Joyelle McSweeney is an associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Notre Dame. She is the author of six books of poetry and prose, as well as a critical book, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, which was published in December 2014.
Jarvis C. McInnis, a scholar whose research blends African American and African diaspora literature with music and visual culture, will join Notre Dame’s Department of English as an assistant professor in fall 2016. In studying what he has deemed the “global black South,” McInnis examines the looming sociopolitical and cultural presence of the plantation in the U.S. South and the Caribbean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
English major Austin Hagwood ’15 doesn’t dream small. He took a train past the Arctic Circle to meet the only living Finnish rune singer. He interned in Paris at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. He taught English courses at Al-Azhar University in Egypt. He ventured to New Zealand to research Maori folklore and literature. And that’s not all.
Douglas Duhaime, Ph.D. student in Notre Dame’s Department of English, is busy expanding the possibilities of humanities research in the digital realm. Very busy. While embarking upon a dissertation project that will use computational models to improve our understanding of early modern book culture, Duhaime has also taken a position with ProQuest, a global information content and technology company, to develop a text and data mining service for researchers.
Laura Dassow Walls, the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English, has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to complete a biography of Henry David Thoreau. A renowned scholar of American transcendentalism, Walls began working on the book with the support of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship during the 2010-11 academic year. She plans to publish the book to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Thoreau’s birth in 2017.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, assistant professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of English, has joined a prestigious group of writers that includes Jonathan Franzen, Alice McDermott, and David Foster Wallace. In March, Van der Vliet Oloomi was named a 2015 Whiting Award winner for “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” Other past winners of the Whiting Award, established in 1985, include Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Marcus, Mona Simpson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.