ABOUT ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS AND FACULTY

2011-2012

 

Luther's Preus Library recently celebrated 19th-century British author Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday by hosting a performance of a skit, "The Essence of A Christmas Carol in 13 Minutes," Tuesday, February 7, 2012, at 3 p.m.  The dramatic skit was written and directed by Professor Emeritus of English Harland Nelson, who served as a narrator and a medium for Dickens' appearance at the event.  The play starred a colorful cast of Luther students (and a couple of colorful faculty--Professor of Theatre Robert Larson and Professor Emeritus of English Martin Mohr). After the general hilarity, birthday cake was served. 

 

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ACM-Mellon Postdoctoral fellow in English and Environmental Studies Andrew Hageman will present a paper entitled "Ecocinema and Ideology: Do Ecocritics Dream of a Clockwork Green?," along with fellow contributors at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Conference in Boston, March 21-25.  The presentation is to promote their forthcoming book, The Ecocinema Reader.  Hageman's blog is at http://thehourofthemachine.blogspot.com/

 

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Carol Gilbertson, Professor Emerita of English, gave a reading of her poems from her recent chapbook, From a Distance, Dancing (Finishing Line Press, 2011), at the Library After Hours program at Grandview University in Des Moines, IA, Friday, February 3, 2012.  Four of her former students from the Des Moines area joined the Grandview audience and re-connected with Gilbertson during the reception and book-signing.  Her visit included teaching three creative writing classes. 

 

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Six English faculty led Study Abroad courses during January Term 2012.  Professor Novian Whitsitt co-taught, with Religion Professor Guy Nave, a Paideia II course in Ghana, titled “Christianity, Slavery, and Their Representations in Ghanaian Literature.”  The course explored the complex connections between Christianity and the African slave trade, studying slave routes and landmarks of the slave industry, including the coastal slave castles, where captured people were held until shipped abroad.  Students also explored how Europeans and European-Americans justified slavery, and how local Ghanaians hold this history in their collective memory.

Professor Nick Preus directed “’Tales of the Sea’ on the Windjammer, Roseway.”  Students stayed on, and formed the crew of, this two-masted schooner, study sailing travel in the past and reading stories of lives and characters transformed by the sea’s challenges.   

Professor Mark Z. Muggli and his wife, Professor Emerita Carol Gilbertson, took students to study “Dramatic Greece.”  The course focused on the history of theater’s birthplace and its fifth-century role.  In addition to visiting Mycenaean and Classical sites and museums, students performed readers’ theater in the ancient sites and theaters, as well as studying movement with a local dance company and constructing theatrical masks with a local theater company. 

Professors David and Rachel Faldet co-taught “Tolkien and Lewis in Context (England / France),” reading the work and following the lives of these two writers, who shared many life experiences, from childhoods in Northern Ireland and Birmingham, to England’s national center of London, to the battlefields of France, and back to their major residential city, Oxford, to see how and why urbanization, mechanized war, disenchantment, and ideas of heroism figure in their work. 

For a complete listing of these course descriptions, click here.

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The sun hardly softened the bitter 18-degree temperature, but it brightened the spirits of the 30-plus participants at the Sounding the Sonnets finale Friday, December 9.  The hardy group of faculty, staff, and students had warm spirits, hot cider, and ginger cookies to brighten this, their last day of classes and the last day of hearing Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, two each day (with a few days of three sonnets), read by Professor Mark Z. Muggli, Luther College’s 2011-13 Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities. Each day since the beginning of September, Muggli has marched to the center of campus, the Bentdahl Commons, talked to the assembled listeners for a few minutes about the sonnets about to be read, and then read them.  The whole process each day has taken from 12:05-12:10. 

Muggli reports that he has been outside reading the sonnets each weekday this semester, come rain, shine, sleet, or snow (though we’ve had precious little of that this fall).  Normal attendance on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—because the reading falls between class hours—has been about 25-30.  Tuesday and Thursday has seen fewer auditors, but some students have hardly missed a day. 

The faithful attendees were rewarded at the finale with a free copy of Shakespeare's sonnets in paperback.  

No one complained about the cold weather.

For more information, and to see photos of the readings, click here.

 

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Five senior students made Senior Project Presentations to faculty and student attendees on Wednesday, December 7, 2011, 4:00-5:30 p.m. in Main Building Rooms 111 and 112.  The students and their project titles were as follows:  Allyson Batis (12), "Sexual and Class Identity in Love in the Time of Cholera" (research); Jessica Rae Samuelson (12),  "We're Going On a Bear Hunt: Exploring the Human-Bear Relationship" (creative nonfiction); Amy Marie Sandager (11), "Conversations" (creative nonfiction); Abigail Nance (12), "Kingly Boys, Subservient Girls: Gendered Hierarchies in Narnia and Harry Potter" (research); and Kristi Wietecha (12), "Jerry, Jesus, and Prufrock: The Chocolate War's Christian Hope for a Post-Christian World" (research). Pictured above, from left to right, are Batis, Samuelson, Sandager, Nance, and Wietecha.

 

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2011-12 Visiting Assistant Professor Chad Parmenter's chapbook of poems, Bat and Man:  A Sonnet Comic Book, also from Finishing Line Press,  is forthcoming in late February 2012.

 

The press run depends on the number of pre-ordered copies, so we encourage you to go to finishinglinepress.com, click on "Pre-order Forthcoming Titles," scroll down the drop-down author list, and click on Chad's name.  The book sells for $12 plus $1.99 shipping.  If you pre-order a copy, you help Chad--and the world of poetry--with the number of copies Finishing Line will print. 

Bat & Man:  A Sonnet Comic Book is a chapbook of sonnets about Batman.  They're persona poems spoken in dialogue, between Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne, with the driving narrative that she has woken him up from a nightmare, and he describes it to her, sonnet by sonnet.  Each one adds to what you might recognize as the ritual activity of most Batman comics and other media:  retracing what led Bruce Wayne to become Batman, revising that story in the process.  This revision is part Citizen Kane and part Yeats, with a kind of comic-gothic inflection to the whole thing that might be what Stephen Burt calls Lowellian, in his essay, "Poems About Superheroes" (http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_burt3.php).

Parmenter has his MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and his Ph.D. from the University of Central Missouri.  His interests include the instability of literary genres and pop culture, especially film and superheroes.

 

 

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From a Distance, Dancing, a chapbook of poems by Carol Gilbertson, Professor Emerita of English, has just been published by Finishing Line Press (Kentucky).   She held book-signings during Christmas at Luther weekend, Saturday, December 3, at the Luther Bookstore in the morning and at Dragonfly Books in downtown Decorah in the afternoon.  Copies of the book are available for purchase at both bookstores.  To order a copy, go to finishinglinepress.com or amazon.com. 

Carol wrote the narration for Christmas at Luther in 2008, "Night of Glory, Dawn of Peace,"  and 2009 "Joy to the World."  Carol's poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including Christian Century, Dogwood, Flyway, The Jefferson Monthly, The MacGuffin, The Pebble Lake Review, and Vineyards.  Her poem “On the Train from Krakow” was named runner-up in the 2009 MacGuffin Poet Hunt, “Hercules” won the 2006 Flyway Sweet Corn Prize for Poetry, and “Night Rising,” a finalist in the 2005 Dogwood Poetry Award, was the inspiration for composer Philip Wharton’s composition for flute, oboe, and strings, “Nightrising” (2008).  Other poems have earned honorable mention and finalist standings in various national poetry contests. Gilbertson has written four hymn texts in collaboration with four different composers, including “Amaze Us With Your Light” with Philip Wharton.  She co-edited the essay collection Translucence:  Religion, the Arts, and Imagination (2004), and her essay on teaching won the Donald Murray Prize (2005).  An Emerita Professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, she has held the Dennis Jones Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities and is the founding director of the Lutheran Festival of Writing. 

 

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Two English alums, Emily Kittleson ('11) and Sonja Butler ('09), are serving with the Lutheran Volunteer Corps (LVC) in 2010-11.  Emily is working with Corcoran Neighborhood Organization in the Twin Cities, and Sonja is at Hilltop Lutheran Neighborhood Center in Wilmington, Delaware.  

Many Luther graduates, including many English majors and minors, have found LVC to be a rewarding post-graduation service to communities and to the world, a time for discerning one's vocation, and even a path to future service careers.

For more information about the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, go the LVC website; for photos of these alums and their placement pals, click here.

 

 

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Professor David Faldet gave an invited presentation, "Transformed by the Journey: the Story of Luther College" on Oct. 21 as one of eight speakers at the Legacy and Leadership Symposium at Concordia University Texas, co-sponsored by the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America (LECNA).  Faldet gave a public reading and class visit connected to his book "Oneota Flow" at Loras College on Oct. 28.

 

 

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Visiting Assistant Professor Sukanya Miles-Watson published an article on Himalayan Pilgrimage, co-authored with her husband, Jonathan Miles-Watson, Assistant Professor or Religion.   The article, "Conflicts and connections in the landscape of the Manimahesh pilgrimage," appears in a special edition of Tourism: an Interdisciplinary Journal (Vol. 59, No. 3).  The special edition, titled "Pilgrimage Communitas and Contestation," explores the relevance of Turner's Communitas for understanding contemporary ethnographic accounts of pilgrimage. The special edition has commentaries by John Eade and Nelson Graburn, two of the most important writers on this area over the last 50 years. 

 

 

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Hannah Lund's ('12) six-word short story has been accepted by Narrative Magazine and has been published on the magazine's website (under the pen-name Anna Lewis).  The six-word story challenge was inspired by American fiction writer Ernest Hemingway's celebrated example, written in the 1920s:  "For sale: baby shoes, never used."  Some of Hemingway's friends bet him that he would not be able to compose a complete story in only six words.  Tradition tells us that Hemingway considered it his finest work.  Lund's six-word story:  "Dinner date: so much to digest."  For more information, see Luther's news release.

 

 

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Professor of English Kate Narveson's book, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Religious Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture, has been accepted for publication by Ashgate Publishing. 

Bible Readers and Lay Writers studies how lay immersion in the Bible gave rise to a non-professional writing culture, one of the first instances of ordinary people taking up the pen as part of their daily lives.  Narveson examines the development of the culture, looking at the close connection between reading and writing practices, the influence of gender, and the habit of applying Scripture to personal experience. She also explores the tensions arising between lay and clergy as layfolk embraced not just the chance to read Scripture but the opportunity to create a written record of their ideas and experiences, acquiring a new control over their spiritual self-definition and a new mode of gaining status in domestic and communal circles. 

Based on a study of print and manuscript sources from 1580 to 1660, this book begins by analyzing how lay people were taught to read Scripture both through explicit clerical instruction in techniques such as note-taking and collation, and through indirect means such as exposure to sermons, and then how they adapted those techniques to create their own devotional writing.  The first part of the book concludes with case studies of three ordinary lay people, Anne Venn, Nehemiah Wallington, and Richard Willis.  The second half of the study turns to the question of how gender registers in lay scripturalist writing, offering extended attention to the little-studied meditations of Grace, Lady Mildmay. Narveson concludes by arguing that by mid-century, despite clerical anxiety, writing was a central feature of lay engagement with Scripture.

 

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essay on the English writer Geoffrey Chaucer by Luther student Kristi Wietecha (LC '12) has been accepted for publication in The Sigma Tau Delta Review: Journal of Critical Writing. With a circulation around 10,000 copies, the Review is a refereed journal that publishes the best essays submitted by members of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society.  Wietecha, an English major and secondary education minor from Eagan, Minn., presented the essay at the Sigma Tau Delta International Convention in Pittsburgh, PA, in March 2011.  Titled "Emelye's Objectified Characterization: A Study of Gender Characterization in Chaucer's 'The Knight's Tale,'" the essay analyzes the close gender characterizations and tensions within "The Knight's Tale"—one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Her work on this topic began in a Chaucer and Renaissance literature course taught by English professor Kate Narveson. Wietecha has been a member of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society, since spring 2010.

 

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Peter Scholl led a post-performance Sunday Salon discussion at the Commonweal Theatre in Lanesboro, Minn., on Aug. 21 about the relation of horror films to the musical theater production of  "Little Shop of Horrors," now playing at the Commonweal Theatre through Oct. 28.

 

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Department Head Mark Z. Muggli has two new appointments.  He has been named the 2011-13 Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities.  The professorship is a two-year award to a member of the Luther faculty who honors the values and traditions of the humanities, engages significant issues in a humanities discipline, demonstrates the ability to nurture the intellectual life of students and provides academic leadership in the humanities.  Muggli's project for the two-year honor is Our Shakespeare, which aims to nurture our community’s rediscovery of the range, power, and wisdom of Shakespeare’s art.  Get more information on the project's homepage.

 

Muggli has also been appointed as spring 2013 director of the London program of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, a consortium of 14 prestigious regional colleges of which Luther is a recent member.  Muggli will direct the London portion of the ACM London and Florence program, providing students the opportunity to study the arts that have made the two cities central to the heritage of the West.  During the London portion of the program, students will focus on the theatre, literature and the history displayed in contemporary London. 

 

 

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Luther English majors, initiated by Allison Croat (LC’12, pictured at left) and Tonya Tienter (LC’12, pictured in next article), have founded WRITE ON!, a club for student writers.  According to Tonya, the club’s purpose is “to create a friendly and relaxed environment where students can just write for fun and hopefully come to love it as much as we do.”  The club will welcome students from all disciplines and with all levels of experience.  The founders hope to create a setting for individual writing as well as workshopping manuscripts for mutual feedback.  The group hopes to invite in guest speakers, host field trips to readings, and manage a shared blog for members’ writing.  According to Tonya, “We are just really excited to be putting things in motion!”  Professor Rachel Faldet serves at the group’s advisor. 

 

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Tonya Tienter (LC'12) was one of the sixteen Luther College students presenting their research projects at the 25th National Conference on Undergraduate Research, the showcase event for exemplary research and scholarship by undergraduate students from the nation's top colleges and universities.  The 2011 NCUR conference was held March 31-April 2 at Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y. Some 2,000 undergraduate students in all academic disciplines came together to present and discuss their research projects through posters, oral presentations, visual arts displays and performances.  Tonya, a junior English and classics major from Chatfield, Minn., presented her paper, "Mockery and Mirrors: The Role of the Clown in Shakespeare's 'A Winter's Tale.'"  Her faculty supervisor was Mark Z. Muggli, professor and Head of the English Department, who was one of the two faculty mentors who accompanied the group. 

 

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Nicholas Nienhaus (LC'11) has been named assistant news editor at the Decorah Newspapers.  An English major with a writing emphasis, Nick has been working for Luther's student newspaper, Chips, currently as an ad representative.  Nick says, "I always enjoyed writing and was hoping I could stay close to home and have a job that pertained to my priorities and major."  Though he will  not graduate until May, he has already begun working for the newspaper.  "I figured that the sooner I start with this fast paced business, the better," Nick said.  "The staff has been very welcoming and helpful.  Every day I feel myself grow as a writer."  A native of Fort Atkinson, IA, Nick has a younger sister at Luther--Kristina, who is a sophomore. 

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Associated Colleges of the Midwest has announced that a story by Rachel Johnson (LC'11), "Inheritance," was selected for the finalist round in the "Nick Adams" short story contest.   Adam Sirgany, a senior at Knox College, was named winner.  Binnie Kirshenbaum, novelist and professor and chair of the Writing Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, served as the 2011 contest's final judge.  The Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) is a consortium of academically excellent, independent liberal arts colleges located in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Colorado.  Luther College is a member.

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NOTE:  For the English Department's News Archive, click here.