Greg Youmans’s essay “Greener Pastures: Filming Sex and Place at Druid Heights” will appear later this year in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, edited by Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). He also served as the film consultant for the Oakland Museum of California’s exhibition Queer California: Untold Stories. The exhibition was on view from April 13 to August 11, and he gave a talk at the museum about the film selections in June. In his teaching, he developed a new course topic for ENG 406: Topics in Critical and Cultural Theory: “Dream/Film,” a course that considers art and experimental film practices in relation to various theories of dreaming and of cinema and of the relationship between the two.
Eren Odabasi
Eren Odabasi has recently published two peer-reviewed book chapters; a study on various audience groups in film festivals included in International Film Festivals (edited by Tricia Jenkins, I.B. Tauris) and an analysis of the commercial success popular Hindi films enjoy at the American box office featured in Pop Culture Matters (edited by Martin Norden and Robert Weir, Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He also has two forthcoming peer-reviewed articles in the journals Post Script and Society and Leisure, exploring the cinematic portrayals of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires and film funds associated with major festivals. In relation to teaching, he has designed new courses on contemporary world cinema with an emphasis on diversifying the canon beyond Western European films (ENG 365), the textual and organizational aspects of international film festivals (ENG 464), and screen portrayals of immigration through different periods in film history (ENG 580).
Ely Shipley
Ely Shipley’s second full-length book Some Animal won the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender Variant Literature, is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, and has received positive reviews in Publishers Weekly, DIAGRAM, Ocean State Review, and Lambda Literary Review. Publishers Weekly calls it a “riveting exploration of what it means to come of age in a genderqueer body” that is “steeped in Anglo-American poetry and literary theory” and claims that “what sets this book apart is its focused attention to the experience of defying the gender binary, of being in a body that intimates and strangers alike are bent on denying…Shipley’s book is one of hard truths, lovingly rendered.” Some Animal was listed as one of the best poetry collections of 2018 by Entropy, as well as poet CA Conrad. Ely has been having a blast teaching poetry and multigenre workshops, as well as a course on Anne Carson.
Donna Qualley
Donna Qualley’s Afterword, “With and Because of Genevieve,” was published in the online collection, The Rhetoric of Participation, in March of 2019. This collection honors the scholarship of the late Genevieve Critel who was to have begun her career as an Assistant Professor in English (Writing Studies) at Western in the fall of 2012. Donna published a second chapter, “How Digital Writing Sustains Reading” in a the edited collection, Digital reading and Writing in Composition Studies, also published in 2019 by Routledge.
Bruce Goebel
Bruce Goebel’s article, “What’s So Funny about Social Justice?” was published in English Journal. The article focuses specifically on breaking down stereotypes of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent and is a direct response to anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Trump administration. Over the past year, he’s collaborated with Jennifer Green and Beth Dillard from the ELL program in creating an English major with a combined ELL/Bilingual Education emphasis. Currently there is no ELL “major” which means the ELL program is an “add on” that takes an additional year. This major is designed to allow a student interested in being an ELL teacher to complete GURs, the English major, and the Secondary Education program in four years rather than five. It should also make ELL and Bilingual Education more visible at Western.
Kami Westhoff
Kami Westhoff’s Your Body a Bullet, a collaborative book with alumna Elizabeth Vignali, was published by Unsolicited Press in November 2018. She presented “Immensities” at the PMLA conference, a poetry project that seeks to honor women who’ve been murdered in Whatcom County. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction appeared in various journals including SWIMM, Ghost City, Stirring, Hippocampus, Threadcount, Permafrost, A-Minor, and Contrary, received six Best of the Net nominations and two Pushcart Prize nominations, and will be included in three anthologies: Mansion, by Ghost City Press, and Ways of Looking, by Carve, and the Running Wild Novella Anthology, by Running Wild Press.
Elizabeth Colen
In Fall 2018 Black Lawrence Press published Elizabeth Colen’s sixth book, a fiction collaboration entitled True Ash. This spring she entered her third year as an editor at Tupelo Press. This summer she hopes to spend a lot of time returning to a novel project, as well as preparing for several new courses she’s developing for next year, including AIDS Literature and Black Feminist Dystopian Narratives, which was inspired by the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive.
Dayna Patterson
Dayna Patterson’s chapbook, Titania in Yellow, is forthcoming in 2019 (Porkbelly Press), and her full-length collection of lyric essays and poetry, If Mother Braids a Waterfall, will meet the world in 2020 (Signature Books). She recently gave a reading in Salt Lake City sponsored by the Sunstone Foundation. This past year, she received three Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won second place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest for her piece “Fledge.” Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, North American Review, Cave Wall, and others. She was awarded a 2019 SAF Mineral School Fellowship, and she continues her work as Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal that makes its home at the intersection of faith and doubt.
Katherine Anderson
Since joining Western’s English department in fall of 2018, Katherine Anderson has been hard at work on her first monograph, entitled Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain. Her review essays, “The Banality of Empire” and “On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism,” have appeared in Public Books. In her teaching, she developed several new courses, focusing on “The Dark Side of Dickens” for ENG 423: Major Authors, and “Post-9/11 Literature” for ENG 418: Senior Seminar, as well as a graduate course (ENG 560) exploring issues of empire and globalization as depicted in British literature. She has also partnered with Professor Nick Galati in Biology to pilot a new program for interdisciplinary community office hours at Western.
Mary Janell Metzger
Mary Janell Metzger presented “Teaching the Tragedy of White Supremacy in Shakespeare’s Othello” at the British Shakespeare Association meeting in Belfast. Her essay “Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice” is forthcoming in Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare (Birmingham UP). She was invited to present a paper on “Teaching Shakespeare for Social Change In, and Beyond, The College Classroom” as part of a 2020 plenary panel at the Shakespeare Association of America on Pedagogy and Social Justice. In spring term, she and her Senior Seminar participated in a national project called “The Qualities of Mercy” in which college Shakespeare students across the country each produce a video of one scene in The Merchant of Venice, after studying the play in light of contemporary, and local, issues of immigration and structural inequality. The linked videos will be uploaded in sequence for viewing on Youtube