A Midsummer’s Dream: The Academic Adventures and Quests of Our English Dept. Students & Professors

Dr. Lubey spent the month of August at the Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, consulting the collection and writing an article on Hester Lynch Piozzi.

Piozzi, widely considered a failed author of historical, biographical, and etymological treatises, also wrote copious marginalia in many of the books she owned.

Dr. Lubey’s article examines the relationship between the sense of history Piozzi gives in her manuscript annotations and the historiography she develops in her 1801 world history _Retrospection_.

She hopes to place the article in an eighteenth-century scholarly journal by early next year.

When she wasn’t writing, Dr. Lubey developed a new affection for sheep and 6:30 am rambles through the beautiful gardens on the estate.

Dr. Lubey and her fellow Chawton scholars.

Dr. Mentz spent the summer with World Shakespeare Congress adventures, which had him in Stratford, and in London through the weekend. He saw Cymbeline, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Alchemist, and Faustus, during his time in Stratford by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and at the Globe Theatre in London.

On August 2nd, 2016 Dr. Mentz present a paper”Digesting Hamlet: Bodies and Binaries in the Early Modern Anthropocene” at the Seminar on Alimental Shakespeare.

Also, as the cherry on top, he went to the Sunday Matins service at Westminster Abbey, at which the sermon was delivered by Rev. Dr Paul Edmondson, who is both an academic and Anglican priest . . . and who works for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

After the sermon, a wreath was laid on the Shakespeare monument in Poet’s Corner, and Dame Janet Suzman read the “Our revels now are ended” speech from The Tempest.

For further reading about Dr. Mentz’s adventures, please visit his blog: http://stevementz.com/

Doctoral Candidate Stephanie Weaver took St. John’s University to Ireland, as she traveled to Galway Ireland to participate in the European Society for the Study of English Conference.

While in attendance, Stephanie presented a paper entitled “Global Positioning Systems in the Wizarding World: Mapping Locations of Liminality in Rowling’s Harry Potter Series. The paper examined Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the evident presentation of ecological restoration practices throughout the series, and how Rowling’s works participates in the discourse on environmental sustainability and “green theory,” placing Rowling in conversation with Tolkien and Lewis.

Overall, the presentation elicited useful feedback and connections with academics and fellow doctoral students on an international level, and resulted in the potential for future journal submissions.

While in Ireland, Stephanie also had a chance to participate in the celebrations of the centennial of the Easter Rising of 1916. The opportunity to be a witness to celebration of Irish culture proved to be a wonderful experience.

This particular international conference encouraged international interactions and established an international community of academics that Stephanie regards as a great first international conference experience.

Stephanie particularly wishes to acknowledge Dr. Mentz, Dr. Sicari, and Dr. Ganter for assisting her through the submission process that eventually resulted in a positive experience.

Doctoral Candidate Lisa M. Robinson‘s CFP was accepted for the 2016 Annual ASTR Conference (American Society for Theatre Research), in Minneapolis November 2016, for her paper “Unsex Me Here: Circulatory Gender Fluidity in Shakespearean Performance”.

Lisa’s paper focuses on the parallels between Early Modern gender designations and contemporary gender fluidity.

Using these notions, Lisa will examine single gender casting, most specifically seen in recent productions of “Taming of the Shrew”, The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s all-male production, in D.C. and the all-female production at “Shakespeare in the Park”, in Central Park NYC.

Doctoral Candidate Danielle M. Bacigalupo ventured to Leeds, England this summer, to speak at The 26^th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Heritage.

On route to Leeds, Danielle happily passed through Dublin, Ireland and met her Irish cousin for lunch during her layover.

At the conference, Danielle presented her paper “Woolf’s (Un)stable Identity: The Transposition of ‘Self’ through Clarissa’s Fluid and (Un)conscious Sexuality”, which was a continued analysis on Clarissa Dalloway’s fragmented sense of self and unstable identity. Danielle examined how Woolf’s protagonist fluidly transposes between two identities “Clarissa” and “Mrs. Dalloway”, which serve as the ephemeral impressions of both her past and present selves. Also, Danielle gave attention to the reorganization of self in the shifts between past and present, with which Clarissa/Mrs. Dalloway tries to stabilize her sense of self. Further, her paper focused on Woolf’s principal as an embodiment of self-questioning, fluid states of consciousness, and eccentric sexual/intimate happenstances.

During the conference, Danielle became friends with Woolfian scholars from various countries, Orit Naamany (Tel Aviv, Israel), Anne Byrne (Galway, Ireland), and Rosomond Rennie (Scotland).  She looks forward to hanging out with them again, in Reading 2017!

Before Danielle’s return to Queens, New York, she did a little sight-seeing around Leeds. She was especially thrilled to lose track of time in the 12^th Century picturesque ruins of Kirkstall Abbey, which was a Cistercian monastery built in 1152. It was disestablished during the threat of Henry VIII.