Mary Loeffelholz

Supporting faculty mentoring through the use of creative technologies

Purpose – Mentoring of junior faculty members (i.e. professors) in higher education has been documented to be critical to their academic success which most often takes the form of receiving tenure and/or promotion to higher academic ranks at universities in the USA. A “junior faculty member” would be defined as someone who has not yet been tenured or promoted and is usually within the first five years of their academic appointment. However, mentoring relationships can sometimes be difficult to build and momentum for continuous mentoring throughout the pre-tenure period can be a challenge to maintain. One of the concerns identified by mentees is the importance of regular meetings with mentors and the concomitant difficulty of knowing what to address in these meetings so as to make them productive and helpful. Mentors, most often senior faculty members, note that they do not always know the most relevant issues to discuss with junior faculty during mentoring meetings. The paper aims to discuss these issues....

Networking Dickinson: Some Thought Experiments in Digital Humanities

The most important and influential digital approaches to Emily Dickinson’s writings to date have focused on curating and presenting the singularity of her work through careful encoding of close textual detail, rather than on the kinds of large-scale, data-driven analytical and interpretive projects that increasingly drive work in the digital humanities. While sites like the Dickinson Electronic Archives and the new Emily Dickinson Archive have made aspects of Dickinson’s manuscript writings widely accessible over computer networks, scholars have yet fully to “network” Dickinson; that is, we have yet to explore whether digital approaches might help researchers map out and better understand her writing, its historical conditions of possibility, and its circulation within its surrounding literary and cultural economies. This essay argues for the value of developing new digital approaches aimed at networking Dickinson, in tandem with the ongoing projects of digital curation.

Women's Studies on Trial

I hese two books have very different stories to tell about the state of feminism in the American academy. The story told in Professing Feminism is already notorious beyond the academy; Gender and Academe will almost certainly never circulate so widely. Together, though, these books imply more than either does alone about how centrally academic feminism figures in current struggles over the nature of academic work and the policing of the academys borders. Professing Feminism, according to its authors, is an inquiry... concentrated on feminism as it is practiced in Womens Studies at colleges and universities (xvii). Daphne Patai, a literary scholar, and Noretta Koertge, a historian of science, insist that their inquiry is an inside critique, aimed at calling academic feminism back from what they diagnose as its current ills to its liberal origins. We are feminists and.. . friends of feminism, they write in their Postscript, feminists arguing from within feminism about the means for achieving the basic goal of the liberation of women from all that impedes their ability to lead full and productive lives (218). Their methods of inquiry draw on the feminist models of ethnography and

Faith and doubt

IN THE MODERN WORLD prof. charles marsh tuesday + thursday 2:00-3:15 pm + section is belief in God a product of wishful thinking? does religion promote violence? on what basis do some intelligent people argue that belief in God is rational & other that belief in God violates reason? what are the implications for people of faith?

“Question of Monuments”: Emerson, Dickinson, and American Renaissance Portraiture

y way of introduction to the literary-historical genre I am calling B American Renaissance portraiture, I want to consider two revisionist entries offered in this line by two works of American Renaissance criticism that saw publication within a few months of one another in 1997. One of them, John Carlos Rowe’s At Emerson’s Tomb, features on its cover a striking photograph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s headstone in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, Massachusetts.1 Cropped so that one of the more conventional tablet stones of the Emerson family plot stands in the middle background, bisected by the book’s spine, the photograph captures the veiny granite of the headstone in high contrast. The headstone’s plaque sits in the very center of the image, with Emerson’s name only faintly legible under a floral design embossed in slightly higher relief above it. The remainder of the plaque’s inscription is entirely lost to the camera. The other work, Charlene Avallone’s “What American Renaissance?” appeared in the October number of PMLA.2 Unusually for P M U , a journal parsimonious with illustrations, Avallone’s essay was

Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority

Preface Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Inquisitive Intensity in Marianne Moore 3. An Unintelligible Vernacular: Questions of Voice 4. Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You: Gender Politics in the Nongendered Poem 5. The Labors of Hercules: Celebrating and Overcoming Race 6. Quotation, Community, and Correspondences 7. Questioning Authority in the Late Twentieth Century Notes Index

The Seductions of Emily Dickinson (review)

Seduction, in Robert McClure Smiths provocatively multifaceted study of Dickinson, means many things. It takes in antebeUum American seduction rhetoric, the cultural narrative of women enticed and abandoned that Dickinson would have encountered everywhere from sensationalist stories in her local newspaper to the high-minded uterature of poUtical and moral reform to Paradise Lost. It refers to Dickinsons Uvely Uterary-erotic epistolary negotiations with her contemporaries, especiaUy her negotiations with the predominantly male audience of advisors, editors, and pubUshers to whom, Smith argues, Dickinson had to fashion her address if her ambitions were to be taken seriously (61). It describes the rhetorical tactics of particular Dickinson poems, tactics that evoke in readers the pleasure of perpetual movement... analogous to the pleasure of a desire itself defined as a pleasurable movement toward an always absent source of satisfaction (106). Seduction describes as weU the larger repetitive patterns of Dickinsons reception, beginning with every readers inevitable, even fortunate faU into the interpretive traps of conjuring a Uteral body behind Dickinsons writerly corpus — the Dickinson readers most blissful Ã1⁄4lusion is represented be the gesture toward the reconstitution of Dickinson herself as a corporeal form (127) — and continuing through the different ways that generations of readers, male and female, have variously performed the open-ended sexual/textual scripts offered to them in Dickinsons writing. Thus widely defined, Smiths master trope of seduction both synthesizes and extends a number of trends in Dickinson scholarship of the last two decades. Along lines estabUshed by Margaret Homans and Cristanne Miller,