Faculty News

2005 - 2006

In June, Henry Alley read from his new novel, Men Touching, at the fifteenth annual Virginia Woolf Conference at Lewis and Clark College. In August, he also read from the book at the Coffee House Café in Salem. In September, he read from his other novel, Precincts of Light, at the In Other Words bookstore in Portland. This was part of a celebration of Gertrude Press, which has newly arrived in the city. In 2003, his story, "The Rembrandt Brotherhood," received honorable mention in the Richard Hall Memorial Contest, sponsored by the Lambda Literary Foundation, the organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender writers, and has now been accepted for publication by Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly.

Monique Balbuena presented her paper, "A Symbolist Kinah? Laments and Modernism in the Maghreb," to the fourteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem this summer. Before the congress, Balbuena also presented a paper at the precongress organized by the A. Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, titled "Sephardim in the Americas: An Agenda for a Comparative Research." There she delivered a version of her paper "Sepharad in Brazil: Between the Metaphorical and the Literal." Almost concurrently with the congress, Balbuena was also part of the Latin American delegation at the International Dialogue for Peace of Latin American, Israeli, and Palestinian Intellectuals, a series of encounters held in different cities, on the eve of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, and culminating with a stay in a kibbutz on the border with the Gaza strip. As an activity of both the congress and the dialogue for peace, a tertulia literaria (literary salon) -- titled Writing, Identity, and Gender in Latin America and Israel -- gave Balbuena the chance to read some of her own poems at a table that included Luisa Futoransky, Esther Seligson, Silvana Rabinovich, and Edith Goel, with comments by Saúl Sosnowski. Following the congress, Balbuena took part in the weeklong Continuing Workshop on University Teaching of Hebrew Language, organized by the International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization. The workshop theme this year was "Hebrew Language as a Theme in Literature and Culture."

Louise Bishop's entry on the myth of the flat earth will appear in Routledge's Medieval Misconceptions in 2006.

This summer, Frances Cogan worked on her new book, The First Ellis Island: Castle Garden, NYC, 1855-1890. During winter break Cogan will be presenting two three-day seminars on clear communication in business and the nature of problem analysis to IBM and Morgan Stanley employees.

David Frank, with colleagues James Crosswhite and Anne Laskaya of the English department, received a Williams Council grant to create a rhetoric program on writing, public speaking, and critical reasoning. Frank's "Arguing with God, Talmudic Discourse, and the Jewish Counter-Model: Implications for the Study of Argumentation" was published in volume 41 of Argumentation and Advocacy. His article, "Barack Obama's Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation," is forthcoming in Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2006.

In March, Toral Gajarawala presented her paper, "Miseducation: A Study of Caste and Color in the Classroom," at the Globalization, Transnationalism, and Cultural Studies Conference at Portland State University. This fall she presented a paper titled "The Space Behind the Door: Observations on Women and Mobility in Twentieth- Century Urdu Literature" as part of the UO series International Perspectives on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Roxann Prazniak's paper on the social and political history [1850-1930] of the lower Yangzi delta region, including Shanghai, as context for understanding the work of UO museum founder Gertrude Bass Warner was published in a conference collection, Ijiuerling niandai de Zhongguo, June 2005, by the Social Science Academic Press (China). In connection with a current project on social and artistic exchange between northern Italian city-states and Mongol-China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Prazniak attended a conference in Rome, September 2005, the fifth European Ecumenical China Conference, where she was able to speak with scholars working on records of the early Franciscan missions.

This summer, while he was enjoying a National Endowment for the Humanities research fellowship at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Daniel Rosenberg's new book Histories of the Future (Duke University Press) appeared. This volume, coedited with Susan Harding (University of California at Santa Cruz), contains a variety of essays on the ways in which visions of the future have changed over time. Rosenberg also traveled to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin to speak about his new book project, The Graphic Invention of Modern Time, and he was named editor-at-large for Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture.

In April, Ce Rosenow read from her poetry at Art Gone Wild Gallery's Second Sunday Series in Stayton, and at the Lane Literary Guild's Windfall Series, in Eugene. Rosenow also presented a paper, "'Two Speak Together': Percival Lowell's Travel Narratives and Amy Lowell's Poetry in Pictures of the Floating World," at the Pacific Northwest American Studies Association conference in Portland. In May she read from her poetry at the Paulina Springs Bookstore in Sisters. An article, "'Different Songs Sung Together': The Impact of Translation on Jose Juan Tablada," appeared in the May issue of Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique.

Sharon Schuman's commentary on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince appeared in the Eugene Register-Guard August 28, and her commentary on "Are Professors too Liberal" appeared in October in the Portland Oregonian. Schuman's review of Carolyn Lehman's book Strong at the Heart: How it Feels to Heal from Sexual Abuse appeared in the November issue of Permanente.

Helen Southworth is currently co-editing (with Elisa Sparks) "Virginia Woolf and The Art of Exploration: Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf" which took place at Lewis and Clark College in Portland in June. The volume will be published by Clemson University Digital Press in June 2006.

2004 - 2005

Daniel Rosenberg, assistant professor of history in the Clark Honors College, will spend his summer immersed in timelines. Winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer stipend, Rosenberg will conduct a broad survey of the history of timelines from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries for his new book, The Graphic Invention of Modern Time.

His research, which also is being supported by fellowships from the NEH and the Clark Library and Huntington Library in Los Angeles, challenges the idea that the timeline is a natural representation of historical time.

"My goal in this work is to put in to question the natural character of linear historical thinking and to provide alternatives to strictly linear thinking in the field of historiography," he said.

Rosenberg, who hopes to complete and publish his new book on the subject next year, explained that no image is more closely associated with history than the timeline. But this visual tool has yet to receive a proper historical treatment of its own.

"While forms of historical narrative have long been subject to literary and historical analysis, the form of the timeline has been ignored," he said. "Viewed from the broadest possible perspective, the timeline has a history that extends back hundreds or even thousands of years. It has roots in printed chronologies and genealogies, calendars and canon tables, as well as traditional forms of narrative imagery depicting historical events and sequences."

Rosenberg's current research also focuses on a study of the groundbreaking Chart of Biography, published by English scientist and dissenting theologian, Joseph Priestley, in 1765.

Henry Alley recently gave a presentation of a new short story, "The Physically Challenged," in the Creative Writing Program Reading Series. He also gave two workshops in January, the Kidd Lecture and a master workshop. In addition, Professor Alley's story, "The Summer of the Beautiful Pink Hydrangea," was nominated for the 2004 Pushcart Award. He has also been invited to read from his fiction at the 2005 Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf.

Monique Balbuena organized the panel, "What's So Minor About Jewish Literatures?", at the annual Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Chicago, where she also delivered the paper, "Reading Jewish Literatures." Additionally, Professor Balbuena presented the paper, "Is There a Jewish Brazilian Poetry?", in the panel organized by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese at the Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia. Recently, she spoke at the Oregon Electric Station in the forum organized by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Balbuena spoke about "Tropical Voices: Constructing a Jewish Latin American Identity." Her text, "Brazil: The Hidden Jewish State," was featured in The Jewish Experience, a magazine published by the Center for Jewish History in New York. Balbuena's essay, "Sepharad in Brazil: Between the Metaphorical and the Literal," will appear in Modern Jewish Studies.

Louise Bishop delivered a paper at "Medicine Across Cultures: 600-1600," the Nineteenth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference at Columbia University in December. Professor Bishop's topic was "Early Modern Medicine: Self-help and State Authority in Thomas Elyot's Castle of Health (1541)." In March, she organized and chaired a panel on the medieval theories of disease (how the brain works, sexual dysfunction, and the analysis of urine) at the Medieval Academy meeting in Miami. Her article, "Dangerous Translation in the Canon Yeoman's Prologue and Tale," will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Chaucer Journal.

Joseph Fracchia recently published an essay entitled "On Transhistorical Abstractions and the Intersection of Historical Theory and Social Critique" in Historical Materialism, which will feature his essay "Beyond the Human Nature Debate: Human Corporeal Organization as the 'First Fact' of Historical Theory" in its next issue. Scheduled to appear in May in an essay collection entitled Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, is his own essay on "The Untimely Timeliness of Rosa Luxemburg" and his translation of Kosmas Psychopedis's "Sozialkritik und die Logik der Revolution: Von Kant zu Marx und von Marx zu Uns." "Does Culture Evolve?", an essay he co-authored with geneticist Richard Lewontin. This piece is scheduled for republication in the new edition of Elliot Sober's Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology.

David Frank's article in the Journal of Communication and Religion, Vol. 26 (2003), "The Jewish Countermodel: Talmudic Argumentation, The New Rhetorical Project, And The Classical Tradition of Rhetoric," won the Religious Communication Association's best article award.

Dayo Mitchell returned to her alma mater, Williams College, in March where she gave a keynote address, "Academia vs. the Real World?" at the 15th anniversary of the Williams College Multi-Cultural Center. Professor Mitchell also participated in several programs that encourage minority and lower-income students to pursue graduate education.

Roxann Prazniak is currently finishing a paper on the social and political developments that shaped both the Shanghai art market and activities of Gertrude Bass Warner, donor of the University of Oregon's Asian art collection. Juxtaposing Warner's lantern slide collection and letters with contemporary events such as the Boxer Uprising, the advent of modern advertising, and the emergence of commercial art shops, she examines the translocal spaces in which the modern intellectual project of Sino-U.S. exchange originated. Professor Prazniak's paper was delivered in draft form at a conference on Republican China in Yinchuan, Ningxia, July 2004 and will be published with the conference proceedings by the Institute of Modern History in June 2005. In October, she chaired and was discussant for a panel at the Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies held this year at the University of Washington in Seattle. The panel was titled "From Revolution to Nation Reconstruction: The Process of De/Politicization Republican China, 1920s-1940s."

Daniel Rosenberg recently published two articles, "Hétérochronies" and "L'avenir des mots," in Issue 53 of Esse: Arts + Opinions (a special issue on Utopia and Dystopia.) The first concerns the relationship between local and global imaginations of the future; the second, electronic technologies and the future of writing. Professor Rosenberg also delivered a New Year's address to the Eugene Rotary Club, titled "Futures, Past and Present." He also recently received two research awards, a summer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a two-month fellowship at the Huntington Library in California to conduct research for a new book, The Graphic Invention of Modern Time. The book will explore the origins of the modern notion of historical linearity. The project focuses on visual representations of history and the emergence of the convention of the timeline during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Ce Rosenow had two poetry readings in April, at Art Gone Wild Gallery's Second Sunday Series in Stayton and Lane Literary Guild's Windfall Series in Eugene. She delivered a conference paper presentation: " 'Two Speak Together': Percival Lowell's Travel Narratives and Amy Lowell's Poetry in Pictures of the Floating World," at the Pacific American Studies Association in Portland. Rosenow will host another poetry reading on May 6 at the Paulina Springs Bookstore in Sisters. Her article, " 'Different Songs Sung Together': The Impact of Translation on Jose Juan Tablada," will be published in May in Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique, 9 (2005).

Sharon Schuman's opinion editorial in The Register Guard on the Inauguration was excerpted in the USA Today's Forum section in January. In March, she wrote a column in The Oregonian Commentary section on tuition at the University of Oregon, which was part of a debate with columnist David Reinhard, called "Breaking the Bank." This spring, Professor Schuman is teaching a public speaking class, EdLd 199, which she developed over the last two years as part of the Residential Academy Pilot Project.

The Eugene Human Rights Program recently named Svitlana Kravchenko a Hometown Human Rights Hero at the celebration of the 56th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The award recognized her for her "Human Rights for ALL" program. She was also the keynote speaker at the celebration, speaking on "A Precious Right to Vote" in the context of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

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