This week I have been working on what I hope will be the final substantial revisions to my book for U of Iowa P. The latest iteration of my title is “Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing.” It’s not a typo: I mean “writing” as a participle not a gerund. The life that is the doing the writing, but I mean for it to capture both “life-writing” and “the writing life.” But “the life writing” seems to me to capture what I’m doing in this book: I’m looking at Wordsworth doing the writing about his life, life-writing, so that he can write a version of himself that will have a writing life. Perhaps this is too cutesy. But I’m liking it.

I’m thrilled and humbled to be among the three inaugural recipients of the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Researcher Award, given to one faculty member from each of the three divisions, Humanities, Science, and Social Science. I’m honored to be recognized alongside my colleagues Professors Dave Coughlin and Ross Steinman.

I’m also thrilled for my colleague and department chair Janine Utell, who won the A&S award for teaching excellence. She truly deserves it!

Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, a great new collection of essays edited by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall, is now in print. The book includes my essay on Poe, Coleridge, and “Monk” Lewis. I am in impressive company!

Part 1 Old World Gothic and the New World Frontier

1 A Transnational Perspective on American Gothic Criticism by Siân Silyn Roberts

2 Transcultural Gothic: Isaac Mitchell’s Alonzo and Melissa as an Early Example of Popular Culture by Christian Knirsch

3 The Old Gothic and the New: The Trollopes’ Wild West by Tamara Wagner

4 Frontier Bloodlust in England: American Captivity Narratives and Stoker’s Dracula by Roland Finger

Part 2 Gothic Catholicism

5 Demonizing the Catholic Other: Religion and the Secularization Process in Gothic Literature by Diane Long Hoeveler

6 A Woman with a Cross: The Transgressive, Transnational Nun in Anti-Catholic Fiction by Nancy F. Sweet

7 The Paradox of Catholicism in New England Women’s Gothic by Monika Elbert

Part 3 Anglo-American Genre Exchanges: Beyond the Novel

 8 The Haunted Transatlantic Libertine: Edmund Kean’s American Tour by Melissa Wehler

9 Gothic Prosody: Monkish Perversity and the Poetics of Weird Form by Daniel Robinson

10 Transnational War Gothic from the American Civil War to World War I by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Part 4 Social Anxieties and Hauntings

11 “At rest now”: Child Ghosts and Social Justice in N ineteenth-Century Women’s Writing by Roxanne Harde

12 All This Difficult Darkness: Lynching and the Exorcism of the Black Other in Theodore Dreiser’s “Nigger Jeff” by Keith B. Mitchell

13 “Duppy Know Who Fi Frighten”: Laying Ghosts in Jamaican Fiction by Candace Ward

14 Stranger Fiction: The Asian Ghost Tales of Rudyard Kipling and Lafcadio Hearn by Mary Goodwin