As many seniors scramble to find jobs or figure out which graduate school they will attend, Menon already knows he will be studying in the NYU graduate program next year. NYU was Menon’s first choice, so naturally he is thrilled, but he could not have gotten there without attending GW first. Menon has always had a passion for research. He said, “Attending my English classes, researching, and writing was never a burden for me, and I actually found myself searching for research opportunities outside of the classroom. After attending a few conferences and developing my first publications, I was completely sure that this was the ideal career option for me.”

Once Menon realized his passion for research, he was supported by the GW English department to pursue it. He believes he would not have found this career path and interest without GW’s help. “Unlike so many other undergrad programs, I always had a small classes so I got to know my professors fairly well. As I progressed in my undergraduate career, I had numerous professors I could turn to based on whatever research I was doing at the time, and often I met with professors that I took classes with in previous semesters,” he said. “My professors have been so encouraging and forthcoming with advice and constructive suggestions that I doubt that I could have achieved my goal of getting into a Ph.D. program without this support system.” Menon found he could rely on Professors Plotz, Daiya, Chu, Cook, Alcorn, Harris, and Goswami in the English department and Professor Chacko in the Geography department for support on all of his research pursuits.

Menons’ professors helped him realize the most important thing, the focus of his research. He acknowledges that the department’s emphasis on global studies was what really led him to study his interests in post colonial literature. “Had I not had the opportunity to study postcolonial and emerging literatures, I doubt I would have discovered how passionate I am about these fields. The fact that I could take so many courses within my fields of interest granted me an opportunity to develop my research interests as an undergrad, which a lot of other programs don’t allow,” he said. However studying other periods in literature has been beneficial to Menon’s overall understanding of literature. He said, “Taking classes on Shakespeare and Milton with Professor Cook and the History of the English Language with Professor Hsy ensured that I had a strong foundation in the field and gave me new perspectives on my other research interests.”

What was really fundamental for Menon was actually having the opportunity to conduct research as an undergraduate. Menon recommends the Luther Rice and Gamow fellowship. He said, “My Gamow fellowship with Professor Plotz allowed me to travel to India for research and led to my first publications.” Furthermore he encourages applying to the Honors Program. “The honors program was so helpful as I was applying to graduate school, as Professor Alcorn structured the class to make sure that the readings and discussions were pertinent to our theses,” he said. Besides the research though, Menon will remember the community of the program. He said, “All of us developed a really strong sense of community and as we all write our theses now, we still turn to each other for support.”

Menon demonstrates that if one takes advantage of everything GW and its English department has to offer, there is a bright future in store for them. Menon’s future will include studying regionality and the concept of race in South Asian literature and film. Menon became interested in this topic after taking his first course here ever with Kavita Daiya and he has run with the topic ever since. He said, “As I began to research Indian literature more, I grew interested in issues of national identity and “racial” difference. As the child of immigrants from South India, I became interested in the way that regional difference defines the constructions of ‘race’ in South Asian contexts.” It is safe to say that we should expect to see many future publications from Menon.

As excited as Menon is to explore his research further, he admits he will miss GW. “I’m going to miss all the friendships that I have made through the English major and the professors who have gone out of their way to help me through my undergraduate studies,” he said. “I’m so glad that I’ll only be a bus ride away, and I imagine that I’ll be make many visits back to DC to see everyone!” We look forward to seeing you Rajiv and hearing about your research!

Which leads me to this year’s reception for graduating seniors. Every year the English Department hosts a party for our graduating seniors and their families and guests. This year’s reception–mark your calendars now–will be Saturday, May 15, 1-3 p.m. in Rome 771 (and the surrounding hallways).

In years past, the primary “entertainment” for this reception has been a brief congratulatory speech by the Department Chair. I know many of you are eager to hear my reflections on your GW experience and the meaning of commencement (“It’s not the end, it’s a beginning”). But I am hoping to supplement my talk with some alternative entertainment: in particular, a modest graduating senior Poetry Out Loud.

So: I am looking for two or three students (preferably seniors; or at least people who enjoy being around seniors and who will be here on May 15) to volunteer to recite a favorite poem of their choosing at our reception. You don’t have to be a slam specialist, just someone who is up to memorizing a piece (cheat sheets permitted–for once!) and reciting it for us.

Send your names and, if you have them, your ideas for specific poems, to me by April 15. But why mark your calendar? You know you want to do this, so email me now: gwald@gwu.edu

As an English professor and as someone who loves to be edited (nothing beats someone making your own prose even better), I thought this was pretty fascinating. Clearly, our President is also Editor-in-Chief. More important, it illustrates what goes into any polished piece of writing: rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. It’s reassuring to know that even boy wonders such as presidential speechwriter Jon Favreau (born in 1981) have to submit to the process of having their work parsed so closely. But as all good writers know, good writing rarely happens on the first draft. Sometimes the key to being a good writer is being a good self-editor.

One blogger suggests that college papers ought to come back to students looking like this. I disagree. Much as I love it when someone edits my work, I also know that English professors aren’t copyeditors–far from it–and that this sort of marked-up page makes many students queasy with anxiety and dread. Good writing, especially of the analytical variety that English courses demand, demands good thinking. Good writers, in my experience, are always asking themselves: Is this the best way to say this? Does this transition make sense? Does this strategy of organization make the most impact? Are there sentences that I love that just have to go?

In any case, next time you feel disappointed with someone’s reading of your work, consider: You could have handed in your paper/essay/poem/short story/memo to our meticulous President.

This just in from Joseph Fisher, who earned his Ph.D. in English in May 2007:

Since earning his degree, Joe writes, he has been “purchasing music in massive quantities—something I had to curtail during my years in graduate school. I have also used the very modest amount of spare time I have been granted since emerging from the Gelman cubicles to begin honing my skills as a music studies scholar, which is an interest I’ve had since (at least) my undergraduate years, when I worked briefly as a music reviewer for my college newspaper.”

Joe’s article on the rise of MP3 culture, “Loneliness Is a Cool iPod. . . Happiness Is a Warm Album Cover,” recently was published on PopMatters.com. “Though I do proudly own an iPod,” Joe writes, “I am suspicious of the way that the contemporary music media have almost universally idealized the distribution of MP3 files at the expense of cassettes, CDs, and other “outdated” physical mediums (not vinyl, of course!). Though I acknowledge that the article has some fairly pronounced Luddite overtones, I certainly won’t complain if any of this blog’s faithful readers decide to Tweet, or Facebook, or Share the article!

Joe has also been collaborating with Brian Flota, another GW English Ph.D., and currently an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, on an anthology about the politics of post-9/11 music. In a former blog post on their collaboration, Joe and Brian described themselves as “two of the department’s most handsome students.” (This blogger will not offer additional commentary, except to note that the English Department has a high percentage of handsome people among its faculty, staff, graduate students, and majors.)

Joe, whose dissertation on addiction narratives engaged with core issues in disability studies, is currently a Learning Specialist at GW’s Office of Disability Support Services.

Many authors’ works are autobiographical, but Dara Horn is glad her own life does not inspire her novels. “I’m happy my life would make a crappy book. You don’t want to live the kind of life that would make a great novel,” she said during her visit to JLL yesterday. However, just because Horn’s novels are not taken from her quotidian life does not mean that they are irrelevant to contemporary society. You may be confused here for Horn mostly writes historical fiction, yet her reason for writing historical fiction may not be what you expect. She said, “Books are about the time in which they are written, not the time in which they take place.” Her latest book All Other Nights, a Civil War espionage drama, was inspired by the polarization in the US today. “It’s impossible to talk about current events without knowing other people’s opinions already or being willing to get into a fight,” she said. Horn noted how many of the political divides today, such as red and blue states, are remnants of the Civil War.

More importantly, the Civil War offers a degree of moral ambiguity that Horn found fascinating to write about. “I find it boring to write about the Holocaust. In fiction it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. You have your good and evil,” she said. “I was interested in the ambiguities of the Civil War.” There is no question that the Confederacy did deserve to lose the Civil War in Horn’s novel, but she was interested in exploring the individuals found on both sides of the war. Horn’s book is unique in the popular genre of Civil War novels. “Civil War literature falls into one of two categories. The largest and most popular category is the novel about nostalgia for the old South. Other Civil War literature shows the horrors of slavery,” she said. “I was interested in showing something that had to do with humanity on both sides.”

Horn had to be very specific in choosing the right type of character to explore both sides and this character had to be Jewish. Horn stated how most Americans during the Civil War led agrarian lives that did not include much travel, but the American Jewish community was different. She said, “They were running businesses, and you cannot run a business in one place. You need to network. Their lives were similar to Americans’ today so they were much easier to relate to. They knew people across the country.” Horn’s protagonist Jacob Rappaport is the son of a Jewish businessman, and it is only because of his father’s business connections in the South that he is able to spy for the Union during the war.

Jacob is not just a Jewish spy though; he is a direct incarnation of Jacob from Genesis,according to Horn. Horn uses Jacob to express the emancipation story in the Bible, within America. She found some parallels between the two identities. “Jewish and American culture are based on the rule of law. America has the Constitution and Jews have the Torah. But there is a very important difference in the way they view time and identity,” she said. “The myth of identity in America is that your parents don’t matter, you can create your own identity. But Judaism says all Jews were at the bottom of Mount Sinai, so all Jewish identity is drawn from the past and American identity is drawn from the future.” Horn believes the two cultures can blend though. She said, “I wanted to express the purpose of freedom in this country. The freedom to create your own destiny. Freedom is about having the ability to freely choose your obligations.” This is hard lesson for Jacob to learn, but one that he finally comprehends by the end of the gripping novel.

Horn is not trying to combine Jewish and American culture in just this novel, but all of her writing. A self-proclaimed dork, Horn is an academic before a writer; she has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, with concentrations in Yiddish and Hebrew. Naturally this interest in Jewish languages led to an interest in literature when she was a teenager. “I was curious as to what happens to the interaction [between Judaism and literature] in modern literature,” she said. At the time the only author that focused on this intersection between the two worlds was Cynthia Ozick, but Horn was determined to delve into this type of literature herself. She said, “I started writing novels in English as if English were a Jewish language.” Horn takes the language in her books from ancient Biblical stories as you can note from her current novel. Horn’s main goal is to, “take Jewish texts and write them for an American audience.” From her novel, I can say she has succeeded in this.

On Friday April 2, 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m., in Rome Hall 771, American University Professor Richard Sha will present his paper on “Italian Science, Electricity, and Frankenstein.” Sha is the author of Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1832. Lunch will be provided. Rsvp to Amber Cobb-Vasquez (acv@gwmail.gwu.edu) by Friday, March 26.

On Friday May 7, 3-5 p.m., the Seminar will hold its second annual “grande finale” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design. This year the featured speaker will be Barbara Gates, the Alumni Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware and author of, among many other works, Natural Eloquence: Women Inscribe Science and Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. Professor Gates will present an illustrated lecture titled “Of Fungi and Fables: Beatrix Potter’s Science and Storytelling.” More details will follow, but please mark your calendars now.

We have all seen the television commercials for the Sylvan Learning Centers, the national tutoring institution, but most of us did not follow up on the ad. However Nedda Mehdizadeh’s first job was as an English tutor there after she saw that very same commercial we all did. When Mehdizadeh graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English she was like many students, interested in everything from journalism to film. However it was not until she started teaching at Slyvan that she found her true calling. “I remember sitting with my students and watching them work and I realized this was it,” she said. Mehdizadeh appreciates the rich experience she garnered while working with such a great age range of students there, but eventually she grew tired of teaching just metaphors and wanted more.

Environment is really important to Mehdizadeh and aided her decision to attend GW. “There are a number of really brilliant universities in small towns, but I was looking at cities I wanted to live in, ” she said. “So I was looking at DC and the work that Jonathan Gil Harris and Holly Dugan did.” Mehdizadeh describes the graduate school at GW as one that “builds a community that works together and challenges each other.” For an Early Modernist like Mehdizadeh the resources of DC such as the Shakespeare Theater Company were a major draw. It was Shakespeare that actually drew Mehdizadeh to English in the first place. She said, “I remember reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade and in drama class we did little Shakespeare plays that really spoke to me. The language made sense to me. I find it to be a fascinating world and the beauty of the language is intoxicating.” It was never really a question that Early Modern would Mehdizadeh’s area of focus after that.

However it was not just Mehdizadeh’s early interaction with Shakespeare that led her to her studies today, but her own heritage. “I am Persian. My culture has always been important to me,” she said. “My parents used to speak to us only in Persian. It was really important to them that we learn that other part of our life.” This brought Mehdizadeh to the study of Anglo-Persian relations, particularly the trade relations between England and Iran in the late sixteenth century. She elaborates to say that he research focuses on, “the ways in which England perceives Iran, translates the space of Iran, and how this conception forms their relationship with England.” Not only does Mehdizadeh enjoy her studies, but it has also connected her to her culture more. She said, “I’ve gotten even closer to my culture and roots. It’s about learning my history and the language.”

One of Mehdizadeh’s other passions is traveling, so it is fitting that she recently traveled to Iran (before the elections). “I’m fascinated by people and their cultures,” she said. This fascination also extends to her love of food (Zaytinya being a favorite restaurant of hers), museums, and theater. Although she generally does not have a lot of time for pleasure reading, Mehdizadeh is currently enjoying Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. That novel is quite different from the first book that really impacted Mehdizadeh, which was Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows. “I think I cried for two weeks after. Its so beautiful and sad.”

Most of the time you will find Mehdizadeh teaching her Myths of Britain sections though. This is her second year of TAing for the course (fun fact: I was in Mehdizadeh’s section last spring). “I really do love my sections,” she said. “It’s nice to see progress over time.” The first year of teaching the sections was a great experience, but one that Mehdizadeh notes where she was in “constant panic.” However this year is much different. “This time I can enjoy it and think about the literature and sit with the literature,” she said.

Mehdizadeh will actually be leading the Myths of Britain lecture on John Mandeville today!

Your chair Gayle Wald wrote:

“My sense of what is “fun” reading changes depending on what’s going on in my life. Sometimes I gobble up old copies of the Nation, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. (I like that I can read an article and be done.) Sometimes I read trashy magazines: People is a favorite; any fashion mag with big photos will do. The books I read for fun are usually contemporary fiction/non-fiction. Recent books I’ve enjoyed: “Half of a Yellow Sun” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “My Father’s Paradise” by Ariel Sabar, “Sag Harber” by Colson Whitehead. My current “to-read” list include Berryl Satter’s “Family Matters.” This is work-related–it is about mid-20th-century struggles over housing discrimination in Chicago, as told through the author’s family history–but it’s on my list because I’ve heard it’s excellent and because I’m just interested.”

Kavita Daiya recommends Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and is planning on reading Gilbert’s follow up, Committed. She also enjoyed The Bitch in the House edited by Cathi Hanauer

Jane Shore wrote, “I plan to read Sarah Blake’s novel, The Postmistress. Sarah taught Creative Writing for us two years ago. Her book has been on The NY Times Bestseller List for the past two weeks.”

Christopher Sten said, “For fun, I just finished reading the novelist Haruki Murakami’s What I Think About When I Think About Running. With any luck, during spring break I’ll catch up on some recent issues of The New Yorker and The Economist, finish Howard Jacobson’s amazing novel, Kalooki Nights, and scan the Post’s coverage of “March Madness”–when I’m not grading student papers. “

Jeffrey Cohen recommends Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, about the ethics behind eating meat. He plans to pursue the topic further by reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma over break.

H.G. Carrillo said that he reads, “Biographies of poets and visual artists–particularly those of
painters and sculptors–read like protracted issues of “People Magazine”. And really the only thing wrong with “People Magazine” is that the issues are too short, hardly worth the effort of lugging them down to the beach.”

Christopher Griffin will be grading papers for most of the break, but he wishes he had time to read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

Faye Moskowitz wrote, “When I am on break, I go to our condo in South Beach, so I am truly “beach reading.” Within a short walk of our apartment is the South Beach Library which I mine for any latest NY Times best sellers, as long as they are not romance or vampire novels; one Anne Rice was enough for me.. I look for Booker Prize winners from Britain. And I always hope for the latest Patricia Cornwell mystery. In fact, I read a lot of mysteries, one a day sometimes.”

Gina Welch recently told me that she loved Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.

And Gil Harris maintains the stereotype that professors don’t actually take time off.

“What will I be reading for pleasure this spring break? I fear there’s not going to be much of that for me this time round, as I have several fierce writing deadlines looming (including one for an omnibus review of this year’s scholarship in Renaissance drama), which means most of my reading will be work-related.

But if my retinas aren’t destroyed by the monographs on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I hope to train my eyes on two other sources of reading pleasure:

1. Hilary Mantel’s The Black Book, a page-turner by the author of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. The latter was a bit of a disappointment for me — maybe because I am already too immersed in early modern England with my research, and so attempts to imaginatively inhabit the minds of people from the period always falls a bit flat. (No, I’m not a fan of The Tudors.) But Mantel’s Black Book — about a spirit medium doing the rounds of contemporary suburban London — is a more riveting read, at least so far.

2. The English subtitles for my favourite Korean soap opera, Dae Jang Geum. Set in sixteenth-century Korea, this series chronicles the trials and tribulations of a woman who rises from the palace kitchen, where she works as a cook, to become the first female physician to the King. She is at the receiving end of all manner of chicanery, skullduggery, and Machiavellian scheming. The best part is that a good half of each episode lovingly depicts the preparation of the King’s food, which may or may not be poisoned. It’s part Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, part I Claudius, part Iron Chef. And it’s all good.”

And what am I reading? Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and José Saramago’s Blindness.
Happy reading! Enjoy your break!

Interestingly enough, the woman whose book is now on prominent display at any bookstore was too intimidated by the English department as an undergraduate at Yale that she avoided the subject almost entirely. “I felt more comfortable with a history major because it is about receiving information not interpreting it like English,” she said. Welch now recognizes that her misconceptions about the English department were purely insecure. She said, “I feel like at that age I personally was so bound up in my own insecurities and my social anxieties. My priorities had not settled yet and I didn’t know who I was.”

Despite this lack of confidence, Welch took two creative writing courses as an undergraduate and completely fell in love with the subject. Her first foray into creative writing took place in a Yale seminar taught by Mark O’Donnell, a writer for “The Simpsons.” ” I was delighted with it. It refreshed this feeling I had as an adolescent in writing and telling stories,” she said. Although Welch is naturally drawn to entertaining, it was not until her second creative writing course that she really felt like she could turn this passion into a vocation. Welch’s advanced fiction course at Yale felt like an “invitation” into the writing world. She said, “I had always had this perception you were chosen for writing, which is foolish. There’s a lot of hubris you have to have to be a writer, the ‘I have a voice that needs to be heard’ idea.”

Welch found herself looking for more validation when she entered graduate school at University of Virginia for her creative writing MFA. Although validation may have been Welch’s initial goal, she ended up learning much more. “I got an ounce of validation and a heartier helping of criticism, rigor, a feeling that I had to work hard if I wanted to be good,” she said. “It wasn’t that I was chosen as a writer, I had to work hard my whole life.”

Despite her creative writing MFA, Welch’s first job after graduate school was not directly writing related. For a year Welch taught a woman’s studies class at UVA in conjunction with editing a feminist magazine called “Iris.” “I really loved it, but I missed writing. It was a business job,” she said. Then Welch had an idea for a book and got representation, starting a two year journey into the world of the Evangelical church.

After three years in Virginia, it was impossible to ignore the fact that Welch, an atheist since the age of six, was unlike most of the Evangelical Christian population. Growing up in the fairly secular environment of Berkeley, California led to almost a culture shock as she resided in Virginia. “To come from that environment to Virginia where Evangelical Christianity was the dominant force of the region confronted me with my own ignorance and my sneering superiority,” she said. The idea to write a book that delved into the Evangelical Christian church came to fruition after George W. Bush was reelected. She said, “It was the first time I realized what a political force they were and how mobilized they were. They get together in ways the left does not seem to match.” Since one fourth of the U.S. self-identifies as Evangelical Christians, Welch was certainly the minority in Virginia leading to her fascination. “There was something that seemed very imperialistic about it, but the Evangelicals I met in person were like you and me,” she said. So Welch set forth to go undercover in Lynchburg, Virginia to discover the truth behind the Evangelical church.

Going undercover was a daunting experience to say the least and very few people were aware of Welch’s project. “My family was concerned I was endangering myself. That I didn’t know how seductive religion was and there was the moral implication of lying to people,” she said. Welch’s close friends wanted gossip though. She said, “That sort of curiosity, the impulse to gossip, became a wedge for me. Once I started developing relationships I was less inclined.” It took Welch an entire year to build these relationships she describes. Her first year in the church was akin to learning a foreign language. “My religious background is different, my politics are different, my region is different, and I had a different accent. There is a whole vernacular of belief I had to learn, ” she said.

However once Welch finally figured out how the church worked, she was in too deep. There were a lot of moral issues with going undercover into a faith that Welch still wrestles with. “I was lying about what I believed and presenting myself as a Christian when I wasn’t,” she said. Eventually staying undercover was nearly impossible. “I had sort of a blithe willingness to mislead people about who I was…I didn’t realize the depth of it and wasn’t sensitive enough to regard them with true empathy. I had to grow, I was forced to grow,” she said. “Once I developed I started to realize how reckless I was being and had to leave.”

The process of leaving the church was traumatic for Welch. “I knew that leaving would be the beginning of the reveal for what I’d done. I knew I was going to be accountable for all the lies I’d told,” she said. “It made me feel like I had been a bad person.” This inherent “wickedness” Welch felt, made writing the actual book difficult for a long time. Welch was forced to write about those she had befriended. “I had been taking notes without their knowledge and writing about them without their knowledge.” It took Welch a full six months to seriously start writing the book. In May of 2008 Welch had a finished draft and with multiple overhauls and edits the book is now published and being sold and discussed everywhere.

Of course Welch is doing a whirlwind of interviews right now. You can read her at the Huffington Post, The Kalamazoo Opinion, and Statesman.com. Welch’s website, with links to her blog and more information on her book, can be found here. Also Welch will be having a reading at Politics and Prose this Saturday at 1pm. And please come to her reading with Romola D, which has been moved from this Thursday to April 21th at 7pm in the Marvin Center 310.