Chelsea Burk-Betts participated in the CLAS Teaching Excellence Showcase, presenting a flash talk titled “The Panopticon and the Gen Ed Lit Classroom: A (Mostly) Cautionary Tale.”
Eric Gidal has co-edited with Alex Dick (University of British Columbia) a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies devoted to "Eighteenth-Century Coasts." Their co-authored introduction, "Coastal Studies for an Age of Sail" makes the case for attending to the littoral zones of the eighteenth century as shaping global and local histories and literary forms. The issue features eleven forum pieces and articles from an international gathering of historians, geographers, and literary scholars. Perfect reading for your next sailing adventure.
Zara Chowdhary's memoir The Lucky Ones won the First Book - Nonfiction prize at the Mumbai Lit Live! Awards.
On Oct. 30th, Harry Stecopoulos lectured on the manuscripts of Native Son at Oxford University. His article “Laboring in the Dream Factory” appeared in the Nov. 16th issue of LARB, and his essay “Oil Men and Ash Heaps: The Energy Economy in The Great Gatsby” will appear in the next issue of Ácoma: Rivista internazionale di Studi Nordamericani (in Italian).
Sarah Minor’s “On Waiting” from Kenyon Review was named a notable essay in Best American Essays 2025. Her visual poem “The Terminal” was published in the newest issue of local, alum-run literary outlet Rampage Party Magazine. Minor curated new video essays by Jessie Kraemer, Diana Khoi Nugyen, and Ryley O’Byrne in the newest issue of Brink.
A longform profile of Wole Soyinka, the first Black and African winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, by Otosirieze Obi-Young (Translation MFA and Department of English TA) was published in Open Country Mag, which he founded and edits. It is an in-depth look at an extraordinary career that, by range and longevity, makes Soyinka a claimant to the mantle of "greatest living writer"; it contextualizes that in a deep political legacy at a crossroads in his home country of Nigeria.
Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem, by Kathy Lavezzo, came out last month with Fordham UP. In November, she delivered a presentation at Oxford University that pertained to the book. Also in November, under the auspices of the Stuart Hall Archive at the University of Birmingham, Lavezzo led a discussion of Stuart Hall's first publication.
On November 20th, Matt Brown gave the American Antiquarian Society’s virtual book talk for the fall on his recent monograph The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in British American (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025). A videorecording of the talk is available here at the AAS’s YouTube channel.
