Allison Giffen recently co-edited the collection Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. This year she is on professional leave researching her new book on childhood and disability in nineteenth-century US popular literature. She is also collaborating on a digital humanities project in Critical Childhood Studies, that includes a website titled the Critical Childhood Studies Forum, funded through the Hatter award. In addition, she is developing a new upper-level seminar titled “Critical Childhood Studies” which will offer interrogations into representations of childhood in literature, the history and construction of childhood, and children as agents of cultural production. She received a summer grant from the Social Justice and Equity Committee to develop new curriculum in disability studies and is working on a new upper-level seminar in the English department, titled “Disability and Literature.”
Christopher Loar
Chris Loar’s unhealthy obsession with Daniel Defoe continues. His essay on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year will appear in Eighteenth-Century Fiction this fall, and he is currently working on a book chapter about Defoe’s responses to scientific developments in the early eighteenth century. He’s also still co-editing the online journal Digital Defoe (digitaldefoe.org). And this summer he’ll travel to York in the UK to present some of his research on Defoe and deism. His students this year have mostly been spared from this obsession, though; instead, his teaching has focused on the sibling novelists Henry and Sarah Fielding; on ecological writing in the past, present, and future tenses; and on literary animals.
Jane Wong
Jane Wong’s second book of poems, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021. Recently, her essays and poems have appeared in places such as POETRY, Orion, New England Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, and others. She has a forthcoming piece in The Best American Non-required Reading 2019 anthology. This summer, she will be busy writing at three residencies, including: Jentel, SAFTA Farms, and Blackacre as Sarabande’s Writer-in-Residence. Check out her solo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (running from June 1st-September 1st) entitled “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly.
BA, 2001: Aliya Weise
Aliya Weise (BA, 2001) earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. This year, she will be graduating with her Ph.D. in English with a speciality in American Literature and Culture from George Washington University.
BA, 2000: Heather June Gibbons
Heather June Gibbons (BA, 2000) published, though The University of Utah Press, the poetry book Her Mouth as Souvenir which was selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize.
BA, 1999: Wendy Fox
Wendy Fox (BA, 1999) published her third book, If the Ice Had Held, through the Santa Fe Writer’s Project in May of 2019.
BA, 1998: Jennifer Jahner
Jennifer Jahner (BA, 1998) is a newly tenured member of the English faculty at Caltech. Her first monograph, Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta is forthcoming from Oxford University Press this fall.
MA, 1981: Sam Green
Sam Green (MA, 1981) had six poems published in Prairie Schooner Volume 93, Issue 1.
BA, 1980: Dion Lissner O’Reilly
Dion Lissner O’Reilly (BA, 1980) has poetry appearing or forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, The Sun, Rattle, Spillway, New Letters, Canary, and a variety of other journals and anthologies, including an upcoming Lambda Literary Anthology. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts, the Intro Journals Project, and was sent to the judges of The Folio Literary Journal Poetry Contest and the Peseroff Prize.
MA, 1980: Paul Lindholdt
Paul Lindholdt (MA, 1980) has published essays in Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Southern Review. Other essays are forthcoming in Seneca Review and Tampa Review.