What some of our current students and recent grads are up to

The Graduate English Conference

The Pizer Graduate Student Colloquium

The GIP Grant Recipients

(Note: you can also see lists of MA theses written by our students by clicking on "MA Thesis" in the left column and going to the bottom of the page)

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WHAT SOME OF OUR CURRENT STUDENTS AND RECENT GRADUATES ARE UP TO

Leah Sadykov, who received both her M.A. English and M.A. English Teacher degrees from Brooklyn College in 2007, published her thesis in the inaugural issue of the journal Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies (June 2008).  The article, “Linguistic Determinism,” engages the debate in linguistics between the Sapir-Worf hypothesis and “the contemporary linguistic trend of universalism.”  Leah currently teaches high school journalism and English courses and is an adjunct English instructor at Suffolk Community College.

Francisco Delgado, a student in the English M.A. program, will present a paper entitled "A Means of Resistance: Basketball in Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" at the 8th annual Native American Symposium, to be held at Southeastern Oklahoma State University on November 5-6, 2009.

Mike Dell’Aquila earned a BA in English from Penn State University and began the M.A. English program in the Fall of 2008 at Brooklyn College.  In October 2009, he will be presenting his paper “Long Ways to Go: Sterling A. Brown, Diane di Prima and the Specter of the American South” at the 2009 American Italian Historical Association’s Annual Conference in Baton Rouge, LA.  In February 2010, Mike will also be presenting a paper entitled “Who Are You Calling Paesan?: Ethnic Identity and Epicurean Transcendence in Lucia Perillo’s ‘The Northside at Seven’” at the Southwest/Texas Popular and American Culture Association’s annual conference in Albuquerque, NM.  His main interests include ethnic and cultural studies, specifically Italian American literature.  Mike plans on pursuing a Ph.D after completing the MA English program.

Michael Clyne received a BA in philosophy and creative writing from Eugene Lang College and entered the MA program at Brooklyn College in 2008 . He will be presenting a paper titled "Romanticized Risk and Arresting Experience in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" at the Fall 2009 New York College English Association Conference in Niagara County.

Catherine Baker presented a paper from her thesis, “Profaning the Sacred and Sanctifying the Mundane: Heretical Humor in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” at this year’s North American James Joyce Conference: “Eire on the Erie” in Buffalo, NY. In November, she will be presenting another paper titled “Don Quixote and ‘The Death of the Author’” on the Cervantes Society of America panel at the South Atlantic MLA conference in Atlanta. And in February, she will be presenting a paper titled “A ‘Manly Voys’ and a ‘Talking Queynte’: The Wife of Bath as a Ventriloquized Hole” on the Gender and Sexual Identity panel at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Catherine’s interests include Irish literature, modernism, and psychoanalytic criticism.

Clare Callahan, Ryan Dobran, Osvaldo Oyola, Suzy Uzzilia, Bridget English, and Melissa Sande have all been accepted to English doctoral programs starting in Fall 2009. As of this posting, Suzy is planning to enroll at the CUNY Graduate Center, right here in New York City, and Osvaldo, who had initially planned to attend SUNY Stonybrook, will be going to SUNY Binghamton after receiving a very generous offer from them. Clare has decided to move to North Carolina where Duke University has offered her full tuition remission, a substantial living stipend, and the promise of a reasonable TA load. Ryan hasn't yet decided between the Graduate Center and Cambridge University in merry old England. As for Melissa, she has just received an acceptance from SUNY Binghamton which includes a significant annual stipend. Bridget turned down offers from Queens University, Belfast, and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in favor of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, where she will study contemporary Irish literature.

Michael DiBerardino came to New York in 2007 to begin the MA program after receiving his BA in Literature and Philosophy from Ramapo College.  In March, he will be presenting his paper "The Saint of Spectacle: Shrike as the Figure of Late Capital in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts" at the University of Rhode Island's Annual Graduate Conference, where this year's theme is "Bodies In Motion."  His main interests include Modern/Postmodern theory, Semiotics, and the literature of the American South.  When he is not preoccupying himself with how to make it into a Ph.D program, he  balances his time between bartending and controlling his potentially pathological obsession with the TV show Lost. 

After receiving a B.F.A from NYU in film and television, Rabecca Hoffman joined the M.A. English program in 2005, where she pursued her interest in film, literature, gender studies and semiotics, culminating in her 2007 thesis "Gender Differences in Cinematic Storytelling Styles: Bound vs. High Art." Since graduating, she has been working for the New York Public Library and will begin the Library Science Program at Pratt Institute in the fall of 2009, focusing on film, media, and performing arts librarianship. When she is not busy assisting patrons with research, she helps run a monthly film program at the library.
THIS JUST IN: Jessica Starr (M.A. 2007) will as also be pursuing a second graduate degree in Library Science, at the University of British Columbia. She was accepted into all the programs she applied to, with several scholarships thrown in, but decided to accept the offer from U.B.C., as she writes, "after they campaigned quite hard to get me to say yes; they also have terrific job placement numbers, and a very strong program, particularly with regard to archiving and preservation."

A 2008 graduate of the MA English Teacher program and a member of the New York City Teaching Fellows' cohort 12, Jennifer Stoops is currently teaching 8th grade English Language Arts at MS 57 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where with the assistance of a funded proposal from Donors Choose, she recently spearheaded an after-school program for students interested in reading and drawing comics, graphic novels, and manga. During her time at Brooklyn College and as a recipient of the Pizer Prize, Jennifer presented her paper, "David Malouf's An Imaginary Life: A Meditation on Language, Loss, and Liminality" in May 2008 as part of the Wolfe Institute's Graduate Student Colloquium. The same month, she was inducted into Kappa Delta Pi, the Education Honors Society. Future professional plans include studying for a second master's degree as a Reading Specialist and compiling her absurd experiences with the New York City Department of Education into some sort of novel.

As an undergraduate at Indiana University, Ryan Everitt studied comparative literature and music. After three years in publishing, he returned to literary study at Brooklyn College, earning his M.A. in 2007. During this time, Ryan rediscovered his interest for Victorian Literature, culminating in a master’s thesis on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Along the way, he was awarded the Michael Tuch Foundation Scholarship; he has also been an adjunct lecturer for the English department for four years. Ryan was accepted to several doctoral programs including those at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the CUNY Graduate Center, which he is currenty attending, while continuing to teach as an adjunct in the English Department at Brooklyn College.

Leah Sadykov, who completed both the MA English Teacher degree (2006) in the Teaching Fellows program, and the MA English degree (2008), is currently employed at August Martin High School in Jamaica, Queens, where she has developed and taught an AP English course as well as created a Media Literacy Program and school newspaper, The Martin Messenger. She has also made presentations at the conferences of the Popular/American Culture Association (2/13/08) and the American Comparative Literature Association (4/24/08), and published her paper "Teacher as Hero in Late Cold-War Film and Culture" in Heroes of film, Comics and American Culture Essays on Real and Fictional Defenders of Home (L. DeTora, Ed. McFarland Publishing, 2009). Leah is applying to doctoral programs in American Studies, where she hopes to examine the way in which "American culture, which is fueled with Christian entitlement, denies its own demise and how this denial informs the entire culture."

After earning her B.A. in Literature and Creative Writing at Bard College in 2000, and spending a few years in the world of web publishing, Lauren Kilian received her M.A. from Brooklyn College in 2005. She then taught composition at Brooklyn College and at Kingsborough Community College, while revisiting her thesis ("'How Do You Connect Things?': Adding up the Arbitrary in Don DeLillo's The Names") in preparation for applying to doctoral programs. Along the way, she presented at Brooklyn College's Graduate Student Colloquium and at SUNY Stony Brook's Annual Graduate Student Conference. She was accepted to several doctoral programs and is now attending attend the English Ph.D. program at SUNY Stony Brook.

Risa Shoup, whose interests include cultural studies, theories of adaptation, gender studies, and post-colonial theory, presented a paper on Shirin Neshat's adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur's Women Without Men at our 2008 Graduate English Conference. She is currently teaching in the English Department, and is the Performing Arts Programming Director at chashama, a not-for-profit arts services organization. She recently spoke at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) about chashama and the use of video to virtually expand an artist's workspace, and will be presenting two papers drawn from her thesis-in-progress, one at the 2009 Joint Conference on "Migration, Border, and the Nation-State" at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and the other in Toronto, at the "Intersections 2009" conference sponsored by the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson and York Universities. Risa reads entirely too many comic books and political blogs, and really enjoys NPR.

Joseph Russo and Prof. Nicola Masciandaro both made presentations at the world’s first heavy metal conference (“Heavy Fundamentalisms: Music, Metal, and Politics”) held in Salzburg, Austria, on Nov 3-8, 2008. Joseph’s paper, “Nile's Primal Ritual - Induction of the Devotee,” examined metal’s indulgence in ritual, not merely as a theme, but as a model for what the form itself is, or might become. Nicola, in his “What is This that Stands before Me?: Metal as Deixis,” explored how metal’s vocal deixis reopens as always present the place where language begins, what Agamban calls “the no-man’s-land between sound and signification.”

Clare Callahan and Deb Travis have obtained graduate assistantships from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). They are currently busy organizing the more than 300 panels which will be held at the 2009 NeMLA Conference in Boston (Feb 26 - March 1) under Elizabeth Abele, the organization's Executive Director. They will also be attending the conference where their duties will include such tasks as working at the registration table and taking minutes for the NeMLA Board Meeting. Compensation includes a stipend and free hotel accommodations.

Steve D'Amato came to the MA English program in fall 2007. His first semester, he obtained a travel grant from Brooklyn College to attend Western Michigan University's 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. The following spring, he helped organize our first Graduate English Conference (see below) where he presented a paper entitled "The Work Of Milton's Alchemy: A Reexamination of Paradise Lost." Now in his second-year, Steve is an adjunct instructor in the English Department where he teaches freshman composition; he is also a writing tutor for the Philosophy Department. He plans to continue his teaching while pursuing the subject of alchemy in his Master's thesis, which he will probably complete next fall. Aside from literary alchemy, Steve practices a form of the proto-science in his very own kitchen at home, cooking and brewing new culinary recipes for the pleasure of his friends and loved ones. He also devotes some of his free time to mixing vinyl records of electronic music.

Peter Quartuccio secured a marketing internship with Maquet Cardiovascular of San Jose, CA this summer. After an awkward beginning (what use is an English MA in a medical firm?), the Maquet folks quickly put Peter's talents to full use; he wrote letters to the field, wrote and edited pieces for a newsletter, and was placed in charge of carrying out a survey to assess the effectiveness of Maquet's marketing tools in the field. He is currently working on his thesis ("Elements of Detective Fiction in Joyce's Dubliners") and plans to complete his degree in January. Maquet has already encouraged him to return to the firm upon graduation, an option which he is seriously considering.

Diane Goettel, currently in her second semester in the M.A. program, is the Editor of The Adirondack Review, an online quarterly publication that has just entered its ninth year, and the Managing Editor of Black Lawrence Press, which publishes literary fiction and poetry as well as nonfiction titles. Diane will participate in the Brooklyn College Study in China Program this summer during which she hopes to complete an independent study project on women's Chinese Literature. She considers that her graduate work is providing her with exciting new perspectives which inform both her writing and her editorial work.

Melissa Sande, also in her second semester here, recently presented a paper entitled "A Move from Modernist to Postcolonial Literature: Heart of Darkness, Voyage in the Dark, and the Cultural Conversation" at the 20th Annual Stony Brook Manhattan Graduate Conference.  Another paper of hers has been accepted by the Conference on "(dis)junctions: Where the Streets are Re-Named" at the University of California, Riverside. This one poses the question, "Who Owns Writing?: Language as the Terrain of Empire." It examines the role of English as the language of the colonizer in creating a separation between a colonized people and their native land.

Tim Holland graduated from Penn State University with a B.A. in English and is now in his final semester in the M.A. program. He recently presented at the James Joyce Graduate Conference in Rome, Italy (keynote speakers included Umberto Eco and Derek Attridge). His paper, The Real Troubles in Joyce’s Dublin: Literature as Agent of Empire in Ulysses, is currently being considered for publication in the journal Joyce Studies in Italy. Tim works for a language translation company in Manhattan, teaches composition at Brooklyn College, writes stories, makes paintings, and is planning to pursue his studies at the doctoral level.

Ryan Dobran, a second-year MA student, graduated from Stonehill College with a major in English and a minor in Philosophy. At Brooklyn College, Ryan won a GIP research grant for work related to his thesis which examines George Oppen’s collection of poems, Of Being Numerous. A second grant is sending him to Detroit’s College for Creative Studies to deliver a talk based on Of Being Numerous. Crucially, Ryan played a central role in  creating the recently established Graduate English Committee,  which has already staged several events,  including poetry and fiction readings, film screenings, social gatherings, and an upcoming colloquium. Last, but not least, Ryan is the drummer in a local Brooklyn band, King Crab.

Clare Callahan graduated from the University of Texas-Austin with a double Major in English and Anthropology. Since beginning her Master’s work at Brooklyn College, Clare has been busy presenting papers at several conferences including the Northeast Modern Language Association convention, the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Conference on Science and the Humanities. She has won a number of awards, including the Michael Tuch Foundation Scholarship, and GIP research and  travel grants. Right now, she is hard at work on her thesis project, which maps the current debate for and against Theory. She is currently revising an essay for publication, while another of her works is up for review. Clare will graduate in June and plans to go on to a Ph.D. program.

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UNDER THE INFLUENCE: POLITICS AND THE CURRENCY OF LITERATURE
Brooklyn College Graduate English Conference - Saturday 18 April, 2009
Woody Tanger Auditorium (Library), Brooklyn College, CUNY
Brooklyn, New York

10:10-11:10: Session 1         Moderator:  Risa Shoup, Brooklyn College

o Osvaldo Oyola, Brooklyn College: Fearful Symmetry: Influence and the Superhero Comic Book Tradition in Alan Moore's Watchmen
o Jarad Krywicki, Brooklyn College: The Floating Subject: Illusions of Influence and Independence in Moby-Dick
o Geri Lawson, California State University at Long Beach:  "An anthem, shredded into discord in its last few notes": The Dark Knight Returns as Eighties Noir and Utopian Subversion

11:20-12:20: Session 2          Moderator: Steve D'Amato, Brooklyn College

o Andrew Dunn, Brooklyn College: Observing Watt: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Psychotic Utterances
o Michael DiBerardino, Brooklyn College: Dangerous Supplements, Strange Influences: The Crying of Lot 49 and the Pharmakon
o Ivan Ortiz, Princeton University: Confessional Resistance: Rehashing De Quincey's Opium-Style

12:20-1:50: Lunch Break:  Buffet and "Meet our Doctoral Students" event involving Ryan Dobran, Melissa Sande, Osvaldo Oyola, Ryan Everitt and others TBA

2:00-3:00:  Session 3              Moderator: Ryan Everitt, CUNY Graduate Center

o Ryan Dobran, Brooklyn College: Philological Poetics: A Study of Reference in Pound and Prynne
o Donald Brown, Brooklyn College: Impressionism Along the Shores of Balbec: The Practice of Impressionism in Proust's In Search of Lost Time
o Justin Katko, Brown University:   The Suggestion of J.H. Prynne in the Idiom of Edward Dorn's "Night Letter"

3:10-4:10:  Session 4             Moderator: Emily Workman, Brooklyn College

o Derek McGrath, SUNY Stonybrook:  "Shrinking from My Father": Disguises and Dickens's Darwinism in Our Mutual Friend
o Jozeph Herceg, Brooklyn College:  Exploring The Ballard/Amis Connection: Anxious Violence and Suicide in Crash and London Fields
o Glyn Salton-Cox, Yale University:  The Lukácsian inheritance: An Overlooked Influence on Two Forgotten British Writers

4:20-6:00   Keynote:  Mystical Anarchism 
                  Simon Critchley, Chair of Philosophy, The New School

Panel Discussion:      
                       Simon Critchley, The New School
                       Kathleen Haley, Brooklyn College
                       Mark Patkowski, Brooklyn College

Subway Directions: Q Local to the Avenue H station, at Avenue H & East 16th Street. Walk 4 blocks east (you’ll see the famous LaGuardia bell tower; walk towards that) to the Ocean Avenue entrance; or #2 (7th Avenue Local) or #5 (Lexington Avenue Express) to the Flatbush Avenue/Nostrand Avenue station, walk down Hillel Place, past the Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore and McDonalds to the campus.   Visitors, please bring appropriate ID to obtain a visitor pass.

Under the Influence was organized by:  Steve D’Amato, Clare Callahan, James Davis, Mike Dell’Aquila, Michael DiBerardino, Ryan Dobran, Joseph Entin, Jarad Kriwicki, Nicola Masciandaro, Mark Patkowski, Risa Shoup, Emily Workman.

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Last year's Graduate English Conference program:

VERNAL TEMPORALITIES: IMAGINING THE NEW IN LITERATURE
Brooklyn College Graduate English Conference
Saturday 3 May, 2008
Woody Tanger Auditorium (Library)
Brooklyn College, CUNY
Brooklyn, New York

10:45-12:00: Session 1: Bodies Moderator: Marie Rutkoski, Brooklyn College
· Laurynn Lowe, Brooklyn College: The Necessity of the New in Richard II and Hamlet, or Making the Real by Way of Nothing
· Steve D'Amato, Brooklyn College: The Work of Milton's Alchemy: A Reexamination of Paradise Lost
· Nairobi Walker, Hunter College: Apocalypse in Milton's Lycidas and Tennyson's In Memoriam

12:00-1:00 Lunch Break

1:00-2:15 Session 2: Places Moderator: Moustafa Bayoumi, Brooklyn College
· Patrick Nugent, Brooklyn College: Gifts for the Great Potluck: Metaphor and Form in Gary Snyder's Danger on Peaks
· Risa Shoup, Brooklyn College: a+b=c An Examination of Shirin Neshat's Adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur's Women Without Men
· Brian Lane, Brooklyn College:"Beyond the Jumna, All is Conjecture": British Travel Writing in Afghanistan, 1783-1842

2:20-3:35 Session 3: Selves Moderator: Joseph Entin, Brooklyn College
· Jarad Krywicki, Brooklyn College: A Cool Spring in a Well-Lit Summer
· Yasser El Hariry, New York University: The Gift of Newness in the Work of Stéphane Mallarmé
· Ryan Dobran, Brooklyn College: Imagination and America: Autonomy and Unity in Cane and Spring and All

3:35-4:00 Break

4:00-5:45 Keynote: Un nouveau temps du verbe être [a new time/tense for the verb to be]: Surrealist nature and the time of the subject in Prynne Michael Stone-Richards, College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI
· Panel Discussion: Michael Stone-Richards
· James Davis, Brooklyn College
· Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn College

Subway Directions: Q Local to the Avenue H station, at Avenue H & East 16th Street. Walk 4 blocks east (you'll see the famous LaGuardia bell tower; walk towards that) to the Ocean Avenue entrance; or #2 (7th Avenue Local) or #5 (Lexington Avenue Express) to the Flatbush Avenue/Nostrand Avenue station, walk down Hillel Place, past the Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore and McDonalds to the campus. Visitors, please bring appropriate ID to obtain a visitor pass.

Vernal Temporalities was organized by: Steve D'Amato, James Davis, Ryan Dobran, Timothy Holland, Nicola Masciandaro, Mark Patkowski, Deb Travis, and Sally White.

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PRESENTATIONS AT THE PIZER GRADUATE STUDENT COLLOQUIUM

The Pizer Graduate Student Colloquium is a series of lectures and presentations by graduate students chosen from all departments and programs. The lectures are usually based on, but not limited to, the students’ master’s thesis research. Recent English MA presenters are listed below:

Michael Clyne: "The Practical Implications of Artistic Limitations in To the Lighthouse" (May 6, 2009)

Timothy Holland: "The Trouble in Joyce's Dublin: Political, Religious, and Literary hegemony in a Portrait of the Artist  and Ulysses" (November 18, 2008)

Jennifer Stoops: "David Malouf's Imaginary Life: Meditation on Language, Loss, and Liminality" (May 8, 2008)

Suzanne Uzilla: "Distancing Through Language in Three West Indian Novels" (December 6, 2007)

Kristi McGee; "Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: A Quest for Meaning"; (May 9, 2007)

Clare Callahan: "Mottled As If By Shadows: The Shadow of the Clown and Trickster of Myth in Hamlet" (December 6, 2006)

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THE GIP GRANT RECIPIENTS

The Graduate Investment Program (GIP) is made possible by the City University of New York in an effort to help students enrich their graduate experience by encouraging them to participate in established professional conferences related to their academic studies (the Travel Grants), and by helping them to purchase items/supplies beneficial to their academic progress (the Research Grants).

GRANT RECIPIENTS 2009 (grants ranged from $300 to $650): Michael DiBeradino, Siobhan Ladjache, Risa Shoup:

GRANT RECIPIENTS 2008: (grants ranged from $45 to $1550): Clare Callahan, Samantha Losapio, Murtha Meghan, Siobhan Ladjache, Ryan Dobran, Rachel Kershenbaum, Stephen D'Amato, Peter Quartuccio, Joseph Russo

GRANT RECIPIENTS 2007 (grants ranged from $700 to $1500): Timothy Holland, Clare Callahan, Peter Quartuccio, Sharbari Bose, Ryan Dobran, Brian Lane

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