In March 2023, Tim Scherman published the first of a series of three volumes contracted with Mercer Press, "Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings. Volume I, Emergence and Fame: 1833-1849" presents readers with a carefully annotated collection of the work that led to Oakes Smith's enormous fame in the 1840s, much of it (a series of letters to and from her husband in the 1830s for example) appearing here for the first time outside of MS archives. Four of the six or seven genres she employed in her career are represented here—letters, poetry, short fiction, and memoir—including the first complete edition of her breakout narrative poem, “The Sinless Child,” printed in a form that allows readers to track the poet’s revisions and additions from 1842 to 1845.
Olivia Cronk published several works in November/December 2022. In November, she published a collaborative critical piece on Madison McCartha's Freakophone World, followed shortly in December by a critical-creative hybrid piece, "Mothering as Archive as Textural Surface" and a multi-genre memoir piece, "The Bobbies."
Ryan Poll has continued to examine the state of popular culture. In November 2022, he published Aquaman and the War Against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2022), examining how the titular DC Comics character "can be read as an allegory that responds to the climate change crisis, an era in which the oceans have become sites of warfare and mass death."
He has also published several more articles in Salon and PopMatters:
"'Everything, Everywhere All At Once' and the Politics of Genre," PopMatters, February 2023
"From 'Aquaman' to 'Avatar' Ocean-Centrc Blockbusters are Eroding our Terrestrial Bias," Salon, January 2023
“How Masculinity Fails in Jane Campion’s ‘The Power of the Dog,” PopMatters, January 2022
Emily Garcia continues to study the early beginnings and ongoing history of Latinx and Hispanophone literature in America:
Beginning July 1, 2023, she will hold a 3-year term as Reviews Editor for the journal Early American Literature
Contributed a peer-reviewed book chapter, “Logics of Exchange and the Beginnings of US Hispanophone Literature.” Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, 1770 – 1828. Ed. William Huntting Howell and Greta LaFleur. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022. p. 188 – 203.
National Conference presentations:
“Not-Quite-Latinx History on the Mississippi River” at the Society of Early Americanists. College Park, MD. June 10, 2023. (forthcoming)
"On the Limits of Precarity and Pedagogy in Times of Crisis." at the American Studies Association. New Orleans, LA. November 4, 2022.
