Announcements

Professor Eric Rasmussen has been named a Foundation Professor

Many of you have already heard the excellent news that Professor Eric Rasmussen has been named a Foundation Professor. Please mark your calendars to join us to celebrate Eric's award. Eric will receive this honor at the Honor the Best ceremony, which will be held on Tuesday, May 14, at 3:00 p.m. in the Joe Crowley Student Union Ballroom. Join us if you can!

Details:

Date:Tuesday, May 14th

Time: 3:00 PM

Location: Joe Crowley Student Union Ballroom

 

 

 

Posted April 24, 2013

Professor Ashley Marshall Publishes The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770

Congratulations to Professor Ashley Marshall on the publication of her new book, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770, from the Johns Hopkins University Press. Thomas Lockwood of the University of Washington enthuses that "this is a remarkable work of scholarship: a revaluation of the whole idea and scope of satire as actually produced in the Restoration and eighteenth century. These chapters are notable for their command of this material, their analytical depth, their nuanced reading of the historical character of satire over generational passages of time, and their clear-sighted power of synthesis in putting all this disorderly mass of material before the reader in such vivid form. I do not see how any serious scholarship on satire will be able to proceed henceforth without reference to Marshall's book." Howard Weinbrot of the University of Wisconsin is similarly effusive in his praise: "The study is important, persuasive, lively, learned, and a major advance upon scholarship concerning English satiric theory and practice from 1658 to 1770."

 

Posted April 25, 2013

Reception to Honor Professor Coake, winner of this year's Mousel-Feltner Award for Excellence in Research and/or Creative Activity

We are pleased to congratulate Professor Coake, winner of this year's Mousel-Feltner Award for Excellence in Research and/or Creative Activity. Please join us for a reception to honor Chris and other College of Liberal Arts award recipients:

Details:

Date: Wednesday, May 1st

Time: 4:00

Location: Graduate / Faculty Reading Room (#422) in the Knowledge Center
University of Nevada, Reno Campus

 

 

Posted April 26, 2013

Book Launch: Mending the Moon by Susan Palwick

Melinda Soto, aged sixty-four, vacationing in Mexico, is murdered by a fellow American tourist. Back in her hometown of Reno, Nevada, she leaves behind her adopted son, Jeremy, whom she rescued from war-torn Guatamala when he was a toddler—just one of her many causes over the years. And she leaves behind a circle of friends: Veronique, the academic stuck in a teaching job from which she can't retire; Rosemary, who's losing her husband to Alzheimer's and who's trying to lose herself in volunteer work; Henrietta, the priest at Rosemary's and Melinda's church.

Jeremy already had a fraught relationship with his charismatic mother and the people in her orbit. Now her death is tearing him apart, and he can barely stand the rituals of remembrance that ensue among his mother’s friends. Then the police reveal who killed Melinda:  a young man who flew home to his parents in Seattle and drowned himself just days later.

It's too much. Jeremy's not the only one who can't deal. Friendships fray. But the unexpected happens: an invitation to them all, from the murderer's mother, to come to Seattle for his memorial. It's ridiculous. And yet, somehow, each of them begins to see in it a chance to heal. Aided, in peculiar ways, by Jeremy's years-long obsession with the comic-book hero Comrade Cosmos, and the immense cult of online commentary it's spawned.

Shot through with feeling and inventiveness, this is a novel of the odd paths that lead to home.

Praise

"Reminiscent of Gail Godwin and Madeleine L'Engle, this is a brave and brilliant book."
--Jo Walton on Mending the Moon

"Award-winning fantasy author Palwick has written a haunting tale of family, friendship, and the philosophy of loss that will stimulate book club discussions."
--Library Journal on Mending the Moon

About Susan Palwick

Susan Palwick's debut novel, Flying in Place, won the Crawford Award for best fantasy debut. Her second novel, The Necessary Beggar, won the American Library Association’s Alex Award. She lives with her husband in Reno, Nevada.

Details:

Date: Monday, May 14th

Time: 6:30 - 8:00 PM

Location: Sundance Books
121 California Ave Reno, NV 89509
(775) 786-1188

Posted April 24, 2013

Professor Keniston Publishes November Wasps: Elegies

This summer, Finishing Line Press is publishing November Wasps: Elegies by Ann Keniston, Reno resident and English professor at UNR since 2002. This sequence of 24 poems, written over the seven years since the death of Keniston’s mother, chronicles a process of grieving that moves from anticipation through shock to reflection and distance. A deeply personal chronicle of Keniston’s relationship with her beloved but deeply private mother, the volume is also an attempt to make sense of larger mysteries of loss, grieving, and absence. In “Egret,” the opening poem, an egret glimpsed at Virginia Lake amid “leaves [that] have gotten loose, / their stems having grown brittler over weeks” recalls the poet’s act of “lifting up my weightless  mother / to set her down.” The late-season wasps of the title poem “thrust[ing] at the window glass” offer an analogy for the poet’s attempt to “excise the easy, early moves of grief, / to make things harsher.”

Local poet and fellow UNR professor Steve Gehrke offers this praise: “November Wasps takes grief apart and examines it in all its intricacies and contradictions. It's a book that balances absence and presence, grief and love, loss and praise. Keniston strips away all clutter and superficial ornamentation to create poems of exactness and hard-earned clarity. While the first-person speaker is everywhere, there is an ethical and rigorous detachment, a rejection of self-pity that creates the sense of powerful feeling being held in check. It’s the intensity of that feeling that draws us to the poems, but it’s the holding back that devastates. November Wasps is a book of aching and mesmerizing truth.”

The book ($12) is available for preorder now from Finishing Line Press. After its publication in late August, it will be available at Sundance Books.

Ann Keniston is the author of the 2005 poetry collection, The Caution of Human Gestures, praised for its “superb match” between “transparency of word” and “density of thought” (Tom Sleigh) and a voice “at once piercing and unflinchingly objective” (Gail Mazur). Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Interim, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review Online, Southwest Review, and elsewhere, and she has received grants from Reno’s Sierra Arts Foundation and the Nevada Arts Council. Originally from the Boston area, she has taught English at UNR for eleven years. Coeditor of The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology as well as a scholar of contemporary American poetry, she lives in Reno with her husband and two teenage sons. More information about her publications can be found at: http://keniston.blogs.unr.edu

 

 

Posted June 9, 2013

Professors Mardock and Rasmussen contribute to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt

Professors James Mardock and Eric Rasmussen have published a co-authored essay in the Cambridge University Press collection Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, which is receiving rave reviews: "The Shakespeare debate has never been hotter" (London Evening Standard). "Irrefutable evidence that Shakespeare really was Shakespeare" (The New Statesman). James Shapiro of Columbia University observes that "Until now no book has provided the comprehensive evidence necessary to satisfy those 'Reasonable Doubters'."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted May 08, 2013