October/November 2009: Vol. 4, No. 2

The inauguration of a new President is surely one of the great milestones in the life of a university, and it presents an opportunity for the campus community to stop, celebrate renewal, and explore new paths for the future. On Friday, October 16, 2009, CSU inaugurated its sixth President, Ronald Berkman at the Allen Theater. It was a festive occasion, with a full delegation of faculty and visiting dignitaries marching in academic regalia. The CSU Orchestra played stirring music from the pit, and many enthusiastic speakers took their turns welcoming the new President to Cleveland State. The highlight of the ceremony was Dr. Berkman’s address to the assembled guests. Some in the audience expected a fully-developed new plan for CSU to be unveiled. Wisely, the President said that he was still in the process of listening and learning and that it was too early for him to enunciate a completed new vision for the university. However, the guests did get a glimpse of a few of Dr. Berkman’s key aspirations. One is to have CSU make its mark in the areas of health and sustainable communities. This builds on foundational discussions begun last year. Another is to have CSU play a pivotal role in the revitalization of downtown Cleveland. He hopes that CSU will become the hub of a thriving new neighborhood, which includes Playhouse Square, St. Vincent’s Hospital, and Tri-C. He sees us in the midst of a bustling new town quarter, filled with faculty and student residents as well as with a K-12 lab school and all the supporting businesses. It is an exciting concept, and we look forward to more of the vision being fleshed out in the near future. Because liberal education offers a crucial component of any sustainable economic and civic revival, I believe that CLASS must be at the core of CSU’s future, and we are committed to working with the President as he brings his vision to life.

As I noted before, while in the past I have commented on CLASS grants, campus events and lectures, my coverage of faculty publications has been spotty. There is a fine line to walk between, on one hand, publishing just long lists of faculty publications (which few would care to read), and, on the other, really informing readers about this important aspect of faculty contributions. So beginning with this newsletter, I will note select faculty publications. My coverage will not be complete, but I will pull out a generous sampling of publications that appeared or were accepted in the past year and that strike me as notable and interesting. I will begin with the humanities. A review of this information reveals an intellectually alive and creative faculty, who are vigorously contributing to our fund of knowledge in linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, religious studies, history, and creative writing.

I begin with John Greppin. I received a note from Dr. Greppin recently, informing me that he had just completed his 500th publication, a figure that includes books, essay collections, articles, and book reviews. Besides a steady stream of articles on Indo-European linguistics, Dr. Greppin is a regular contributor of book reviews to the Times Literary Supplement. His most recent article, for example, is “The Proto-Lezgian Dental Negative and Armenian t-,” which will be published in Historiche-Sprachforschung, and one of his more recent TLS book reviews covers The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer by Jean-Jacques Glassner. Dr. Greppin has clearly established not only an authoritative critical voice but also an international scholarly reputation of the highest caliber. We congratulate him on this career milestone.

Several English faculty books have recently appeared or have been accepted for publication. Rachel Carnell, for example, recently published A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (Pickering & Chatto). Manley was an 18th-century novelist, playwright, and political pamphleteer. Along with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, she is sometimes identified as a member of the “Fair Triumvirate of Wit.” Jennifer Jeffers, who was just named Associate Dean of the Graduate College, will see her book, Beckett’s Masculinity (Palgrave Macmillan) appear in December of 2009. This is the first book to focus on Beckett’s masculinity as a way of understanding not only his historical and national contexts but also his works’ ruthless disintegration of sexual and gendered norms. Finally, James Marino’s book, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property has recently been accepted for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book seeks to explain how Shakespeare’s plays functioned as “intellectual property” in an era that lacked intellectual property laws, and it challenges a number of common scholarly assumptions about how the plays were created, published, and attributed. Of course, we’ll have to await the response from the fans of the 17th Earl of Oxford.

In addition, Gary Dyer has just published an interesting article entitled “The Transatlantic Pocahontas” in Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Jeff Karem has recently published two articles. One of them, “Fear of a Black Atlantic? African Vistas in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! And Slave Ship” just appeared in an essay collection entitled Global Faulkner. Moreover, Adam Sonstegard has published several articles and book chapters. One of them is entitled “Artistic Liberty and Slave Imagery: ‘Mark Twain’s Illustrator,’ E. W. Kemble, Turns to Harriet Beecher Stowe” and recently appeared in Nineteenth Century Literature.

Besides writing literary criticism, English faculty also write their own fiction, poetry, and drama.  For example, Mike Geither’s most recent play is entitled It’s Okay to Cry: A Personal History of Cleveland Baseball. (He can use the same title if his next play is about Cleveland football…) Mr. Geither performed his play at the Ingenuity Festival of Art and Technology last summer. Michael Dumanis’ poem, “Occasionally, I Write a Poem” is set to appear in Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (University of Iowa Press). Nuala Archer’s collection entitled Cuyahogagua will be published this fall by Salmon Press. In addition, three poems from Ted Lardner’s award-winning collection, Tornado, will be reprinted in The Next of Us About to be Born: The Wick Poetry Series Anthology. And, finally, Imad Rahman’s short story, “Call Me Manny,” will soon appear in the journal Second Run.

From the Department of Philosophy, the 3rd expanded edition of Alan Rosenbaum’s Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide was recently published by Westview/HarperCollins. In addition, Mary Ellen Waithe’s article on Heloise and Abelard was recently published in An Unconventional History of Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield). In the Department of Religious Studies, Matt Jackson-McCabe had two articles recently accepted. One of those articles, entitled “Memory, Body and Gender in Ancient Greek Magic and Early Christianity” will be published in Women in the Religious and Intellectual Activity of the Ancient Mediterranean World (Mohr Siebeck).

The Department of Modern Languages has been uniformly productive in multiple languages. For example, Tama Engelking published several recent articles. I noted one of these last year, but another is entitled “Ceci n’est pas Colette: Writing, Performance and Identity in Colette’s Mes apprentissages.”  This article appeared in a special issue of Women in French Studies. Another French professor, Annie Jouan-Westlund, has published two articles on Serge Doubrovsky, a contemporary French writer and critical theorist. One of the two, entitled “Ce qui seduit chez Serge Doubrovsky,” was published in L’Esprit Createur. The Spanish faculty have also been productive. Heba El Attar, for example, has published several articles recently. The most recent article is entitled “Between Turcophobia and Turcophilia: Politics of Representations of Arabs in Latin America,” which will appear in Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas. From Stephen Gingerich’s several publications, I would like to highlight his article “Telling in the Halflight: The Mimetic Poetics and Juan Benet’s En la penumbra,” which was published in Hispania. Finally, Antonio Medina-Rivera, who organized and led the Third Annual Crossing Over Symposium which met recently on our campus, published an article in Voces del Caribe entitled “Becoming a Man in a Minority Setting: The Stories of Piri Thomas, Pedro Juan Soto, and Jack Agüeros.”

As to our German and Classics faculty, Edward Haymes has published several articles recently, one of which was entitled “The Lied and the Ring: Wagner’s Use of the Nibelungenlied in his Der Ring des Nibelungen” and was published in Studies in Medievalism. (Interestingly, next semester Dr. Haymes is teaching a course in “the two rings,” Wagner’s and Tolkien’s.) And, finally, Kelly Wrenhaven, who is hard at work on a book about slavery in antiquity, had an article accepted in Hesperia entitled “The Identity of the Wool-workers in the Attic Manumissions.”

Two pages of citations is a lot to digest. I will, therefore, cover publications in our large History Department in the next issue.

Last month I highlighted some summer ’09 activity in the college. Ron Reminick later reminded me that he and Todd Pesek (Health Sciences) were also busy last summer. They traveled to Belize to study traditional medicine and healing rituals of contemporary Mayans, and they are currently in the process of writing a research article about their discoveries. In another cooperative project, this time between CLASS and the College of Education and Human Services, our Social Work School teamed up with Education’s Counseling Program to create a joint certificate in Chemical Dependency Counseling. This certificate has recently been approved by the Ohio Chemical Dependency Professionals Board. Finally, I also wanted to note that two of our Music faculty, Stephen Stanziano and Andrew Rindfleisch have been given 2009-2010 awards by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

I’ve already noted in passing the successful Crossing Over conference organized by Antonio Medina-Rivera, at which the keynote speaker was poet Judith Ortiz Cofer. I would also like to call your attention to another conference that will take place on our campus, the 19th National Conference of the Association for Black Culture Centers. The conference, which is being organized by Mike Williams and will draw participants from around the country, will take place on November 5th through 7th. The highlight of the conference will be the 3rd annual Treasures of Jazz concert, taking place on November 6th at 8 p.m. in the MC Auditorium. The featured jazz vocalist will be Vanessa Rubin, and she will be accompanied by our own Jazz Heritage Orchestra. It should be a great, upbeat night.

Comments on this newsletter may be sent to g.sadlek@csuohio.edu.

Greg Sadlek