Indian Angles and Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India

In 2011, Professor Mary Ellis Gibson, English and Women's and Gender Studies, published two companion books with Ohio University Press: Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore and Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913. Both works contribute greatly to the scholarship of literature in English in India during the long nineteenth century and serve to introduce this poetry to a wider audience.

From the publisher's website:

"In Indian Angles, Mary Ellis Gibson provides a new historical approach to Indian English literature. Gibson shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much or even more about figuration, multilingual literacies, and histories of nationalism than novels can. Gibson recreates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that were experienced by writers in colonial India—writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities."

"Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature. . . . With accurate and reliable texts, detailed notes on vocabulary, historical and cultural references, and biographical introductions to more than thirty poets, this collection will significantly reshape the understanding of English language literary culture in India. It allows scholars to experience the diversity of poetic forms created in this period and to understand the complex religious, cultural, political, and gendered divides that shaped them."

Death in Crete

In Prehistoric Crete: Regional and Diachronic Studies on Mortuary Systems, editor Joanne M.A. Murphy (Classical Studies) brings together a group of essays that present "a diverse sample of contemporary scholarship on Crete." Archaeologists, divided by the time periods they study as well as locale, have built research silos, and Murphy seeks to bridge that gap with this volume.

As the publisher notes, "since the inception of Minoan archaeology, studies pertaining to tombs and tomb deposits have played seminal roles in our understanding of Minoan culture and the reconstruction of Bronze Age society. For several geographical areas and chronological periods of Cretan history, tombs are the most abundant source of data. Each author in this volume take a clear and distinct approach . . . including some that emphasize political geography . . . some that examine the commemoration of the dead . . . and others that underline the overlap between mortuary rituals and religion."

In addition to editing the book, Murphy contributed the introduction and a chapter entitled "Landscape and Social Narrative: A Study of Regional Social Structures in Prepalatial Crete."

What to do with data--new book by Lynda Kellam

UNCG's University Libraries are fortunate to have data services librarian Lynda Kellam on hand to guide students, staff, and faculty through the ever-growing world of numeric data resources. The World Bank and other NGOs and government agencies have opened up tremendous amounts of data on climate change, nutrition, education, and much much more, and at UNCG, our researchers can turn to Kellam to navigate the numbers. But smaller libraries typically are unable to employ data experts. That's where Kellam's Numeric Data Services and Sources for the General Reference Librarian comes to the rescue. Numeric Data Services provides librarians everywhere the tools they need to develop data services. As London School of Economics and Political Science Data Manager Tanvi Desai blogs,

"This guidebook serves as a primer to developing and supporting social science statistical and numeric data sources in the academic library. It provides strategies for the establishment of data services and offers short descriptions of the essential sources of free and commercial social science statistical and numeric data. Finally, it discusses the future of numeric data services, including the integration of statistics and data into library instruction and the use of Web 2.0 tools to visualize data."

To learn more about Kellam's research and how to incorporate statistics into library instruction, listen as Kellam sits down with the creators of Adventures in Library Instruction.

Advancing Your Career: Getting and Making the Most of Your Doctorate

Emeritus Professor Dale Brubaker, Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations, recently published Advancing Your Career: Getting and Making the Most of Your Doctorate, a book co-authored with his son, Michael Brubaker.

Advancing Your Career is appropriate for the reader considering applying to graduate school, to the student in the midst of assistantships and exams, to the researcher embarking on a dissertation, to the newly-minted Ph.D, to the graduate professor advising a new crop of students. The book provides a road map of what to expect and advice on how to navigate issues such as selecting a committee and "The 'Table Manners' of Doctoral Student Leadership."

John Hattie, Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute, University of Melbourne, calls Advancing Your Career "the book that all doctoral students, advisors, and supervisors need to read to know what to do next. It maximizes the fun and worthwhile aspects of completing the thesis and degree while remaining realistic to the fact that it may not all be a bed of roses. The authors helped me hear the voices of the students--the caring striving, thriving, and surviving.

Ronald Williamson, Professor of Educational Leadership, Eastern Michigan University, notes "It's about time someone had the courage to talk about the joys and the challenges of doctoral study. In Advancing Your Career the discussion is open, honest, and takes the mystery out of the process. It also provides students with a set of tools they can use to reflect on their own experience. The ability to critique your own work and to maneuver through the politics of the doctorate are important to your skill as a researcher. That's exactly why Advancing Your Career is such an important addition to the literature."

Blaire Cholewa, Assistant Professor of Counselor Education, Kean University, says that "Brubaker and Brubaker have created a wonderful, detailed map that simplifies and demystifies the often grueling journey of obtaining a doctorate. This book provides invaluable information and insight for every step of the doctoral process and gives readers an honest account of the hurdles to come as well as provides them with the tools to prevail. I only wish such a book had existed to help me navigate my own doctoral journey."

Book Talk on November 8--Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work

Dr. Carisa Showden, Political Science, will discuss her new book, Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work, at the Multicultural Resource Center in the EUC on Tuesday, November 8, at 4 pm.

Dr. Showden's book, published earlier this year, examines women's agency in several contexts. As the publisher (University of Minnesota Press) describes:

"In Showden’s analysis, women’s agency emerges as an individual and social construct, rooted in concrete experience, complex and changing over time. She traces the development and deployment of agency, illustrating how it plays out in the messy workings of imperfect lives. In a series of case studies, she considers women within situations of intimate partner violence, reproductive decision making, and sex work such as prostitution and pornography. Each narrative offers insight into how women articulate their self-understanding and political needs in relation to the pressures they confront."

For further reading, see Dr. Showden's post on the University of Minnesota Press' blog. Here she takes on the "mainstream" view of domestic violence, as articulated in a recent Glamour article, exploring the question of women's agency in abusive relationships and challenging the assumption that all women have more options:

"What the article misses in framing the question in this way is that while some women indisputably do have more options—and more to the point, more good options—than they did forty or fifty years ago, not all women do. To have 'good choices' available, material resources have to be more widely distributed, gender norms (what we might in our philosophical language call 'discursive resources') have to change, and laws and public policies have to support an array of ways that women and men deal with ending abuse. So women have 'more choices than ever' only to the degree that they have increased access to healthcare, good jobs, day care, supportive friends and family networks, full citizenship status, mobility, access to legal interventions that enable them to negotiate effectively with their partners when needed, and a strong enough sense of self to buck gender norms about responsibility for the maintenance of relationships and being a good partner. Not all women have most of these resources."

Two Books by Craig Nova, English Department

Noted novelist and UNCG faculty member Craig Nova (English) is attracting favorable notice for two recent publications.

Earlier this year, Nova re-issued an expanded version of his memoir Brook Trout and the Writing Life, a book that looks at writing, marriage, fatherhood, and fishing (including fishing with the FBI!). As Kirkus Reviews describes, "One of Nova's great strengths as a novelist is his unerring eye for natural detail....The book is unflinchingly candid about both the writing process and the hard work of marriage, each of which is seen intertwined with his fishing and his love of nature."





In 2010, Nova published The Informer, a political crime novel. John Irving praised the book, noting,

"There are three elements in a Craig Nova novel that you can rely on. First, there is the indelible atmosphere--in the case of The Informer, this is Berlin in the 1930s, and the atmosphere is both brutal and mystifying, because everyone seems capable of betraying anyone. The second element is that there are characters who know they're in trouble, but they have underestimated how much trouble they're in, and they are unsure in regard to which of the other characters they should fear most. The third and most important element is that these characters, and their entwined stories, are on a meticulously plotted collision course. . . . This is a dark but fantastic novel."

Dr. Elizabeth Bucar (Religious Studies) Book Talk on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 4 p.m.

Dr. Elizabeth Bucar, of the Department of Religious Studies, recently published Creative Conformity: The Feminist Politics of U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi'i Women. She will talk about the book at the Multicultural Resource Center, EUC, on Tuesday, Sept. 13 at 4 p.m.

Read more about the book (taken from the Georgetown University Press blog):

"Much feminist scholarship has viewed Catholicism and Shi’i Islam as two religious traditions that, historically, have greeted feminist claims with skepticism or outright hostility. Creative Conformity: The Feminist Politics of U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi'i Women demonstrates how certain liberal secular assumptions about these religious traditions are only partly correct and, more importantly, misleading. In this highly original study, Elizabeth Bucar compares the feminist politics of eleven U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi’i women and explores how these women contest and affirm clerical mandates in order to expand their roles within their religious communities and national politics.

Using scriptural analysis and personal interviews, Creative Conformity demonstrates how women contribute to the production of ethical knowledge within both religious communities in order to expand what counts as feminist action, and to explain how religious authority creates an unintended diversity of moral belief and action. Bucar finds that the practices of Catholic and Shi’a women are not only determined by but also contribute to the ethical and political landscape in their respective religious communities. She challenges the orthodoxies of liberal feminist politics and, ultimately, strengthens feminism as a scholarly endeavor.