Ph.D. candidate Nick Valvo was awarded a prestigious American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship for his project, titled "Penurious Payments: Debt, Dependence, and Communal Form in Eighteenth-Century Britain." Valvo's dissertation focuses on the literary history of debt in the eighteenth century in literary texts by Defoe, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Garrick and Chatterton, and homiletic and controversialist texts by Tillotson, Wesley, Sherlock, South and Challoner.

Dyani Johns Taff will spend the summer teaching at the Skidmore Summer Program, which focuses on small, intense classes in liberal arts and studio arts. Johns Taff will teach a writing seminar and a second class on poetry. She is currently at work on the first chapter of her dissertation, which examines the intersections between translation, conversion, and navigation in early modern English and Spanish texts.

Barbara Zimbalist’s essay, "Performing Sacred Speech in the Visioenenboek of Hadewijch of Brabant," receieved the Graduate Student Essay Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. Zimbalist has essays in two forthcoming anthologies: 'Diuerse Imaginaciouns of Cristes Life': Devotional Culture in England 1300-1550, edited by Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry and forthcoming from Turnhout and Reading Memory and Identity in the Texts of Medieval European Holy Women, edited by Margaret Cotter-Lynch and Bradley Herzog and forthcoming from Palgrave.

Austin Smith (M.A. 2009) received a two-year Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction at Stanford University. Smith's poems have been published by the Sewanee Review and Midwest Quarterly.

Accepting new job offers are…

2012

Kyle Pivetti will be starting in the fall as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 17th and 18th century literature at Norwich University in Vermont.  

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela has accepted a tenure-track job as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she will hold a joint appointment in the English Department and the Comparative Literature Program.

Gina Caison has accepted a tenure-track job in 20th/21st-Century Southern literature at Georgia State University.

Ryan Fong has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at Kalamazoo College.

2011

Alysia Garrison, is now Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

John Garrison, is now Assistant Professor of English at Carroll University.

Andrew Hageman, is a ACM-Mellon Postdoctoral fellow in English and Environmental Studies at Luther College.

Darcy Irvin, is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Puget Sound.