RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP

Alice Dailey, PhD, is the author of the book, Mother of Stories, a captivating memoir and artful examination of family, love and the power of storytelling. Created in the wake of her mother’s passing in 2017, the book defies traditional memoir structures, weaving together lyrical memoir, scholarly writing, original art, photographs and textual artifacts to explore this complex maternal figure.

Yumi Lee, PhD recently published a co-edited volume Dr. Karen R. Miller, Prehistories of the War on Terror, which examines the longstanding American project of classifying enemies who challenge U.S. power abroad as terrorists. To do so, the volume brings disparate episodes of U.S. military empire-building into dialogue across time and space. From settler colonial wars in the nineteenth-century American West to twentieth-century wars of conquest in Asia and the Pacific, the collection’s essays argue that the United States has drawn both materially and ideologically on older systems of empire in the conflicts through which it has waged the present-day War on Terror.

Mary Mullen, PhD, recently published a co-edited volume, with Professor Renee Fox, titled Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland, which is the product of several collaborative conversations at the University of Notre Dame, Villanova University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The volume is dedicated to Sara Maurer, Mary's undergraduate professor, mentor, and friend, who dreamed up ideas behind the book. The second volume in the new Studies in the Global Nineteenth-Century series from Liverpool University Press, this book challenges assumptions about nineteenth-century Irish identity, exceptionalism, and literary conventions.

Megan Quigley, PhD, along with David E. Chinitz, PhD, released a new edited collection, Eliot Now, which collects new and established voices in Eliot studies, integrating contemporary critical approaches with careful attention to newly published materials. Whether grappling with the controversial new two-volume Poems, narrating the experience of opening Eliot's letters in the Emily Hale papers (until 2020 the “most famous sealed archive in the world”), or rereading his works through ecocritical or trans studies lenses, Eliot Now shows how this most effusively celebrated and heatedly criticized 20th-century writer continues to change the way we read literature in the 21st century.

Lauren Shohet, PhD, has released a new edited collection, Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, Matter. This new collection, edited by Dr. Shohet and Christine Varnado, PhD, of the University of Buffalo, analyzes a variety of celebrated texts, including The Duchess of Malfi, The Alchemist, The Spanish Tragedy, The Winter's Tale, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night's Dream using queer theoretical methodologies to offer fascinating insights regarding early modern conceptualizations of humanity, embodiment and temporality, among others. Dr. Shohet and Dr. Varnado utilize queer logics to suggest poignant understandings of early modern death as non-dualist, non-linear, a-teleological, and fruitfully muddled, showcasing the fascinating expansiveness of death through a queer lens.