04-19-10

Welcome to Professor Patricia Wareh!

Joining the English Department as an Assistant Professor to teach Renaissance Literature is Prof. Wareh, a specialist in Spenser and Renaissance poetry.

05-19-10

Congratulations to Professor JillMarie Murphy!

Professor Murphy has received the rank of Assistant Professor.

04-29-09

English Thesis Team members

Congratulations to all our English thesis writers! And bon courage to those presenting at Steinmetz this year! To see a picture of the Thesis team, click here.

04-12-09

Welcome to Prof. Brian Hauser

04-11-09

Congratulations to Profs. Selley and Bracken!

Professor April Selley has received the rank of Senior Lecturer, and Prof. Claire Bracken has moved up to a tenure-track Assistant Professorship.

09-18-08

Farewell to Brian Glover

Brian Glover is moving on to a teaching appointment at East Carolina University, Greenville, NC.  He recently returned from a research trip to archives in the UK for a project applying current ecocritical thought to eighteenth-century Anglican sermons.  He wishes to thank everyone at Union for a wonderful year.

07-23-08
Farewell to Bonney MacDonald

Professor Bonney MacDonald has accepted the position of English department Chair at West Texas A & M University, where she will also set up a new program in the American West. Professor MacDonald has been at Union since 1988, the year she received her Ph.D. from Yale University. An accomplished scholar and one of the most popular professors, she will be sorely missed by her Union students and colleagues, all of whom wish her the best of luck at her new academic home.

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05-14-08
Prof. Wineapple to Talk about Emily Dickinson

A talk about the upcoming book
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

by Brenda Wineapple, Doris Zemurray Stone Professor in Modern Literary and Historical Studies

Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 7:30 p.m. in Everest Lounge

Free and Open to the Public

Sponsored by the English Department

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05-07-08
PRIZE DAY WINNERS!

William F. Allen (1895) Essay Prize
To a senior in any department for a non-fiction essay
Carly Chasin

Andrew W. Archibald (1872) Prize
To the senior in humanities with the highest scholastic standing
Carly Chasin

William H. Bloom (1945), M.D.,
and Jonathan R. Bloom (1988) Poetry Prize
For the best poem or series of poems
by Union undergraduates
Sarah Samson, Corinne Simisky

David Brind (1982) Memorial Prize in English
To one or more outstanding senior students in English
Carly Chasin, Rachael Federico, Kevin Siedlecki

Edward Everett Hale, Jr. Prize
For the best essay written by a sophomore or junior
Cara Gallivan

Mrs. Edwin L. Rich Prize
To a student majoring in English
who has demonstrated outstanding scholarship
Carly Chasin

Daniel Shocket (1972) Memorial Scholarship
To a student majoring in English with a strong
interest in creative writing
Sarah Samson

Wessel Ten Broeck Van Orden (1839) Prize
To a freshman excelling in English composition
Deirdre Finnegan, Sarah O'Connor

Eugene I. Yudis (1955) Prize
To the student in any class who has produced the best
piece of prose fiction
Ian Clemente, Clare Stone

George H. Catlin (1867) Prize
To one or more liberal arts seniors with
the highest scholastic record,
deemed most promising for graduate study and eventual
service in the field of college teaching
Rachael Federico

 05-06-08
Spectacular Steinmetz 08

02-28-08
Brenda Wineapple: On Judging a Book by Its Cover

A talk on the experience of being a judge for the National Book Awards by Brenda Wineapple, Doris Zemurray Stone Professor in Modern Literary and Historical Studies

February 28, 2008, 7:30 p.m. in Everest Lounge

Free and Open to the Public

Sponsored by the English Department

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01-17-08
Dr. Lewin a Scholar-in-Residence at Brandeis

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10-12-07
Union Welcomes Back Alumnus Phil Alden Robinson

The first guest writer for Writers Return: The 2007-08 Alumni Writers Series was Phil Alden Robinson '71, acclaimed director and screenwriter. At two well-attended events on October 12 and 13 during Homecoming, Robinson provided a delightfully witty insider's look at the film industry and recalled fondly his years at Union as a Political Science major who also worked at WRUC and Channel 6.

In an evening presentation at the Nott, Robinson discussed the nine-year journey from idea to completed movie for Sneakers, which he co-wrote and directed. During those nine years, he also worked on other screenplays in order to make a living. He described how he and his co-writer did numerous drafts of Sneakers. One of those contained the minimal number of scenes to make the movie intelligible, but another "maximum" draft contained every viable idea and scene taken from every other draft. The final screenplay struck a happy medium between the two extreme drafts.

The title of the movie derives from "sneakers" -- people whose job it is to check security systems, particularly those involving computers. Robinson told how someone played a practical joke on him during the filming and sent a supposed "agent" from the federal government who said that the movie was revealing national security secrets and so had to be shut down and scrapped. To this day, Robinson does not know who played the joke, but it certainly worried him for a while.

In Sneakers and in Robinson's work as a whole, one sees the broader themes of males bonding both within and across generations. Robinson deals with everymen who are called to deal with extraordinary situations, like agent Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears (a film that Robinson directed) who must act during a terrorist attack. But Robinson is probably best known for adapting W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe into the screenplay Field of Dreams and then directing the film. At a Q & A brunch at Wold House on October 13, Robinson was asked whether he had foreseen the huge success of Field of Dreams. No, he replied. He was "gobsmacked" by it. While making the film, he sometimes felt extremely discouraged and thought it wasn't working at all. In fact, when the men who were going to write the music came to see an early cut, and one left the room immediately after the screening, Robinson thought the film was so terrible that the man had fled for good. Actually, the man had been moved to tears. Robinson also told a funny story about sneaking into a cinema to see Field of Dreams with an audience, since, by the time it was finished, he had no perspective on it. He sat behind of a couple, and the man didn't think much of the film, but the woman said, "This movie is going to win the Grammy for Best Picture!" Indeed, the film was nominated for three Oscars.

Robinson has won many well-deserved awards, including the Christophers Award, the Humanitas Prize, Premiere Magazine's Readers Poll for Best Picture of 1989 for Field of Dreams, a Writers Guild Award, three NAACP Image Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Sound Editors Golden Reel Award, the San Francisco Film Society's Golden Gate Award, a National Association of Minorities in Communications Image Award, and an Emmy for Best Directing of a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special.

Robinson's fellow alumnus and friend Robert Saltzman has a website devoted to Robinson and his visit to Union. 

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09-30-07
Where In the World Is Binyavanga Wainaina?

When Binyavanga Wainaina is not teaching at Union, the award-winning writer is busy traveling around the world. Here is his most recent itinerary:

Currently, Wainaina is in Texas, whence he sends his latest e-mail update: "...there are a lot of large and small creepy critters, including giant centipedes, tarantulas (in my kitchen yesterday) and large feral pigs called havelinas... and I am loving it..."

SUMMER, 2007

June 2007. Was a speaker at TED Global 2007, in Arusha, Tanzania together with other speakers like Bono, Chris Abani and 50 or so accomplished Africans from all walks of life.

June/July 2007. Was a Guest Speaker at PEN International's 73rd International Congress in Dakar, Senegal, where Wainaina hosted "Freedoms," a night of African literature. The evening celebrated some of the established and emerging voices in Africa -- including Jack Mapanje (Malawi), Maliya Mzyece-Sililo (Zambia) and Ekbal Baraka (Egypt) -- who read from their work, some of which will be published in the next edition of PEN International, PEN's bi-annual magazine.

July 2007. Took part in the Sable Litfest in Gambia.

July 2007. Took part in a ten day workshop, together With Chimamanda Adichie, winner of the Orange Prize 2007, and Jason Cowley, the new editor of Granta... 

October 15th. Guest Speaker and Panelist at the New Images of Africa Conference in Olso, Norway, hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Other speakers present include Henning Mankell (the Swedish Writer), Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (President of Sierra Leone) and Mrs. Pumzile Mlambo-Ncguka (Vice President of South Africa).

October-November. In Marfa, Texas on a Lannan Foundation scholarship for two months.

November 1-4th. Guest Participant and Speaker in the Partnership-with-Africa Conference, hosted by the German President Horst Koehler in the Monastery "Eberbach" near Frankfurt in Germany. Other guests include, The Asantehene (The King of the Asante in Ghana), John Le Carre (writer), Nurrudin Farah (Somali writer), llija Trojanow (German writer) and the presidents of Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Germany.

Finally. In the fall of 2009, for one semester, Wainaina has been invited by Williams College to be the Sterling Brown Professor of Africana Studies.