Welcome!  We hope you enjoy the first issue of the online newsletter for the Roosevelt University Master of Arts in English.

1. Greetings from the chair - Invite to Grad Open House
2. Alum profile
3. Summer Workshop for Teachers: How to Teach Research
4. Faculty research
5. In the classroom
6. Faculty accomplishments

I. GREETINGS FROM THE CHAIR

You're a busy teacher and your time is valuable – but I hope you'll take five minutes to learn a bit about what's going on in the English program at Roosevelt University, and that you'll consider applying to our M.A. Program in English. We've graduated many, many area high school teachers from our M.A. Program (you can read a firsthand account from one teacher-alum below) because we offer a dedicated and highly trained faculty, a flexible schedule of courses, and opportunities for you to focus on both scholarly work and curricular development. You can learn a bit about our program in the newsletter below – and to find out more, check us out online at: http://www.roosevelt.edu/english/default.htm

We'd love to talk with you in person about our M.A. in English at our Graduate Open House, which will be held in the Gage Building (18 S. Michigan Avenue) at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 2, 2006. You're welcome to just drop by, but you can also RSVP for the Graduate Open House here: http://www.roosevelt.edu/admission/info/complete2.asp?jump=404

If you're ready to apply to our MA Program in English, you can do that here: http://www.roosevelt.edu/admission/graduate/default.asp

We hope you enjoy this newsletter, and we hope to meet you – at our Grad Open House or in our classrooms – sometime soon. Best wishes for a great spring semester!

Bonnie Gunzenhauser

Chair, Department of Literature and Languages

Roosevelt University

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II. ALUM PROFILE: Frank Alletto

Frank Alletto teaches English at Lyons Township High School and received his M.A. in English from Roosevelt in 2003. We recently caught up with Frank for a question-and-answer session about his experiences in the M.A. Program and how he uses his degree in the classroom….

Q: What led you to the MA program in English at Roosevelt?

A: Most high school teachers go back to earn a graduate degree in some discipline, usually in education, curriculum and instruction, administration, or their content area. I knew immediately that I planned to study literature, but I didn't know where. Three of my colleagues (who were strangers to each other!) recommended Roosevelt University. It didn't take long to convince me. Once I looked at the wide variety of course listings and the conveniently scheduled night classes, I was on the phone planning my first semester.

Q. What was a particularly memorable class you took in the graduate program?

A: I will never forget my first graduate class, “Sexuality and Literature,” with Carrie Brecke. This is where I first learned the concept of homosociality, and how historians often confused it (and still do) with homosexuality. In other words, Emily Dickinson's “love letters” to her sister-in-law are not proof of a homosexual relationship, but of a very typical feminine bond in an era when single women were not allowed to socialize with men.

Q: How would you describe the faculty-student interaction you experienced while you were in the graduate program in English?

A: The faculty student interaction at Roosevelt is unparalleled. I've heard many colleagues speak of their experiences at other universities with bitterness. They lament the inattentiveness of professors or the obvious indifference of instructors. I experienced none of that. Professors and instructors were always available during their office hours; their help was sincere and timely.

Q: How would you describe the personal benefits of doing your MA in English at Roosevelt?

A: Roosevelt made me truly literate and prepared me not only to appreciate the many interpretive levels and historical trends visible in the literature of the world, but to teach it as well.

Q: How do you use your Master's education in your teaching now?

A: Every teacher needs intellectual rehydration. I don't think students intend to dehydrate us…but they do, nonetheless. Roosevelt's MA in English was and is a wonderful oasis (am I taking this metaphor too far?). I was invigorated, and I brought that enthusiasm into my classroom. I've used many texts from my courses at Roosevelt to supplement my teaching, and have even used examples from my own essays and research papers to model many writing techniques.

Q: What advice would you have for a busy high school teacher who's unsure whether pursuing an MA in English at Roosevelt is a good idea for him or her?

A: My advice is simple. Pursue an English MA at Roosevelt University. The program and its faculty offer all the benefits of a full-time degree in a part-time program. It has improved my reading, my writing, my thinking, and, most importantly, my teaching.

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III. Teaching Research: Methods, Strategies, Pitfalls, and Possibilities

6:00-8:30: Wed June 21, Mon, June 26, Wed June 28
Roosevelt University, Auditorium Campus (430 S. Michigan Avenue)

Teaching research is something many teachers do—but not all teachers love it. In this three-night workshop course, we'll talk about the challenges teachers face in teaching research and we'll discuss some practical strategies for meeting those challenges. Our specific topics will be driven partly by the needs of the participants, but some possible areas of inquiry include:

• how to develop research-based assignments that will boost student engagement

• how to help students get away from the internet and into alternative kinds of research (primary texts, surveys, interviews, and more)

• how to bridge the gap between secondary and post-secondary expectations for student research

• how to develop assignments that will allow students to present their research in formats beyond the traditional “research paper”

Bonnie Gunzenhauser, Chair of the English Program at Roosevelt University, will be the instructor for the course, which will meet Wednesday June 21, Monday June 26, and Wednesday June 28. The class will run from 6:00-8:30, and will be held at the downtown campus of Roosevelt University (430 S. Michigan Avenue). The fee of $75 will cover materials, and teachers will be able to earn CPDU credits for their participation in this course. Please direct any questions about the course to Bonnie Gunzenhauser at bgunzenhauser@roosevelt.edu

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IV. FACULTY RESEARCH: Gina Buccola: Renaissance Woman

Our own Gina Buccola recently published a book titled Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith (Susquehanna University Press, 2006). According to Gina, the book examines the ways in which this trio repeatedly stages resistance to early modern conceptions of appropriate class and gender conduct and state-mandated religion in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cymbeline, All's Well That Ends Well, and Jonson's The Alchemist.  An early modern audience would have recognized in these plays constellations of fairy beliefs with important implications both for the plays' heroines, and for their religious import.  We caught up with Gina to learn more about how she got interested in this topic, how it plays out in her classroom, and what she's up to next.

Q. How did you get interested in the topic?

My interest in this topic came from the place that many of the best research leads do -- from a student's question. I had taught an introductory Shakespeare course a number of the markers of early modern witchcraft with respect to Lady Macbeth, designed to suggest that she might be an even bigger witch than the "weird sisters."  When we came to read All's Well that Ends Well, one of my students found (rightly) that the lead female character in that play, Helena, possessed many of these same characteristics, yet was not considered a witch.  Why not, he wanted to know? Finding that I did not have a terribly satisfactory answer for him, I embarked on research that lead me to actual women similar to Helena, who did witchlike things with impunity because they claimed to do them with the aid of fairies rather than the devil.

Q. Did you get to travel to do research for the book?

While I am lucky enough to live and work in Chicago, in close proximity to the Newberry Library (which has been immensely helpful), I have twice received research grants to work at the British Library in London.  While there, I also took advantage of the opportunity to see productions at the reconstructed Globe Theatre and to visit significant museums, such as The Museum of London, and the Tate, which has many fine fairy paintings.

Q. How has your time in the classroom at Roosevelt shaped your thinking about the book?

I have found (to my delight) that students at Roosevelt are very interested in the fairy lore that lies behind the plays. Several students have pursued research projects of their own on this topic, and I have learned some fascinating new things from reading these essays -- mostly yet more sources that everyone interested in these matters should know about, in American literature as well as British literature.

Q. What are you working on now?

My new project is on the brief vogue for plays about gypsies in Jacobean and early Caroline England (roughly the sixteen-teens through the 1630s) in England.  In December I gave a talk at the MLA convention in DC on two such plays -- The Benefice and The Fool Would be a Favorite , neither of which is currently in print (see my earlier comment about the joys of having access to the Newberry!)  My working thesis is that, just prior to the outbreak of hostilities associated with the rise of the Parliamentarians and the War of the Three Kingdoms, the nobility in England were captivated by plays about members of the nobility who masqueraded as the abject poor -- the mythical beggar gypsy, singing and dancing his/her way through a carefree life.  Such a fascination in effect anticipates the moment in the late 1630s when the Royalists would begin to run the sentimentalized gypsy migration in reverse -- from England to the continent, rather than the other way about.  Stay tuned for future developments.

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V. IN THE CLASSROOM: “IMAGINING TERROR” –
A Talk with Ellen O'Brien

Ellen O'Brien specializes in Victorian literature and culture and Irish Studies. She teaches a range of courses in those fields and in postcolonial and global literatures, and this spring she's piloting her most recent offering – an innovative new course called “Imagining Terror.” Here's what Ellen has to say about the course

Q.  Imagining Terror? What's that?

A. Well, “Imagining Terror” is a literature class, so while it draws upon the political topics of terrorism and state terror, its key questions are about how writers address this topic through literary forms of representation. In other words, we'll be considering how terror is “imagined” in literature. While we think about the political ideologies of terrorism and counterterrorism, we will examine specific aesthetic strategies for representing violence and the influence of genre on these representations. For example, we will think about how lyric poems, multi-plot novels, and postmodern plays might approach these issues differently. Also at stake in most of these texts is the question of how violence, and the constant threat of violence, affects individual subjects and creates psychological responses, and so, again, we will consider how authors address this phenomenon through the creation of fictional characters or poetic speakers.

Q. How did you get interested in the topic?

A. This course marks a convergence of several research and curricular interests. I have become increasingly interested in the international dimensions of Anglophone literature and the scope of non-western writing in English. On a very practical level, the theme of terror provides us some mobility to move across the national boundaries that most often shape the study of literature in academe and to study writers in dialogue with one another on a subject of global concern. I suppose I really first became interested in the literary representation of terror in reading the work of Northern Irish poets, such as Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon, who have developed lyric poetry in really innovative and different ways as they address the experience of living in the North during the “Troubles.”

Q. Are you focused on terrorism globally or are you looking at a few geographical or historical ‘hot spots'?

A. In designing this course, I have aimed for historical depth and geographical breadth. Rather than privileging the post-9/11 context, I decided to return to the beginning of the twentieth century with Conrad's The Secret Agent —often considered the first political thriller. Moving through the twentieth century, we will study some African writers, including Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, both of whom have been detained as political prisoners. Soyinka's Madmen and Specialists was written shortly after his release from prison and deals with the Nigerian civil war, and Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat deals with the Mau Mau insurgency and the colonial government in Kenya. After studying the Irish poets that I just mentioned, we'll conclude with a glimpse at South Asia with Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost , which explores the civil war in Sri Lanka, and Salman Rushdie, whose latest novel, Shalimar the Clown , considers the ongoing struggles in Kashmir.

Q. What kinds of students are interested in a course like that?

A. Perhaps not surprisingly, several students have expressed a general interest in considering the topic of terrorism—the predominant political concern of our time. But many students have also expressed more specific interests in the international scope of the readings, in learning about writers that they have never heard of, and in exploring the dimensions of political writing and the strategies of political writers.

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Full-Time English Faculty, 2005-2006 (l. to r.): Gina Buccola; Ann Brigham; Larry Howe; Mary Anne Mohanraj; Bonnie Gunzenhauser; Priscilla Perkins; Janet Wondra; Ellen O'Brien; Emily Tedrowe; Julie Sanford

VI. FACULTY ACTIVITIES

Ann Brigham (Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies) received a 2005 NEH Summer Stipend for her book project on the 20th century American road narrative genre. In spring 2005, she co-taught the Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar, entitled "Sites of Democracy and Difference: U.S. Popular Culture and Entertainment, 1880-1930,” and this spring she returns to the Newberry to offer a seminar about teaching Native American literature as part of the Newberry Teachers' Consortium.

Gina Buccola (Assistant Professor of English) recently published a book titled Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith and is co-editing a collection of essays, Marian Moments in Early Modern Drama , forthcoming from Ashgate Press. She also presented a paper at the recent Modern Language Association Convention in Washington D.C. and, during the fall semester, gave four different pre-show lectures at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Bonnie Gunzenhauser (Assistant Professor of English, Department Chair) was chosen to participate in an NEH Summer Seminar on “Genre, Dialogue, and Community in British Romanticism” during summer 2005. In the fall semester, she chaired a set of panels on “Reading in History” and presented a paper at the Midwest meeting of the Modern Language Association.

Larry Howe (Associate Professor of English) just completed a Faculty Research Leave, during which he conducted research at the Newberry Library for a book on the Culture of Novelty in the Early American Republic. He's also had an article, "The Epistemology of Adaptation in John Greyson's Lilies," accepted at the Canadian Journal of Film Studies/ Revue canadienne d'etudes cinematographique.

Ellen O'Brien (Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies) has presented five conference papers in the past year. Most recently, Ellen spoke on “Broadside Ballads and the Poetics of Everyday Life” at the annual meeting of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada in Vancouver.

Priscilla Perkins (Associate Professor of English, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences) recently published an article titled "Psychology" in American History through Literature, 1870-1920 . The article traces developments in psychological theory, experimentation, and clinical practice as they influenced writers like Gertrude Stein, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Kate Chopin, and Pauline Hopkins.

Janet Wondra (Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing) had two pieces of creative nonfiction published this fall: “Cleaning Theory” in The Southern Review and “The War at Home” in Bellingham Review , where it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The latter essay was reprinted in a collection published by W.W. Norton, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction.  She will be performing original poetry this spring at the University of Louisville's Twentieth Century Literature and Culture Conference. Her scholarly article on Terrence Mallick's film, “Marx in a Texas Love Triangle: ‘Marrying Up' and the Classed Gaze in Days of Heaven,” is forthcoming this winter in the Journal of Film and Video.

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