Accomplishments: Department of English
November 6, 2020
Timothy Erwin (English) chaired the opening panel of The Intermedial Eighteenth Century: Textual and Visual Arts, 1660-1832, a virtual conference hosted by Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. Tim was recently named to the Advisory Board for the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Shanghai University in China, and his essay “Alexander Pope and a Carracci Venus at the Court of James II and Mary of Modena” appears in the current Huntington Library Quarterly.
October 16, 2020
P. Jane Hafen (English) was interviewed about Zitkala Sa on South Dakota Public Broadcasting in connection with Indigenous People's Day
October 14, 2020
Evelyn Gajowski (English) has published The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, a comprehensive guide by an international team of leading scholars to those critical practices that dominate Shakespeare studies today. It includes chapters on 20 specific critical practices, each grounded in an analysis of a Shakespeare text. A seismic shift occurred in the 1970s and 1980s: feminism, cultural materialism, and new historicism challenged traditional liberal humanism....
September 22, 2020
P. Jane Hafen (English) delivered the keynote address for the John Whitmer Historical Association Conference. Additionally, her book, Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, co-edited with Brenden Rensink of Brigham Young University, won the association's award for best anthology of 2019.
August 17, 2020
John M. Bowers (English) had his book, Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, which was published last year by Oxford University Press, recorded and released as an audiobook by Recorded Books, the world's largest distributor. This unabridged eAudio version is narrated by Jennifer M. Dixon.
August 7, 2020
P. Jane Hafen (English) was a featured commenter on "UNLADYLIKE 2020: Unsung Women who Changed America" on American Masters on PBS. She spoke about Zitkala-Sa, Yankton Sioux activist. Additionally, she participated in an online panel discussing the program for Utah PBS.
August 5, 2020
Erin Zimmerman (Writing Center) published an article, "Locating Visual Communication across Disciplines: How Visual Instruction in Composition Textbooks differs from that in Science-writing Textbooks" in Across the Disciplines. This study compares how a corpus of 60 science writing textbooks and composition textbooks address visual communication topics and suggests ways composition instructors and science instructors teaching students about their discipline's writing conventions can work to...
July 31, 2020
Gary Totten (English) wrote "Mobility, Skepticism, and Counter-storytelling in African American Travel Writing: Carl Rowan's South of Freedom," which has been published in the Journal of American Studies. In the article, he discusses Rowan's narrative of his travels through the U.S. South in the 1950s, showing how Rowan's resistance to systemic racism through individual action serves as a model for understanding African American travel writing and mobility more generally.
July 2, 2020
P. Jane Hafen (English) is the author of Help Indians Help Themselves: The Later Writing of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), which has been featured as book of the Month on Native America Calling.
June 4, 2020
Brittany Paloma Fiedler and Niki Fullmer (both Libraries) will present "Latinx Students in a Hispanic-Serving Institution's Academic Library" at the California Academic and Research Libraries Association 2020 virtual conference. The presentation will include preliminary findings from surveys and interviews of Latinx students at UNLV and their usage of and feelings toward the UNLV University Libraries. Fiedler is a teaching & learning librarian. Fullmer, '17 BA English, is a research,...
May 20, 2020
Gary Totten (English) has published an article, “Wharton’s Wild West: Undine Spragg and the Dakota Divorce,” in the journal Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory. He examines Edith Wharton's portrayal of western U.S. divorce colonies in the early 20th century in her novel The Custom of the Country (1913).
May 8, 2020
Lauren Paljusaj (English), along with Anne Savage and Susanna Newbury (both Art) wrote an essay that was published in Nevada Humanities' inaugural Double Down post on distance — part of its COVID-response series on human connection. The essay considers how to interpret photographs as meaningful points of time-lapsed contact. Using UNLV Special Collections & Archives photographs, students explored how tangible, historical artifacts inform our sense of community in the present day. Their...