Graduate Student Notes

Each year in the “Faculty Notes” section of the department newsletter, we list the most recent faculty accomplishments. In the same spirit of recognition and congratulation, listed below are only some of the many accomplishments of our graduate students from this past year. They include prizes, fellowships, academic and literary publications and prizes, conferences organized, and conference papers presented.

• Joe Albernaz has an article forthcoming in the Thomas Wolfe Review entitled “Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane: Romantic Affinities.”




• Edward Alexander, Spencer Coldren, Nilofar Gardezi, Rebecca Gaydos, Christopher Patrick Miller, and Bradford Taylor all traveled to France in Summer 2012 to present papers at the Berkeley-France Conference.




• Stephanie Bahr received the Hart Grant in Summer 2012 in support of her research at the British Library and Oxford Libraries. She was named one of the Chernin Fellows in 2012-2013




• Stephanie Bahr, Stephanie Moore, Rebecca Munson, and Trudy Obi helped to organize a conference entitled Inarticulacy: An Interdisciplinary Early Modern Conference, under the auspices of the Berkeley Early Modern Organization, which is a Townsend Center interdisciplinary working group for early modern studies.




• Jeffrey Blevins’s essay on Ezra Pound entitled “Pound Sign” was accepted for publication at ELH: English Literary History. He also has an essay entitled “‘Suppose this was the root of everything:’ Wallace Stevens and the Imperative to Suppose” forthcoming in the Wallace Stevens Journal (volume 37.1). His essay on Thomas Hardy entitled “Thomas Hardy’s Timing” won the Kirk Underhill Graduate Prize from the Center for British Studies.




• Jasmin Borja presented her paper “The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘I Kan Namore’ in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde” at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association’s conference in Seattle, WA in October 2012.




• Erik Born, Ken Fockele, Marcos Garcia, Jacob Hobson, and Jennifer Lorden are organizing “Re:form,” a national graduate student conference sponsored by Graduate Medievalists at Berkeley, to be held at UC Berkeley in February 2013.




• Shannon Chamberlain won the Humane Studies Fellowship for the second time.




• Jesse Cordes Selbin presented “To the Lighthouse and the Pathos of Parentheticals” at the 2012 ACLA conference, held at Brown University in April. She was awarded a Max Kade fellowship for summer study in Berlin and continues to serve as the Book Reviews Editor for Qui Parle, a critical humanities and social sciences journal.




• Aristides Dimitriou presented a paper titled “The Nowhere Place: Dialectical Paralysis and the Problem of Transnational Hybridity in Junot Diaz’s Drown” at the 31st Annual West Indian Literature Conference.




• Christopher Fan’s essay, “Naturalism with Chinese Characteristics: Speculating on Neoliberalism in Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang,” will appear in the forthcoming anthology, Techno-Orientalism: Science Fiction History, Literature, Media, edited by David Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta Niu. He was also invited to speak on a panel on digital diasporas at the Association for Asian American Studies national convention in April.




• Marta Figlerowicz published one article in Boston Review this year, as well as two articles in Film Quarterly. She also edited a special dossier of Qui Parle (vol. 20.2) devoted to affect theory, and wrote an introduction to the dossier.




• Katie Fleishman’s piece “Not Helping: The Help is Stuck in the Same Stereotypes It’s Supposed to Debunk” appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media (No. 54). Earlier in the year, Fleishman presented ” ‘Watching Her Stories’: TV as Historical Narrative in Mad Men” at the February 2012 Yale Conference on Television in New Haven, CT.




• Erin Greer wrote a half-critical, half-creative essay called “Tolstoy and Tahrir” that was published in the Spring 2012 issue of The Normal School.




• Jacob Hobson received a Fritz O. Fernström Traveling Fellowship, administered through UC Berkeley’s Department of Scandinavian; he used this fellowship to study Modern Icelandic at the University of Iceland. He also presented “Killing Ælfheah: Cnut’s Anglo-Danish Kingship and the Changing Angelcynn” at the 18th Annual ACMRS Conference in Tempe, AZ and “Unraveling friðuwebbe” at the 47th International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI.




• Monica Huerta received a short-term Fellowship at the New York Public Library for 2012-2013. She also presented a conference paper this summer entitled “Intangible As Well As Tangible: The Image in Roberson v. Rochester and the Un-Self” at the Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth University, June 2012.

• Sarah Johnson presented the paper “Disney Does Evangeline: The Southern Tale of Exile as Transformed in Film” at the South Atlantic MLA (SAMLA) conference, November 2012 in North Carolina.




• Marisa Knox has a forthcoming article on Aurora Leigh in Victorian Poetry (2014). She also received a UC Dissertation-Year Fellowship for this year and presented a paper entitled “Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Elective Readership” at the North American Victorian Studies Conference in September.




• Margaret Kolb presented papers at a number of conferences this year, including: “Moving Stillness: Animation in the Victorian Novel” at the North American Victorian Studies Association, Madison, WI, October 2012; “Eliot’s Statistical Methods in Daniel Deronda,” at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Providence, RI, April 2012; and “Shelley’s Half Counts” at the International Society for the Study of Narrative Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, March 2012. She was also awarded part of the Hart Summer grant for summer 2012.




• Aileen Liu, Matthew Ramirez, Lucy Sirianni, Claire Marie Stancek, José Villagrana, and Esther Yu organized the 2012 annual Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Student Conference, held at Berkeley in April.




• Jennifer Lorden presented “The Devil’s Advocates: Cynewulf’s Demons as Anti-Apostles” at the International Medieval Congress, 9 July 2012, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. She presented a response entitled “Formal Address: Literary Cultures and the Love of Words” to the panel “The Form of the Content: Formal Approaches to Old English Literature” at the 8th Annual Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium Conference, 25 February 2012, University of California, Berkeley.




• Ella Mershon attended the “Principles of Uncertainty” conference on critical theory at CUNY’s Graduate Center this May. The title of her paper was ““Reading the ‘Fringe:’ Vague Thoughts and Dim Relations in James, Emerson, and Poe.” She helped organize the “Indisciplines of Enlightenment: Firsts, Origins, Foundations” summer seminar with Ian Duncan and Adriana Craciun. This seminar was the first program created under the direction of “The Material Cultures of Knowledge, 1500-1830,” a University of California multi-campus research group. She attended Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz this summer, the yearly summer conference organized by The Dickens Project, where she participated in professionalization seminars and the writing workshop in addition to getting to attend wonderful lectures and events all week!




• Rebecca Munson was selected for the Phi Beta Kappa Doctoral Fellowship Award which provides support in the amount of $5,000 to aid the process of writing and research. It is awarded by the Northern California Association to members of Phi Beta Kappa currently enrolled as graduate students at an institution of higher education in the area. She was the recipient of a travel award from the Shakespeare Association of America to fund travel to the 2012 meeting in Boston. She participated in a seminar on “Chronologies in Theater History” with her paper “Shakespeare and Fletcher Side-by-Side: The King’s Men 1609-1611.” An article, co-written with her husband Claude Willan (a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford), entitled “The Children of New Historicism: Literary Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Will to Publish” appeared in a collection of essays called The Limits of Literary Historicism (ed. Thomas Haddox and Allen Dunn) published by The University of Tennessee Press.




• Gillian Osbourne is the Emily Dickinson International Society Graduate Fellow for 2012. She also had an article, “Dickinson’s Lyric Materialism” in the Emily Dickinson Journal. Her poetry manuscript was a 2012 Yale Younger Finalist.

• R. D. Perry presented a paper, “Chaucer’s French Connection and the Complaint of Venus,” at the New England Medieval Studies Colloquium, held at Yale last March, and he presented a paper, “Chaucer’s Melibee and the Neighborly Sovereign,” at the meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Portland last July.




• Benjamin A. Saltzman received a Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust award and a Center for British Studies dissertation grant for archival research in England this past summer, and he was invited to Columbia University to give an ASSC lecture entitled, “Spiritual Secrecy and the Regulation of Secrets in Anglo-Saxon Monasticism.” At the Eighteenth Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society in Portland, OR, he gave a paper titled, “To Erase: The Case of Chaucer’s Friar and Summoner.” And as a Haas Fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies, he is helping to organize “Connected Worlds,” an international comparative studies conference to be held at UC Berkeley in January 2013. He will also give a paper on the field of comparative studies and the imitation of Aldhelm’s style at the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI in May 2013.




• Spencer Strub won the Alison Goddard Eliot Prize, given by the New England Medieval Studies Consortium, for his paper “The Place of the Plowman’s Tale in Milton’s Radical History,” presented at NEMSC’s annual graduate student conference at Yale in March 2012.




• Ian Thomas-Bignami presented “Capturing the Ignis Fatuus: Beautiful Putrefaction in Eighteenth-Century Poetry” at the ASECS Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX, 22-25 March, 2012. He also received a Chernin Mentoring Program Fellowship.




• Isaac Zisman delivered a paper on William Gaddis, “Freeing into Recognition: Epiphany, Close Reading, and the Difficulty of Being Open” at the Southland Graduate Conference at UCLA this summer (June 1). The conference’s theme was Art and Accident.