Faculty Accomplishments

Daniel Shank Cruz’s dissertation “A Third Way to Change: Violence Against Whites in African American Novels From the 1970s” won the 2010 Harlan R. Teller Award for Best Dissertation from Northern Illinois University. He has essays forthcoming in Italian Americana and Short Story, and will present a paper on Miriam Toews’s novel Summer of My Amazing Luck at the 2012 International Mennonite/s Writing Conference in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Sean Desilets's article "Cocteau's Female Orpheus" is forthcoming in Literature/Film Quarterly. He delivered a paper called “Pretty Pow: Femininity, Waste, and Reading in Kiss Me Deadly” at the Popular Culture Association Conference in Boston in April.

In January, Georgi Donavin’s book, Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England, came out. Currently, she is completing her term as president of the Medieval Association of the Pacific and is attending the annual convention in Santa Clara, CA. In May, Georgi will attend the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, for which she’s organized two sessions for The Gower Project on the poetry of John Gower. She will also be presenting a paper on one of Gower’s shorter Latin poems entitled “Rex Celi Deus.”

Peter Goldman’s article “The Winter’s Tale and Antitheatricalism: Shakespeare’s Rehabilitation of the Public Scene” was published in the fall 2011 issue of Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology. His presentation on “Shakespeare’s Gentle Apocalypse: The Tempest” was accepted for the 2012 Generative Anthropology Summer Conference to held this year at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, on July 6-9th. Peter has also been awarded a Henkels Teaching Fellowship by Westminster College (funded by the John and Jean Henkels Endowment) for summer 2012 to study using visual arts for teaching literature, history, and philosophy. He’s looking forward to exploring the connections between figural art and literary, historical, and philosophical texts; and using figural art in various creative ways in his future classes.

Susan Gunter’s book Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James (Un. of Nebraska Press) came out in March 2009, receiving a feature-length positive review by Colm Toibin in the June/July 2009 issue of New York Review of Books. Susan participated in the centennial of William James’s death this summer at Harvard. She is also writing an essay and giving a talk on his engagement, along with a group of 11 others including Harvard president Drew Faust, writers Gore Vidal and Louis Menand, Director of the New York Public Library Jean Strouse, Cornel West, and others. Susan has an essay coming out in the Henry James Review this fall, “Henry James, Peggy James, and Circulating Desire.”

Chris LeCluyse attended the Modern Language Association conference in Seattle to complete his final term as a regional delegate to the MLA Delegates Assembly. He helped organize the first Utah Community Literacy and Writing Consortium staff retreat, which brought together tutors and directors from the Westminster, the University of Utah, the Salt Lake Community College Student Writing Center, and the SLCC Community Writing Center. In March he presented “Writing Consultants as Disciplinary Translators” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis and took five writing consultants to the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference at Utah State University. He continues to serve as president of the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association.

Jeff McCarthy was invited to lead a seminar at this year’s Modernist Studies Association conference where 20 professors and graduate students worked with him on “Modernism & Nature.” His review of George Handley’s Home Waters appeared in Western American Literature. The University of Edinburgh Journal will publish his essay “Reading Green: How Ecocriticism Works.” Also forthcoming is the essay “Beyond Romantic Nature” which will appear in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. His op-ed “How to Stop Ski Resort Expansion” appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune and urges everyone to oppose Talisker’s Ski-Link initiative.

Fatima Mujcinovic will deliver a keynote speech at the interdisciplinary arts and sciences conference, Confutati 2012, held at the University of Utah April 13th-15th, 2012. Responding to the conference theme “Mapping Effaced Identities,” Fatima will discuss the potential role of minority literature in expressing oppositional forms of identity, cultural practices, and political positioning. Her talk is entitled “US Latino/a Literature: Writing on the Margins, Mapping New Identities.”

Lance Newman's book, The Grand Canyon Reader,  was published in October 2011 by the University of California Press with support from a Gore Research Grant from Westminster College. An article, “Cosmopolitics and the Radical Pastoral: A Conversation with Lawrence Buell, Hsuan Hsu, Anthony Lioi, and Paul Outka,” which Newman co-authored with Laura Walls appeared in the Journal of Ecocriticism in July 2011. He delivered a paper titled “Transcendental Historicism and Race in Lydia Maria Child’s The First Settlers of New England,” at the Modern Language Association Convention in Seattle, WA, in January 2012.

Jennifer Ritter co-presented a paper, “Writing Centers and the Resident ESL Writer: Mapping New Routes,” at the Symposium on Second Language Writing in November 2009 at Arizona State University. The discussion addressed pedagogical approaches to tutoring ESL writers whose literacy and language learning experiences have not adequately prepared them for college writing. Also, Jennifer joined the editorial board of The International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching and Research

Natasha Saje accompanied five Ellipsis editors (Lauren Johnson, Thomas Johnson, Cyndi Lloyd, Monica Walker, Mikki Whitworth) to the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Chicago over spring break. There, they distributed 400 back issues and otherwise spread the word about the magazine and Westminster College to 10,000 attendees, as well as listened to readings and panel discussions, and visited the other 500 tables in the book fair.