News Archives:  Academic Year 2010-2011

• Professor Elizabeth Ammons recently received the annual Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The award recognizes faculty who have made an outstanding commitment to teaching and mentoring in the Tufts Graduate community.
   
• Grace Talusan, Lecturer, published an essay in the Boston Globe Magazine's Coupling column on April 10 entitled "A Very Long Engagement."
   
• Lecturer Dale Peterson's latest book, "The Moral Lives of Animals" (Bloomsbury USA), is due to be released on March 15th. It has been picked up by the Scientific American Book Club. There is a book release party at Porter Square Books on March 5th at 6.30 PM. He has also co-written a play, titled "Spirits of Gombe", soon to undergo a preliminary reading at the Dallas Children's Theater in Dallas, Texas.
   
• Lecturer Marcie Hershman served as the faculty representative for the Tufts Travel-Learn trip to Israel, February 4-14. In a tour that encompassed rich, in-depth travels and discussions, she gave two readings/lectures: "Reconsidering Lot's Wife: On Looking Back in Witness/Writing the Holocaust" in Jerusalem, and "Tels: The Dream Dialogues" at Kibbutz Lavi, in the lower Galilee.
   
• New Course Opportunity for Undergraduates
  Stephanie Elsky, currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, will be offering the following course in the English Department this coming semester only. Students of English Literature, Women's Studies, International Relations, History, and Political Science will find this a wonderful opportunity to discover new aspects of those fields.
  
  ENG 0192-02 Woman's Place: Gender, Space, and Power in Early Modern Literature
  In this course, we will read poems, plays, diaries, household manuals, court records, and travel narratives written during the early modern period, challenging the assumption that a Renaissance woman's place was in the home. In reading about the various spaces that women inhabited and traversed, we will think together about the divisions constructed along gender lines between private and public, domestic and political – dichotomies that are still subjects of heated debate today. What are the ramifications for our understanding of gender if the past conceived of and represented these categories in multiple ways, some still familiar and some deeply alien to us? We will read some contemporary theory addressing the idea of the public in order to gain purchase on this question. Readings by William Shakespeare, Isabella Whitney, Anne Clifford, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish and others also offer a tantalizing glimpse into past in yet another way: they allow us to visit the sites and locations that loomed large in the early modern English imagination, from the nunnery to the battlefield, from the city of London to the strange lands of the East and New World and even to planets beyond our own.
   
• The English Department welcomes lecturers Daniel Bosch and Susan Carlisle to the First-Year Writing Program. Daniel Bosch is very interested in how writers engage visual objects. He spent the last seven years building a small conservatory for high-school aged poets, playwrights, and fiction writers at Walnut Hill School for the Arts. Poet Susan Carlisle is a longtime member of the ID 450 Collective. Asian Studies and visual arts are also big interests of hers. Before coming to Tufts, she taught in the Writing and Humanistic Studies program at MIT, in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard College, and in the English Department at BU.
   
• Journalism Lecturer Neil Miller's most recent book, “Banned in Boston,” was published in September by Beacon Press. Miller recounts the colorful history of the Boston Brahmin-led Watch and Ward society, a notorious literary censor and self-appointed arbiter of morality, from its formation in 1878 through its waning days in the 1950's. They made the expression “Banned in Boston” a national catchphrase. Read more in the Tufts Journal.
  
  

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