Kelly Magee’s story “Nobody Understands You Like You” was selected by Antonya Nelson to be included in New Stories from the Midwest 2018, her story (with Carol Guess), “With Killer Bees” was included in an anthology of collaborative writing, They Said, and her story (with Kami Westhoff) “The Unbearable Here” was published in Contrary. She developed a new course in “Queer Memoir” and taught a Graduate Fiction Workshop around the idea of “influence”—what things contemporary writers are influenced by, and how they can best exert their own influence. She also spoke on a panel on “The Speculative and Fantastic in LGBTQ+ Writing” and organized “Taste of Western,” a reading of WWU faculty at this year’s AWP conference in Portland.
Laura Laffrado
Laura Laffrado and her work on Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson were featured in the Seattle Sunday Times Magazine cover story “Poetic Justice.” Her project for a bronze bust honoring Higginson was completed in November with installation of the bust in the Wilson Library foyer and the Ella Higginson Celebration (watch the event). Her book Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature received the 2018 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Edition Award ( watch her acceptance speech in Denver). Her essay, “The Value of Digitized Newspaper Collections in Researching Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing: Two Newly Recovered Poems by Ella Rhoads Higginson,” appeared in the Readex Report and her Op-Ed “The New West” appeared in The Seattle Times.
Allison Giffen
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.
Kathleen Lundeen
Kathleen Lundeen joined Western’s English Department in the fall of 1991 as a specialist in British Romantic literature. Along with Romantic literature, she has taught courses in physics and literature, intermedia art, epic poetry, the nineteenth-century novel, biblical literature, and literary and cultural theory. Throughout her distinguished teaching career, students and colleagues have expressed great admiration for her ability to explain complex theoretical concepts, the clarity of her rigorous writing assignments and feedback on student writing, finely tuned lectures, respect for students, attention to the visual elements of texts, and expert facilitation of class discussions.
In addition to publishing on a range of Romantic authors and subjects, she has written articles and book chapters on literature and science, intermedia art, film, and biblical literature. In her book Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology, she shows how Blake creates an epistemological alternative to empiricism and rationalism in his poetry and art. After completing her long-range study of Blake, she began pursuing the engagement between Romantic texts and the discoveries of late eighteenth and early nineteenth astronomers, notably William Herschel. Her work in this area has appeared in several journals and was solicited for a book on literature and science.
Kathleen also served as an elected officer of PAMLA (Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association), which culminated in her service as president of PAMLA in 2007. For several years she served on the editorial committee of Pacific Coast Philology, and she chaired the site committee when Western hosted PAMLA’s annual conference in 2002 and 2007. Her service outside of Western has included the mentoring of post-doctoral instructors through the Keats-Shelley Association mentoring program and participation as a grant referee of AAUW (American Association of University Women).
Kathleen’s participation in the English Department includes a term as department chair and several terms as associate chair, during which she attended to numerous personnel issues in a professional and compassionate manner, saw several faculty members successfully through the tenure and promotion process, initiated significant reforms in department procedures, developed a new and improved advising system, and developed a collaborative leadership style. We will miss her warm and compassionate presence.
BA, 1967: Vern Giesbrecht
Vern Giesbrecht (BA, 1967) has become a regular contributor to BC History Magazine, publishing eight articles since the Fall 2012 issue, as well as writing book reviews.