The Quill
SPRING 09
S a n ta C l a r a U n i v e r s i t y
A New Minor in
Cinema Studies
Beginning as a Pathway in the new
Core, the English Department soon
hopes to have in place a Minor in
Cinema Studies. The Minor in Cinema
Studies would involve the critical study
of film and video history, theory, and
aesthetics, rather than film or video
production. Although minors could have
the opportunity to do screenwriting and
production work, they will primarily
engage in the interdisciplinary study of
national cinemas, international film
movements, major and minor filmmak-
ers in various traditions, film and media
theory, the economic, legal, and political
forces governing film industry practice,
and the relationship between film and
the other arts. Ideally, undergraduates
would emerge from our program of
courses not only knowledgeable about
cinema, but also enriched by contact
with history, literature, foreign cultures,
philosophy, and theology. (In a January
survey of 220 English majors, 51%
requested more English Department
courses in cinema studies, the highest-
ranked category in terms of interest.)
Students would be urged to take one
introductory course and five other
courses, plus two quarters of a weekly,
two-unit, film viewing course called
“Film Odyssey,” for seven courses in
total. A maximum of four courses for
Cinema Studies credit would be taken
from any one department. In order for
a course to be considered for inclusion
in the Minor, it would not just use film
or video as a form of illustration of a
literary or historical text but would
Continued back page
www.scu.edu/english
New Core, Ready or Not
When I was an undergraduate at
St. Louis University one of the professors
that I found impressive was Fr. Walter
Ong, who taught Renaissance literature.
He wrote something that I still find
helpful as a teacher:
We [Jesuit educators] are called
on to cultivate and to communicate
to our more mature students an
attitude which sees literature not
as simply a refuge or solace but
as a part of our unfinished world,
where the unknown is faced…
This point of view demands certain
reservations in our attitudes toward
Renaissance humanism…[other-
wise] literature becomes a means
of escape to the golden days of
youth and intellectual
irresponsibility…The scholar who
finds the twentieth century less
comprehensible than the sixteenth
century understands very little of
the sixteenth.
Ong’s implication finds an echo in education specialist
Henry Giroux, who writes that “essential to a critical
pedagogy is the need to affirm the lived reality of
difference as the ground on which to pose questions
of theory and practice.”
This combination of an education that 1) seeks
connection with an “unfinished” world, and that
2) recognizes that we’re not all the same goes a
long way in explaining the transformations that are
coming to the typical Santa Clara education next
year. Students entering in fall quarter 2009 will be
the first group whose studies will be structured by
the new core curriculum, and it has been designed
to put in place Fr. Paul Locatelli’s statement some
years ago that “a Santa Clara education means
inspiring students and graduates to make a
difference in the world…We hope our mission of
fashioning a better world spreads to corporations,
courtrooms, Congress, and beyond.” With graduates
Janet Napolitano now heading the Department of
Homeland Security, and Leon Panetta heading the
CIA, the importance of such learning objectives
comes into clear focus.
For the English major, one of the most exciting
aspects of the new core is its thematic nature,
its overriding implied narrativity and sequencing
of ideas. No longer is it simply “Composition
and Rhetoric.”
Now it will be courses such as “The Challenge of
Love: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” “Carpe Diem
or Memento Mori,” “Confronting the Unknown,”
“Technology and the Science Fiction Film,” and
“Representations of the Body, Nature and Foreigner
in Ages of Empire.” Want to sign up?
1
 California Legacy
Update
Spring 2009
The California Legacy Project
has made great strides in its
goal of maintaining and promot-
ing California history. This year
featured the publication of
several new books, an exciting
grant award, and the continued
production of the California
Legacy radio series. The
California Legacy website has
been updated, and the California
Legacy Project is still virtually
alive in Second Life.
This Fall, Wallace Stegner’s West
was released as the newest
addition to the project’s book
series. This single-author reader
features a broad range of Wallace
Stegner’s short fiction and essays,
including several previously-
unpublished pieces, and was
edited with an introduction by
the author’s son, Page Stegner.
Wallace Stegner founded and Wintu, Atsugewi, Nomlaki, Legacy radio series, which can
directed the creative writing Yokuts, and Chumas tribes. now be listened to on the
program at Stanford University California Legacy website in a
and devoted his professional This January, the California new user-friendly format.
career to writing about the West. Legacy Project was awarded a
He won the Pulitzer Prize and the $10,000 grant from the National In the coming months, the
National Book Award, and his work Endowment for the Arts. This California Legacy Project’s book
reflects the dynamic atmosphere money will be applied to the series will expand with an anthology
of Northern California in the mid- production of a longer-format of writing on California deserts.
1900s and works to protect the radio series entitled Nature
cultural base that he helped Dreaming. The California Legacy http://californialegacy.org/
create for the region. Project also continues to produce media_gallery/video_gallery.html
segments for the Your California
A second collection was also
added to the project’s book
series this fall. Spring Salmon,
Hurry to Me! celebrates the role
of the seasons through the eyes
of some of California’s best
Indian writers and features a
literary calendar of the seasons
that play such a large role in the
lives of California Indians. The
book is an expansion on a series
from the Heyday Institute’s
magazine, and features poems,
myths, and personal stories from
the Karuk, Shasta, Maidu, Yana,

Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies:
A New Area of Study at
Santa Clara University
by Cynthia Mahamdi
In 2007, SCU gained a new minor, “AIMES,” or Arabic,
Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, allowing students to
study Arabic (now offered up to the advanced level), partici-
pate in study abroad programs in the Near and Middle East,
and take a broad range of courses relating to the Middle
East and Islamic world. Seven departments are currently
participating in the minor, including English, which offers an
advanced literature course, “Studies in the Literatures of the
Middle Eastern and Islamic World,” currently focused on
contemporary Arabic literature and film. I teach the course in
the fall so that students can attend the Cinemayaat, or Arab
Film Festival, which is held in October in the Bay Area.
Students watch some of the dozens of films screened and
often get to meet Arab directors, producers, and actors.
I have also just developed a new course on the historical
relationship between the West and the Middle East from
the early 19th century to the present. It is hoped that AIMES
and the Department of English will continue to expand its
offerings in this exciting new field and that our students with
an interest in international relations, world literatures, and
languages will benefit from the exposure to the ideas, arts,
and diverse cultures found in a part of the world that is so
often misunderstood.
In sharing aspects of my near-Eastern background and close
connections to the Arab world, my travels abroad and years
spent studying or teaching at European universities with my
students, it is my hope that more SCU students will be
inspired to take advantage of the many opportunities SCU
offers to broaden their horizons and become citizens of a
globalized world.

2
Letter from the Chair Revisioning American
Cultural Studies
I don’t have an avatar or a page on
Facebook; I don’t even have an ipod and Two of our Americanists have published remark-
only have a cellphone because my even-
able books in recent months. Eileen Elrod’s Piety
more ancient father recently gave me one
and Dissent: Race, Gender and Biblical Rhetoric
for Christmas. How did I get to be such a
fuddy duddy (and only my benighted in Early American Autobiography, from the
generation would use such a word) without University of Massachusetts Press, focus on
seeing it happen? Does this mean I’m living religion in the lives of late eighteenth- and early
in the world of ideas, or just that I’m out of it? nineteenth-century New England believers, who
Why do I have a growing fascination with
found themselves marginalized by their race or
photos of times past, with my parents as
sex and who therefore relied on their faith to
children, with befores and afters, with babies
of all species? Am I turning into Yeats, or reconcile the tension between the spiritual
just a dirty old man (and maybe Maud Gonne experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of
thought the two were the same?). I didn’t exclusion and injustice. A very favorable review
used to notice Spring, but now I love it. And in the journal Church History notes that Elrod
just as I’d been warned by the ancients, each John Hawley
successfully guides the reader through a “thicket
year seems to go more quickly than the one before. Festina lente!
of theoretical apparatus” and helps us view these
I note that I proclaimed in last year’s Quill that “the ‘life of the mind’ is a wonderful early Americans through a the critical lenses of
vocation,” neglecting to curb my enthusiasm with some recognition that the mind/body feminism, border theory, critical race theory, and
problem hasn’t been solved yet. The cover photo of Dick Osberg, who suddenly died in postcolonialism. According to the critic, in Elrod’s
October of 2007, dramatically underscores the urgency of our lives, an urgency camou- capable hands “the narratives became and remain
flaged by slow days and weeks. I listen at my office doorway and hear down the hallway
plain-speaking personal life histories addressed to
the creaking joints and lamenting moans of an aging faculty. Well, okay, that’s an
exaggeration, but you get the point. Carpe diem! all people seeking the truth and purpose of God’s
saving grace.”
I have to say, though, that that life of the mind bit is more compelling, rather than less,
each year. Maybe it’s the Obama effect—hope springs eternal, and all that; the Michelle Burnham’s Folded Selves: Colonial
economy’s in crisis, there are horribly complex problems all over the world, but ideas New England Writing in the World System, from
continue to sparkle and beckon. Most recently Terry Beers called my attention to a book Dartmouth College Press, radically refigures
he’s using in his composition class, Tim Cresswell’s fascinating Place, and the wholly
traditional portraits of seventeenth-century New
intriguing notion of social geography. We give meaning to the space in which we find
ourself, and in turn are given meaning willy-nilly by being placed somewhere, and it England literature and culture by situating colonial
can be a contested meaning (think: graffiti), an objectified meaning (think: museum), etc. writing within the spatial, transnational, and
I remember V.S. Naipaul’s complicated relationship not only with the native Caribbean economic contexts that characterized the early-
that he rejected, but also with the London to which he moved: “I grew to feel,” he modern “world system” theorized by Immanuel
writes, “that the grandeur belonged to the past; that I had come to England at the Wallerstein and others. One prominent critic writes
wrong time; that I had come too late to find the England, the heart of empire, which
that “this learned book will quickly assume its
(like a provincial, from a far corner of the empire) I had created in my fantasy.”
rightful place on the shelf of anyone interested in
Naipaul suggests to me the intersection of time and space that we each are, and early American history and culture,” and another
suddenly the present moment comes into full view. Through our engagement with writes that “this book is sure to have a major
space, we bring our particular presence, our body thrown through time, into this impact on the literary and historical study of early
place now layered with innumerable interpretations and fleeting ownerships. That’s
New England.” This complex argument, from a
one of the reasons we English majors read—books, yes, but a lot else.
cultural studies point of view, discusses literature
in the contemporaneous contexts of early
American commerce, aesthetics, and economics:
a heady brew.
Next year, Terry Beers will be chair and Eileen Elrod
associate chair of the English Department.

www.scu.edu/english 3
 Creative Writing
Updates
by Rebecca Black
As the new Director of Creative
Writing, I have enjoyed getting to
know our creative writing student
minors. Currently we have
–minors, with majors majoring in
every discipline from Philosophy
to Engineering. This fall, the
program sponsored the visit of
former Alice James Press editor
April Ossmann, who spoke to
students about her thirty years in
the editing. She read from her
first collection of poems, Anxious
Music. In February, five Santa
Clara Review students received
support to attend the Associated
Writing Programs annual confer-
ence in Chicago. Ron Hansen
and Juan Velasco also attended
the conference. They talked to
hundreds of poets and writers at
their Santa Clara Review booth,
and attended panels on a multi-
tude of topics. While we were in
Chicago, Jeremy Townley and
student Lauren Backes recruited
new minors at the major/minor fair.
Also in February, our writer-in-
residence, poet Forrest Hamer,
gave a reading, an interview,
visited classes, and met individu-
ally with several aspiring student
poets. Hamer is the author of
three books of poetry, Call and
Response, Middle Ear, and Rift.
He spoke at length about his
experiences in listening and emo-
tional exploration as a practicing
psychotherapist in the East Bay.
This spring, biographer and
fiction writer Catherine Brady will
visit campus. She has recently
completed a biography of
Elizabeth Blackburn, a molecular
biologist and leader in stem-cell
research. Brady’s new book of
fiction, The Mechanics of Falling,
was published this spring.
Next year, we hope the program
will continue to flourish as we
develop a new web presence,
seek program donors, and
continue to create opportunities
for students to work closely with
visiting writers. Our new classes,
like Claudia McIsaac’s Creative
Writing and Social Justice
course, continue to offer innova-
tive connections to the new core
curriculum. We hope to work
closely in programming with the
new Cinema Studies program, as
well as the Justice and the Arts
initiative, the student writing Hub,
the Women’s and Gender
Studies program, and the
Environmental Studies Institute.
The program would like to thank
our student assistant, Lauren
Silk, for her work on planning
events this year. We are grateful
for the support of the Office of
Multicultural Learning, and the
Center for Student Leadership.
Members of the current creative
writing program committee are
professors Diane Dreher, Ron
Hansen, Claudia McIsaac, Kirk
Glaser, and Jeremy Townley.

From Book To Blog
The response to Marc Bousquet’s 2008 book How The
University Works has kept him pretty busy. During the spring
term, he’ll make several appearances, including at UNC-Chapel
Hill, Yale, NYU, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University
of Florida. He was also invited to join the “Brainstorm” group
blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he publishes
text and video: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm. In
the excerpt below, he talks about blogging and the way
electronic media is changing academic writing. The complete
interview with Jeffrey Williams appears in the minnesota review.
Williams Besides your book, you have developed other ave-
nues to talk about the university, notably your blog and your
series of video interviews. The blog has become a sort of
clearinghouse for progressive issues in higher ed. What do you
see as the function of your blog? What are you doing with it?
Bousquet While I understood blogging intellectually, I personal-
ly was in the habit of writing very long things. And I still had this
romantic idea of writing that you bring it to your cave and labor
and come out with an incredibly contorted finished product, so
I wasn’t at all sure that I was ready for the short form and all
the characteristics of blogging—rapid response, finish your
thought quickly—that were at variance with my personal habits
as a writer. I’m grateful to have had the chance to be at The
Chronicle of Higher Education, in part because they imposed a
certain discipline on me. They expected me to post at a certain
rate, and without a little bit of editorial pushing I would be one
of those people who posts every day for three weeks and then
not at all for three months.
Williams In a way it clearly follows your interest is participatory
culture. Where do you see it going?
Bousquet Because it connects to elements of my teaching and
research, it has become an opportunity for me to practice what
I preach. If I’m asking my students to compose activist video,
then it becomes an opportunity for me to figure out what it is
I’m asking them to do and how can I guide them best. I don’t
say, “Well, they are young people, therefore they know all about
Facebook and YouTube.” I see it as an opportunity to get
involved and make my own judgments about the best ways to
frame pedagogy and help them to achieve their goals in using
social media.
At another level, I’m very interested in different ways of framing
scholarship. I’m very concerned about the future of academic
writing, of academic discourse in the context of the electronic
mediation of textuality. What would it mean for scholarship to
acknowledge the possibilities and engage more fully the possi-
bilities of having scholarship literally interwoven with an archive?
People have been exploring just how that would work, but
those practices have yet to pervade the profession.

4
What is Your Vocation? Writing Awards: Winners
by Diane Dreher from 2009

What should I do with my life? Where do I find Sarah Graham

joy and meaning? For the past few years, I’ve
examined these questions, exploring the concept
of vocation which flourished during the
Renaissance. In what psychologists call the “self-
fulfilling prophecy,” our expectations dramatically
shape our experience. Because they believed that
God had given them a unique set of gifts and a
personal call to vocation, Renaissance men and
women made unprecedented contributions to
science, religion, politics, and the arts. In a remark-
able parallel, today’s psychological research has
found that not only do we each have a unique set
of strengths but that using them can make our lives
happier, healthier, and more successful. (You can
identify your own strengths with the free VIA-IS
survey on www.authentichappiness.org.)
Each major challenge or change offers us new opportunities to discern our vocations
and renew our lives, as I’ve found by conducting empirical studies of people from their
late teens through retirement and examining over 100 Renaissance lives—from Queen
Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Galileo, and Michelangelo, to St. Ignatius, St.
Teresa of Avila, and Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz. My findings have appeared in academic
journals and conferences on Renaissance studies, lifelong learning, and clinical
psychology. Combining insights from Renaissance lives with research in psychology and
neuroscience, my new book, Your Personal Renaissance (Da Capo, 2008), shows how
we can discern our vocations throughout the changing seasons of our lives.
Winner of the Katherine Woodall Prize for her
essay: “Desire for Laurie, Jo and the Reader
in Little Women”
Krystal Wu
Winner of the Christiaan Lievestro Prize for
her essay “Not so Black and White: The
Construction of White Womanhood in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Rachel Wilde
Winner of the Shipsey Poetry Prize for her
poem: “Rachel Weeping”
Nicholas Sanchez
Winner of the Academy of American Poets’
Tamara Verga Poetry Prize for his poems:
“Patter,” “Sales (Fever),” and “enumerate”
Randall Holaday
Winner of the McCann Short Story Contest
for his short story: “Welcome”
Khanh Le Vu Trinh
First-Year Composition Competition for
her essay “Holding onto an Identity in a
New Homeland”

Since 2003, Santa Clara has affirmed the Ignatian call to vocation in our DISCOVER
Program. Funded by a Lilly Endowment grant, DISCOVER offers a series of talks,
reflection groups, retreats, immersions, and classes to support ongoing vocational
discernment in students, faculty, and staff. As DISCOVER Curriculum Director, I’ve Suggested Reading
incorporated vocation into my freshman composition courses and senior seminar, Buddha’s Wife, by Gabriel Constans
developed a new English/Religious Studies course on vocation, and helped faculty
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
develop new courses on vocation in English, Theatre, Communication, Religious
Studies, Philosophy, Economics, Sociology, and Law. In our new 2009 University Forgiveness, by Paula Huston
Core Curriculum, students may choose a Vocation Pathway, a series of four courses Bread and Fire: Jewish Women Find God
that help them reflect on this essential theme. The Pathway will offer courses from in the Everyday, edited by Rivkah Slonim.
12 departments, including writing and literature courses from English Professors
Simone Billings, Rebecca Black, Diane Dreher, Judy Dunbar, Claudia McIsaac, and Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan
Juan Velasco. Grace, Eventually, by Anne Lamott
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
Ongoing vocational discernment holds great promise for us today. I’m convinced
that our greatest natural resources are our hearts and minds, our personal gifts and As a Friend: A Novel, by Forrest Gander
creativity. As English majors, we know how creativity brings hope in times of crisis, for The Stone Gods, by Jeanette Winterson
we’ve often found consolation in writing and in reading great works of literature. By
affirming our own creativity, by renewing our sense of vocation as we confront today’s 2666, by Roberto Bolaño
challenges, we can move forward into a new Renaissance of hope, discovering new Indignation, by Philip Roth
possibilities to heal and transform our world.
Leaving Tangier: A Novel, by Tahar Ben Jelloun

www.scu.edu/english 5
 Student and Alumni
Achievements
For the first time, all LEAD Critical
Thinking & Writing II students
participated in a two-part Poster
Session. Forty-seven students
had the opportunity to display
their research on a public stage
by discussing their projects with
a campus-wide audience.
This Symposium encouraged
students to become active
scholars with their own ongoing,
original research projects, and
several students have plans to
pursue these projects further.
The projects relate to a variety
of fields including art history,
film criticism, gender studies,
ethnic studies, the sciences,
and many more.
Krystal Wu and Jill Goodman
presented “The Perfect
Environment to Teach Students
to Write for College” at The 16th
Annual California Charter Schools
Conference in Long Beach.
Catherine Guarente accompanied
Simone Billings to the Sigma Tau
Delta conference in Minneapolis,
where they chaired a session.
6
Jessica Jang has been accepted
to Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins,
Vanderbilt, Emory, and Marquette,
and is likely going to accept
Yale’s offer. She writes: “The
faculty member who interviewed
me wrote me a personal email,
saying that she likes English
majors and really values this
background. I was pleased to
hear this, as I too have truly
valued my English studies. I
will be entering an accelerated
program to earn my Masters as
an acute care nurse practitioner.
My goal is still to focus on
underserved populations and
continue work abroad in third
world countries.”
Brent Colasurdo, at USC’s law
school, writes: “We don’t discuss
grades in law school. You can
imagine how this taboo would be
necessary for any friendships to
survive subject to a strict curve,
desperate job competition, and
legal-sized egos.” But he
confides that he’s doing well,
and writes: “any page of decent
writing I emit is a tribute to the
quarter I spent as a scared
transfer student in ENGL 177…
Sometimes I worry that I’m
enjoying law school too much—
it’s not proper. The build-up to
and climax of exams was an
interesting experience, it was
taxing in an absolute sense
(most work I’ve ever done, etc),
but because I’m so intrigued by
the law the experience was
relatively painless. The only
damper on my capacity for study
was my body, it kept interrupting
my good fun with needs for food
and sleep, etc. My experience
speaks to the advice I heard
again and again in undergrad—
be sure you want to study law
before you apply to law school.
I can’t imagine doing this volume
of exhausting drudge-work
without being absolutely titillated
by the content (as some of my
distressed classmates aren’t). “
SCU grad and ex-student
Neil Ferron has won a
George J. Mitchell scholarship
(http://us-irelandalliance.org/
wmspage.cfm?parm1=34), one
of the 12 awarded nationally, and
will use it for working further on
his playwriting in Ireland at Trinity
College. He writes: “I just found
out that in March, one of my
ten-minute plays is going to be
produced in Dublin by the Painted
Filly theatre company as a part of
their 100 Minutes festival
(www.paintedfilly.com). The play
is called We Are Not Blinking
(part of a GW Bush quote), and it
examines how a pair of American
children interpret the global
politics and injustices of the day,
namely US-sponsored torture. It’s
dark, it’s funny, maybe even cute.”
Graduate Athena Arnot-
Copenhaver reports that she is
completing an M. Phil. in Literary
Theory at the University of East
Anglia in England.
Caroline Bonafede will join
Pacific University’s masters
in counseling psychology
program—a stepping stone to
the doctoral program. She writes:
“I am so very excited about the
opportunity and look forward to
the upcoming years. I miss being
a student!”
Kara Thompson has just about
completed her dissertation on
“A Romance with Many
Reservations: American Indian
Figurations and the Globalization
of Indigeniety,” and hopes to
soon join to professoriate.
Peter Taylor, who left the faculty
some years ago, is now Assistant
Dean of Academic Affairs of the
Graduate Division at the University
of California, San Francisco
Graduate Joanna Law is now
editor of LexisNexis, responsible
for several journals.
Nate Swinton graduated from
Georgetown law in May 2007,
passed the New York bar exam
that summer, and spent last year
clerking for a federal magistrate
judge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He
is now (May 2008) in Memphis
clerking for a federal district court
judge and next year will also be
in Memphis clerking for a judge
on the Sixth Circuit. Nate says
he very much enjoys clerking:
“it’s a great job—but as you can
probably guess, obtaining those
positions often requires one to
be fairly flexible about where one
would like to live. I’ve actually
enjoyed Memphis and the South
in general more than what I
expected, and sometimes when
I look out on the Mississippi River
from my office window, I half-
expect to see Huck Finn floating
by on his way down to Louisiana.”
Vincent Price, English Major
(1979) has been named Provost
of the University of Pennsylvania.
Brian Hegarty, an English major
who graduated in 1996, died
unexpectedly; he had been
named as the new principal at
St. Clare’s elementary school
next to campus.
Faculty Achievements
Simone Billings will be a Fulbright
Scholar at the University of the West
Indies in the Fall.
Rebecca Black has won a fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts
for $25,000.
Sherry Booth presented a paper on
sustainability education in Britain.
Phyllis Brown gave a paper at the annual
meeting of the Medieval Association of
the Pacific on Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s
and presented a paper on Hrotsvit at a
conference in Cologne, Germany.
Stephen Carroll published an essay on
‘The Rhetoric of Teaching (Art History) with
Technology,” and another jointly with Andrea
Pappas and Dolores LaGuardia, titled,
“Angel in the Architecture: Course
Management Software and Collaborative
Teaching.” Over the past three years he
has done a lot of work on the Student
Assessment of their Learning Gains project.
Juliana Chang and Linda Garber were
co-editors of The Aunt Lute Anthology
of US Women Writers, Volume Two: The
20th Century. Julie gave a talk on mentoring
at a Women of Color Network event
and was a discussant for a panel on
“Heteronormativity and Racialization in
Transnational Asian/America.”
Diane Dreher published her new book,
Your Personal Renaissance.
Marilyn Edelstein has published a chapter
in Approaches to Teaching Lolita, another
on Nabokov, and a chapter in Critical
Perspectives on bell hooks.
Eileen Elrod attended a conference on
The Indian Ocean and Arab Slave Trades
at Yale University.
John Farnsworth has been appointed to
serve on a task force to develop a common
set of student learning outcomes to guide-
curriculum development associated with
www.scu.edu/english
sustainability issues. He presented papers
on related topics in Vancouver and Raleigh,
and traveled to El Salvador this quarter to
observe SCU student participation in Casa
de Solidaridad. He will be directing the SCU
Study Abroad program at University of
Stirling this summer.
Andy Garavel gave a paper on “Land
Reform and Irish Writing” at the University of
Washington, and received a grant of $3800
from the National Endowment for the
Humanities to attend their summer seminar
for college and university teachers at the
University of Notre Dame to study “Anglo-
Irish Identities.”
Kirk Glaser has had two poems nominated
for a Pushcart Prize, and has edited the
script for Hands Left Behind, a dance/
theater production in Santa Cruz.
Jill Gould gave a talk about her class on
Holocaust Memoirs at the Oral History
Association Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh.
In May she spoke on “Bringing Oral History
into the Digital Classroom” at Jagiellonian
University in Krakow, Poland.
Ron Hansen gave fiction readings at
Virginia Commonwealth, Eastern Michigan,
Georgetown, St. Mary’s College in
Minnesota, the University of Portland, the
University of Binghamton, Creighton
University, and St. John’s University. In
March he gave the talk, “What Would Jesus
View?” for a series on Religious Themes in
Film at the University of Southern California,
and he spoke at Regis University in Denver
on “The Catholic Imagination and Film.” A
play based on his novel Mariette in Ecstasy
collected boffo reviews in its run from
February 13th to April 5th at Lifeline Theatre
in Chicago. This July he will be teaching at
the Tin House Writer’s Conference at Reed
College in Portland.
John Hawley published a three-volume
encyclopedia on LGBTQ America Today,
with 250 contributors (Linda Garber among
them), and guest edited the annual creative
writing issue of the South Asian Review. He
was a plenary speaker at a conference on
“Migration, Border, and the Nation State” at
Texas Tech, chaired a session at a
Transgender conference at the Sorbonne,
and presented a paper at the University
of Cordoba.
Aparajita Nanda presented a paper on
Nawal El Saadawi in Salzburg.
Myisha Priest got some wonderful news—
she received the very competitive Schomburg
Scholars in Residence Fellowship, which
comes with a hefty stipend of $30,000! This
will take her to New York for some portion of
next academic year, to work on a fascinating
new project: Focusing on African American
communities of the antebellum waterways,
the book will function as a corrective (and
completing) addition to the metaphor of the
Underground Railroad.
Roseanne Giannini Quinn gave a talk called
“The Faces of Domestic Violence” at Saint
Mary’s College and two papers at the MLA’s
annual meeting.
Don Riccomini published two review essays
in Technical Communications, and a critical
essay in the Journal of Religion and Film.
Avantika Rohatgi presented a paper on
“The Transformative Power of Terror” at the
University of Washington.
Jeremy Townley published a review in
Harvard Review.
Priya Venkatesan presented a paper at the
Semiotic Society of America in Houston, and
another in Charlotte, NC on “Nanoselves.”
Her article, “Making Science Accessible”
was recently published in Biosemiotics. An
article on Julia Kristeva appears in the Spring
issue of L’esprit createur.
Fred White has published two books:
Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical
Currents and Crosscurrents since 1960,
and The Daily Writer: 366 Meditations
To Cultivate a Productive and Meaningful
Writing Life.
Fred White has been promoted to
Full Professor.
7
 English Department
Santa Clara University
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95053-1500
A New Minor in
Cinema Studies
(Continued from page 1)
devote a least one-third of the
classroom cinema itself. Though there
would be possible a production compo-
nent the primary emphasis would be on
studies of film and video as literary,
cultural, and historical texts.
Professors Diane Dreher and John
Hawley of the English Department, and
Paul Soukup, S.J. and Michael Whalen
of Communications, will be members
of the Cinema Studies Committee.
Professor Ron Hansen will be the
program director.
8
Gender Studies in
the Department
In the Introduction to his new
three-volume encyclopedia,
LGBTQ America Today, editor
John Hawley writes that his
classmates in seventh grade told
him that boys who wrote with
their left hand or wore green and
yellow on Thursdays were
“homos.” He didn’t know what
that was, but since he did both,
he figured he was already in
trouble and would have to do a
lot of pretending. That, as it turns
out, was the inspiration for his
latest publication, in which he
has orchestrated 250 writers
from around the country to
describe the sexual revolution
of the last 60 years, particularly
as it has shaped, and been
shaped by, the lesbian, gay,
www.scu.edu/english
bisexual, transgender, and queer
communities. Part of the over-
arching theme of the three
volumes is the plural nature of
those communities, in which
there are many competing
voices, some alliances, and
some broad disagreements.
Entries range from androgyny
to queer youth groups, from
prominent individuals in the vari-
ous movements, to organizations
that have supported the
expansion of LGBTQ rights, to
marriage, to pride parades, to
“outing,” and on and on. Many
entries are biographies of well-
known or still-to-be-discovered
poets, playwrights, musicians,
entrepreneurs, etc. Others are
studies of the history of oppression
in this country, easily forgotten now
that many rights have come to be
expected. But the encyclopedia
makes obvious those issues
that are still unresolved, such
as marriage, adoption, hate
laws, the role of trangendered
individuals in the work place, etc.
Hawley has published earlier
related books, including
Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical
Intersections, which studies the
impact of western notion of
gayness in the emerging world.
This latest work is less theoretical
and more historical, with photos
and illustrations of some of the
memorable events in this impor-
tant component of the expansion
of human rights in the United
States. As an encyclopedia,
it is less likely something an
individual would purchase, and
more likely to be found in school
and communities libraries.
FL-08265 6/09 2,000