Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

by

University Press Week Day 2

Bucknell UP welcomed these 10 developments over the past 10 years, making it a force to #KeepUP with.

Since 2012, Bucknell University Press…

1. Celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2018.

2. Became a full member of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) in 2020.

3. Saw the retirement of its longtime director, Greg Clingham, at the end of 2018 after 22 years of service to the Press.

4. Welcomed, in 2019, Suzanne Guiod as its first fulltime, non-faculty director.

5. In 2018, entered into a new distribution partnership with Rutgers University Press.

6. Began to release all new books simultaneously in paperback, cloth, and ebook formats as a result of its new arrangement with RUP.

7. Made all new publications since 2018 available free of charge to Bucknell students, faculty, and staff via Bucknell’s Digital Commons.

8. Saw the creation of two new book series, Scènes francophones: Studies in French and Francophone Theater (edited by Logan Connors) and Campos Ibéricos: Bucknell Studies in Iberian Literatures and Cultures (edited by Jason McCloskey and Isabel Cuñado).

9. Took over the publication of two long-running annuals, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiry in the Early Modern Era (edited by Kevin L. Cope) and The Age of Johnson (edited by Jack Lynch & J. T. Scanlan), both in their 24th year.

10. Upgraded its office space in 2018 when it moved from the basement of Taylor Hall, the oldest building on campus, to the top floor of the newly-renovated and named Hildreth-Mirza Humanities Center.

by

University Press Week Day 1: Guest blogger Manu Chander

To kick off the 10th annual University Press Week (UP Week) celebration, we invited author Manu Samriti Chander to share his thoughts on publishing with university presses and why they matter. Professor Chander’s first book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century, published by Bucknell UP in 2017, calls for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Reviewers agree, proclaiming it “the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time”[1] and declaring, “[t]here’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”[2]

“‘Leo’s’ poems have not even the thinnest guise of poetry. They illustrate a strain of trite, and often silly reflection, and a sentiment of ‘goodiness’ that is nauseating.” That was one London reviewer’s assessment of a poetry collection called Leo’s Poetical Works, which was published in 1883. The author in question, “Leo,” was an Afro-Guianese poet and essayist whose birth name was Egbert Martin. The review, which appeared in the Saturday Review on May 3, 1884, made its way across the Atlantic and back to Martin, who, understandably, took offense, writing in the preface to his second collection, Leo’s Local Lyrics, “Some…held that my book of poems published in 1883 contained too much ‘goody-goodiness,’ and I must confess that I have deliberately searched through at least two dictionaries without being able to discover such a word.” In a world in which an English reviewer’s opinion would always trump that of a Black colonial subject, Martin nevertheless found a way to express his frustration with the imperial order of things.

I learned of Martin’s poetry while conducting research for my first book, Brown Romantics, which looked at the way that colonial writers in the nineteenth century struggled to be considered as what Emerson (whom Martin had read and admired) called a “representative man”: “a monarch who gives a constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.” Or, in the case of the Brown Romantics, a poet capable of unifying diverse readers into a coherent whole. Martin, along with such figures as Henry Derozio in India and Henry Lawson in Australia, saw poetry as a means of community-building, a way of forging connections among peoples through the shared experience of reading. My book sought to recognize these figures in a way that reviewers from centers of literary power rarely did. 

Shortly after the publication of Brown Romantics, as I was preparing an edition of Martin’s collected works, I visited Le Repentir Cemetery in Georgetown, Guyana, where, I knew from my research, Martin was buried. When I arrived at the cemetery office I was met by a woman who had never heard of the poet. She asked me to write down his information, name and date of death: “Egbert Martin,” I wrote, “June 24, 1890.” Just wait, she told me, and she headed to a back room, returning after several minutes with a large log book. When she found the page for June 1890, my heart sped up, and it continued to race as she ran her finger down the yellowed page. It landed on Martin’s name, penciled in neat cursive. Age: 29. Nation: Demerara. The log indicated where he was buried by division (New General), space number (30), and grave number (108). I asked if I could visit the spot, and I was told it’s a “mud grave,” no marker, nothing to see.

“Pecuniary success,” wrote Martin in the preface to Leo’s Poetical Works, “is…outside the Author’s anticipations; and fame, the idol of so many, for him has so little attraction that he cares not so much as to couple his name with his works.” And yet, we know from his response to his London critic, he was not without pride. I wonder what it might have meant to him to know that, over a one-hundred twenty years later, someone would see in his poetry something more than “trite” and “silly” “goodiness.” I wonder what it might have meant to him, as he labored daily over his verse, a “confirmed invalid,” as one British Guianese newspaper described him, largely confined to his home at 317 East Street in Georgetown (this, at least, is the address listed in an issue of the London periodical Truth on January 6, 1887)–I wonder what it might have meant for him to know that someone would one day see in the poems he wrote a serious contribution to that literary movement we call “Romanticism,” worthy of collecting and making available to readers across the globe.

Poetry is not as popular as it was in Martin’s time (although it is making a bit of a comeback). It is not regularly published in daily newspapers for readers to peruse casually as they get caught up on the events of the day. Nor is the study of poetry the stuff of popular books, not usually at least. It is largely sustained by scholars and, importantly, publishers who see value in poetic labor, both the labor of producing poetry and that of thinking through poetry in prose. Beyond–to recall Martin’s phrase–“pecuniary success,” we believe that something is gained, that the world is somehow better when we reserve a space for the analysis of line breaks and metrical substitutions, textual variations and publication histories. Perhaps that belief makes us Romantics, as well. If so–if we who publish with and work for university presses are inheritors of certain Romantic commitments–we have figures such as Martin to thank for sustaining these commitments, and for reminding us to sustain them as well.

Manu Samriti Chander is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell UP, 2017). He is currently editing The Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford UP) and The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP) and writing a second monograph, Browntology, under contract with SUNY Press.

[1] “Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century is the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time. Brown Romantics examines how and why poets from India, Guyana, and Australia placed themselves into conversation with authors now commonly associated with British Romanticism. The book significantly expands our understanding of canonical Romanticism’s transnational reach and revises critical commonplaces that have defined Romantic aesthetics since the nineteenth century.”
— Papers on Language and Literature

[2] “This book has already provided a focal point for a new direction in Romantic studies, as emerging research clusters around its central claims. There’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”
— Romantic Circles

by

Continued praise for Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen by Jocelyn Harris

Jocelyn Harris’s new book, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, continues to receive high accolades. Read on for praise of the recent Bucknell Press publication.

Please follow this link to a page where you can purchase Jocelyn Harris’s new book:
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781611488395/Satire-Celebrity-and-Politics-in-Jane-Austen

In Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, Jocelyn Harris argues that Jane Austen was a satirist, a celebrity-watcher, and a keen political observer. In Mansfield Park, she appears to base Fanny Price on Fanny Burney, criticize the royal heir as unfit to rule, and expose Susan Burney’s cruel husband through Mr. Price. In Northanger Abbey, she satirizes the young Prince of Wales as the vulgar John Thorpe; in Persuasion, she attacks both the regent’s failure to retrench, and his dangerous desire to become another Sun King. For Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Austen may draw on the actress Dorothy Jordan, mistress of the pro-slavery Duke of Clarence, while her West Indian heiress in Sanditonmay allude to Sara Baartman, who was exhibited in Paris and London as “The Hottentot Venus,” and adopted as a test case by the abolitionists. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, this new book by Jocelyn Harris contributes significantly to the growing literature about Austen’s worldiness by presenting a highly particularized web of facts, people, texts, and issues vital to her historical moment.

REVIEWS

“[Jocelyn Harris is a giant who looms] large in the landscape of Austen scholarship…. [Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen positions] Austen as a writer of political import…because she commented incisively on the corruption of national leaders in her own day…. [These] chapters raise the important question of whether women’s celebrity, including Austen’s own, is received differently from men’s by the public.”
—Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (Fall 2020)

“Harris’s monograph represents the crowning achievement of a career devoted to placing Austen’s novels in rich historical context…. In her newest book, Harris presents Austen as much more keenly aware of politics and celebrity figures—from bestselling novelists to the royal family—than has hitherto been recognized…. To re-encounter Austen’s works through the eyes of a scholar as knowledgeable as Harris is a bracing experience. She establishes with admirable thoroughness the degree of likelihood of every possible influence and parallel that she delineates. And she acknowledges scrupulously how her ideas intersect with and build on those of fellow scholars. The result is a master class in scholarly thinking and research.”
—European Romantic Review (2019)

“Ultimately, this book has much to teach Austen enthusiasts and scholars, as well as general readers interested in British literature, European history, and women’s studies…. Harris’s study provides a fascinating comparative narrative that illuminates Austen’s works in light of the events and lives of famous people from her time. Harris’ book fully captures the gamut of Austen’s life as well as her works, for it offers us an opportunity to expand our thinking on all of Austen’s writings —from her juvenilia up to her last piece of writing, her verses on Winchester. The result is a fresh way of seeing Austen as a flexible writer, editor, and reviser who taps into current events and furtively—and satirically—tucks them into her tales.”
—Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Spring 2020)

“Jane Austen has changed a lot in the past couple of decades. Not many scholars (and hopefully fewer and fewer readers) attach much credence to the image of the retired spinster, marooned in villages and rectories in the backwaters of Hampshire, but equally not many have tried to alter our perception of Austen quite as dramatically as Jocelyn Harris does in this remarkable book…. In all of her arguments, Harris uses painstaking research to connect [then-current] events to Austen, her movements and her letters, to show why they might have worked their way into the fiction…. By the end, we are presented with two Austens: one removed from the world of contemporary events and aspiring to some higher, universal plane, and one embracing current affairs, satire, and celebrity. There is, as Harris admits, no way of knowing which is right, and the ‘truth’ will in all probability lie somewhere between the two, but no one who reads this scholarly, meticulous book will ever discount the possibility that a very different Austen lies beneath the official family portrait.”
—The Cambridge Quarterly (2019)

“Harris is well established as a guide to the wider thought-world of the author…. In her latest book her expertise and questing curiosity are brought to bear on a set of themes that have not generally been associated with Austen.”
—Emma Clery, University of Southampton; Times Literary Supplement (February 2018)

“New Zealand academic Jocelyn Harris’s excellent Satire, Celebrity and Politics in Jane Austen published early this year shows what a keen political observer Austen was, and how her interest in the celebrities of the day, such as actress Dorothea Jordan and Sara Baartman (an African woman with very large buttocks who was exhibited in English freak shows as “the Hottentot Venus”), influenced and inspired characters in Austen’s fiction.”
—Susannah Fullerton; The Australian (July 2017)

“[T]his is a wonderfully rich and convincing presentation of much new material. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.
—CHOICE

“This book is an enjoyable one for anyone who has read Austen’s novels or watched productions of them on television…. Jocelyn Harris is an excellent writer. For an academic study, the usual jargon and allusions to various post-modern theories are happily absent in this book. It is packed with detail and citations. It’s is valuable for Cook enthusiasts because of its chapter on Molesworth Phillips, and the broader considerations surrounding the death of Captain Cook.”
—Cook’s Log

“Satire, Celebrity, and Politics is unfailingly fascinating in its dissection of Jane Austen, the satirist, and the text is enhanced by a well-chosen selection of contemporary portraits and gloriously scurrilous cartoons. The ‘stories behind the stories’ always make for an interesting read and Harris has produced a book that will be read with great pleasure by academics and devoted readers alike.”
—Jane Austen’s Regency World

“Burney scholars will find Jocelyn Harris’s latest book Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen an enriching read.… [It] responds to, and expands upon, the work of critics who have demonstrated that Austen was so much more than the domestic, apolitical novelist her family portrayed her to be.… Harris reinforces the image of Austen as a well-informed and sharp-minded woman who was seriously engaged with the socio-political issues of the day…. With a keen eye for detail, Harris exposes the subtle connections between the unrestrained, public laughter surrounding such figures and the more restrained, oblique laughter in the novels, thereby deepening our understanding of Austen’s skill for sature in the process.”
—Elles Smallgoor, Burney Newsletter

“Jocelyn Harris’s book, which reflects on the ways in which Jane Austen’s work may have been influenced by what she knew about certain celebrities of her time, is a pleasant and accessible read…. On the whole…I would emphasise the thorough research into the socio-historical context that has gone into this book, and which makes it of interest to anyone who would like to know more of current events during Austen’s lifetime.”
—Rita J. Dashwood, The Jane Austen Society (Spring 2018)

“In Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, University of Otago Emeritus Professor Jocelyn Harris approaches Austen in terms of the world in which she lived, using what is known of everything from her social networks to contemporary media portrayals of prominent figures, to argue that her novels are much more than mere domestic dramas…. Although primarily an academic text, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics has much of interest here for the lay reader too. The glimpses it offers into regency England and diversions into topics as diverse as the disputed accounts of Cook’s death and the misbehavior of the Prince Regent are as interesting as the primary analysis…. [Harris’s formidable thesis] is standing its ground in the fierce world of Austen scholarship.”
—Cushla McKinney, The Otago Daily Times (July 2018)

“Harris’s impressive new book, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen (2017), builds on the work of her pioneering 1989 study, deepening our sense of what Austen may have been up to in crafting her novels…. Harris’s well-written, deeply researched, and timely book has a great deal to offer…. It is difficult to find any scholarship on these subjects that is simultaneously attentive to Austen’s fiction, to the history of theory and criticism, and to the minutiae of Austen family history and biography. Harris weaves all of these kinds of evidence and arguments together to great effect…. For years to come, readers and critics will be weighing the massive number of new insights in this book, troubling through their implications for our future readings of Austen, politics, history, and popular culture.”
—Devoney Looser, Arizona State University

“Last year’s bicentenary commemoration of the death of Jane Austen has given her readers many reasons for celebration. This book is one of them…. Jocelyn Harris in this careful, enthusiastic and learned book shows how Jane Austen achieves vision through observation and creates a new and distinctive world from a recognisable world.”
—Tony Voss, Jane Austen Society of Australia

“Jocelyn Harris has studied the influences on Jane Austen’s writing for a long time…. [Her] thoroughness and detailed and intriguing analysis are exceptional. The text is dense. Her sleuth work is incredible and includes compelling evidence…. The twenty-first century student of Jane Austen will never read her in the same way after reflecting on Jocelyn Harris’s latest book.”
—Sylvia Kasey Marks, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

“Like most members of JASNA, I think that I know Jane Austen, but after reading Jocelyn Harris’s latest book, I’m not so sure…. For many readers…Jane Austen is isolated, safely removed from controversies of personality or politics. Jocelyn Harris overturns that view of Jane Austen and demonstrates just how connected the author was to her contemporary scene. Harris’s work…will prompt scholars to penetrate deeper into her suggested connections.”
—David Wheeler, JASNA News

“Throughout Satire, Celebrity, and Politics, we are thoroughly persuaded of Harris’s main argument that Austen ‘was a politician, in the former sense of a person keenly interested in practical politics….’ [Harris conducted] capacious research.”
—Melissa Rampelli, Holy Family University

“Harris’s thoroughness and detailed and intriguing analysis are exceptional…. Her sleuth work is incredible…. The twenty-first century student of Jane Austen will never read her in the same way.”
—Sylvia Kasey Marks, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer (March 2019)

“Harris’ book offers a fascinating study of Austen’s engagement with the cult of celebrity of her time.”
—Jennifer Golightly, Colorado College, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research (Winter 2016)

by

Curators of Creative Error

A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

A parson tucked away in the tiny village of Ousby who formulates an evidence-free theory of the evolution of the earth.

A forgotten poet who imagines that the citizens of Saturn enjoy a marvelous overhead view of planetary rings.

A nutritionist whose dietary recommendations give clients so much energy that they exercise themselves to extinction.

Along with many other unusual persons granted a second life in university press books, these eighteenth-century thinkers could be generously styled creative, but they might also, more accurately, be deemed wrong.  Such eccentric if occasionally entertaining earners of that off-putting adjective, incorrect, epitomize the many real and fictional figures who missed the mark while showing a bit of creativity.  Whether bad leaders who erred their way to their destinations, such as HMS Bounty Commander William Bligh; whether “tech” inventors who max out at 98% accuracy, such as those who struggled to make an accurate clock for use in maritime navigation; or whether make-believe heroines like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, who never seems to know what is happening to her yet who ends up as lady of the manor, the erroneous outnumber the accurate in studies of the past.

Aided and abetted by an assortment of university presses, I have spent most of my professional life in (sometimes) creative commentary on the vast corpus of early modern errors.  A life spent in nonstop discussion of ideas that stand no chance of being true might qualify as “creative” in the worst sense: a diddling away of a tiny bit of talent on miscellaneous curiosities.  In this peculiar diversion of educational resources, I am far from alone.  By the brutally pragmatic standards of twenty-first century industry, the vast majority of what university presses publish must count as little more than a distraction from the pursuit of productivity.  The prognosis is not much better for those actively creating the cultural history of our own era.  Given the proliferation of discredited ideas in the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, we may infer that most of our notions will eventually end up among quaint collectibles, like old farm equipment nailed to the walls of a Cracker Barrel restaurant.

Creative thinking—figuring out the meaning of our history or artfully understanding the culture of yesteryear or discovering something in the past that has unexpected applications in the present or future—is largely about the sympathetic stewardship of error: the willingness to cut some slack to the past and to appreciate what even crackpots (perhaps inadvertently) achieved.  After all, mainstream figures like astronomers William and Caroline Herschel can seem freakish, what with sitting out, night after night, a brother and sister team looking at luminous smudges about whose true nature they have nary a clue.  In the effort to appreciate the productive irregularities of the past, university presses make a colossal contribution.  At 250 pages and under the imprimatur of a legitimizing institution, a university press book provides the perfect vehicle in which to observe not only one or two historically significant mistakes but to view manageable arrays of discarded phenomena or ideas—to reveal worthwhile patterns amidst a bevy of blunders.  The significance of the university press book as a genre expressing creative curatorial concern for the variably valuable paraphernalia of the past is easy to overlook.  A comparison between the compact modern university press book and an intelligent but unwieldy commercial synoptic production such as Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization will immediately show the amazing ability of the university press format to extract an abundance of knowledge from unusual topics.

When not studying the peculiarities of the long eighteenth century, I spent a certain amount of career time—over a decade—in “faculty” or “shared” university governance, dealing with the astounding range of people, activities, and administrative arrangements in a multi-campus public university.  This experience repeatedly showed the centrality of university presses for whatever remains of creativity in modern mega-universities.  By persisting in the protection of impracticalities, university presses keep their sponsor institutions honest, open, and, in a word, creative.  Reliably and consistently attracting media attention, university presses remind everyone that higher education really should be about innovative thought rather than about sport, grants, and state legislatures.  Throughout my years in university governance, I never ceased to be amazed at the reluctance among powerful administrators, when budget cuts came along, to withdraw even the slightest bit of support from a costly press that would never turn a profit.  Such, to make an odd comparison, is the power that religious symbols exert over Dracula.  Books that gleefully celebrate knowledge without concern for gain dazzle every eye and sear through resistance. They surprise even the skeptical with their sacramental power. The more peculiar, offbeat, and creative the volume, the stronger the enchantment.  Paying heed, in a university press book, to all those historical figures who made creative mistakes thus brings us happily back to the true, energetically creative purpose of universities.

Kevin L. Cope is Adams Professor of English Literature at Louisiana State University. He is the author or editor of dozens of books and articles, including Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment and, with Cedric Reverand, Paper, Ink, and Achievement: Gabriel Hornstein and the Revival of Eighteenth-Century Scholarship. He is also the founder and editor of the annual journal 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. A former member of the National Governing Council of the American Society for University Professors, Cope is regularly referenced in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and is a frequent guest on radio and television news and talk shows.

by

Amplifying Voices from Sierra Leone

A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

“Sierra Leone, your tragedy was too painful to be a poem.
If you could speak, it would be raw in my bones!”
–Syl Cheney-Coker, “Lake Fire,” in Stone Child and Other Poems (2008)

My work in postwar settings has taught me that our moral indignation and empathic response to others’ pain sometimes recedes, and we grow numb, no longer capable of effective political action to prevent, oppose, or end injustice. Unlike sterile news reports, creative expression such as poetry can help us move past numbness and retain (or regain) a capacity to respond. After spending more than five years working as a psychologist and human rights advocate in international contexts, I was drawn to “found poetry,” a genre in which phrases from existing sources are presented in new ways. Found poetry is a vehicle for transforming seemingly indescribable events into literary expression, and powerfully impresses on the mind of the reader the voices of those affected.

I first encountered public transcripts from the UN-backed international war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone in 2005, when serving as a psychologist for the trials held in Freetown. It became evident to me that eleven years of civil war had resulted in a new reality in which the unthinkable had become a part of daily life:

“…in Kono
when they chop off people’s hands
we use tobacco leaf
to tie it round the wounded place.”

The rebels who had tried to overthrow the Sierra Leonean government were eventually defeated, but the country suffered tremendous losses. The testimonies – comprising hundreds of witness reports – deserved the attention of the international community, but that attention was limited. A number of poets from the West African sub-region have tried to rectify that by creating poems pertaining to the war. Among these, the most notable are Liberian American Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who has published several collections featuring poems about the two civil wars in neighboring Liberia, and Syl Cheney-Coker from Sierra Leone, whose 2008 collection contains compelling poems about the civil war in his homeland. Now, I have rendered the public transcripts into poetry to make a broader global community aware of the war’s impact and to underscore the twin truths of survivor suffering and resilience.

After I compiled this collection, I was faced with the task of identifying a publisher who would consider a book by a first-time author, the subject matter and genre of which were largely unfamiliar. I had a hunch that commercial publishers would not accept this book, but that a university press might. In spring 2019, I was blessed to contact Dr. Carmen R. Gillespie – poet, literary scholar, professor of English, founder and director of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies at Bucknell University, and editor of Griot Project Book series. She had a warm, encouraging attitude toward my proposal, and despite her sudden passing in August 2019, the book is now due out from Bucknell University Press in July 2021.

 As I sit here today reflecting on the results of the U.S. presidential election, my mind and heart go back to the many Sierra Leonean women, men, and children whose limbs, lives, and voices were taken from them as a punishment for exercising their right to vote for a civilian government and their refusal to support a rebel force that tried to rob them of that right:

 “Since you say you love a civil government
we are going to chop off your hands,
we will not let you go free.
If we don’t chop off your hands,
we’re going to kill you.”

After the war finally ended, Sierra Leoneans began the long, hard work of attempting to rebuild—and restore faith in—their society and country. That effort is ongoing in Sierra Leone as, indeed, it is in the United States and many other countries across the globe where rights have been violated and power abused. In August 2007, shortly before I left Freetown, millions of Sierra Leoneans all over the country braved long lines to vote in the first presidential election since the end of the long civil war. Those who had had one arm severed by the rebels voted with the other. Those who had been cruelly robbed of both arms voted with their toe-print. There is so much, so very much, that the world can learn from Sierra Leoneans’ determination to survive and to preserve or reclaim their dignity and human rights, including the right to vote and be counted.

University presses help make it possible to know about these stories, and to develop a keener alertness to the ways that language is used in public life: the kind of rhetoric that rationalizes aggression and the kind that serves to reduce it. If we strive to pay attention, we can discern truths that would otherwise slip away. Where do we locate the words to give voice to these truths? The words that we need might be anywhere. The words that we need might be everywhere. Listen. Read.

Shanee Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. Her collection of found poetry, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press in June 2021.

by

Call for Essays and Proposals: Teaching the Eighteenth Century Now

Bucknell University’s series Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850 invites expressions of interest for essays or collections of essays that highlight the scholarship of teaching the long eighteenth century including the Romantic era. Proposals for edited volumes need not have firm commitments from authors at this stage, but should detail possible contributors and topics.

The long eighteenth century was a period of complex interest in the processes of learning and education, exploration of the natural and human-made world, and questions about who should be educated, in what manner, and for what purposes. Many of our ideas about pedagogical projects and processes have their roots in the period—for good or ill—and these same pedagogical questions drive our scholarship and vice versa. Ernest Boyer argued in 1990 for the value of the scholarship of teaching and learning: “The work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others. … knowing and learning are communal acts. … great teachers create a common ground of intellectual commitment. They stimulate active, not passive learning and encourage students to be critical, creative thinkers, with the capacity to go on learning … (Scholarship Reconsidered, 23-24).

Thirty years later, in this moment of pandemic pedagogy and cultural reckoning, our methods of delivery, curriculum, and even parameters of expertise are all under pressure. It thus seems both timely and essential to ask how we teach the long eighteenth century now. The Transits series invite expressions of interest that recognize and represent teaching as a serious scholarly activity—one that bridges the sometimes solitary and reflective work of conventional scholarship with the more communal and communicative work of teaching and learning.

Essays might consider the connections rather than the disjunctions between the work of scholarship and the work of teaching; theories of pedagogy from the long eighteenth century and their implications or revisions for our own contexts; how we teach the eighteenth century—as the period in which academic institutions were born, the period of Enlightenment and the developing idea of human rights, but also the period that institutionalized settler colonialism and slavery. Work that engages critical pedagogical practices and pragmatic approaches as a way to think about the significance of the pedagogical act (rather than say how to teach a specific work or figure), are particularly welcomed. Interdisciplinary work or work that could be adapted into multiple fields would be of particular interest. We particularly welcome essays and collection proposals from junior faculty and contingent faculty, who often find themselves on the “frontlines” of teaching. Additionally, Transits and Bucknell University Press are deeply committed to the work of equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in solidarity with the Association of University Presses and instructors and scholars of color. We warmly welcome work that explores or exemplifies inclusive teaching practices.

We welcome expressions of interest or submissions as you are able; by October 30, 2020 for fullest consideration. https://www1.bucknell.edu/script/upress/series.asp?id=33

Kate Parker, University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse (kparker@uwlax.edu) and Miriam L. Wallace, New College of Florida (mwallace@ncf.edu).

by

My Novel Body

Guest blogger Jason S. Farr, of Marquette University, concludes University Press Week with his profound and personal post on disability and perception.

When I was 29, I suddenly found myself struggling to hear professors speak in the graduate seminars I attended. Conversations with friends and classmates became minefields of misunderstanding and sources of frustration. My physician referred me to an audiologist for a hearing test. She sat me in a dark booth and placed heavy headphones over my ears. Alone and filled with anxiety, I went on to fail an impossible test: somewhat discernible beeps followed by faint beeps followed by silence and the ringing oblivion of my tinnitus. The audiologist showed me the exam’s results, a line graph which plummeted at the mid-to-high frequencies. The diagnosis shocked me: I was severely hearing impaired.

A recent audiogram that measures Farr’s hearing impairment, with hearing level in decibels represented in the y-axis and frequency in hertz measured in the x-axis.

The audiologist advised me to purchase behind-the-ear hearing aids but I opted for the completely-in-canal ones because they were less visible. They would require more repairs and would be uncomfortable to wear, she warned me, but I was ashamed. To have a visible indication of diminished capacity was unthinkable to me at the time. In retrospect, I wasn’t just confronting profound cognitive disorientation due to the mechanized, digital soundscapes I was learning to process; I was reconciling myself to how people reacted when they noticed the hearing aids themselves. The question that I came to dread in casual conversation was “what happened to you?” which may as well have been, “what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you able-bodied?” For a young man navigating the body-driven subculture of gay San Diego, hearing aids called attention to my disability, and disability was something I regarded as compromising the body I was building in the gym and on basketball courts. Coming out as gay seven years prior to all of this was grueling, but coming out as disabled offered an entirely new set of challenges. In many ways, claiming my disability was even more difficult than claiming my gayness because of how deeply embedded and unchecked ableism is in our social and medical systems.

In the face of all this, I continued through the PhD program in Literature at UC San Diego where I would soon become acquainted with disability studies. One of my professors, Michael Davidson, introduced me to this vibrant interdisciplinary field and, consequently, to new ways of thinking about myself and others. In disability studies, for instance, disability is conceived of as a social and cultural phenomenon, not merely a physical one. Disabled people are often regarded as defective. But by reading disability activists and scholars, I soon learned that disabled people are manifestations of biological and cultural diversity, impaired perhaps in our bodies and minds but ultimately constrained by the communities we navigate, by the systems of thought to which we are exposed, and even by language itself, which reinforces ableism with clichéd metaphors of blindness-as-ignorance, of deafness-as-obtuseness, and of crippling-as-inhibiting.

When it came time for me to write my dissertation, I turned to disability studies to help me understand how literature reimagines social and political structures. I began by writing about Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, published in 1762. Scott’s utopian novel depicts a British country estate run by variably-embodied women whose utter abhorrence of heterosexuality and patriarchy is matched in intensity only by their boundless love for each other. Curiously, all of the servants of the estate, and the inhabitants that live within the estate’s walls, are what we would today call disabled—deaf, blind, maimed, short-statured, neuroatypical, and so on. What I eventually realized was that, in writing queer and disabled bodies into her narrative, Scott imagines a social order that remedies the wrongs of her day. In Scott’s utopian reckoning, variable bodies and queer intimacy work together to reform a society that prizes freak shows and treats women as property.

The book that eventually came out of my dissertation and which was recently published with Bucknell University Press, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, is the culmination of years of research and rewriting. It argues that Scott’s novel and other fictional narratives from the eighteenth century reveal the extent to which ableism and homophobia govern social life, but it also shows that, through the disabled and queer bodies that they imagine, authors opened up new avenues of lived experience for readers from the eighteenth century forward.

Much like the fictional characters in the novels I write about, becoming disabled has enabled me to perceive myself and the world differently. It helps me to discern more acutely the plights of the people who compose the communities I inhabit. It spurs me to try to improve these communities in my own imperfect and limited ways. I don’t want to downplay the exhaustion I feel at the end of classes and office hours, after listening as attentively as possible to the ideas, questions, and concerns of students and colleagues. But I’m also motivated and energized by my impairment. Like the fictional characters of eighteenth-century novels, my body is novel, it is extraordinary, and it is rewriting the script that was designed for me. My hearing is unwieldy, to be sure, but it is also directing me toward new social landscapes whose expansive vistas I am only just beginning to perceive.

Jason S. Farr, author of Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature published by Bucknell University Press