Department Stories

May 2008

Clyde Stats (Academic Suport Services) performed with PoJazz, JSC's poetry and jazz collective, at several events in the Rutland area, along with Tony Whedon and Neil Shepard, Steve Blair (Fine and Performing Arts), and several JSC student poets. The group performed at the New England High School Drama Festival on April 1, and at Castleton State College on April 29 as part of Castleton's "Soundings" program. Soundings is a series of cultural events tied to CSC's first-year programming. Students are required to attend and write reviews of several of these events.


On April 15, 2008 Stowe Free Library presented two poets — Neil Shepard and Julia Shipley— in its Face to Face: Meet the Author series. The event featured a poetry reading, followed by a discussion of the poets' work.

December 2007

Part-time faculty member Margaret Hanzimanolis' blog is registered as an important sub-saharan African literature resource on the Stanford University's "African Literature And Writers on the Internet," and a summary of her work has been included on the "Dissertations in Atlantic History Abstracts," an online resource developed by the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University. View the abstract.

   A scholarly paper, "White Lies and Black Peril: Castaway Women, Nineteenth-century Novels, and Lady Travelers in South Africa" is under consideration with the Canadian Journal of African Studies, for its special issue on sexuality in southern Africa.

October 2007

Part-time faculty member Dr. Margaret Hanzimanolis attended the Atlantic History Seminar Conference: "Regional Networks, Shared Experiences, Forces of Integration" at Harvard University on June 21-23 2007, and the the Fifth Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, August 15-19, 2007.

   She will present "White Lies and Black Peril: Castaway Women, Nineteenth-century Novels, and Lady Travelers in South Africa," at the Chimalpahin Conference 2007: Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness, in Mexico City, October 15-18, 2007.

   Her paper examines a "constructed" female hyper-vulnerability that circulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and concerned attitudes toward European women's presence in southern Africa. This disposition to dramatize or revel in the dangers that women might face, shipwrecked or on long trade voyages round the Cape of Storms, is in marked contrast to British women's descriptions of southern Africa in the later, high imperial, period: their travel texts — such as Charlotte Barter's Alone Among the Zulus (1865) — were key to the "reconstruction" of southern African spaces as hospitable to solitary female travelers (and thus rendered suitable for emigration schemes). In a third permutation, an "internal" South African discourse of "black peril," largely promoted via popular literature, developed in the late nineteenth century. The existence of these three largely artificial discourses — that of hyper-vulnerability, ultra-safety and black peril — illustrate how representations of women's physical safety and intact honor were entangled with (and often manipulated for) imperial objectives.

Neil Shepard read his poetry at the recent Burlington Book Festival. He also performed PoJazz with Tony Whedon (Writing and Literature) and others at Halverson’s on Church Street in Burlington. On October 2, Neil was the featured reader at Green Mountain College. The 20th anniversary issue of Green Mountains Review just hit the news stands. Because of GMR’s special issue on "Literature of the American Apocalypse," Neil has been invited to serve on a panel — "Poetry and the Atom Bomb" — at this year’s Associated Writing Programs conference. Other panelists include Carolyn Forche and William Heyen.

Writing and Literature