Faculty News

Over the past two years, the Department has conducted several successful faculty searches. Starting with us in the Fall of 2000 have been Professor Reginald McKnight (Creative Writing: Prose Fiction), Assistant Professor Julian Levinson (Jewish American Literature, a joint appointment with the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies), and Lecturer David Sheridan. Starting with next Fall term will be Associate Professor and Zell Professor Nancy Reisman (Creative Writing: Prose Fiction), Assistant Professor Susan Najita (Asian-Pacific American Literature, a joint appointment with the Program in American Culture), Assistant Professor Catherine Sanok (Medieval), and Assistant Professor and Michigan Fellow Simon Dickie (Eighteenth Century British Literature). Also hired but not to arrive until Fall of 2002 is Assistant Professor Vivason Soni, currently a post-doctoral fellow at Yale (Eighteenth Century British Literature). Meanwhile other searches are in process.

Professor Ira Konigsberg, a specialist in film and Director of the the Program in Film and Video Studies, retired this year. His presence and experience will be missed.

It has been another prolific year of writing for our faculty, and recently published works include: Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, edited by Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor; The Huron River: Voices from the Watershed, edited by John Knott and Keith Taylor; Paradise New York, Eileen Pollack; Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, George Bornstein; What Remains, Nicholas Delbanco; Six Mile Mountain, Richard Tillinghast; Equal Love, Peter Ho Davies; Victorian Afterlife , edited by John Kucich and Diane Sadorff; Felt, Alice Fulton; Queering the Moderns, Anne Herrmann; Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Anne Herrmann and Abigal Stewart; The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification, Tobin Siebers, editor; Michigan Quarterly Review: Reimagining Place, Robert Grese and John Knott, editors.

We deeply regret the deaths of three Professors Emeritus: John Arthos, Sheridan Baker, and Jack Reidy. We remember their accomplishments as scholars with admiration, their fellowship with fondness.