Faculty & Department News

2026 PhD Cohort Announced: Media Archaeologies

Rachel Canning — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:10:36 +0000

2026 PhD Cohort Announced: Media Archaeologies Rachel Canning Mon, 06/30/2025 - 14:10

91�Թ�� English is embarking on a new kind of PhD that is collaborative, experimental, and that affords students a chance to work closely with each other and with faculty.We are introducing a “Media Ecology” lab and team-taught courses where PhD students work with faculty and one another to map, theorize, and develop dissertation specialties via intensive mentoring, reading, and co-writing and -publishing in the lab. We offer competitive funding packages, along with excellent teaching and networking opportunities. Students will work with established academics and professionals in the fields of their interest.

What are “media ecologies”? If “ecology” refers to the relationships between humans and the more-than-human,mediaecology takes its cue from manuscripts, archives, as well as printed and digital environments to consider how text technologies and material infrastructures shape readers and their worlds. Conversely, readers perceive the material world through the lens of media. In addition to asking traditional questions in literary scholarship like “What does the text mean?” we theorize texts as occupying an ecological niche, suggesting that both medial form and its content occupy a symbiotic and competitive relationship with other texts. Like capital itself, text is always in motion and always innovating. The field of cultural production shifts, morphs, combines, and mutates. We are seeking students interested in both environmental and media studies. We encourage those working in any literary period, with interests anywhere from medieval manuscripts to AI.

For more information, click Prospective Students above.

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Stephen Graham Jones' New Book Now Available

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 17:20:50 +0000

Stephen Graham Jones' New Book Now Available Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/13/2020 - 11:20

"Attack of the 50 Foot Indian" by Stephen Graham Jones is now available through Saga Press!

91�Թ�� the book:

A Tale of Two Moons.

Every government of every nation debates what to do when a fifty-foot tall man, dressed in a loincloth and dripping from the sea, appears off the Siberian coast. As the American people puzzle over how he came to be and what to do next, the news outlets start calling the titan “Two Moons,” social media abducts him into the memesphere, and the military, well, they have their own action-plan for dealing with threats to what they mistakenly consider their homeland.

With unapologetic honesty and wit, Stephen Graham Jones cuts to the bone of the stereotypes used for American Indians, showcasing his talent as a humorist and as one of our great American writers in this short story.

You can order "Attack of the 50 Foot Indian" here.

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Bradley Named 2020 Hazel Barnes Award Winner

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 17:50:35 +0000

Bradley Named 2020 Hazel Barnes Award Winner Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/07/2020 - 11:50

Dr. Adam Bradley, Full Professor of English, has been named the 2020 recepient of the Hazel Barnes Prize at the 91�Թ��.

The $20,000 Hazel Barnes Prize is the largest and most prestigious single faculty award funded by the 91�Թ��. It was established in 1991 by former Chancellor James Corbridge in honor of Philosophy Professor Emerita Hazel Barnes to recognize “the enriching interrelationship between teaching and research.”

Nominees are regionally and nationally recognized, tenured faculty members who are not only outstanding teachers, but who also have distinguished records in research and scholarship. The Hazel Barnes Prize selection committee is comprised of past recipients.

Congratulations, Adam!

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Nicole M. Wright's Book Now Available

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 17:49:05 +0000

Nicole M. Wright's Book Now Available Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/07/2020 - 11:49

Dr. Nicole Mansfield Wright's book, Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel, is now available for purchase through Johns Hopkins University Press!

A critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of victimhood and appeals to "rights" to safeguard the status of the powerful.

As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor and the enslaved. In promoting their agenda, these authors resuscitated literary modes regarded at the time as derivative or passé—including romance, the gothic, and epistolarity—or invented subgenres that are neglected today due to widespread revilement of their politics (the proslavery novel).

Although these authors are not typically considered alongside one another in scholarship, they are united by their firsthand experience of legal conflict: each felt that their privilege was degraded through lengthy disputes. In examining the work of these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors, Wright traces a broader reactionary framework in the Anglophone literary legacy. Each novel seeks to reshape and manipulate public perceptions of who merits legal agency: the right to initiate a lawsuit, serve as a witness, seek counsel from a lawyer, and take other legal actions. As a result, Defending Privilege offers a counterhistory to scholarship on the novel's capacity to motivate the promulgation of human rights and champion social ascendance through the upwardly mobile realist character.

Her book can be purchased here.

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J. DeShell Publishes New Mystery Novel with University of Alabama Press

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 15:11:53 +0000

J. DeShell Publishes New Mystery Novel with University of Alabama Press Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/25/2019 - 09:11

Jeffrey DeShell, faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at the 91�Թ��, has had his newest novel released titled Masses & Motets: A Francesca Fruscella Mystery from the University of Alabama Press.

A crime novel loosely based on the masses and songs of the 17th century Flemish composer Pierre de la Rue Masses and Motets is a tale composed of four basic interwoven threads, corresponding to the four-part choral writing of Pierre de la Rue’s service music. The first thread comes from the diaries of a recently murdered priest, Father Andrea Vidal, former secretary to the notorious Father Marcial Maciel.

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