HISTORY – Rod Andrew’s book, “The Life and Times of General Andrew Pickens: Revolutionary War Hero, American Founder,” was published by the University of North Carolina Press this month. Andrew Pickens was a central figure in the early history of the South Carolina upcountry, and his Hopewell Plantation is part of the Clemson University campus.
ENGLISH – Susanna Ashton’s opinion piece, “Congress should support cultural outreach,” appeared in April in the Charleston Post and Courier. In other news, Ashton presented her research project “Fugitives in the Margin: The Canadian Census of 1851 and the hidden lives of self-emancipated slaves” at the Southern American Studies Association (SASA) which held its annual conference in Williamsburg, Virgina, hosted by the College of William and Mary on March 4th.
PERFORMING ARTS – Anthony Bernarducci had a feature article published in the American Choral Directors Association Choral Journal. The article was titled “Missa Brevis: An Ancient Genre Revitalized.” The research described modern composers’ treatment of form, text, harmony and rhythm of the ancient Missa Brevis genre.
ENGLISH – David Blakesley’s Parlor Press book, “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future” by Asao Inoue, won the CCCC/NCTE Outstanding Book Award. CCCC is the largest organization in the field of rhetoric and composition. Another Parlor Press book (“Go On” by Ethel Rackin) was named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in poetry in January.
HISTORY – On Feb. 28, Vernon Burton presented “Lincoln’s Words” at the Chautauqua in the Greenville Hughes Main Library. Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 55:2 (February, 2017): 9-10, carried an article, “Historians as Expert Witnesses: Can Scholars Help Save the Voting Rights Act?” The piece focused and followed up on the American Association’s 2017 annual meeting session, “Historians as Expert Witnesses,” organized by the National History Center in which Vernon Burton was one of three panelists. Bernice Bennett interviewed Burton about a number of his books and his ongoing research on race and the Supreme Court on her show, “Research at the National Archives and Beyond,” for Blog Talk Radio. On March 11, Burton keynoted the annual meeting of the South Carolina History Association at Bob Jones University and spoke on “Reconstructing South Carolina’s Reconstruction.” On March 18, Burton spoke at the dedication of the National Park Service’s first national Monument to Reconstruction at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island. At the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in New Orleans, April 5-9, Burton spoke at the memorial session for former OAH president James O. Horton. During March (last aired March 27), C-Span broadcast an interview with Burton on “Historians as expert witnesses on Civil Rights.” On April 3, he was featured in “The Inevitable Evolution of Fort Frederick” on SC ETV. This documentary has been fed to PBS affiliates by the National Educational Television Association.
PERFORMING ARTS – Paul Buyer’s new book, “The Art of Vibraphone Playing: An Essential Method for Study and Performance,” with co-author Josh Gottry, was released in April by Meredith Music Publications.
HISTORY – At the Classical Association of the Midwest and South meeting in Kitchener, Ontario, Elizabeth Carney organized the “Featured Opening Evening Panel” (co-sponsored with the Women’s Classical Caucus): “Grace Harriet Macurdy (1866-1946) and her Impact on the Study of Women’s History,” and gave a paper as part of the panel, “Grace Harriet Macurdy and ‘Woman Power’ in Argead Macedonia: Eurydice, Mother of Philip II.”
ENGLISH –Professor Emeritus Wayne K. Chapman published a substantial assessment of the state of W. B. Yeats studies in “Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult,” ed. Matthew Gibson and Neil Mann (Clemson University Press, Dec. 2016). Entitled “‘Something Intended, Complete’: Major Work on Yeats Past, Present, and Yet to Come” (11-56) and based on a lecture presented at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland, it is supported by an appendix, “Annotations in the Writings of Walter Savage Landor in the Yeatses’ Library” (289-303), highlighting in both essay and appendix the two ongoing book projects that Wayne expects to complete in coming months. “Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult” was the best-selling book published or distributed by Liverpool University Press in North America in the first quarter of this year.
ART – Dave Detrich was included as one of “10 South Carolina Artists You Need to Know” this spring by Amuse magazine.
ART – In March Andrea Feeser traveled to Berlin to interview internationally-renowned artist Jimmie Durham, the subject of her next book. She worked with two recent art department graduates, MFA Haley Floyd and Kevin Pohle, to document in photos and video Durham’s use of materials and processes. This unique research opportunity is funded in part by the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities and the art department.
LANGUAGES – From March 31-April 2, Stephen Fitzmaurice served as an invited moderator for two sessions at the second international Symposium on Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Research held at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. The symposium promoted the exchange of scholarship on signed language interpretation and translation as well as provided a platform for interdisciplinary research across various disciplines including linguistics, communication, sociology, psychology, anthropology and education.
CAAH AND PERFORMING ARTS – An article by Rick Goodstein, Eric Lapin and Ron McCurdy, “The Future of Arts Performance in Higher Education,” was published in March by the journal College Music Symposium.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – During this period, Steven Grosby:
PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, director of the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts, was made an honorary member of the Clemson University Alumni Association at the annual Department of Performing Arts POPS concert held at Patrick Square on April 9.
ENGLISH – Jan Holmevik was interviewed by John Sloop, associate provost at Vanderbilt University, for the podcast series Leading Lines.
ENGLISH – Tharon Howard has been selected for the Society for Technical Communication’s highest award for research – the Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research. In notifying Howard, the STC cited his “focused, original, and significant research program in usability and user experience that has had a highly significant impact on industry practice.”
ENGLISH – Walt Hunter has an interview with the French philosopher Frédéric Neyrat for his forthcoming co-translation (with Lindsay Turner) of Neyrat’s “Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism” (Fordham UP, 2017). He and Turner were recently invited to Davidson College to speak to a class on translation studies and to lead a workshop. In April Hunter received the CAAH Faculty Member of the Year Award for Excellence in Teaching.
ENGLISH – Steve Katz, Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, published three works combining creative and scholarly writing. “Pentadic Leaves,” a poem in five parts Steve wrote and delivered for the Kenneth Burke Conference in St. Louis in 2014, was selected by special issue editor Jodie Nicotra, and published with the video of the reading in the KB Journal (12:2, Spring 2017). “Poetry Editor’s Note: A Missive to Our Selves,” consists of prose and dialogue composed for Survive and Thrive: A Journal of the Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine (Vol 3, pp.1-26). This introduction reviews contemporary (even posthuman) notions of “writing as healing” and “self,” and sets up the republication of his 1994 article, “The Rhetoric of Confessional Poetry (Revisited): Ethos, Myth, Therapy, and the Narrative Configuration of Self” (Vol 3, pp.91-114). Steve co-authored two other articles in press: “A Predestination for Posthumanism” with Professor Nathaniel Rivers of St. Louis University, in “Kenneth Burke + the Posthuman” (Penn State UP); and “Lines and Fields of Ethical Force in Scientific Authorship: The Legitimacy and Power of the Office of Research Integrity” with MAPC graduate C. Claiborne Linvill, in “Scientific Communication: Practices, Theories, and Pedagogies,” edited by Han Yu and Kathryn Northcut (Routledge).
HISTORY – Tom Kuehn participated in a panel on Renaissance commentaries at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Chicago March 31. Kuehn’s book, “Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy, 1300-1600” was just published by Cambridge University Press.
CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING – Mickey Lauria has been reappointed chair of the advisory committee for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Planning Accreditation Board.
ENGLISH – Michael LeMahieu received the Frederic D. Weinstein Memorial Fellowship from Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas-Austin. The fellowship provides a stipend and a month in residence at the Ransom Center. In April, LeMahieu presented a paper titled “Ordinary Logic” at a conference on Logic and Literary Form at the University of California-Berkeley.
ART – Joey Manson installed a new sculpture as part of the Arts Around Roswell, Georgia initiative.
HISTORY – Steven Marks received the Senior Scholar Award of the Southern Conference of Slavic Studies at organization’s annual meeting in Alexandria, Virginia in April.
ENGLISH – Dominic Mastroianni’s chapter “Revolutionary Time and Democracy’s Causes in Melville’s ‘Pierre’” was reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville’s novel “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities,” edited by Robert S. Levine (University of Maryland) and Cindy Weinstein (California Institute of Technology). The chapter originally appeared in Mastroianni’s book “Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature” (Cambridge 2014).
LANGUAGES – Tiffany Creegan Miller was invited to Elon University in North Carolina on April 6th to give a talk on Kaqchikel Maya children’s songs in relation to contemporary Pan-Maya activism in Guatemala and participate in a panel discussion of the film, “Ixcanul” (2015). Both of these events were part of a series focusing on indigenous rights in Guatemala in the 21st century. Miller also was invited to be a guest lecturer for a medical Spanish class at Brown University on March 13th to discuss health care initiatives focusing on diabetes and child malnutrition in Guatemalan Maya communities.
ENGLISH – John Morgenstern published the first volume of “The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual.” (He is general editor.) The annual strives to be the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the new edition of his complete poems and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays.
HISTORY – The spring 2017 issue of Humanity includes a dossier on Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) for which Maribel Morey co-authored the introduction and authored an article. In January 2016, she was invited to attend a Gunnar Myrdal workshop at Harvard Law School, and this Humanity dossier is the result of the conversations that started in that meeting. Morey is invited to speak at two events in May — the 2017 meeting of the Stockholm Philanthropy Symposium and the public seminar inaugurating the new guest scholar program in philanthropy studies at Ersta Sköndal Bräcke University College, also in Stockholm.
ENGLISH – At the 48th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Lee Morrissey spoke about “Behn’s Oroonoko and the Emergence of ‘Slavery’ as a Metaphor,” on a panel, “Race – now you see it, now you don’t” – co-chaired by Pamela Cheek (University of New Mexico) and Margaret Waller (Pomona). He learned there that Professor Waller’s father is Dean Robert Waller, the last dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Clemson.
ENGLISH – Mike Pulley has two poems, “Out of Place” and “How the World Was Made,” coming out in the Summer 2017 issue of The Carolina Quarterly, the literary journal of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pulley is also serving for the second semester as facilitator of the Clemson University Writers’ Group, a program of Clemson’s Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation.
ENGLISH – On April 7 at the annual Shakespeare Association of America Meeting in Atlanta, Elizabeth Rivlin presented a paper titled “Shakespeare and Contemporary Middlebrow Fiction: Elizabeth Nunez’s ‘Prospero’s Daughter’ and Terry McMillan’s ‘How Stella Got her Groove Back’” in the seminar “Shakespeare and Black America,” led by Patricia Cahill (Emory University) and Kim F. Hall (Barnard College).
LANGUAGES – Johannes Schmidt’s book chapter “Herder’s Religious Anthropology in His Later Writings” was published in “Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology” in the United Kingdom by Oxford University Press in March. It will be published in North America and elsewhere in May. From the publisher’s description: “J. G. Herder is enjoying a renaissance in philosophy and related disciplines and yet there are, as yet, few books on him. This unprecedented collection fills a large gap in the secondary literature, highlighting the genuinely innovative and distinctive nature of Herder’s philosophy. […] The second part then examines further aspects of this understanding of human nature and what emerges from it: the human-animal distinction; how human life evolves over space and time on the basis of a natural order; the fundamentally hermeneutic dimension to human existence; and the interrelatedness of language, history, religion and culture.”
ART – Greg Shelnutt’s sculpture, “Samovar,” was accepted for exhibit in the show, “Steeped: The Art of Tea,” at 108 Contemporary in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Curated by Anh Thuy Nguyen and Janet Hasegawa, the show runs through May 21.
ENGLISH – Rhondda Robinson Thomas was the featured panelist for “Innovative Approaches to Commemoration, Race, and Place: A Conversation with Rhondda Robinson Thomas” at the Southern States Communication Association Conference on April 7. She discussed how her project “Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History” reflects ways that archival research and digital technologies can excavate histories and places that have been hidden, lost or covered over; the identification of efficient and effective processes in using the archive to better understand how commemoration and cultural heritage sites and historical texts preserve national and cultural identities, especially in terms of gender, race and class relations; and innovations in scholarship through partnerships between scholars in the humanities and in architecture and design. Carole Blair (UNC-Chapel Hill), Jason Black (UNC-Charlotte), and Cynthia King (Furman) provided responses that included the methodological, critical and theoretical insights they have developed from their own work. Thomas also accepted an invitation to participate in the “Universities and Slavery: Bound by History” pre-conference workshop sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University on March 2, where scholars discussed issues related to the legacy of slavery at their institutions and compared best practices.
LANGUAGES – Graciela Tissera presented her research on literature, film and culture, “The Fiction of Borges and Cortázar in Film: Exploring the Realm of Metaphysical Imagery,” and chaired a panel on adapting philosophers to film at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association 38th Annual Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico (February 17). Tissera’s students, Elouise Cram and Rebecca McConnell, participated in the panel to discuss their Creative Inquiry projects related to the Hispanic world through film, literature and media. Elouise Cram discussed the film adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “The Saint” and Rebecca McConnell the cinematic interpretation of the novel “Aura” by Carlos Fuentes.
LANGUAGES – Eric Touya read a paper entitled “Remembering the Great War: Apollinaire, Proust, Claudel, Valéry” at France and the Memory of the Great War: An Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of South Alabama, Mobile, Alabama. He also read a paper entitled “Sens, Interprétations, et signifiances musicales chez Valéry, Barthes, et Bonnefoy” at “Le Sens et les sens/Sense and the Senses,” the 2017 International Colloquium on 20th and 21st French and Francophone Studies at the University of Indiana in Bloomington.
ENGLISH – Jillian Weise’s poems were published online at Boston Review for National Poetry Month. One of the poems, “The Early American Hour,” was inspired by Jonathan Beecher Field’s work. Weise was the keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Association for Theopoetics. She gave a talk titled “Permission and Provocation” at Davidson College. And, most recently, she presented at the Disability as Spectacle Conference at UCLA.
PERFOMING ARTS – Bruce Whisler served as mastering engineer for a newly-released CD entitled “Trumpets of Brazil.” The CD is a compilation of recordings from many of the most prominent trumpet players in Brazilian orchestras and universities. It is being released by the International Trumpet Guild.
RELIGIOUS STUDIES – Benjamin White had an article, entitled “Justin between Paul and the Heretics: The Salvation of Christian Judaizers in Dialogue with Trypho 47” accepted for the Journal of Early Christian Studies. He was also invited to contribute a chapter entitled “Paul and his Diverse Champions” for the Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity.
ART – Valerie Zimany has received the The Antinori Fellowship for Ceramic Artists for a two-week residency at The Hambidge Center in Georgia from June 6-18.