2021 QUARRY FARM FELLOWS

Aleksandra Hernandez is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of English and an Affiliated Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami. Her research focuses primarily on questions of how domesticated and wild modes of perception affect animals’ emotional experiences, and how writers such as Jack London, Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau use sentimental narrative techniques to provoke anger and disgust in their readers and incite action on behalf of other animals. Her work has appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, and she has a forthcoming article related to her book project in Journal of Modern Literature.

During my residency at Quarry Farm, I will be conducting archival research for a chapter on Twain. In that chapter, I focus on Twain’s narrative strategies for breaking the frame of detachment intrinsic to sentimental fiction and inciting compassionate action on behalf of other animals.

Ryan Heryford is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Literature in the Department of English at California State University, East Bay, where he teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, with a focus in ecocriticism and cultural narratives of environmental justice. He has published, or has forthcoming articles, on environmental thought in the works of William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Édouard Glissant, and M. NourbeSe Philip. His scholarship has been supported by the William Faulkner Society, the Emily Dickinson International Society, and the University of California Center for Global California Studies. His current book-length project, “The Snugness of Being:” Vitalism and Decay in Nineteenth Century American Literature, explores the influence of nineteenth-century environmental and biomedical philosophy on constructions of self and subjectivity within the works of Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville.

Clifton Hood is the George E. Paulsen ’49 Professor of American History and Government at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.   He received his B.A. from Washington University and his Ph.D. from the History Department at Columbia University.   Hood is the author of two books:  722 Miles:  The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (1993) and In Pursuit of Privilege:  A History of New York City’s Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis (2016). He is now writing a history of imposters in the United States (tentatively entitled “American Imposters: Identity, Aspiration, Surveillance”) and plans another book project, about the relationship between core and periphery in the Pittsburgh region.  Hood has published scholarly articles in publications like the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Urban History, and the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute; op-ed pieces in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Newsday, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; and has appeared in several American Experience as well as other historical documentaries. 

Bob Ievers

Bob Ievers is a freelance painter living in the Finger Lakes region of New York state.  He started painting in college.  Family and career put that on hold for a number of years.  He’s now been back to painting for more than twenty years.  Mostly self taught but he’s taken a number of classes through 171 Cedar Arts Center in Corning, New York.  He’s a realist painter and does a good bit of landscape painting, much of it plein air.  Now retired, he devotes significant time to painting.

The grounds of the Quarry Farm are significantly different than they were the last time Twain was there. Small scale plant life such as shrubs would be unrecognizable from that time. Even trees would have changed in number and size in a significant enough way to bear only slight similarity to when Twain was there. My approach then will be to focus on two things: (1) Distant vistas: The hills surrounding Elmira would appear much the same as they did in Twain’s time. I’d also look to architectural elements of the house e.g. the large chimney, the porch, arrangements of windows etc. (2) Interior views: I think a more crucial part of the project would be to capture interior images – from an entire room to individual views such as a desk or bookcase. I’m thinking that a good deal of effort has gone into keeping these as they were in Twain’s time. Since I see the importance of interior images, I believe it would also be crucial to capture images of the octagonal study, both interior and exterior. That is after all where he worked.

Bob Ievers, “Quarry Farm Maid’s Cottage – 8/22/20”

Barbara Ladd

Barbara Ladd is Professor of English at Emory University, where she teaches courses in American literature, with an emphasis on the work of southern writers. Her publications include Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner; Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty; and The Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the U.S. South (co-editor) as well as numerous essays. “‘Night After Night and Day After Day’: Mark Twain and the Natural World” appeared in the Mark Twain Annual in 2019.

Alan Rankin

Alan Rankin is a writer and independent researcher with an abiding interest in the unexplored corners of history. Since 1992, he has been studying the life of Nina Gabrilowitsch, Mark Twain’s granddaughter. His presentation “Nina: The Lost Diary of Nina Gabrilowitsch” was received with acclaim at the 2019 Clemens Conference in Hannibal, Missouri. The companion piece, “Finding the Lost Diary of Mark Twain’s Granddaughter,” appears on the website for the Center for Mark Twain Studies. His work-in-progress chronicles the lives of Nina and her parents, Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Clara Clemens, in Europe and America during the Roaring ’20s. He also writes a biographical column for Renaissance Magazine.

Laura Rice

Sponsor: Tracy Daugherty, Oregon State University

Twain’s Elmira: the Next Generation traces the social and cultural changes Elmira experienced during the last two decades of Mark Twain’s life when sports pages rivaled politics in popularity, a new century focused on “manly behavior,” and Roosevelt progressives advocated anti- corruption policies and imperial expansion. In Elmira, sports became the touchstone of character. Twain dubbed baseball “the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century,” but football, he explained, was “the grandest game ever invented for boys,” building up “the mind as well as the body.” “This beats croquet,” Twain crowed, “There’s more go about it.”

This book project began with clippings in a family scrapbook about a nationally-reported 1905- 06 conflict between coach “Pop” Warner of Cornell and Elmira’s Lawrence “Cooney” Rice. “Cooney,” even Warner admitted, was “something of a hero in the minds of many.” This enmity over “fair play,” while deeply personal, dated back a decade to conflicts between Warner and older Elmirans at Cornell. The tutelary spirits of Twain, Beecher, the Langdons, and exiled Fenian T. McCarthy Fennell inspired the values of Elmira’s Cornell graduates of the 1890s: Railroad executive Jervis Langdon, Jr., Attorney Thomas Fennell, NY Senator John Murtaugh, and Businessman Clint Wyckoff. Through sports, they mentored the stars of the new century: “Cooney” Rice, Joe “Dode” Birmingham, Matty “Ironsides” Fennell and Harry “Deacon” Costello, Irish kids from Elmira’s “Frog Hollow.” Young sports reporters Frank Tripp, Frank Gannett, and Grantland Rice captured these events. Tripp would celebrate Elmira’s Father Mathew semi-pro team half a century later: “it was the greatest baseball I have ever seen.” For Cornell, Tripp wrote, “the triumvirate from Frog Hollow [Costello, “Cooney,” Birmingham] well nigh carried the [football] works on their shoulders for the red and white.” By 1910, Feeney’s Corner tobacco shop, the Mecca of Elmira sports and news for a decade, was gone, Elmira’s semi-pro baseball team had moved into legend, and Twain had been laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery. It was the end of an era. But, as Cornell’s Rym Berry reminisced in 1956: “Rejoice that we were present in the flesh.”

Merav Schocken

Merav Schocken is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American literature with a particular emphasis on critical race studies and topics of space and place. Her dissertation explores practices of self-deception in nineteenth-century American literature.

During my time at Quarry Farm, I plan to immerse myself in research and writing related to my third chapter, which centers on the role that self-deception played in American depictions of the Holy Land. In examining Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad and Herman Melville’s Clarel, narratives replete with disappointment and cynicism, I center on the authors’ uncharacteristic attempts to safeguard the sanctity of material relics at traditional pilgrimage sites. Such strategies, in my reading, constitute self-deceptive practices that aim to counterbalance disillusionment from the land and escape complete spiritual darkness. I view these attempts at reconciliation as reflective of the nineteenth century era’s broader struggle between faith and doubt.

I hope to use the resources of the Center for Mark Twain Studies to explore Twain’s relationship to antiquity and religious material culture, a concern central to The Innocents Abroad. While Twain is repeatedly disappointed by what he perceives as the desolate landscape of the Holy Land, he finds himself both repelled and enchanted by emblems such as ancient relics and sacred stones at sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Grotto of the Annunciation. I will argue that Twain’s disappointment with the land leads him to construct a narrative of holiness around such sites with the help of the purported relics, allowing him to salvage a shred of sanctity.

Mika Turim-Nygren is an American Literature Faculty member at Bard High School Early College DC, part of the Bard College network. Her current book project concerns 19th-century American dialect literature, and the relationship between racialized dialect and the formation of a national literature, both in the American context and beyond. Her published work related to this project includes “Twain’s Modernism: The Death of Speech in Huckleberry Finn as the Birth of a New Aesthetic,” which appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and “Bret Harte’s Birtherism: Dialect Literature and the Fiction of Native-Born Citizenship,” which is forthcoming in the Spring 2021 legal issue of nonsite.org.

Although Twain was far from the only author of his day to write in dialect (one scholar has called it the era’s “dominant mode of literary production”), he was the first to grasp the dialectic of dialect, as in the sheer effort it cost to imitate natural-sounding speech on the page, which inevitably produced prose that looked more artificial than ever. Twain’s solution to this was to draw Huck’s most characteristic expressions from the racialized dialect of Joel Chandler Harris, and then to reproduce them in purposefully cleaned-up form, which means that the very simplicity that makes Huck sound so natural is itself proof that his language belongs on the page rather than in anyone’s mouth. In Harris’s hands, racialized dialect makes an ethnographic claim about the old plantation (whether accurate or otherwise); in Twain’s hands, the same kind of dialect makes a literary claim about the country as a whole, which serves to transform the voice of the folk into the voice of the nation. My time at Quarry Farm will be devoted to building the case that not just “all modern American literature,” but in some sense all modern national literature, comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.