University of New England

Newsletter-Fall 2007

Matthew Anderson and Anouar Majid presented papers at the 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Chicago. Anderson's paper,  "Gender, Justice, and Judgment:  A Jury of Her Own and the Silkwood Case," was part of a panel on Gendered Justice, arranged by the Discussion Group on Law and Literature.  Majid gave a paper titled "The Litmus Test of Disbelief" at a panel on Religion and Postcolonial Literature.  Majid was also the chair of the Arabic Literature and Culture Discussion Group, and, as such, presided over a panel which he organized, “The Arab." The panel was highlighted in the 2007 presidential theme on The Humanities at Work in the World.

On Friday, Dec. 14, 2007 Anouar Majid gave a talk about the forces undermining a vibrant civil society to service-learning professionals and VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) members who are working on a variety of topics ranging from student leadership development to college-community outreach across the state of Maine. 

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Anouar Majid was interviewed on Air America on Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007. His interview in the Sam Seder Show was part of a special program dedicated to recently published books. On Sunday, November 4, 2007, Majid was interviewed live for about 30 minutes by Cynthia Black of the Arizona-based Action Point, a program of Air America Radio. According to its website, Action Point exists to bring a new dimension to talk radi Solution Politics - the who, what, when, where, and how of people taking back the democratic process from extremist special interests.

Majid was also quoted in an article by the eminent African-American scholar, Sulayman Nyang, in the Washington Post.  Nyang's article examines the differences and similarities between the Mormon and Muslim experiences in the United States.

A biography of Majid was shown on Al Jazeera TV on Thursday, Nov. 22, 2007 on a program called Mawid Fil Mahjar (Date in exile). An Al Jazeera crew filmed Majid for two days last June, capturing his personal and professional life at home and at the University. 

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On November 21, George Young of the English Department delivered the keynote address at the plenary session of the four day Tenth Annual Conference of  Scholarship Devoted to  N.F. Fedorov , jointly sponsored by the Russian National Library, the Maxim Gorky Institute of World Literature, The Philosophy Department of Moscow University, and the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.  Little known outside Russia, Fedorov was a nineteenth century religious thinker who significantly influenced Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solovyov, and many leading figures in early  twentieth century Russian culture.   Young, who was introduced as the leading authority on Fedorov outside Russia, spoke in Russian on “The International Significance of Fedorov’s Ideas.”

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On October 12, 2007, Anouar Majid was a guest on Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS.

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On Oct. 10th, Anouar Majid A Call for Heresy at the Bluestockings bookstore in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. On November 19th, he discussed the book at Washington DC's Busboys and Poets. On October 3rd, he read from his novel in progress, tentatively titled Blood of Nations, at Medaille College.

Anouar Majid's new Book, A Call for Heresy:  Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America, was reviewed Oct. 8 th at Metro.com. Majid also published a commentary on dissent and the war in Iraq titled "The Bonds of Dissent" in the Tampa Tribune on October 11, 2007.

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English Sponsors International Conference on "Code"

The Department of English sponsored the twenty-first annual conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) on November 1-4, 2007 in Portland, Maine.  Over three hundred scholars from all over the world attended.

SLSA is an international organization that welcomes colleagues in the sciences, engineering, technology, computer science, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and independent scholars and artists. Its official publication, Configurations, is the only scholarly journal devoted to the study of discourse in scientific, technological, and medical theories and practices.  Founded in 1993, the journal explores the relations of literature and the arts to the sciences and technology; special issues often reflect themes developed at the annual conference.

The 2007 conference theme was code, broadly defined.  Code can be “wet” (genetic, organic, human), “dry” (digital, mathematical, logical), something in-between, neither, or both (linguistic, symbolic, religious, moral, legal). Code is the meeting ground of strange bedfellows, the cipherer and decipherer, the domain of law and its subversion, communication and privacy.  Code is about patterns, sequences, systems, translations, and substitutions.

The conference featured two plenary sessions, one on Friday evening and one on Saturday evening, respectively headlined byN. Katherine Hayles and Brian Massumi. Hayles has achieved extraordinary renown as an incisive critic at the intersection of science, literature, and the arts, and her work is particularly concerned with the parallels between scientific models and literary theories as well as in contextualizing the interactions between humans and intelligent machines. Major books include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (U of Chicago Press 1999), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (U of Chicago Press 1991), and most recently, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (U of Chicago Press 2005).  She is the Hillis Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Massumi established his preeminence by introducing the English-speaking world to the poststructuralist theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through his translation of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (U of Minnesota Press 1987), followed by his own interpretive study, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press 1992).  Massumi’s most recent book, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke U Press 2002) places him once again at the center of interdisciplinary research, advancing philosophies of communication, electronic art, and the virtual. He is Professor of Communication at the Université de Montréal.

The Friday evening plenary was introudced by UNE's President Danielle Ripich and English Assistant Professor Susan McHugh (one of the main organizers of the event) at the conference site, the Holiday Inn By the Bay. The Saturday evening plenary was held at the Portland Museum of Art.

English faculty Matthew Anderson, Cathrine Frank, and Jennifer Tuttle as well as Beth DeWolfe, Chair and Professor of History, presented at a panel titled "De/coding Women in Medical, Legal, and Labor Narratives, 1840-1914."  Brian Duff, Assistant Professor of Political Science, chaired a panel on the "Politics of Bios" and presented a paper titled "Family Talk in American Politics."

Spring 2007 Newsletter