A Note from the Chair

As Syracuse University has returned to a new kind of normal, one of the most exciting things I have observed as the chair of the Department of English is the renewed demand for our courses. Both our upper and lower division courses are more regularly filling up to capacity. This is particularly striking in our lower division courses, which seem to fill up well before the close of registration each semester.

This is not surprising given the power of these courses to address the questions our students are confronting in their lives and the concerns that they carry with them into the classroom. The literature, film and screen studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and creative writing courses that we offer are giving students the language, space, skills, and community through which they can both deepen their understanding of and begin to understand their relation to the issues of social inequality, racism, and sexism exposed by the unequal effects of the global pandemic, the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Buffalo massacre in May 2022, the #MeToo Movement and the backlash to it, and the environmental crises of wildfires, heat waves, and the frequent occurrence of “one hundred year floods” as effects of climate change.

Our students use their English course work and distinction projects to explore these issues in powerful and creative ways. 2022 graduate Sophia Perida wrote her English Thesis and Honors Capstone Project on the intersection of racial and climate grief in Octavia Butler’s novel, The Parable of the Sower. Sophia Perida’s analysis of Butler’s novel shows that it offers a creative model of productive grief through community, thus offering us all a path through the devastating losses the narrator—and we the readers—are forced to confront. Another Distinction and Honors student, Marissa Solomon, examined the way that the sexist and misogynist ideas that she calls “taming ideology” are reborn in new forms today by comparing Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew to its ostensibly more progressive, updated film version, 10 Things I Hate About You.

Professor Patty Roylance’s ENG 407 students worked with the Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections and produced essays on historical texts that engage contemporary issues. Cody Benbow rereads E.W. Dwight’s Memoirs of Henry Obookiah (1818) in a way that, while “recognizing the racist colonial logics and legacies underpinning the text and what the book was made to do, also seeks to uncover how Memoirs, when read as an embodied (re)presentation of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, might also evade or resist those logics and insist on Kanaka presence and life” (Benbow). Another student in Professor Roylance’s class, Sarah Deitch, examines the journal of a World War I surgeon who recorded the natural sounds and lights around him each evening as a way of keeping his psychological bearings in the face of the disarray of the battlefield.

In my ENG 192 Gender and Literary Texts course this spring, a first year student and new Creative Writing major, fuses the creative and critical in a way that explores her own embodied subjectivity in relation to the performances that are demanded by normative femininity on a minute-by-minute basis, even as she also explores that of the characters of Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Real Women Have Bodies” and Eli Clare’s essay, “Reading Across the Grain.” These are just examples of our students’ stellar work. 

Through their English studies,our students accept the often heavy responsibility of the current moment in ways that challenge all of us to use the critical, theoretical, and creative tools we have acquired to forge a better understanding of this world and, through that, a better world.  We would love to hear how you as Syracuse University English alumni are doing the same.  If you are willing to share your story, please do so.

-Coran Klaver, Chair of English

Faculty News

The achievements of the English Department faculty this year are almost too many and too great to account for, but we’ll try.

·      Professor Scott Manning Stevens, Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, was the recipient of a 1.5-million-dollar grant to create a Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice at SU. He also received the 2022 Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence Award in the category of Faculty Excellence and Scholarly Distinction. This award is intended for faculty who have made extraordinary contributions as collaborators in work of intellectual richness that has the potential for future impact. He is the first citizen of the Mohawk Nation to receive the award.

Professor Scott Manning Stevens, recipient of the Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence Award

·      Professor Silvio Torres-Saillant, as a member of the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Latino Scholarly Advisory Committee, he contributed to the Smithsonian Latino Gallery, a 4,500-square-foot exhibition space being constructed in the Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

·      Professor Carol Fadda received the Excellence in Graduate Education Faculty Recognition for her outstanding work with graduate students.

·      Professor Dorri Beam received the Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship.

·      Professor Michael Goode has been promoted to Full Professor this year. He also has been appointed Tolley Professor for the Humanities.

·      Professor Pat Moody has been recognized for 50 years of service to the university.

Books published this year:

Chris Forster, Modernism and its Media

Michael Goode, Romantic Capabilities

Brooks Haxton, Mister Toebones

Dana Spiotta, Wayward

Undergraduate Student Awards

The English Undergraduate Program awards numerous yearly prizes to students for varying academic accomplishments. Here they are:

MARGARET Y. CRAGG PRIZE, Sophia Perida; JOAN GARFINKEL MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP, Yasmin Nayrouz and Kailey Norusis; SULLIVAN SCHOLARSHIP, Hannah Gardner; LAURETTA H. MCCAFFREY PRIZE, Hannah Deichler; ANTHONY J. PIETRAFESA PRIZE, Hannah Deichler; JEAN MARIE RICHARDS PRIZE, Sophia Menes; NU SIGMA NU Cody Benbow and Yasmin Nayrouz.

A SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR INAUGURAL ENGLISH UNDERGRADUATE AMBASSADORS: Samuel Baylow, Hannah Deichler, Rachel Ferrera, Ivy Lin, Sofia Menes, Yasmin Nayrouz, Kailey Noruris, Sophia Perida, and Madison Tyler. 

“What Dreams Are Made Of:” A Senior English Major’s Semester Abroad in Italy

Cold, tired, hungry, bitter, and slightly nauseous, I landed in Florence, Italy, for the beginning of my study abroad semester with only one thing on my mind: the iconic American teen comedy film The Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003).

As any person from my generation who grew up with excellent taste in film could tell you, the movie chronicles the adventures of Disney’s Lizzie McGuire during a school trip studying abroad in Italy. The audience watches as Lizzie navigates accidental stardom, lying lip-synching celebrities, and, perhaps most harrowing of all, the impending end of her junior-high career. Then the movie ends with a moving performance of the earworm classic, “What Dreams Are Made Of,” in which Lizzie McGuire and her pop-singer doppelganger tell their young audience – you guessed it!– what dreams are made of.

Almost two decades after this movie came out, the connection it created in my psyche between studying abroad in Italy and the fulfillment of one’s dreams is apparently as solid as ever. I’m sure my relating to the end of Lizzie’s junior-high experience as a senior at the end of an undergraduate experience myself also contributes to the connection. And despite somehow managing to resist the urge to launch my own revolutionary singing career in Europe, I did often find myself walking through the streets of Italy reflecting on the study abroad experience using the language Lizzie taught me – that is, is this experience really what dreams are made of?

At the end of this semester, I can safely say Lizzie might have been onto something. As an English major, studying abroad might seem like a strange decision to make for one’s undergraduate career: Why go away to study something you could study in Syracuse? I am lucky enough to say that this is my second semester studying abroad, and I would not trade either of those experiences for anything. In the classrooms of the SU Florence Center at the Villa Rossa, I was able to continue making academic progress in English and Literature courses that focused on prose and poetry, diversity, otherness, Tuscany, and traveling. Beyond the classrooms, I gained a more nuanced appreciation for the English language, linguistics, etymology, the power of literature and connection, and effective communication in general. There is truly nothing like badly playing charades at a grocery store, trying to buy a bottle of shampoo your first week alone in a foreign country, to make you appreciate your work as an English major.

Is studying abroad in a foreign country always wonderful? Of course not. Forget about worrying about what dreams are made of when the language barriers alone are occasionally enough to make you question if you should have left the States at all. You have to psyche yourself up just to order coffee some mornings. You feel awkward when you need to ask for directions to use the restroom. You are exhausted after dinners with your homestay family because your brain is constantly fighting for its life over a bowl of pasta trying to understand even one sentence exchanged while everyone talks over each other and the TV playing in the background.

But is studying abroad in a foreign country always worth it? I think so – at least, with the right perspective. You frequent a coffee bar enough to learn the names of the baristas there and they learn yours in return, and as the months pass by, you realize the conversations are becoming longer and more Italian. Or one day, an Italian tourist family from a different region asks you for directions on the street and you are actually able to help them in their language. You brag to everyone you know for the next week that you did this successfully. And you develop so many inside jokes with your homestay family during those weekday dinners, there are some nights you spend hours at the table laughing so hard with them that half of you are crying by the time you all have dessert.

As The Lizzie McGuire Movie’s song ends, Lizzie and her doppelganger sing one of my favorite lines in the movie: “Yesterday my life was duller/ Now everything’s technicolor.” Arguably, this encompasses what the study abroad experience was all about to me, and maybe even what the English degree is all about to me, and really even what the liberal arts education as a whole can be all about, too. I like to think that at least some of the joy in pursuing this sort of experience and work is rooted in the understanding that one’s perspective on the world can always be more expansive, more nuanced, more inclusive, more vivid, and more connected with others. I am grateful that my semester abroad in Italy and my time pursuing this English degree have helped me develop the skills and perspective I need to see my life in “technicolor,” and I encourage anyone else who is privileged enough to pursue the same opportunities as me to use their time at SU to do the same.

-Sophia Perida, English and Textual Studies and History B.A., ’22

New English Course Offerings

The undergraduate English department would like to highlight a few new popular English courses. These courses filled up nearly instantaneously, and so will be offered regularly to interested students.

●   ENG 164: Children’s Literature, with Dr. Katherine Kidd

In the Spring 2022 semester, ENG 164 was brought back in the undergraduate course listing by Florencia (Flor) Lauria, a fourth-year English Ph.D. graduate student whose research centers around contemporary Latinx and Native American studies. In particular, one aspect of Flor’s research focuses on identifying the borders of what is conventionally considered “normal” or human. With that focus in mind, Flor created the ENG 164 syllabus and incorporated many genres in children’s literature (e.g., fairytales, picture books, fantasy, graphic novels) for students to read, historicize, analyze, critique, and engage in discussion about the underlying, often negative themes within various texts. In doing so, students can expect to learn how to “make sense of the things [they] grew up with and as adults, [they might] take issues with” and “denaturalize” concepts that are taken for granted.

●   ENG 300 (M001): Creating Characters, with Professor Jonathan Dee

For students who are unaware of such, Professor Jonathan Dee teaches fiction writing in the SU graduate MFA program. He is also an author of eight novels. For the fall 2022 semester, Professor Dee decided to create an undergraduate Creative Writing course that would allow students to “have a deeper understanding of one of the most basic building blocks of [writing]” and become better writers. The course will center around the basics of how to write and create characters as students will read and examine some pieces of literature in addition to producing some of their own writing.

When asked about what works of literature students will read, Professor Dee provided an example: “We’ll read The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith and try to figure out how she makes this very unlikely, sociopathic, homicidal figure seem not only real but sympathetic. Then we’ll look at the movie version and try to identify some of the tools filmmakers have that writers don’t (and vice versa) when it comes to making fictional characters seem convincing.” Based on Professor Dee’s response, we hope students are interested in what the course will offer and gain helpful insights from a professional and highly respected writer.

●   ENG 300 (M002): The Poetry of Letters & Dreams, with Professor Jules Gibbs

Another ENG 300 course offered in the fall is with Professor Jules Gibbs, a poet and Creative Writing faculty member. Professor Gibbs became interested in “the unconscious mind and how it governs us” and how poetry can “act [as] an intermediary” for such in dreams and letters. Hence, this course was created.

In this course, students will be read various pieces of literature (e.g., Horace’s epistles, Berryman’s Dream Songs, Emily Dickinson, Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and more) and practice writing techniques from these pieces.

“I hope this course opens up an imaginative space for students that provides a kind of respite from the tyrannies of our day.” Professor Gibbs said. “Dreaming will be encouraged!”

●   ENG 345: Critical Theory, with Professor Ethan Madarieta

Although Professor Ethan Madarieta is a relatively new SU English professor, he is well-versed in (queer and Afro) Latina/o/x literature and Indigenous literature and philosophies of Abya Yala, more specifically, the Mapuche people in what is now Chile and Argentina. In addition to teaching courses related to his expertise, for the fall semester, Professor Madarieta decided to create a new course, ENG 345, to teach students more about Critical Theory.

“Every course I teach is informed by Critical Theory and we read Critical Theory in every course.” Professor Madarieta said. “I created this course because I believe many people have heard about Critical Theory but do not know what it is, where it comes from, what it does, and what we can do with it. Or they might think it is too difficult to understand.”

“[S]ome people feel Critical Theory is purely academic and separate from their communities and community experiences, but it has always been an integral part of cultural and social practices, political action, and activism,” he added. “I want to share with students that Critical Theory is not separate from life, from practice, but is practice and offers us ways of living and ways of understanding life.”

In this course, students will learn more about theories pertaining to gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, and culture. This course will also explore colonialism, slavery, consciousness, memory, feelings and emotions, dispossession, genocide, economics, governance, and systems of knowledge. Students will read extensively from many authors, some of which are Audra Simpson (Kahnawake Mohawk), Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Gĩkũyũ).

“Reading and learning Critical Theory might sound hard, but I promise you it is no harder than living in the world,” Professor Madarieta said. “In fact, I believe this process– of learning and unlearning– can help us become better people, to love and live better and more ethically.”

To take this course, students should have already taken ENG 242.

–Ivy Lin, Creative Writing and History B.A., ’23

The English Education Dual Major

Hannah Deichler and Sofia Menes are both future high school English teachers dual majoring in English and Secondary Education in the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education, respectively.

Syracuse offers a dual major program for students interested in becoming future secondary educators that allow students to take both education and specific content area classes. Over the last three and half years, we have both completed our English majors, taking ten English classes with many of the professors in the department. Alongside these English classes, we have also taken the education courses that have taught us about the history of education, how to teach, and have placed us in schools to put that teaching into action in a hands-on situation.

As individuals who have known that we wanted to teach English since high school, Syracuse offering this dual major was the main factor in both of our decision to attend SU. Not only were we able to do exactly what we wanted, but we also would be able to take classes and have access to esteemed faculty in both the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education. Because the School of Education’s Secondary Education program puts us in the field as student teachers, starting as early as our first year, we were able to immediately apply our growing skills in English directly in the classroom. We simultaneously developed our skills as teachers as we were also growing as readers and writers ourselves in our English classes. 

As student teachers, we have been able to apply what we have learned in the university’s English classrooms in high school and middle school classrooms in the Syracuse area. Through the classes that we have taken in the English department, we have learned countless strategies and skills to help develop our writing, content that we can use in our classrooms, and classroom management styles. We have been able to utilize everything that we have learned as students in English classrooms as we transition to becoming teachers of English ourselves.

What we have learned in our English courses, however, is not limited to only being used in the classroom. We utilize these skills every day in many ways. For one, being a good communicator is essential to any student or adult. Throughout the day, we all find ourselves in situations where communication is key– whether that be emailing a professor or coworker or thanking the barista who made your coffee. Communication is also key in the interviewing process for jobs. In interviews, we have found ourselves equipped with the knowledge and skills of how to communicate and express our ideas in a clear manner due to the experiences we have had in our English classes. Discussing difficult texts and ideas in our English classes has provided us with the skills necessary to find ways to not only communicate ideas clearly in our own classrooms but also in the broader world as well. Our English classes have provided us with the skills necessary to be effective verbal communicators and have provided us with the opportunity to develop and hone our skills in written communication. Whether it be through writing our resumes, cover letters, lesson plans, or professional emails, we have been able to grow as writers and communicators. While it may seem simple, some of the skills taught in English courses provide students with strategies for improving everyday communication.

-Hannah Deichler and Sofia Menes, both dual majors in English and English Education, ‘22

Banned Books: An SU English Perspective

This September, the English Department held its first Banned Books Reading in a number of years. This event revival coincided with increased book banning and censorship efforts across the country. 

From the desks of our English classrooms, we were all taught about the dangers of banning books. Many of us have read Fahrenheit 451 and many have created projects centered on various banned books. The immorality of book banning is a doctrine lectured in many of our high schools. Therefore, we view book banning as a fringe issue, a problem that gets one news article a year and then falls into the back of our minds. However, 2022 has proved that book banning is not a fringe issue, but an overt attack deployed to resist reading material that asks people to question their prejudices and the status quo.

The most prominent book banning is occurring in the state legislature in Florida. Two bills passed by the state have led to a wave of books being banned in classrooms across the state. The first bill, the Stop WOKE Act, approved by lawmakers in March, attempts to disrupt critical race theory being taught in the classroom. In reality, critical race theory is a graduate-level subject that is not being taught in any classroom of a primary education school; what these lawmakers really mean is anything that honestly depicts our history of racism. Simply put, the bill uses critical race theory as an umbrella term to describe any mentioning of civil rights or race studies, thereby limiting the teaching of those subjects under the guise of protecting children.

The second bill, known by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, seeks to ban any discussion of non-normative gender or sexuality with students. Both bills have led to the banning of reading material; most recently, the Stop WOKE Act was used to ban certain math textbooks for students K-5 because the word problems included topics such as climate change, the gender pay gap, and reference to racism. Other states are participating in banning books as well, leading to the widespread silencing of Black and Queer topics and studies in the classroom.

While we can evaluate these events and draw our own conclusions, professors in the SU English Program who have experienced or studied banned book movements offer new insight into these current events. Professor Forster, an English professor who wrote a book about banned books, has been surprised by the size and intensity of this recent movement, shocked that his niche field of study has real-life applications now. “The sense of state-level laws being passed, the sense of even a national movement to remove some of these books; that is not something I have witnessed in my lifetime,” said Forster. When examining the movement and evaluating its similarities to other banned book movements he’s studied, the banned book that came to mind was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book banned for obscenity from the 1920s until the 1960s. Forster discussed how the banning of this book called for the cease of publication of the material rather than curriculum bans and library bans of certain books. “In 1959, in England, they hauled in a jury and had literary critics and clergy members testify about the morality of the book. That’s not what we are seeing today.” There is a clear difference in intensity and tactics between the movements of England in the 20th century versus the current day. However, what is similar between the two movements is how obvious the bigotry behind these banned book movements is. The Well of Loneliness, another book banned in England, is described as the first lesbian novel published, and the same obscenity laws were used to justify the banning of the text… even though the book itself is not sexually explicit: “It’s a very modest text… But the sheer fact that it was dealing with the possibility of a romantic relationship between two women meant that it was as obscene as a very explicit text.” The quiet part of the legislation was out loud; the bigotry behind the thin veil of lawmaking and “protecting children” was immediately evident as it is today within the current movement to ban books.

Professor Roger Hallas, an English professor, and resident of England during a period when Margaret Thatcher attempted to ban certain books in schools described how Thatcher created a boogeyman to justify her legislation. In this case, that boogeyman was the Queer community. Hallas claims that the laws to restrict Queer literature were left ambiguous in Thatcher’s policies, allowing those on local levels to draw their own conclusions on what type of literature promoted aspects of homosexuality, such as the narrative of homosexual recruitment, a narrative that is resurfacing as some throw accusations of grooming against trans people just for saying that they are trans. Thatcher’s attempts to ban queer reading material deployed a blueprint eerily similar to the blueprint used by lawmakers today, resulting in paranoid narratives like the ones claiming that LGBTQ+ texts work to groom children.

What English professors offer as an insight into the banned book conversation is the acknowledgment of history and shared tactics and motivations between the past and the future when it comes to banned book movements. The banned book movement of today isn’t new by any means, but that’s what’s so frightening about it. The fact that these narratives are resurfacing from Thatcher’s era, and that the lawmaking tactics used to prohibit The Well of Loneliness in the late 1920s are resurfacing today, highlights that banned book movements are not a thing of the past. That being said, our tools against these movements are stronger than ever. If anything, this movement to ban books has and should inspire people to read more, as it has recently with books like Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. We shout even read the math textbooks that Florida banned (it might not be fun for English majors, but who cares). At the end of the day, the greatest weapon you have against the bigoted legislature is simply to read.

–Sam Baylow, English and Textual Studies (Film and Screen Studies), and Radio, Television, and Film B.A., ’24