Miscellany

A lecture honoring C.W. Sullivan III, the 2004 Distinguished Professor of the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, was given by renowned Tolkien scholar T.A. Shippey on March 2 in Bate 1032.  Shippey's lecture, titled "Both Rings are round and there's an end of it! Tolkien, Wagner, and the Rediscovery of the North," concerned the source material for Tolkien's trilogy.  Dr. Shippey, who received his degrees from Queens College, Cambridge, is a medievalist, the current editor of Studies in Medievalism, and author of Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, Routlege (1998).  His other major works include: The Road to Middle-Earth, Houghton Mifflin (1983, expanded 2003), a source study of Tolkien's fiction, and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Houghton Mifflin (2000), a discussion of Tolkien's place in twentieth-century literature.  Dr. Shippey held the Chair of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds until 1993 (which Tolkien had held before him), and now holds the Walter S. Ong, S.J., endowed chair at Saint Louis University.

Biodun Jeyifo presented the ECU Dept. of English Annual TAG Lecture, titled "Being and Becoming an Anglophone Now: Meditations on Global Language and Desire," in Bate 1031 on March 4.  Seodial F. Deena introduced Jeyifo, who is presently Professor of English and Associate Chair of the Dept. of English at Cornell University.  An international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary scholar, Jeyifo has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Indiana  University, and University of Bayreuth, West Germany.  He is the author of Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism published by Cambridge U P (2003) and the editor of Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity published by U of Mississippi P (2001).

On February 19, at the Sheppard Memorial Library, ECU alumnus and current instructor at Bowling Green State University, Theresa Williams, read selections from her current novel The Secret of Hurricanes published by MacAdam/Cage (2002). Williams also shared a few passages from a soon to be published short story.  As part of the ECU's Writer's Reading Series of Eastern North Carolina, Ms. Williams offered insights into the motivations of the writing process during her presentation.

The 76th Annual Academy Awards were held February 29th. For a list of winners see: http://www.oscar.com/oscarnight/winners/index.html  Several ECU graduate writers offered their views on some of the contenders: Kendra Jones on Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain; Ryan Johnson on Clint Eastwood's Mystic River; and Josh Hasty on Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.