Research & Innovation

Lithopedia, the winner of the 2010 Bull City Press First Book Prize, marks the emergence of a haunting and lyrical new voice.

When poet Amy Lowell died in 1925, her will established the scholarship, which is administered by the trustees at the law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston, Massachusetts.

Drawing on a combination of primary and secondary sources of information, including the Preserving Virtual Worlds project (an academic investigation into viable models of preservation for videogames and 3D virtual worlds based on a series of archiving case studies) and the results of a game documentation survey conducted by Donahue, we examine how players are taking responsibility for collecting, managing, curating, and creating long-term access to computer games. Because our interest lies with the contact zone between players and information professionals, we also describe and analyze how we and other scholar-archivists are collaborating with or relying on the user community to preserve virtual worlds, with an eye to how these relationships might eventually be codified within a larger preservation framework.

Enright's flexible syntax, and his weaving in and out of impression and meditation, illuminate these sixty-three extraordinary and memorable poems, written over the last twenty-five years. He enacts a double mood of nostalgia and skepticism, where he at once longs for the past and distrusts the powerful images his longing conjures. Enright's honesty toward the past, and his sense of memory as both essential and inadequate, heighten what is already a vivid constant irony. In "The Old Story," a dying father is shaved by his child, and the speaker listens to tales of the past and tempers them with his own desolate perception of approaching loss: "Though time demanded a new tradition, here/The waiting would go on, everyone wanting/Their new life to begin, the saddest life." In "My People," an alphabetical lexicon of the speaker's imagined family lineage since the beginning of time, mock biblical invocations ("so out of Bewilder, Churlish;/out of Dicey, Errant, who begat Fallow") mix with comic historical summaries ("Brutal litho years waited on the shore. Great beasts,/Not my uncles, lumbered through the forests, overeating./ The sense of change was born, and just in time,/But not for my people, scholars of the Mud and the Stick.")

From Amazon

Centered on the adoption of a gay couple's first child, The Foundling Wheel employs apt imagery to create an emotional mosaic that explores the complicated bond between father and son. Beginning in a place where the desire to have a child has not yet been realized, this book is a journey, and while the poems certainly rejoice in fatherhood, they also grapple with the fears that accompany it.

From the publisher's website:

A bold recasting of prayer as a rhetorical art, Spiritual Modalities investigates situations, strategies, and performative modes of discourse directed to divine audiences. Examining how prayer “works,” Spiritual Modalities reads prayer’s situations and strategies, its characteristic acts and attitudes, to advance an understanding of prayer as a basic expression of our rhetorical capacities for communication and communion. This groundbreaking analysis demonstrates how prayer draws on fundamental capacities to engage other beings rhetorically to argue that we are never more human than when we address the nonhuman.

Spiritual Modalities is notable in its aim to articulate a critical rhetoric of prayer in a secular idiom. It draws on contributions to rhetorical theory from Kenneth Burke along with a broad range of classical and contemporary perspectives on audience, address, speech acts, and modes of performance. The book also takes a multicultural and multimodal approach to prayer as rhetorical performance. The texts and practices of prayer represented range across religious traditions and historical eras and include both verbal and physical modes of divine address. The book will be of interest to scholars researching religious language, Burkean approaches to discourse, practices of memory, and media studies.

In Jeffrey J. Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012). 93-123.

Beneath the statehouse dome and from the banks of the Severn River, the ghosts of Annapolis rise to roam the red-bricked streets of the old city. The capital of Maryland since 1694, the city hosts the restless dead who never left the narrow alleys, taverns and homes where they met their ends. Come dine with Mary Reynolds at the tavern she's been keeping since the 1760s, stand vigil at the sarcophagus of Admiral John Paul Jones and search for the figure of Thomas Dance, who plummeted from the heights of the statehouse dome in 1793. From headless men and ghostly soldiers to unlucky bootleggers and ominous gravediggers, Annapolis Ghost Tour founder Mike Carter and tour guide Julia Dray narrate the eerie tales of these and other supernatural residents of Annapolis.

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence.

In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens.

Lives in Play explores the centrality of life narratives to women's drama and performance from the 1970s to the present moment. In the early days of second-wave feminism, the slogan was "The personal is the political." These autobiographical and biographical "true stories" have the political impact of the real and have also helped a range of feminists tease out the more complicated aspects of gender, sex, and sexuality in a Western culture that now imagines itself to be "postfeminist."

The book covers a broad range of texts and performances, from performance artists like Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and Bobby Baker to playwrights like Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, and Sarah Kane. The book examines biography and autobiography together to link their narrative tactics and theatrical approaches and show the persistent and important uses of life writing strategies for theater artists committed to advancing women's rights and remaking women's representations.

Lives in Play argues that these writers and artists have not only responded to the vibrant conversations in feminist theory but also have anticipated and advanced these ideas, theorizing gender onstage for specific ends. Ryan Claycomb demonstrates how these performances work through tensions between performative identity and the essentialized body, between the truth value of life stories and the constructed nature of gender and narrative alike, and between writing and performing as modes of feminist representation.

The book will appeal to scholars in performance studies, women's studies, and literature, including those in the growing field of auto/biography studies.