Celebrating 2022: Recent English Faculty Publications
Faculty discuss their wide-ranging books, from poetry to pedagogy.
The CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D. Program in English is home to hundreds of talented faculty, students, and alumni publishing academic and pedagogical texts, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. In our Monthly English Books Roundup series, we will highlight these accomplishments for the Graduate Center and beyond. For our first roundup of the spring 2023 semester, we look back to our faculty’s work in 2022. Read on to learn more about these books and what is next for these researchers.
Faculty Publications
Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction by Mary McGlynn (October 2022, Syracuse University Press)
Professor Mary McGlynn (Graduate Center/Baruch, English) is also the co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies; she writes about class and economics in contemporary English, Scottish, and Irish literature, and also about film, detective fiction, and country music.
How does this work relate to your research at the Graduate Center?
My book Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction examines the departures from realism and grammatical coherence that mark texts in the era of recession, austerity, and precarity accelerated by the global economic crisis. I argue that a pervasive climate of financialized discourse aligns with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility. As I was thinking through these concepts in 2018, I taught a class here in which we read some of the key theoretical and fictional works I examine. The conversations we had really helped me to refine my ideas.
What are you working on next?
I’m currently working on a few shorter pieces, all of which seem to share an interest in the move in Ireland from a more collective Catholic worldview to an individualist one, each with their own scandals, tragedies, and drawbacks. I’m writing about poetry (Paula Meehan, Rita Ann Higgins) as well as fiction (Sally Rooney, Sara Baume), putting these texts in conversation with scholars like Mark Fisher and Melinda Cooper to explore how underacknowledged economic privation and serious mental health struggles persist in a capitalist system that privatizes and monetizes stress.
The New College Classroom co-authored by Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis (August 2022, Harvard University Press)
Distinguished Professor Cathy N. Davidson (English, Digital Humanities, Data Analysis and Visualization) has published more than 20 books. The senior advisor to the CUNY chancellor on transformation, she was appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities and twice has keynoted the Nobel Prize Forum on the Future of Education.
How does this work relate to your research at the Graduate Center?
This work is a direct challenge to the status quo of higher education. This is the last book in my “How We Know” trilogy, which begins with the neuroscience of learning (Now We See It, 2011); surveys the history of higher education and the mechanistic, hierarchical Industrial Age infrastructure we have inherited and desperately need to work together to change (The New Education); and then ends with what one reviewer called the “installation guide” — a step-by-step “how to” for beginning the radical transformation of higher ed by examining our own assumptions, changing our pedagogical practices in our own classrooms, and then taking on our institutions and our society.
What are you working on next?
I’m currently working on a new book on how one successfully manages change, against odds.
You can read more about co-author Christina Katopodis (Ph.D. '21 and Research Associate and Associate Director, Transformative Learning in the Humanities) in our December monthly roundup.
The Winter’s Tale: Language & Writing by Mario DiGangi (June 2022, Bloomsbury Publishing)
Professor Mario DiGangi (English, Early Modern Studies) is the author of Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (2011) and The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997).
How does this work relate to your research at the Graduate Center?
Because The Winter's Tale: Language and Writing is a book aimed at helping college students interpret and write about Shakespeare, it's not directly related to my teaching or scholarship at the Graduate Center; however, it does address methods of formal and historical interpretation of Shakespeare, which I always emphasize in my Ph.D. courses.
What are you working on next?
Right now I am working on a book called Shakespeare and Queer Studies and on another project exploring intersections of sexuality and race in Shakespeare's drama.
Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies by Mark McBeth (June 2022, Peter Lang)
Professor Mark McBeth (Graduate Center/John Jay, English), now in his 21st year of teaching and administration at CUNY, is also a Graduate Center alumnus. He received his Ph.D. from the GC in 2001.
How does this work relate to your research at the Graduate Center?
Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis emerged out of the collective labors of a group of CUNY professors, who while collaborating in a writing group during the pandemic, realized that this historical moment was generating significant and sound pedagogical and administrative labors. While the pandemic initially prompted this collection, the editors wanted to acknowledge the many crises (i.e., 9/11; school violence; natural disasters, systemic racism) that have happened and the emergent teaching that responded to them. Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis highlights the educational decision-making that educators have used to cope with the dilemmas that they and their students have faced at the turn of the millennium, both to honor these resilient educational efforts but also to chronicle the moment for those educating in future crises.
What are you working on next?
In my 2019 book publication, Queer Literacies, I focused on how 20th-century queer people used their literacies to self-identify and discover community, documenting where, when, and why they relied upon reading, writing, research, and critical thinking to upend homophobia and heteronormativity. My new research extends that exploration and examines how dominant influences of that same century circulated homophobic/heteronormative discourses through young adult sex education publications, syndicated advice columns, union charters, police training manuals, and religious tracts as well as how queer literates responded to or reappropriated those genres for their own word-/world-making.
Ultramarine by Wayne Koestenbaum (February 2022, Nightboat Books)
Distinguished Professor Wayne Koestenbaum (English, Comparative Literature, French, Biography and Memoir) has published 22 books, including The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, and Humiliation.
How does this book relate your research at the Graduate Center?
Ultramarine, the third volume of my trance poem trilogy, reflects the procedures and philosophies of three seminars I've taught here at the GC: Trance, Notebooks and Other Irregular Accountings, and Experiments in Art Writing.
What are you working on next?
Right now I'm working on a collection of my short plays; I call them playlets. The working title of the collection is Dream Pumps.
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