Jacob Emery spent much of the spring in the Lake District of England, where he carried out research (supported by generous grants from the College Arts and Humanities Institute and from the office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs) on William Wordsworth and local extraction industries.
In April, he traveled to Harvard University to present “Variations on Nabokov: Autobiography, Exile, Errancy” for the annual Svetlana Boym Memorial Lecture. He also spoke on Nabokov at the AATSEEL conference in Las Vegas in February, with a paper entitled “Solus Rex and Its Sibling Cadaverkins”; at the same conference, he participated in a roundtable on “New Horizons in Slavic Graduate Education. In May, he presented on “Transcription Technologies and the Interesting” at the Science Fiction Research Association Conference in Tartu, Estonia.
Professor Emery published two book reviews: of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Stravaging Strange, in the November 2023 issue of Literature and Translation, and of Tatyana Gershkovich’s Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds, in the Winter 2023 issue of Modern Fiction Studies. His essay on “Contemporary Russian Fiction” is due to appear in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel. Works in progress include an essay on Vladimir Nabokov’s work of the early 1940s, a book on science fictional transcription technologies, and a theoretical account of the work of art as framed by other kinds of work.
Professor Emery was promoted from Associate to Full Professor in the summer of 2024.
Chair David Michael Hertz signed a two-book contract with Louisiana State University Press to publish his American Songbook From Vaudeville to Hollywood, a project that grew out of his many years of teaching a class on lyrics and popular song for Comparative Literature and his lifelong fascination with the interplay of words and musical notes. Volume one will cover the years 1890-1938, stretching from the early Tin Pan Alley bestsellers to the end of the Gershwin era. Volume two, will begin with the great popular songs of the World War II period and end with Elvis Presley’s pretend sing-off duel with Frank Sinatra on television in 1960.
Oana Panaïté delivered several conference talks among which the one entitled “Confier la matière postcoloniale - risques et partages contemporains” at the international colloquium “Pratiques et modèles de la confiance en littérature” co-organized by The University of Chicago in Paris and the Institut Universitaire de France in November 2023.
She authored the chapter “Mondialité” in the open-source volume Fragments d’un discours théorique. Nouveaux éléments de lexique littéraire (Codicille éditeur, Université Laval) and the article “Le Tapis magique immobile. Détail colonial et inattention narrative dans le roman de l’entre-deux-guerres” (with Étienne Achille) in the journal French Studies. Her fourth monograph, Fictions of Race in Contemporary Literature: French Writers, White Writing (written in collaboration with É. Achille), was published by Oxford University Press in March 2024.
The College of Arts