Panels & Presentations

While on research leave in Australia during spring term 2003, C.W. Sullivan III was invited to give two lectures at the University of Sydney: "The Mabinogi and Matrilineal Power," for the Medieval Studies Department; and "Denis B. Cashman and His Diary," for the Celtic Studies Symposium.  He has just returned from the quadrennial International Celtic Studies Congress in Aberystwyth, Wales, where he presented a paper, "Uncrossed Boundaries: The Unfulfilled Promise of Celtic Studies," in which he criticized the field of Celtic Studies for all but ignoring contemporary authors' use of Celtic myth and legend in contemporary fiction.

Karen Baldwin joined other audio documentarians in an intensive broadcast production program, "Hearing Is Believing," at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, August 10-16. Produced by CDS and American Radio Works of Minnesota Public Radio, the week-long program featured National Public Radio reporters and community activists who use radio and audio. Baldwin's report on tobacco culture in Durham will air soon as part of a series on WNCU-fm, 90.7, Durham.

Gay Wilentz presented, "African Women Writers Healing Women's Space as Neo-Colonialism Develops," at the Institute of Language, Literature, and Culture, the University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana, June 16, 2003.

Bob Siegel's new play, "Jerusalem," was performed June 5-8 at Carolina's Contemporary Playwrights Festival in Charlotte.  The play concerns Steve and Vic, who have been roommates since college. They've seen girlfriends come and go.  Now thirty is approaching. Vic has been with a woman for a year and she wants him to move out and begin a life together.  Vic tells her that he will as soon as Steve recovers from a recent trauma. Steve has just returned from a vacation in Israel.  He comes back with more than presents.  He returns with a woman, an Israeli (or is she?).  Her presence upsets the unspoken arrangements in this household. What happens over the course of an afternoon and a very long night changes four lives forever.

Tom Douglass presented "Aristocrats in Blue Jeans: Appalachian Fiction Since 1950" at the 17th Southern Writers Symposium, Sept. 19-20, at Methodist College in Fayettevlle, NC. Douglass asserted, "Establishing the importance of Literary Appalachia is much like the long hard struggle to establish the Literary South and all the programs and institutions and symposiums devoted to that cause. ... What has fed the fire for Appalachian secession is a literary establishment so ready to claim these new Appalachian writers as their own, that in effect absorbs the Appalachian identity within the Southern definition ...." The Symposium featured keynote speakers, John Shelton Reed and Lucinda McKethan, and a documentary presentation of the "Rough South" series by filmmaker Gary Hawkins.

Ron Hoag presented, "A Force Not Bound to Be Kind: The Mountain Wildness of Walden and Other Thoreau Writings," at the June conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in Boston.  In July he participated in the Thoreau Society board of directors meeting and presented a paper, "Crossing a Bare Common: So We Saunter toward the Holy Land," at the society's annual Concord convention.  The September issue of AMC Outdoors, the Appalachian Mountain Club magazine, has a cover-story article on the making of the film Wilderness and Spirit: A Mountain Called Katahdin in which Hoag appears on-screen as a "talking head."   A photograph accompanying the article shows Hoag with the production crew during filming in Maine.

Angelo Restivo was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at the July 2003 conference "Italians and their Others" at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Western Australia in Perth.  His paper, "Visual Pleasure in 1971," examined Bertolucci's Conformist and Visconti's Death in Venice, and showed how, in both films, the eruption within the images of the figural announced the limits of the post-1968 project of "analysis of the code."  He also spoke at the Adelaide University Film Society on Bertolucci's Conformist, after a screening of a 35mm print of the film.

Peter Makuck was on the faculty at the West Virginia Writers Workshop (July 16-20) which was held at West Virginia University in Morgantown.