English Department News

            

January 31, 2001

          

Volume 3, No. 16


January 31

  

Professorial Faculty meeting, 3:00 p.m., HC 3104

February 5

  

Graduate Studies Committee meeting, 2:30 p.m., HC 9030D

February 12

  

Great Books Committee meeting, 3:00 p.m., HC 9030D

February 19

  

Graduate Studies Committee meeting, 2:30 p.m., HC 9030D

February 26

  

Great Books Committee meeting, 3:00 p.m., HC 9030D

February 26

  

English Hour, Christian Gregory, "Captivity as Farce: Patty Hearst and the Proletariat of Fear," 4:00 p.m., HC 3104

March 2

  

Mid-Semester

March 5

  

Graduate Studies Committee meeting, 2:30 p.m., HC 9030D

March 5

  

Littleton-Franklin Lectures, E. O. Wilson, Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center, 4:00 p.m.

March 12

  

Great Books Committee meeting, 3:00 p.m., HC 9030D

March 26-April 1

  

Spring Break

April 2

  

Graduate Studies Committee meeting, 2:30 p.m., HC 9030D

April 9

  

Great Books Committee meeting, 3:00 p.m., HC 9030D

April 9

  

Littleton-Franklin Lectures, Lynn Margulis, Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center, 4:00 p.m.

April 16

  

Graduate Studies Committee meeting, 2:30 p.m., HC 9030D

April 23

  

Great Books Committee meeting, 3:00 p.m., HC 9030D

April 26

  

Benson Lecture and Undergraduate Awards Ceremony, Patricia Yaeger, 3:00 p.m., Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center Auditorium

April 30

  

Graduate Studies Committee meeting, 2:30 p.m., HC 9030D

May 2

  

Classes end

May 2

  

Graduate Student Reception, Pebble Hill, 4:00 p.m.

May 3

  

Reading Day

May 4-5, 7-9

  

Final Exams

May 12

  

Graduation

May 22

  

Classes begin for Summer Term


Patricia Yaeger Accepts Invitation to Deliver Benson Lecture

The Benson Lectures Committee is pleased to announce that Patricia Yaeger, Professor and Director of First and Second Year Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), will deliver the 2001 Benson Lecture at our annual undergraduate awards ceremony.
Professor Yaeger’s most recent book, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing 1930-1990 was published last summer by The University of Chicago Press. The publisher offers this description of the work: The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture.
For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it.
Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.
Yaeger is also the editor of Geography of Identity (1996) and co-editor with Beth Kowaleski-Wallace of Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy (1989). In addition, Yaeger is the author of Honey-mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing.
The Benson Lecture is planned for 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 26, 2001 in the Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception for Professor Yaeger will follow her presentation.

Congratulations to Graduate Faculty Members

Congratulations to the following faculty members whose nominations to full or "level 2" graduate faculty status have been approved by the University's Graduate Council: Craig Bertolet, Jonathan Bolton, and Betsy Smith.
Congratulations also to these faculty whose reappointments to full graduate faculty status were also approved: Drew Clark, Miriam Clark, George Crandell, James Goldstein, Dan Latimer, Patrick Morrow, and Constance Relihan.
Level 2 or full graduate faculty members are eligible to chair Ph.D. advisory committees and direct Ph.D. dissertations. Level 1 graduate faculty members are eligible to teach 7000-level courses, serve on or chair master's thesis committees, and serve as members (but not chairs) of doctoral advisory committees.

Dave Haney Named "Outstanding Program Officer"

Dave Haney, after being nominated by a number of graduate students, has been named one of three Outstanding Program Officers at Auburn University. He will be recognized by the Graduate Student Council at the Graduate School Spring Awards Picnic later in the semester. Congratulations on being recognized for a job well done!

Question of the Week

What are the important elements in creating a mentoring relationship for faculty? Please respond to this week's question in The Forum. If you have forgotten your password, please contact George Crandell.


Tom Nunnally's article, "Glossing the Folk: A Review of Selected Lexical Research into American Slang and Americanisms," is scheduled to appear in the Summer 2001 issue of American Speech.
Judy Troy's story, "Ten Miles West of Venus," has been anthologized in the ninth edition (2001) of Fiction 100.
If you would like to include an item in the "Professional Notes" section of The English Channel, please submit your note to George Crandell.


If you would like to include an item in the "Personal Notes" section of The English Channel, please submit your note to George Crandell.
Please submit items and direct all questions or comments about The English Channel, to George Crandell, who currently maintains this site.
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