We are very pleased to present Michelle Zauner (aka Japanese Breakfast) in concert and conversation Sunday, April 25 at 4:30 PM. Recording as Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner has released two critically-acclaimed albums, Psychopomp and Soft Sounds from Another Planet; her third album, Jubilee, will be released June 4, 2021. She is also the author of Crying in H-Mart, a memoir that develops her essay of the same name in the New Yorker. You can read more about the memoir here. This concert is presented by The Mountain Goat Literary Journal, the Writing House, the Asian Languages and Culture House, the Wick, Campus Activities, the Sewanee Review/Dakin Fund, and the Departments of English and Music.
Out of over 550 applicants, English major, Claire Crow, was offered (and accepted) one of 3 positions in the Ph.D. Program in English at Yale to continue her work on depictions of race in medieval romance. She was also accepted with full funding into the Ph.D. program in Medieval Studies at Cornell and into the English Ph.D. programs at Indiana University, The Ohio State University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Fordham University. In addition, she was offered positions in the M.A. program in English at NYU and at the University of Birminhgam (UK), the M.A. program in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth, and the M.A. program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Bramwell Atkins and Mandy Tu have been awarded the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a one-year grant for purposeful, independent exploration outside the United States. Bramwell's study, How Can We Sing?: Music and Displacement will take him to Russia, Ukraine, Laos, Vietnam, Greece, and Germany to study how music helps displaced people to cope. Through her study, Voices in Verse: Perspectives on Postcolonial Women Writing, Mandy will travel to the Bahamas, Jamaica, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, Nigeria, and the U.K. to learn about women writing in the shadow of the British Empire.
Dr. Ben Mangrum's article, "Market Segmentation and Shirley Jackson's Domestic Humor" appears in the Spring 2021 edition of American Literary History.
Professor Engel will be delivering the keynote lecture (via zoom) at The Early Modern Studies Symposium jointly hosted by Bangor University and Sheffield Hallam University.
This week Sewanee graduate and author Una Mannion, C’87, signed a major publishing deal with Faber & Faber.
Darin Graber, Visiting Assistant Professor in English, recently published "The Wild Boys of London's Sickening Circulation." a piece forthcoming in a pandemic-related "cluster" of articles in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (Vol. 27 no. 4 issue), as it relates childhood homelessness and sewage mishandling to the mid-century cholera outbreaks in Victorian London.
Professor of English Bill Engel publishes on the use of Shakespeare by Karl Marx in A Journal for Critical Debate.
Professor Bill Engel publishes on seismic shifts in the history of Western thought in his newest study.
Recent Sewanee graduates and English Majors Sydney Leibfritz C'20, Briana Wheeler C'20, and Carlos Zayas-Pons C'20 have founded a new literary journal called Ample Remains.
Associate teaching professor of English, Dr. Stephanie Batkie, is featured in an article lauding her transformative pedagogy on and off campus.
The American Shakespeare Company will perform Othello live-streamed outdoors to an audience seated in the main quad (or in Guerry if it is rainy). Following Othello, the company's actors will engage questions of race and performance; issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the ASC; and the performance of Othello as a call to racial justice.
On October 16, The American Shakespeare Company will treat us to a live-stream performance of Twelfth Night beginning with live (streamed) music at 6:30, followed by a 7:00 performance at the Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton. The live stream will be followed by talk-backs with the actors, who will engage what it is to play Shakespeare in a time of pandemic.
Dr. James Ross Macdonald's article, "Milton's Tutelary Angels" appears in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 vol 60, no. 1 (2020), pp. 113–132. It explores Milton’s representations of the tutelary angel. While patristic tradition envisaged separate angels watching over each believer, John Calvin instead conceived them as a ubiquitous army, any of whom might be called upon to execute God’s will. As poet and theologian, Milton introduces Raphael and Michael as guardians with distinct identities at the same time that he declines to assign Adam’s or Eve’s care to any single angel. This pluralized vision of heavenly protection creates an affective theodicy, furnishing a social world about Eden that nevertheless skirts the characteristic Satanic error of interposing hierarchies between God and his creatures.
During the summer quarantine, medievalists, Dr. Batkie and Dr. Irvin, conducted a virtual reading group to analyze William Langland's Piers Plowman. Carlos Zayas-Pons describes the experience in The Paris Review.
This talk draws on the W. B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming” to showcase the surprising ways interwar literature encoded the conditions of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.
Professor Engel has contributed to the critical volume The Birth and Death of the Author: a Multi-authored History of Authorship in Print (Routledge, 2020).
A new Sewanee student run podcast bringing you weekly doses of the medieval world with guest appearances from experts and scholars.
The Trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, and the Hyla Brook Poets today announced that the winner of the 10th Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry is Jennifer Davis Michael, for her poem, "Forty Trochees."
English majors Bramwell Atkins and Claire Crow enjoy a visit to the Cotswolds while studying at Oxford this Spring 2020 semester.
Sewanee English major Claire Crow (C'21) recently won the Proxime Accessit prize for her dissertation on women in the literature of the Middle Ages while studying abroad at Oxford University this spring.
The English department's own Bill Engel will be featured on NPR's "Academic Minute"
Professional actors will read from Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s play, Looks Like Pretty, on Sunday, Feb. 23rd, at 4 P.M. in the Tennessee Williams Center.
Our own Dr. Jennifer Michael will read from her latest published collection of poetry, "Let Me Let Go" in downtown Sewanee at The Blue Chair.
Professor Engel just signed a contract with Cambridge University Press for a collection of essays on Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England. He also will appear on a new NPR show called "The Academic Minute".
The School of Letters is pleased to announce a Post-Baccalaureate Tennessee Williams Fellow position for a Sewanee graduate, thanks to generous funding from the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund.
The American Shakespeare Center’s 2020 National Tour comes the University of the South from February 6-February 8, 2020.
On January 10, 2020, Professor Engel represented Sewanee at the Société Française Shakespeare in Paris, with a paper on “The Tug of Memory: Shakespearean Backstories.”
Bramwell Atkins, a current junior double majoring in English and Classics, has been awarded a Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs Study Abroad Research Grant to support his independent research while abroad in Oxford, England next year.
Hastings Hensel will give a poetry reading in Gailor Auditorium on Thursday, December 5, at 5 p.m. A reception and book signing will follow the reading.
On November 22, 2019, Sewanee’s English department celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Victorian author George Eliot.
Sewanee Professor of English and acclaimed author Kevin Wilson has just published a new novel, "Nothing to See Here".
On Monday, November 11, 2019, Atlanta-based attorney Sarah Owings C’03 spoke to students about her work on the frontlines of immigration law and practice.
Sewanee English Professor and Department Chair Jennifer Michael has a new poetry chapbook now available for sale!
Sewanee Professor of English Virginia Craighill has published three poems in the most recent issue of THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays.
