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
Dawn Dietrich
Dawn Dietrich recently published “’For America to Rise, it’s a Matter of Black Lives/And We Gonna Free Them, so We Can Free Us’: 13th and Social Justice Documentaries in the Age of ‘Fake News,’” in Pacific Coast Philology, Special Edition: Ways of Seeing: Visuality, Visibility, and Vision, vol. 54, issue 2 (2019), forthcoming. She was also honored to be featured as part of a roundtable on The Impact of N. Katherine Hayles’s NEH Summer Seminar on the Field, 1995-2001, Special Session. Modern Language Association Conference, Chicago, IL, January 3-6, 2019, in honor of N. Katherine Hayles’ retirement. Dawn will offer two news courses next year: English 423 Major Authors: Haruki Murakami and English 238 Society & Literature: Horror across Media.
Christopher Wise
Christopher Wise’s À la recherche de Yambo Ouologuem (Paris: Les Èditions Philae, 2018) was selected as La Livre de la Semaine [Book of the Week] by Africa No.1 Radio in Paris, France. He also translated Jean-Michel Djian’s The Manuscripts of Timbuktu: Secrets, Myths, Realities (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2019), which was launched at the “Global Africa, Migration, and the Arts” Conference at Rutgers University at a panel honoring Kassahun Checole and Africa World Press on March 28, 2019. Wise was a plenary speaker at the conference and spoke on the topic of “Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence at 50.” Wise also published an article “Après Azawad: Le devoir de violence, djihad, et idéologie chérifienne dans le Nord du Mali” in Fabula/Les colloques: L’oeuvre de Yambo Ouologuem: Un carrefour d’écritures (1968-2018). In January 2019, Wise was invited to speak at Green College, UBC in Vancouver Canada, where he gave a talk on the crisis in Mali, entitled “The Jihad of Iyad Ag Ghali”. He gave another talk at Université Hassan II in Casablanca, Morocco on “American Studies in the Arab University: 9/11 to Azawad”. In Paris, Wise also gave a teleconference on Yambo Ouologuem for UBIZNEWS, “Yambo l’Utime Témoignage: Téléconférence” on February 28, 2019.
Kathryn Trueblood
Kathryn Trueblood’s new novel, Take Daily As Needed, treats parenting while chronically ill with the desperado humor the subject deserves (forthcoming September 2019 from the University of New Mexico Press). She will be offering a workshop to celebrate the Whatcom Library System’s Anniversary: 75 Years of Sharing Stories called “Telling Tough Stories: Writing Illness,” in the fall of 2019. This year, Trueblood co-taught a Red Badge Project weekend workshop in Walla Walla with Shawn Wong in October 2018, and a month-long workshop at The Bellingham Veterans Center in April 2019. She was invited to attend a workshop sponsored by the Great Books Foundation “Help Veterans Help Each Other,” in Chicago, October 26-27, 2018, fully funded. From October to May, she then co-moderated a book club, “War Through the Eyes of Women” at The Bellingham Vet Center, and she again served as writing coach and faculty advisor for “Stories Deployed: the Veteran Chronicles,” now in its sixth year.
Brenda Miller
Brenda Miller, with her colleague Suzanne Paola, has been hard at work on the updates for the Third Edition of Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, scheduled for release this summer. Her poetry and essays have appeared in such venues as Tupelo Quarterly, Jet Fuel Review (with alum Julie Marie Wade), and Psaltery & Lyre (edited by alum Dayna Patterson). Brenda’s essay “The Shape of Emptiness,” originally published in Brevity, received recognition as a “Notable Essay of 2018” in Best American Essays. Her article “The Fine Art of Containment in Creative Nonfiction” appeared in the March issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. In her teaching, she developed a new course focused solely on “Hermit Crab Essays” for ENG 458: Topics in Nonfiction Writing, and a graduate course (ENG 598) exploring the assumptions and practices of creative writing pedagogy.
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.”
Stefania Heim
Stefania Heim is a scholar, poet, translator, editor and educator dedicated to the intersections between those pursuits. Her essays on 20th-century and contemporary American poetry, women, war, and experimental practice have appeared in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Textual Practice, Jacket2, and through Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. An essay on Walt Whitman, amputation, and archives is forthcoming in the edited collection 21 | 19: Essays in Proximity. She is author of the poetry collections A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books 2014) and HOUR BOOK, chosen by Jennifer Moxley as winner of the Sawtooth Prize and forthcoming in early 2019 by Ahsahta Press. Geometry of Shadows, her book of translations of metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems, is forthcoming from APS Books. She is the recipient of a 2019 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.
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.