agriculture, Letters and Science) student, Fran pays extraordinary attention to the details of pedagogy; she is interested not only in introducing students to new texts, genres and critical questions, but also in strengthening their ability to read closely and to ask big questions of what they read.”

Angela Hume Lewandowski‘s piece “Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview
with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner”
is forthcoming in /ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment/ 19.3. Recently she was selected to participate in the
Bonn University Summer School in German Philosophy in Bonn, Germany.
This year’s seminar, led by Martin Hägglund, Graham Harman, and Slavoj
Žižek, among others, is themed “The Ontological Turn in Contemporary
Philosophy.”

Angela recently was named a semifinalist for the Sawtooth Poetry
Prize. A statement of poetics is forthcoming in /Evening Will Come/
(August 2012).

Currently Angela is working to organize the 2013 Conference on
Ecopoetics (Feb. 22-24). Please find more information about the
conference and cfp here: hhttp://ecopoeticsconference.blogspot.com/.

The English Department welcomes new faculty member, Matthew Vernon (ph.D Yale). Professor Vernon specializes in medieval and 19th century literature, and is particularly interested in conducting cross-temporal work along the lines of genealogy,
interraciality, medievalism, vernacular literature and migration. He comes to UC Davis from the Gallatin School for Individualized Study at New York University. Professor Vernon looks forward to teaching a course on monstrosity in the Middle Ages: a survey of medieval texts designed to give students an overview of the possibilities of reading in the Middle Ages including Icelandic literature, Beowulf and Chaucer. He is currently working on Twain’s medievalism in “A Connecticut Yankee.”