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Alumni Notes

Notes from the Chair

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New Faculty Appointments

1

Recent Faculty Publications

4

Degree Awards & Job Placement

6

Reflections on the Job Market Journey

7

IN THIS ISSUE :

I meant to write this message back in

October, when the campus was in its

full autumnal glory, and I was having

lots of autumnal insights,

of the poetic and bitter-

sweet kind that you ex-

pect from an English

professor. But, some-

how, October turned

into November and No-

vember into December

and… well, here it is, the

dead of winter, and

those bittersweet in-

sights have given way to

bitter cold, and the piles

of leaves to piles of

snow.

And yet, it’s hard to feel

gloomy in the middle of

an academic year like the one we’ve

been having here at Tufts. In my mes-

sage last year, I announced the arrival

of two new colleagues. This year, we

have two more new colleagues, about

whom you can read elsewhere in this

newsletter. I will just say that their

presence in the department has been

exciting. Greg Thomas, an Associate

Professor with expertise in African

American literature and Africana Stud-

ies, is a well-known scholar whose in-

terests range from Frantz Fanon to Lil’

Kim to the Black Panthers.

Nathan Wolff, our new Assis-

tant Professor, specializes in

nineteenth-century American

literature, with an emphasis

on affect and politics in the

novel.

So, just since two or three

years ago, there are quite a

few new faces in the depart-

ment. But if you came back

to campus—and we hope that

you will do so—you would

find a lot of familiar faces in

East Hall as well. Let me in-

vite you to drop by if you find

yourself in the Boston area,

despite (or perhaps even because of)

the New England winter. We’d also be

delighted to see you in the spring. And

if you’re too far away, send us an e-mail

message for the next newsletter so that

your former teachers and classmates

can find out what you’ve been doing,

thinking, reading, or watching. Wher-

ever you are, have a wonderful new

year.

Joseph Litvak, Chair Department of English

Notes from the Chair

Alumni Notes

English Department

210 East Hall

Tufts University

Medford, MA 02155

Telephone:

617-627-3459

Visit:

ase.tufts.edu/english

News from the English Department of Tufts University

New Faculty Appointments

The English Department is very excited to welcome two new faculty members this fall:

Greg Thomas and Nathan Wolff.

Issue VII

Continued on page 2

2

Greg Thomas comes to Tufts from the English

Department at Syracuse University where he

taught courses in African and African Diasporic

literature in particular. His general research

interests include: Black Radical Traditions;

body poltics; epistemology; music and

film; neo/colonialism and anti-colonialism.

After receiving his

M.A. from SUNY-

Binghamton and

his Ph.D from UC-

Berkeley, he pub-

lished his first

book, The Sexual

Demon of Colonial

Power: Pan-African

Embodiment and

the Erotic Schemes

of Empire (Indiana

UP, 2007), which

was followed by

Hip-Hop Revolu-

tion in the Flesh:

Power, Knowledge

and Pleasure in Lil’

Kim’s Lyricism

(2009) and a book collection co-edited with

L.H. Stallings, Word Hustle: Critical Essays and

Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines

(Black Classic Press, 2011).

The founder and former editor of the e-journal

PROUD FLESH, he just guest-edited a special

issue of Black Camera: An International Film

Journal on the recent film-work of Haile Gerima

in Spring 2013. He is now at work on a study of

the writings of George L. Jackson.

In his first semester at Tufts, he would teach an

undergraduate course on Black novels written

in North America but set outside of the United

States as well as a graduate seminar on the twin

corpora of Frantz Fanon and Chester Himes.

This year he will also teach courses entitled

“Black World Literature” and “The ANTI-

Colonial Mode of Thought.”

Nathan Wolff: A Massachusetts native who

grew up in Maine, Nathan Wolff is very

pleased to be back in New England and hon-

ored to be joining the English Department at

Tufts. He received his Ph.D. from the Univer-

sity of Chicago and his B.A. from Bowdoin

College.

His research focuses on 19th c. American lit-

erature and culture, with a particular interest

in the emotional dimensions of public life—

that is, how affect helps form and sustain po-

litical communities, how literature themati-

cally explores that process, and how novels

seek to produce an affective public of read-

ers. His current project, Fits of Reason: The

U.S. Political Romance, examines the ways

seemingly rationalist reform novels of the

later 19th c. both challenged and rede-

ployed sentimental genre conventions of the

pre-Civil War period. An article drawn from

this work, “Emotional Insanity, Cynical Rea-

son, and the Gilded Age,” on Mark Twain’s

era-defining political satire, appeared in the

journal ELH in March 2013.

At Tufts, he is

t e a c h i n g

courses de-

voted to ma-

jor 19th c.

A m e r i c a n

authors and

g e n r e s

(“Poe, Haw-

thorne, Mel-

v i l l e ” ;

“ C o o p e r ,

E m e r s o n ,

T h o r e a u ” ;

“The U.S.

H i s t o r i c a l

Novel”), as

w e l l a s

graduate and undergraduate seminars on

topics including political emotion; labor,

class, and literature; and the American

gothic.

New faculty continued from page 1

Greg Thomas,

Associate Professor

Nathan Wolff,

Assistant Professor

3

Eli Evans: PhD in the Comparative Literature

Program at the University of California, Santa Bar-

bara, where he has just completed a dissertation

on philosophical and theoretical thought in post-

Civil War Spanish exile and its relevance to the

current political and socio-economic crisis in

Spain and Europe.

As a writer, he

has published

work with such

domestic and

i n t e r n a t i o n a l

journals as n+1,

The American

Reader, and

Quimera, and

has had work

included in the

n+1 limited edi-

tion e-book Bad

Romance. He

has published

translations of

essays by the

Spanish writer

Juan José Millás

and the Italian writer Michele Monina, and his

translations of selections from Peruvian poet

Jaime Rodríguez Z.'s Song of Vic Morrow

are forthcoming in the literary magazine Man-

dorla. In the coming months he will have an es-

say published in MFA v. NYC, the next in the n+1

Small Book Series, as well as the academic jour-

nal Romance Notes.

He is currently splitting his time between Boston

and Deerfield, MA, where his wife is a teacher at

Deerfield Academy. His summer itinerary took

from Waterloo, Iowa to Panama to Milwaukee to

the Marche region of Italy to Barcelona to Am-

herst and finally back to the Midwest for a short

spell before he piloted a twenty-six foot Penske

truck back to Massachusetts, breaking down only

once along the way. Perhaps not surprisingly, his

best friend is his dog.

Greg Thomas and Nathan Wolff are not the only new members to be welcomed into the Tufts University de-

partment of English this past year. The fall of 2013 saw the addition of three new part-time instructors: Emma

Duffy-Comparone, Tanya Larkin and Eli Evans.

Tanya Larkin

was born in

Montebelluna,

Italy and raised

mostly in Penn-

sylvania. She is

the author of

two collections

of poetry, My

Scarlet Ways,

winner of the

2011 Saturnalia

Books Poetry

Prize, and Hot-

house Orphan

( C o n v u l s i v e

Editions), a

chapbook of

poems accom-

panied by the

pen and ink

drawings of

New York artist Ben Gocker. She is the recipient

of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Po-

etry and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Her

most recent poems have appeared in The Boston

Review, Conduit, Hanging Loose, and Ping Pong.

E m m a D u f f y -

Comparone comes

to Tufts with a BA

from the University

of New Hampshire

and an MFA from

Boston University. In

2013 Emma was a

scholar at the Bread

Loaf Writers’ Confer-

ence as well as the

Sewanee Writers’

Conference. Forth-

coming work from

Emma in 2014 in-

cludes “The Blue

B o w l ”

(Ploughshares), “Do You Do It Like This?”

(Southern Review), “Marvels Sands” (The Sun),

and “Crossing the Sagamore” (Cincinnati Re-

view).

Eli Evans

Tanya Larkin

Emma Duffy-Comparone

4

In 1993, Lecturer Joseph Hurka flew to Prague to walk

in the footsteps of his father, a former Czech resis-

tance fighter and American spy. The resulting manu-

script, Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Fa-

ther, won the Pushcart Editors' Book Award

(nominated by Andre Dubus) and was published in

2001 and 2003.

An anniversary edition

(paperback and Kindle) was

released by Wild Creek

Press in late July. Publishers

Weekly called the book

"gripping," and gave it a

starred review.

Booklist said, "It's the story of a

man who fought for democ-

racy and...the moving ac-

count of a son who finally

comes to know his father."

Kathleen Peterson published two books this past Sep-

tember: Permission (Western Michigan / New Issues)

and The Accounts (University of Chicago). Recently,

her long poem about the President won the Stanley

Kunitz award from the American Poetry Review;

"Filibuster to Delay the Spring" will appear in that

magazine's September issue.

After spending the summer

in the West, she is writing a

new set of poems that ap-

pear to have something to

do with conversion and

something to do with capi-

talism, and she’s doing

some collaborative work

with a photographer which

will culminate in a book

composed of poems, photo-

graphs, and collages of a

kind.

New summer reading discoveries include the novels

of Iris Murdoch (especially A Severed Head) and

books of poetry by Christina Davis (An Ethic) and

Saskia Hamilton (Divide These).

Faculty News, Publications and Current Work

Christina Sharpe published Blackness, Sexual-

ity, and Entertainment. American Literary His-

tory. (ALH 24.4, Winter 2012, 827-841)

and “Three Scenes” in the book Ethical Con-

frontations with Anti-Blackness: Africana Stud-

ies in the 21st Century, ed. Tryon Woods and

P. Khalil Saucier.

(Forthcoming

2014).

She also published

pieces online in

various academic

journals and blogs.

At the Social Text

Journal, with Jayna

Brown, she dis-

cussed the film

Beasts of the South-

ern Wild in “The

Romance of Pre-

carity.”:

http://socialtextjournal.org/beasts-of-the-

southern-wild-the-romance-of-precarity-i/

Her essay “Hearing the Tenor of the

Vendler/Dove Conversation: Race, Listen-

ing, and the ‘Noise’ of Texts, January 23,

2012” appears on the Sounding Out! Blog.

http://soundstudiesblog.com/2012/01/23/he

aring-the-tenor-of-the-vendlerdove-

conversation-race-listening-and-the-noise-

of-texts/

Christina delivered a number of papers in-

cluding: “In the Wake: After Life” at the Car-

ibbean Studies Association Conference;

"Three Scenes" at First Exposure Confer-

ence; and "Property and Django Unchained"

on the "Trauma, Affect, and Genre in African

American Culture" Roundtable at the Confer-

ence of the Modern Language Association.

Lastly, Christina was the Summer Scholar

mentor for Rafael Fonseca who is currently

working on James Baldwin, Blackness,

Queerness and reading black queer theory,

and as much of Baldwin's writing as he can.

We asked department of English faculty to discuss their current research and share their recent accomplishments, publications, and recommendations.

Christina Sharpe,

Associate Professor Joseph Hurka

Kathleen Peterson,

Professor of the Practice

5

Read: the Tufts English department faculty

Greg Thomas, The Sexual De-

mon of Colonial Power: Pan-

African Embodiment and Erotic

Schemes of Empire (Indiana UP,

2007);

Greg Thomas, Hip-Hop Revolu-

tion in the Flesh: Power, Knowl-

edge, and the Pleasure in Lil’

Kim’s Lyricism (Palgrave Mac-

millan, 2009)

Joseph Hurka, Fields of Light: A

Son Remembers His Heroic Fa-

ther (Wild Creek Press, 2013)

Jonathan Wilson, Kick and Run:

Memoir With Soccer Ball

(Bloomsbury, 2013)

Linda Bamber, Taking What I Like:

Stories (Black Sparrow Press, 2013)

Katie Peterson, Permission

(Western Michigan / New Issues /

Green Rose, 2013)

Katie Peterson, The Accounts

(University of Chicago Press /

Phoenix Poets, 2013)

6

Tufts Graduate Student Degree Awards and Job Placement, January 2013—Present

2013 has been a year of extraordinary achievement for our graduate students. With dissertations spanning

six centuries, touching upon various topics ranging from race studies to spirituality to genre theory, Tufts

students have contributed to a rich and diverse academic community. Likewise, the job market for English

students has been fiercely competitive for many years, but at Tufts we are pleased that our graduate stu-

dents are finding success. For the past year under the guidance of the Job Placement Director, Modhumita

Roy, graduate students were hired for academic positions at institutions across the United States.

The following graduate students have recently defended their dissertations: Nino Testa (January ‘13) “Written in Blood: AIDS and the Politics of Genre”

Mark Kaufman (March ‘13) “Secret States: Modernism, Espionage, and the Official Secrets Act”

Kristen Bennett (April ‘13) “Thomas Nashe and Early Modern Protest Literature”

Tisha Brooks (April ‘13) “Spiritual Lives: Embodied Spiritual Practice in African American Women's Literature and Film”

Jeffrey Vanderveen (April ‘13) “Frontier Modernisms: Form, Race, and Rupture in 1920s Novels”

Caroline Gelmi (September ‘13) “Producing Persons: Fictions of the Speaker in American Poetry, 1882-1915”

Mark GwinnLandry (September ‘13) “Epistemology of the Veil”

Erin Kappeler (September ‘13) “Shaping Free Verse: American Prosody and Poetics from 1880-1920”

Ian Scott Todd (October ‘13) “Bathroom Reading: Modernism, the Novel, and the Toilet”

Stay Connected

Visit our new website ase.tufts.edu/english

Our brand new website launched this winter.

There you’ll find news, events, and other go-

ings-on about the Tufts English Department.

The following graduate students have recently secured job placement:

Tisha Brooks (G ‘13) Tenure-track Assistant Professor of African American Literature,

Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

Chiyo Crawford (G ‘12) Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Erin Kappeler (G ‘13) Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Maine at Farmington

for the 2013-2014 academic year

Mark Kaufman (G ‘13) Adjunct Assistant Professor, Bentley University

Brianna Rae Burke (G ‘11) Tenure-track Assistant Professor at Iowa State University

Kristina Wright (G ‘11) Tenure-track Assistant Professor at Southern New Hampshire University

7

Reflections on the Job Market Journey: A Tufts Alumni Newsletter Editorial, by Tisha Brooks (G ‘13)

A year ago, I began the job search process think-

ing that a private liberal arts school (preferably on the

East coast) would be the best place for me to begin my

academic career. Yet as I write this, I am about to begin

a tenure-track position at Southern Illinois University

Edwardsville, a fairly large public institution in the

Midwest with over 14,000 students. At first, this might

seem like an odd fit and I admit, when I began the job

search process, I was a bit uneasy about applying to

schools outside of my “comfort zone.” But I’m sure it

comes as no surprise that the current condition of the

job market pushed me to move beyond my initial set of

job requirements.

I had never heard of SIUE until I saw the job announce-

ment, but I soon discovered that fellow Tufts alum, He-

lena Gurfinkel, taught there, so it must be a school

worth considering. Moreover, the position description

posted on the MLA job database was very attractive—

offering the opportunity to design and teach courses

that reflect my interdisciplinary interests in African

American Literature, Religion and Women’s Studies. So

I applied, not simply because I had adopted an “apply

everywhere” attitude, but also because I knew that I

could meet the requirements of the position.

Yet if I’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s

that receiving a job offer is only partly about how

well you fulfill the position description and much

more about how well you “fit” on campus and in the

department. This is why the on-campus interview is

so important. In fact, the interview was just as impor-

tant for me, a candidate seeking a welcoming and

supportive environment to begin my professional ca-

reer, as it was for the department looking to hire a

committed colleague.

Although I expected the campus interview to be the

most stressful part of the job search process, it turned

out to be the most enjoyable (albeit exhausting) part

of this journey. I am certain that my low level of anxi-

ety and worry about the campus visit had much to do

with the hours of preparation that Tufts faculty put into

staging mock interviews, providing much-needed

feedback, and the wise counsel and encouragement

of fellow alumni willing to share advice from their

own experiences. But the ease that I felt during my

interview was also the result of feeling genuinely

comfortable on campus, in the department, and with

my now fellow colleagues.

As I sit here about to begin this new journey as an

Assistant Professor at SIUE, I realize fully the gravity

of having received a job offer for a tenure track posi-

tion. Yet I also recognize that this success is a shared

victory—one that would not have been possible with-

out the continued investment and support of Tufts fac-

ulty and friends.

What are YOU doing now? Have you written a book? Did you pursue

another degree? Did you major in English

then become a Doctor? Airplane pilot?

Scuba instructor? Professional musician?

We want to hear about it! Send us an e-mail at English@tufts.edu and

tell us what you’re doing now!

Make a Gift

When making a financial gift to Tufts Uni-

versity, please keep in mind that you can

designate the department as a recipient.

We are grateful for gifts to support current

activities and new initiatives.