2014 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, and panels and conferences organized.

• Jeffrey Blevins’s essay “How Stevens Uses the Grammar of Is” will be published in The Wallace Stevens Journal in Spring 2015, an issue which he will also guest-edit. He was renewed as a Dolores Zohrab Liebmann fellow and will present papers for the T.S. Eliot Society, the Ezra Pound Society, and the Robert Frost Society at MLA and ALA in 2015.
• Shannon Chamberlain was awarded a Townsend Dissertation Fellowship and a Humane Studies Fellowship. She had three articles published in The Atlantic based on her dissertation research.
• CFS Creasy was awarded a Mellon-CES Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2014-2015. He was also awarded a Research Fellowship in the Humanities for 2014-2015 from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas, Austin, where he was in residency conducting archival research for his dissertation last June. His essay “Flaubert’s Alibi: The Impossible Ensemble of Madame Bovary” was accepted for publication in Novel: A Forum on Fiction.
• Chris Fan’s essay “Melancholy Transcendence: Ted Chiang and Asian American Postracial Form” was published in the journal Post45: Peer Reviewed. Another essay, “Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang,” was published in the Journal of Transnational American Studies. He will be contributing a chapter titled “If Present Trends Continue: Chinese/American Speculative Realism in Chang-rae Lee’sOn Such a Full Sea and Han Song’s 2066: Red Star over America (火星照耀美国)” in the forthcoming anthology Yellow Planets: Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (U. Mississippi Press). He was also invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on techno-orientalism for the 2015 Association of Asian American Studies meeting in Chicago. A number of his non-academic articles were also published this year at The New Inquiry and Hyphenmagazine. Chris will also be racing cyclocross for Team Oakland Cycling in the Bay Area Super Prestige series this winter.
• Kathryn Fleishman was awarded the 2014 Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Fellowship (Alpha Chapter), as well as a sponsored place in Sianne Ngai’s course “The Contemporary” at the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory in the summer of 2014.
• Rebecca Gaydos was awarded an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2014-15. Her article, “Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s Lifework” will be published this fall in  Journal of Modern Literature. Her first book of poetry, Güera, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing in 2016.
• Tim Heimlich was awarded the Center for British Studies Pre-Dissertation Research Grant.  His essay “‘Mass of Ruin’: Deconstructing Empiricism in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head” was accepted for publication in the forthcoming collection Romanticism and Knowledge, due to be published in Spring 2015 by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
• Sarah Jessica Johnson was awarded the Benjamin Putnam Kurtz Prize for the best essay written in a graduate course in the academic year 2013-2014 for her essay “Maroon as Subject: The Legend of the Slave in the Swamp in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or The President’s Daughter.” She and Megan O’Connor received a 2014 James D. Hart Summer Grant for research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Sarah has a translation of Louis-Armand Garreau’s short story “Bras-Coupé” forthcoming in the Spring 2015 issue of Transition.
• Margaret Kolb’s essay “Plot Circles: Hardy’s Drunkards and their Walks” is forthcoming in Victorian Studies. Her conference talk, “Literary Divination,” was awarded the 2014 Universities Committee for Scottish Literature (UCSL) prize for outstanding postgraduate research.
• Lili Loofbourow co-edited a “Changing Profession” special section called “The Semi-Public Intellectual: Academia, Criticism, and the Internet Age” with Phillip Maciak, forthcoming in the March 2015 issue of PMLA. Featuring essays from Sharon Marcus, Michael Berube [accents on both e’s], Salamishah Tillet, Evan Kindley, Natalia Cecire, and Hua Hsu, the collection (with an introduction by the editors) addresses the increasingly urgent matter–especially given Steven Salaita’s “de-hiring”–of how the academy should deal with public and “semi-public” writing. She is an editor of a new series launching next year under Bloomsbury Academic provisionally titled beyond criticism, which will be dedicated to publishing works of formally adventurous criticism, and will be managing editor of the website.
• Jesse Cordes Selbin received an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, a Teaching Effectiveness Award, and a Teagle Foundation Award for Excellence in Enhancing Student Learning. She chaired a panel at the International Conference on Narrative, held at MIT in March, and helped organize Berkeley’s third annual interdisciplinary Graduate Conference in the History of British Political Thought. She works as the Editorial Assistant for Representations.
• Rachel Trocchio received a 2014-15 New England Regional Consortium Fellowship and a Barra Dissertation Fellowship from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she will be in residence beginning in January. Last Spring she read with Jorie Graham as part of the Holloway Series in Poetry.
• David Vandeloo won the 2014 UC Berkeley Eisner Prize in Poetry for his manuscript uo / no.  A selection of his poems was recently published in bafterc, put out by BookThug, Toronto, Canada.  A collection of his poems was selected runner-up by CA Conrad in BOMB magazine’s national poetry contest.  This collection will appear in BOMB’s winter edition.  His chapbook, ARKANSAS, is forthcoming this spring from Cannibal Press, Fayetteville, Arkansas.
• Brandon White co-edited Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice (New York: Springer, 2014), a volume of essays on computational approaches to education and instruction, and the first comprehensive resource in the field of learning analytics, now available from Springer Publishing.