2023 e-Newsletter - Graduate

Katie Carithers
“Metonymical Body, Metonymical Resistances: Figuring the Obliterated Body in Frankenstein in Baghdad.” Northeast Modern Language Association 54th Annual Conference, University of Buffalo. 

Chadd Heller
“Beyond the Line: Jean Rhys and the Paradox of Plantation Intimacy” Modernist Studies Association conference in Portland, OR October 2022.

Trivius Caldwell

• "The Intersection of Race and Occupation: Understanding the Mindset of Black Military Service." Endnotes Conference at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2023.
• Talk at Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, Maryland
• "Leadership and Literature"
• Talk at University of Louisville Strategic Broadening Seminar, Washington, DC. "Contrarian Leadership: Lacan and Servant Leadership"

Tessa Bolsover
 “Delay Figure”(multimedia talk, performance) Hybrid Lyricism panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture in February 2023.

Michael Cavuto
 “Birds Anonymous and Nathaniel Mackey’s Subsonic” presented at the 50^th Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 (February 2023)

Tye Landels
“Shame and the Society of Sentiments in Hume and Smith,” ASECS, St. Louis, 2023

Effie Harrington
 "Historicizing Clarissa's 'Mad Papers': Towards a Trauma-Informed Theory of the Novel," ASECS, St. Louis, 2023.

Abby Rogers

• "Coleridge's Open, Responsive Subject." NASSR, 2022.
• "Hermeneutics as Hospitality: A Response to Thomas Pfau's Incomprehensible Certainty,” the American Catholic Philosophical Association, New Orleans. 2022.

Carolin Benack was awarded the Bass Instructor of Record fellowship from The Duke Graduate School for the 2022-2023 academic year. 

Catherine Lee was Awarded the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by the Graduate School. The Alumni Association also awarded her a Forever Duke Student Leadership Award.

Dray Denson and Elly Veloria (Anthropology) were recently granted FHI funding to start a Critical Food Studies working group next Fall.  Dray writes: The Critical Food Studies working group will address the intersection of politics, practice, materiality, and aesthetics of food. The group will focus on the practitioners of those foodways and their experiences, who are often alienated from their labors by economically and ecologically exploitative habits of Euro-Western food culture. We’re invested in learning from the Black Southern foodways that route through Durham, into the Deep South, and across diasporas traced by Black Southerners in the United States and beyond. This working group hopes to create digital humanities projects that incorporate documentary film, collaborative archive-building, and oral histories around the experiences of producing and consuming food. We intend to support local restaurants, particularly spaces owned by Black and brown folks, especially Black and brown queer and trans people, alongside community organizations like the Earth Seed Collective in Durham. We imagine a cadence that mixes a practice of reading and learning in community with cooking demos, talkbacks with culinarians, historians, and stewards of the land, and, of course, eating together. 

Kelsey Desir was awarded the Julian Price Graduate Fellowship in Humanities and History from The Duke Graduate School for the 2022-2023 academic year. 

Tessa Bolsover and Michael Cavuto are the coeditors of Auric Press.  The Press has published the following books and chapbooks this year:

• Three Novenas, Stacy Szymaszek (Fall 2022)
• Blue Knight, Hamish Ballantyne (Fall 2022)
• Daisy & Catherine², Aristilde Kirby (re-issued Spring 2023)
• WHAT, Robert Kocik (forthcoming Summer 2023)

Damilare Bello won a Bass Connections Student Research Award for a project entitled “Soundtracks of Black Presence: Music, Duke and Pan-African Legacies. He will use the historic 1971 Pan-African–USA International Track Meet hosted at Duke University's Wallace Wade Stadium to examine how music forges transnational bonds between Africa and its U.S. Diaspora. Existing research on the meet has been largely limited to sports scholarship. This project will present a different perspective, placing music that Black Durhamites used to welcome African athletes at the center of the narrative to examine the broader history of Black cultural connections. This work builds on themes Bello explored as the graduate mentor of the 2022 Story+ team From Stephen to C.B.: Tobacco, Race and Duke Men's Basketball. Tsitsi Jaji will serve as his faculty mentor. This summer project was exhibited at the Cameron Indoor Stadium during the Louisville vs Duke Basketball Game.

Amber Manning was awarded the 2023 Stephen Horne Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Anya Lewis-Meeks

• Julian Price Graduate Fellowship AY 2023-2024
• Dissertation Research Travel Award: Domestic AY 2023-2024

James Draney was awarded a Graduate School Administrative Internship for AY 2023/2024. Also Bass digital education fellowship.

Derek Witten won a Dissertation Research Travel Award: International.

William Brewbaker won a Dissertation Research Travel Award: Domestic

The Remembering the Middle Passage research collective (Charlotte Sussman, Kelsey Desir, Jane Harwell, Anya Lewis-Meeks, Tye Landels, and two other graduate students from outside of English) has a co-authored journal article, “‘Died a Small Boy’: Re-Centering the Human in Geospatial Data from the Middle Passage,” forthcoming in the next issue (#7) of archipelagos: A Journal of Caribbean Digital Praxis. They also published a final version of their website/digital project at www.rememberingthemiddlepassage.com

Tessa Bolsover

• Inlet, a poetry chaplet, was published by The Swan in February 2023.
• “From Crane,” a sequence of hybrid-form prose poems, will be published in Black Sun’s online journal, Digital Vestiges, in May 2023.

Michael Cavuto

A new poem, “Degrees of Departure” will be published in the forthcoming Poetry Project Newsletter (May 2023)

Derek Witten

• "Dante's Construction of the Creative Reader in the Commedia's Passages of Direct Address." 
• in Dante Studies. Vol. 141 (2023). 

Anya Lewis-Meeks

• Book review of Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Dub: Finding Ceremony in New West Indian Guide
• creative non-fiction: On Beauty, Eating Disorders and Rap Sh!t in Triangle House
• Letter from the Editor for Issue 17 of Apogee Journal (for which she serves as Nonfiction Editor) 

Maryn Gardner earned her BA and MA in English from Brigham Young University, where she wrote an MA thesis titled “Tidal Translations: Thinking With Untranslatability in Craig Santos Perez’s from Unincorporated Territory.” Her intellectual interests center on ecocriticism—including ecopoetics, climate fiction, and multispecies studies, with a special interest in the politics and poetics of translation amidst a global climate crisis.

Julia Gordon completed her BA at Stanford this December in English.  A former engineering major, she’s interested in narrative form and media theory in post-1945 fiction.  She’s participated in digital humanities research and pedagogy projects.  Her honors thesis examined Infinite Jest’s self-feeding culture industry and its mythological products, showing how the abject, post-historical quality of this media environment manifests in the novel’s narrative structure. 

Kara Kozma is completing a BA in English and Latin at the University of Michigan, with a minor in translation studies.  She’s interested in the relationships among poetry, philosophy and literary criticism in Romanticism.  Her honors thesis, “Authorial Mediation in Coleridge and Ovid,” also reflects her interest in the influence of classical Latin poetry on the Romantics.

Samara Michaelson received a BA from UC Berkley in interdisciplinary studies and an MPhil from Cambridge in Culture and Criticism.  Her interests lie in philosophy and literature, especially in ethics and politics. Her M.Phil thesis on James Baldwin’s use of music also reflects her interest in Black fiction and aesthetic theory; her writing sample on Alice Monro’s short stories enquires into the short story form.  She is also a free-lance journalist.

David Palko has a BA from Davidson, and a JD from Harvard.  He’s had a 10-year legal career and spent time on active duty in the US Army.  Currently, he’s finishing an MA in English at NC State. His interests lie in law and literature in the medieval and early modern periods. His writing sample uses Cavell’s definition of judging in The Claim of Reason to analyze Duke Vincentio’s juridical speech acts in Measure for Measure.