Professor Emery’s essay “The Mirror and the Mine: Photography in the Abyss of Labor,” appeared as the afterword to the Verso anthology Capitalism and the Camera in 2021. Another essay, on "The Contemporary Russian Novel,” will be included in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel.
His novel A Clockwork River, which he wrote with his sister Sara, came out in October 2021. It was featured in a list of the best new fantasy and science fiction in The Times, which called the book “as charming as it is uncontainable, an uber-confident picaresque comedy in the authentic, madcap 18th-century manner.”
He co-edited a selection of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s nonfiction in English translation with Alexander Spektor of the University of Georgia. The compilation is called Countries That Don’t Exist and was published by Columbia University Press in February 2022. Professor Emery’s next book, The Vortex That Unites Us: Versions of Totality in Russian Literature, is a conceptual anthologizing of the Russian canon and is scheduled to release in 2023 with Northern Illinois University Press.
Jennifer has been happy to once again share her research through performance. In the fall 2021, she performed Balinese wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) at Northern Illinois University after giving a research talk. In April, she gave a workshop talk and performance at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Her article, “Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band," will be published by the Journal of American Drama and Theatre in the fall as part of a special issue on Asian American Dramaturgies. She also presented papers at the MLA and Mid-American Theatre conferences. Jennifer is also happy to announce that she and her wife Tina adopted a puppy, Lyra, in the fall. This spring also marks the return to roller derby. Watch for her playing with the Circle City Roller Derby this summer!
Bill Johnston published two new translations in 2021: from the Polish, Kaja Malanowska’s Fog (Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing), and from the French, Jean Giono’s Ennemonde (New York: Archipelago Books).
In November he was awarded the Joseph Conrad Literature Medal by the Józef Piłsudski Institute, for his contributions to promoting Polish literature abroad. For the 2021 – 2022 academic year he is on sabbatical in Marseille, France, where he is working on a translation of Parts I and II of Maria Dąbrowska’s novel cycle The Nights and the Days, supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.
Edith Sarra, along with her co-translator Yasuko Ito Watt, published From the Edges of Disaster, a volume of translations from the tanka poetry of Tanaka Takuya. The book began as a translation of 50 tanka by the poet on the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011. In 2014, Sarra and Watt’s translation of the sequence won the William F. Sibley Memorial Prize in Translation of Japanese Literature and was published on the University of Chicago’s website.
Over the next few years, Sarra and Watt interviewed Tanaka and continued translating more of his poetry, focusing on his use of tanka as a medium for documenting the subjective experience of environmental disaster. Tanaka wrote two moving, prize-winning tanka sequences in response to the “triple disasters” of March 2011, and to a nuclear accident at the Tōkaimura uranium re-processing plant in 1999. From the Edges of Disaster includes a bilingual translation of Tanaka’s two tanka sequences on these disasters and Sarra’s critical introduction contextualizing Tanaka’s work in the framework of contemporary Japanese poetry and the cultural critique of global environmental crises. In March 2022, on the 11th anniversary of 3/11, Sarra was invited to deliver a lecture on Tanaka’s disaster poetry for Harvard's Japan Forum series, co-sponsored by the Japan Disaster Archive. In February, she delivered the Kempf lecture at Yale University on the problem of narrative closure in the Tale of Genji, a lecture based on her 30 years of teaching the Tale of Genji at IU, and her 2020 book, Unreal Houses: Character, Gender and Genealogy in the Tale of Genji.
Russell Valentino returned to serve as chair of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures in July 2021 after nearly five years in the dean's office (work for which he received the IU Bicentennial Medal). A month earlier, his translation of Bosnian author Miljenko Jergović’s epic family saga Kin was published by Archipelago Books. The book was subsequently long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award, the world's most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English.
In spring 2022, Professor Valentino offered a new upper-level undergraduate course, “How to Translate Anything,” jointly listed between Slavic, Honors, and Comparative Literature. The course has drawn a very talented group of high-achieving students working in a range of languages from Spanish, French, and Italian to Hindi, Russian, Croatian, Korean, and American Sign Language. Professor Valentino will offer this course again in spring 2023. Finally, late 2022 was supposed to mark the end point for a four-year, $1M grant from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine for which Professor Valentino served as a co-director. The project had achieved many of its goals in support of Ukrainian higher education initiatives associated with strategic communications training by the time research and teaching in Ukraine abruptly ceased due to the Russian attack of the country in March of 2022. Professor Valentino has shifted his efforts for the time being into a variety of service projects to help displaced students and scholars and is currently serving on a coordination committee for PEN USA in search of ways to help displaced Ukrainian writers.
After two years of Zoom conferences, Sonia Velázquez was thrilled to participate in person in the Texas Cervantes Symposium this past October. She spoke about the political importance of the prologue in Miguel de Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares. Following up on her love for the author's more unconventional works, Prof. Velázquez has published an article on El rufián dichoso, Cervantes' only hagiographic drama. It will appear as a chapter in Drawing the Curtain: Cervantes's Theatrical Revelations.
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