2022 QUARRY FARM FELLOWS
The Center for Mark Twain Studies is honored to announce the 2022 Class of Quarry Farm Fellows!
Elizabeth Cantalamessa is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Miami whose research lies at the intersection of social philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophical methodology. Her dissertation proposes an alternative model of humor as a methodological tool with unique expressive powers that allows speakers to publicly demonstrate socially-significant values without explicit justification, which explains why humor serves as a tool for political critique. She has published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, as well as the online public philosophy outlets Aeon, Psyche, and Aesthetics for Birds.
I plan to use my time at Quarry Farm to delve into Twain’s archives and gain a better understanding of the historical figures that inspired him, his self-conception as a humorist, and his remarks on the limits of traditional “straight-faced” political deliberation.
Max Laitman Chapnick is a PhD candidate in American and English literature at Boston University. He is working on a dissertation called “Wild Science: Radical Politics and Rejected Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Fiction” interested in the fields of novel studies, the history of social movements, and the history of science. He earned an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington on a Fulbright scholarship. His essays appear in Configurations, Current Affairs, and PMLA.
At Quarry Farm, he plans to work on the section of his dissertation focusing on three late-nineteenth-century time travel narratives: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and H. G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895). The three authors emerge from a broad field of “scientific socialists,” yet in each narrative an anti-scientific element remains; Wells shows evolutionary theories unraveling; Bellamy’s “quack” mesmerism remains necessary for imagining communism, and Twain’s techno-state turns dramatically into a militarized wasteland, a premonition for the first World War. For Twain in particular, even as he would later express a fraught relationship to rejected knowledges like Christian Science, his relationship to science was fraught as well. These three technology-minded dys/utopic time travel narratives ask: what if the increasing consolidation of science into a disciplinary and elitist project, and its uptake as an engine of state, empire, and war, undermined science’s more populist promise? In the context of Twain’s later interest and disdain for pseudo-science as in Christian Science (1907) and his critique of imperial projects as in King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905), I will investigate to what extent that engagement with science and empire, and the relationship between those two, began in earlier decades during the writing of Connecticut Yankee.
Cassio de Oliveira is an assistant professor of Russian in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University. His articles, primarily on Soviet-era Russian literature and film as well as in Translation Studies, have appeared or are forthcoming from Russian Literature, The Slavic and East European Journal, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Slavonica, Tolstoy Studies Journal, Studies in Slavic Cultures, KinoKultura, and other journals. He recently completed his first monograph, entitled Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921–1938. De Oliveira is currently conducting research for his second monograph, Mark Twain’s Mississippi Writings in the Russian Imagination, which focuses on the reception, translation, and adaptations of Mark Twain’s works in Russia. In telling the history of Twain in Russia, de Oliveira concentrates on the Soviet period, when Twain came to be seen both as a prime representative of world literature, and as a staunch critic of bourgeois society and American imperialism. De Oliveira completed his B.A. at Bard College and received his Ph.D. from Yale University. At Portland State, he teaches courses in Russian language and literature, European Studies for the general education program, as well as a seminar in Translation Studies.
At Quarry Farm, I plan to research Twain’s connections with Russia and to start drafting Chapter One of the book, which focuses on Twain’s visit to Russia in 1867 (recounted in The Innocents Abroad) and on the Russian reception of his works before the October 1917 Revolution.
Jodi DeBruyne and Mallory Howard will be conducting research and drafting exhibition text for the Mark Twain House & Museum’s upcoming 2023 exhibit on Summering with Twain. The exhibition will use the experiences of Samuel Clemens and his family to illustrate and examine the development of an iconic element of American culture, which continues to play a major role in our society today – the summer vacation. The exhibition will educate visitors through an engaging and accessible format about Mark Twain and aspects of his life, his work, and his era, while also allowing them to make connections to their lives today and causing them to reflect on the still relevant themes that will be explored – including the impact of class, gender and race on lifestyle, health, and access to leisure activities. The exhibit will explore many locations visited by Sam Clemens and his family while on their summer holidays., but a large section of the exhibit will be dedicated to the more than twenty summers they spent with Livy’s family at Quarry Farm and it is their time in Elmira that will be the focus of our fellowship.
Read Mallory Howard’s Quarry Farm Testimonial HERE.
Jodi DeBruyne
Jennifer A. Hughes is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Culture at Averett University where she teaches courses in American literature, including an honors course on American humor and satire. She served as the Secretary/Treasurer of the American Humor Studies Association from 2013-2018 and has held fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her essays have appeared in Studies in American Humor, Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches, The Southern Literary Journal, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, A Concise Companion to American Fiction 1900-1950, and African American Review.
While visiting Quarry Farm, she will be researching Mark Twain’s awareness of late nineteenth-century laws and trials concerning libel, censorship, and freedom of religion. Mark Twain weighed legal and social risks to himself and his loved ones while drafting the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts (“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” “Schoolhouse Hill,” and “No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger”). In his notebooks, Mark Twain expresses vague concerns about publishing controversial texts at the turn of the century — “books that laugh at the whole paltry scheme” – because he was responsible for the well-being of his family. He would have been aware of international trials in which texts played a role in ruining careers and lives. For example, Oscar Wilde was put to trial in 1895 and eventually sentenced to two years in jail for the “gross indecency” of homosexuality. The prosecution used Wilde’s writings, and his jokes, as evidence against him. In 1898, Emile Zola published “J’accuse,” knowing that he would be tried for libel in exposing the corrupt anti-Semitism of the French government in the Dreyfus affair. This project will consider the extent to which Mark Twain felt similarly endangered, and the degree to which his concerns influenced writings that present laughter as an utterance that testifies against the absurd immorality of humanity.
William Hunt
Bill Hunt is an assistant professor at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina, where he usually teaches WRT 101, WRT 102, ENG 201, ENG 231, and ENG 232. He specializes in 19th- and early-20th-century American literature, with interests in Gender and Women’s Studies, Post-/Colonialism Studies, Sentimentalism, Middle East Studies, and literatures of the U.S. Suffrage Movement. He has published articles in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and in an edited book collection, American and Muslim Worlds before 1900 (Eds. John Ghazvinian and Mitchell Fraas). He holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Duke University.
His scholarship is often impelled by the notion that the American Suffrage Movement was essentially literary in character, as much as it was social and political. In 2017, he began a digital humanities experiment, www.100signersproject.com, a research blog that utilizes archival records to create recuperative biographies for the 100 individuals who lent their names to the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention.
From his arrival in 1832 until being forcibly removed in 1837, one Joshua W. Hill fashioned himself as the de facto ruler of Pitcairn Island. In “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn,” Butterworth Stavely, Twain’s literary proxy for Hill, drives his newly minted empire swiftly to the brink of ecocidal and economic collapse. In this context, suffrage appears to have been mustered into existence as an anti-colonial strategy, designed to protect the island’s population from future political usurpations. I am interested in how the narrative’s shifting attitudes toward universal franchise in “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn” speaks to related, seemingly inconsequential events that occurred in the borderlands of the Burned-over District during the same period.
Hester Kaplan is the author of two story collections, The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, and Unravished, and the novels The Tell and Kinship Theory. Her fiction and non-fiction has been widely published and anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories series. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her current nonfiction project, How Mark Twain Helped Me Find My Father. She is on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and is a co-founder of Goat Hill Writers.
When my father wrote about Twain that “the central drama of his mature literary life was his discovery of the useable past,” did he know that his own past was usable? The orphan must write his own life story and become fiction writer, protagonist, and autobiographer at the same time. In writing about my father, I am fiction writer, protagonist, and biographer, striving to tell the story of a life that is both connected to and separate from my own. “Most biographies are begun out of enchantment or affection,” Leon Edel wrote, and mine begins with both.
Judith Yaross Lee
Judith Yaross Lee is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Communication Studies at Ohio University, where she taught from 1990 to 2019. Her six books and five dozen articles on American popular rhetorics include Twain’s Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture (2012), Seeing MAD: Essays on MAD Magazine’s Humor and Legacy (2020), and “The Sociable Sam Clemens: Mark Twain Among Friends” (2018). She chaired the 2020 Quarry Farm Symposium, “American Humor and Matters of Empire,” based on her essay of the same name in Studies in American Humor. She is currently completing a study of Clemens’s 37-year relationship with the African explorer Henry Morton Stanley.
Jeanne Campbell Reesman is Professor of English and Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, which she joined in 1986. She has served as Division Director, MA and PhD Directors, as Graduate Dean, and, presently, on the Executive Committee of the UTSA Academy of Distinguished Scholars. She has been awarded two Fulbrights, one in Thessaloniki and the other in Aix-en-Provence. She is the author of numerous books and essays on American writers, especially London and other Naturalists, Twain, James, and Faulkner. Her critical biography, Jack London’s Racial Lives, appeared in 2009, and her co-authored Jack London, Photographer appeared in 2010, both U of Georgia P. Her most recent book is Jack London in His Own Times, 2020, U of Iowa P. Her essays and book chapters have appeared in journals including the Mark Twain Annual, the Mark Twain Journal, American Literary Realism, and American Literary Naturalism. Her current project is her book, Mark Twain Vs. God: The Story of a Relationship.
The book demonstrates that Twain aims at God and belief in many settings. In some works he attacks hypocritical churchgoers and organized Christianity; in others he naturalistically surveys humanity and the false “spiritual” worlds men and women have created for themselves. His Defendant and Judge are the same: God Himself, not “religion.” He does not spare Americans’ most cherished institutions: first religion, but also banks, police, courts, Congress, clergy, the bourgeois class he married into, Sunday School, universities, U.S, Imperialism. He imagines medieval cultures against modernity. He seeks God behind Nature in the West and in the cities of the East. He travels with other “pilgrims” to the holy sites of Europe and Palestine. He tracks the Euro-American global imperialism of his age. But in more fantastic works his evolving understandings of the relationship between himself and God, and God and humanity take his readers from myth to reality to myth to reality again—Eden and the Flood through the Civil War to the Gilded Age, and from dream-life to real-life and back again. His questions about the Creator’s intentions remain as provocative now as they were when he first penned them. Oddly, though Twain sometimes sounds like or outright says he is God’s agent here on Earth, he hated God more than anyone; he never used the kind of invective he reserves for the Almighty on anyone else. He is essentially outraged by the hoax or catch-22 God presents humanity. He made us as we are but damns us for it. Particularly troubling to Twain is the actual Creator’s indifference, coupled with the God of the Bible, who made us in His image but should not have admitted it; this split is clearest in Letters from the Earth.
Ariel Silver
The purpose of her Quarry Farm Fellowship is to complete a chapter on Twain for a larger proposed monograph, The Literary Eve. The chapter on Twain – “There was Eden” – serves as a crucial point of transition in the project, moving from male to female authorial consideration of this iconic scriptural figure whose story has come to represent so fundamentally a conception of the female and her place across the monotheistic world. By placing Adam and Eve in the context of one another in The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Twain suggests that their fortunes and their fates, their tribulations, and their joys, are inextricable. Written near the end of his life, in a period when he also produced Recollections of Joan of Arc, this work of religious commentary by Twain deftly combines the serious and the satirical to produce a wholly new view of Eve. Even as the historical-critical method begins to be applied to the Bible, Twain comically attempts his own textual deconstruction and reconsideration of the Genesis text in a manner that gives space for a female voice and perspective, however funny, however ironic. This chapter then sets the stage for the American female writers who take up their own critique of how Eve has been cast and how she can and should be deeply reconsidered.
Bridget Bossart van Otterloo paints and teaches in Corning, New York. Her artwork is about the beauty in nature. She has a degree in Studio Art from Houghton College and has studied in Florence, Italy. Bridget moved to Corning in 2002 to work as an apprentice and studio assistant for the late Thomas S. Buechner. She currently works from her light-filled home studio, where her subjects include still life, flowers, plants, portraits and landscapes painted in oils and watercolor. Bridget teaches painting workshops from her home studio. She has also has taught art classes at local youth centers, museums, libraries, Corning Community College, and public schools. Bridget has been on the faculty of 171 Cedar Arts Center teaching oil painting and watercolor painting classes since 2002. Bridget’s work can be viewed at several venues in New York State including The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes in Corning, The North Star Gallery in Ithaca, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, Oxford Gallery in Rochester, Gallery 54 in Skaneateles, and The Franklin Street Gallery in Watkins Glen.
“SUMMER ON THE PORCH”
