Faculty News Spring 2026

Nicolas Allan's new book, Late Heaney, is out in Europe and will be available to American audiences in March. Late Heaney follows Seamus Heaney through the landscapes, friendships and events that shaped his last four collections, The Spirit Level, Electric Light, District and Circle, and Human Chain, all set in conversation with his work at large.

Josh Cohen published a two-part essay "Abolition and Vigilante Justice" in Genealogies of Modernity's online journal.

Simon Gatrell's scholarly critical edition of Hardy's novel Far From the Maddening Crowed was published by Cambridge University Press. This edition, unlike all other available editions of the novel, includes as footnotes every revision to words that Hardy made - and he revised the novel ten times.  Appendices discuss in page-by-page detail the nature of the printers'-copy manuscript, alterations over time to the environment of the novel, and surviving passages that Hardy decided not to include in the manuscript. The 130 page introduction explores the genesis of the novel, the complicated  history of its publication in Britain, America, Europe and the British Empire from 1874 to 1920, offers analysis of the nature of the substantial revisions that Hardy made over time to the text, and provides a rationale for the choice of copy-text for the edition. 

The Wallet and Other Thefts, a collection of short stories by Kristen Gleason, will be published in May 2026 by Fonograf Editions. You can read more here.

Sujata Iyengar's dogged detective-work in tracking down the specific “Shakespeare in the Park” performance in Morningside Park that the award-winning American novelist Gloria Naylor saw as a young teen led to an article that examined how Naylor's novel The Women of Brewster Place transforms that multicultural Midsummer Night's Dream in the Park into an Afrocentric production that uplifts the community of African American women within the novel. Other publications included the long-awaited appearance of “Whiteness in Early Modern Women’s Writing,” in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1526-1688 and a technically challenging, but intellectually rewarding review of a book about the significance of the Kindle Platform for studies in book history. The summer saw Iyengar’s first visit to Portugal, to the biennial meeting of the European Shakespeare Research Association, and in the fall Iyengar visited the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she was delighted to rediscover from the vaults an artefact that had not been seen since 1993: a coronation gift to William IV of England comprising a set of miniature books in a miniature bookshelf modeled after the famous eighteenth-century “Shakespeare Temple” in London built by theatrical impresario David Garrick. Research is ongoing both at the Folger and at the Royal Collection to discover more about the provenance and history of this unique object. 

Barbara McCaskill received the Karen L. Dandurand Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). Named in honor of one of the founding editors of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, this award recognizes her mentorship, scholarship, teaching and service, and furthers SSAWW’s goals to broaden knowledge among academics and the general public about American women writers, past and present. Dr. McCaskill’s most recent peer-reviewed article was published in Legacy, in a forum commemorating the 250th anniversary of Harper’s birth. In September, for the 110th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in Atlanta, she organized and chaired a panel titled “Black Women, Education, and the Radical Work of Citizenship in the Rural American South.”