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Dan Stiffler
(e-mail)
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While I teach Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, Women Writers, and the first half of the British Literature survey, I think I am famous (infamous, perhaps?) for my Renaissance Literature class, subtitled "Unruly Women." In this upper-level course, we examine a wealth of writing (drama, poetry, medical treatises, legal documents, royal proclamations, and sermons) that concerns itself with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries most unruly women: prostitutes, murderesses, witches, and virgins. The class, based on my own scholarly research on female sexuality, gendered representations, and Renaissance literature and culture, allows us to make connections between life in the 21st century and life in the 17th century; the concerns that preoccupied and even obsessed our Renaissance writers -- the bodies, minds, and souls of women -- often sound quite familiar to us. In all my classes, students discover that while Renaissance writing may seem dated, it still has the power to shock, fascinate, amuse, and disturb us. It can be silly, scary, or sexy, or sometimes all three simultaneously. In 2005-06 I was a Visiting Research Associate at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. While there I completed work on a two-volume anthology – Texts on Prostitution, 1592-1633 and Texts on Prostitution, 1635-1700 – that was published in February 2007. Currently I am working on The Purchase of Pleasure: Representing Prostitution and the Early Modern Market, a book that examines seventeenth-century representations of prostitution and its relationship to pleasure, performance, pornography, and profit.
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In addition to literature, I love music and the visual arts, and I try as hard as I can to make them connect in ways that are meaningful. I like having students look at paintings by Titian while they are reading the poetry of Edmund Spenser. Music and Shakespeare is an endlessly rich subject; and a few years ago, I taught an upper-level course on the 18th century which was organized around the year 1781. We read English and French fiction, biographical criticism by Dr. Johnson, and spent several weeks on Mozart's opera Idomeneo. I've directed two honors projects which dealt with the relationship between literature and painting. Of course, history, politics, philosophy, and religion are important too, but for me, the arts are the core: there we can see at its most interesting the tension between form and urge, the container and that which it contains. My favorite hunting ground is the century from roughly 1560 to about 1660 in Britain, when the gods that dispensed artistic genius were exceptionally generous, and where the rewards that lurk around every corner are enormous.
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When I graduated from Randolph in 2004, I had no clue that I would return some four years later to take up a teaching position. To know Randolph from both perspectives–as a student and as a teacher–is a real blessing. While studying at Randolph, I experienced first hand the special and enduring bond that often forms between student and professor. The encouragement and support of my professors helped me complete the initial draft of my first novel Sticklebacks and Snow Globes as a Senior Honors project. Today, as I work with my own students, I do my best to hand on that same encouragement and support. I’m currently working on a sequel to Sticklebacks and on a poetry manuscript called The Weather House. I love both genres with a passion that I hope spills out into the classroom–whether I’m there teaching College Composition or Creative Writing. Sticklebacks and Snow Globes is published by Permanent Press. Foreign rights were subsequently sold to Scribe Publishing and Centrepolygraph.
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Nancy Goulde
(e-mail)
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In formal terms, I specialize in Modernist as well as 17th - and 18th -century literatures in English. I practice formalist, historicist, and structuralist criticism, most often upon the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald; I serve the Fitzgerald Society as Board Administrator, and as Program Chair for the 10th International Conference (Baltimore, 2009). I also relish interdisciplinary studies, and find the writing of the American South and the history of satire particularly fascinating. Less formally, I "follow my bliss" wherever the literature leads: when a great book drops a name, that name often leads off the page and into popular culture. Recent research interests include British youth idol Rupert Brooke, the dreamboat Georgian poet; astronomer Maria Mitchell, the first American to discover a telescopic comet (in 1847)early "physical culturist" Bernarr McFadden, whose exercise demonstrations earned him multiple arrests for public indecency yet whose relationship advice tracts sold by the millions; and Southern novelist Augusta Jane Evans, the best-selling 19th century writer whose Confederate propaganda disqualifies her from the canon. Certain pastimes - scouring antique shops for whale oil lamps and
phrenologists' heads, digging with the archaeologists at Jamestown, St. Mary's
City, and St. George (Bermuda), celestial navigation - inevitably find their way
into my literature and American Culture classes.
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Jim Peterson's poetry collections are The Man Who Grew Silent (The Bench Press, 1989); An Afternoon with K (Holocene Press, 1996); and The Owning Stone (Red Hen Press, 2000, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award). His chapbooks are Carvings on a Prayer Tree (Holocene, 1994) and Greatest Hits 1984-2000 (Pudding House Publications, 2001 and 2004). A new poetry collection, The Last Child, is forthcoming in 2005 from Red Hen Press. Petersons novel, Paper Crown, was published by Red Hen Press in March of 2005. Peterson received a Poetry Fellowship from the Virginia Arts Council in 2003. His work has been published widely in such journals as Poetry, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Texas Review and many others. A number of his plays, both one-act and full-length, have been given full productions and/or staged readings in theaters around the country. He is currently coordinator of creative writing at Randolph College, where he lives with his wife Harriet and his beloved Welsh Corgi, Dylan Thomas. For more information about his books go to www.redhen.org/owningstone.htm and www.redhen.org/papercrown.htm
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Laura-Gray Street’s work has appeared in Many Mountains Moving, The Human Genre Project, Isotope, Gargoyle, From the Fishouse, ISLE, Shenandoah, Meridian, Blackbird, Poetry Daily, The Notre Dame Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere; selected by George Garrett for Best New Poets 2005; commissioned by the New York Festival of Song; and included in Pivot Points, an exhibition of poets and painters that traveled internationally. Street has received a Poetry Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from Isotope, the Emerging Writer in Poetry Award for the Southern Women Writers Conference, the Dana Award in Poetry, and The Greensboro Review’s Annual Literary Award in Poetry, and fellowships at the VCCA and the Artist House at St. Mary's College in Maryland. She is co-editing an anthology of ecopoetry that is forthcoming from Trinity University Press, and her poetry collection Rung was short listed for the 2009 Benjamin Saltman Award with Red Hen Press. Street has an MA in English from the Universityof Virginia and an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers. Street also teaches in the Environmental Studies Department and serves on the board of two local environmental groups, the Greater Lynchburg Environmental Network (GLEN) and the Central Virginia Land Conservancy (CVaLC). Some of her work can be read at...
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