Julie Campbell

My volume, co-edited with Anne R. Larsen, Professor of French at Hope College, entitled Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, is now under contract and forthcoming with Ashgate Publishing in 2009.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters.

Edited by Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen

Women & Gender in the Early Modern World

An important contribution to growing scholarship on women’s participation in literary cultures, this essay collection concentrates on cross-national communities of letters to offer a comparative and international approach to early modern women’s writing. The essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures from several countries, ranging from Italy and France to the Low Countries and England. Individual essays investigate women from different social classes, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers; the collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and exploring familial, political, and religious communities. Taken together, these essays offer fresh ways of reading early modern women’s writing that consider such issues as the changing cultural geographies of the early modern world, women’s bilingualism and multilingualism, and women’s sense of identity mediated by local, regional, national, and transnational affiliations and conflicts.

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John Guzlowski

Our move to Danville, VA, was harder than I thought it would be. As soon as we arrived there, I came down with a biblical case of shingles (don't laugh!), and I am still trying to recover. I wrote about it at my Everything's Jake blog where I also posted a picture of the new house. You could also read there -- don't laugh -- about my 60th birthday .

Other than that we've been remodeling the house and enjoying some travelling (Las Vegas, Connecticut, and a cruise to the eastern Carribean). Mainly the vacations are excuses to gamble. Linda and I have become masters of Black Jack and Pai Gow Poker!

My writing? Well, the agent didn't like my novel about German soldiers on the eastern front in WWII because there wasn't enough there to interest women readers, so I am adding romance on his recommendation. It isn't easy. I also recently published a couple poems about my mom and her non-romantic experiences in the war ("The Evil that Men Do" and "My Aunt Sophie was 17") in the Chattahoochee Review. Last weekend, I did a poetry reading from my Lightning and Ashes book at American University in DC. It really went well.

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Letitia Moffit

I ran five 5K races and one 10K race this summer! Yes, there are probably more relevant things I could mention -- I seem to recall something about a summer creative writing camp, plus there must have been some manner of research and creative activity in there -- but this is the accomplishment that makes me most proud. Of course, sadly, I'm now on the DL with a sore Achilles's tendon, but I can still delight in boring people with details of my sports injury.

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Dana Ringuette

While not exactly all work or all pleasure, my travel this summer was still very enjoyable. I traveled to Santa Fe for the Summer Seminar of the Association of Departments of English (ADE), where, with Sue Wells from Temple, I led an all-day workshop for new chairs. In July, I traveled to Newport, Rhode Island for the 4th International Conference of the Henry James Society, for which I delivered a paper on James and Iris Murdoch. Great fun, great place. I had an article on scholarship, tenure, and promotion published in the Winter 2008 ADE Bulletin, and I recently learned that the article will be re-published in MLA’s Profession 2008. I also had accepted for publication, by The Henry James Review, an article on James’s three essays on the speech and manners of American women. It is, as they say, forthcoming.

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Tim Taylor

My response article, "A Comment on 'Pedagogical In Loco Parentis: Reflecting on Power and Parental Authority in the Writing Classroom,'" is published in the September issue of College English My research proposal, "A Call Unheard?‹The Efficacy of TYCA¹s 'Guidelines for the Academic Preparation of English Faculty at Two-Year Colleges,'" was accepted for the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication.

And this summer I was invited to be part of research panel for the Council of Writing Program Administrators. The panel's focus is to build stronger relationships between the Council of Writing Program Administrators and two-year college composition faculty.

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Angela Vietto

I have two new projects under way this fall: a research guide for undergraduates on the literature of the early American Republic (under contract to Layman Publishing for Facts on File) and an edition of two novels by Hannah Webster Foster, which I'll be co-editing with Jennifer Desiderio from Canisius College, for Broadview. Foster was the author of The Coquette, one of the top two U.S. best-sellers in the post-Revolutionary era; Jennifer and I will be publishing that novel together with Foster's only other novel, which has long been out of print, so we're pretty excited about the potential to bring this neglected text into the discussion of early American fiction.

These projects will give me a place to pour my emotional energy as I mourn the loss of my long-time companion, the Birdmobile. Ah well, at least certain graduate students who shall remain nameless can stop mocking me for driving a car they'd be embarrassed to own.

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Jennifer Rardin ('87)

Bitten to Death, the fourth novel in my series, went on sale August 12, and the fifth, One More Bite, is due out by February. This project is keeping me busy, but I'm not complaining! Through February, the series runs as follows:

• Once Bitten, Twice Shy
• Another One Bites the Dust
• Biting the Bullet
• Bitten to Death
• One More Bite

To read an excerpt and order any of the books, visit the Orbit Website

And thanks, from the bottom of my heart, to all who have sent words of appreciation and encouragement. It's one of the greatest joys of my life to be able to share my stories with you.

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