3 English Department Faculty Receive Fall 2018 Travel and Research Awards

Three English department faculty—Justin Catanoso, Meredith Farmer, and Joanna Ruocco—received university travel and research awards in fall 2018. 

Journalism professor Justin Catanoso was awarded funding from the Dingledine International Faculty Development Fund to travel to Katowice, Poland, to cover the UN Climate Change Conference in December. This is Justin’s fifth UN climate summit; he will be reporting for the Mongabay.com, a leading environmental news organization with a global readership.

English literature professor Meredith Farmer was awarded funding from the Baker Family Faculty Development Fund to travel to New York and participate in two conference panels—one on collaborative work and the other on her edited collection titled Rethinking Ahab—at the Melville Society’s 12th Annual International Melville Conference in June 2019. As the Melville Society’s Associate Secretary of Conferences and Programs, she will also be helping to organize events during the conference.

Creative writing professor Joanna Ruocco was awarded an Archie grant to travel in December to Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she will conduct research for a novel imagining the life of the half-human half-shark daughter of the Comte de Lautréamont’s anti-hero Maldoror. Lautréamont was a French poet whose poetics became central to the Surrealist project. Ruocco’s research will take her to archives where she’ll read 19th-century accounts of shipwrecks and to museums where she’ll encounter 20th-century surreal texts and objects.