ELIZABETH HARTLEY WINTHROP READS
AT THE UCI BOOKSTORE AUTHOR SERIES

Wearing a bright, turquoise button-up with flip-flops and a low ponytail, Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop walks into the UCI Bookstore with a polite smile. You wouldn’t have known that she was walking into her own book signing with her humble demeanor and friendly chatting with nearby students and teachers. A graduate of the MFA in the Programs in Writing at UCI, Winthrop was the recipient of the 2004-05 Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction.

In October, Winthrop returned to UCI to read from her newest novel, December, which centers on Isabelle Carter, an 11-year-old who hasn’t spoken for nine months.  Winthrop explores the family’s trauma surrounding their silent daughter through realistic characters and careful observation of details. December has earned praise for its “genuine intelligence” (Kirkus Reviews) as well as Winthrop’s “spellbinding climax” (Library Journal). 

Before an impressive turnout of professors and students, Winthrop read a scene from the first chapter of the novel, and captivated the audience with a scene of the father’s birthday dinner. Winthrop allowed the audience to observe the dynamics of a family at the dinner table with a child in silence. After the reading, Winthrop revealed that the inspiration for her work was based on the idea that “every child puts their parents through hell,” and this notion was something she wanted to further explore. Winthrop commented on a previous essay she wrote, explaining how Isabelle’s silence “is a metaphor for the way any adolescent girl might react to the difficult task of being alive, whether it be through depression, addiction, anorexia, or any other number of ways.”

At the end of the q&a session, Winthrop smiled in good humor and admitted that she “does her best work in the morning” and always takes it a day at a time. December continues to enchant readers, and we congratulate Elizabeth Winthrop for the success of her winning novel. --Angela Koh

 

PATRICIA SEED ON THE PORTUGUESE MAP IN NEH'S HUMANITIES MAGAZINE



Click here to visit Portuguese Mapping of the African Coast

A joint collaboration between the University of California Humanities Research Institute, GIS Data Center at Rice University, and the Texas Learning & Computation Center, University of Houston, Patricia Seed's "The Portuguese Mapping of the African Coast" is a dynamic website and database that features Portuguese cartography during the 15th century. Seed received a 2007-08 ICWT UCI Faculty Associate Grant last year to support the translation of manuscripts for this project.

Click here to read Seed's "The Cone of Africa" article featured in the November/December issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities

 

VISUAL STUDIES PH.D STUDENT KEN YOSHIDA RESEARCHES "THE ECOLOGICAL IMAGE" IN JAPAN

Ken Yoshida, the recipient of a 2007-08 Graduate Student Summer International Travel Grant, reports:

The ICWT research grant was used for my project, “The Ecological Image: Competing Notions of Ecology in the 60s-70s Japanese Visual Culture.”  The topic of “environment” in Japanese postwar art has not been treated within the field of Japanese film studies and art history, although many publications have dealt with the objects of my research from different perspectives.  Over the summer, I was able to gain access to valuable publications only available at the National Library in Tokyo, as well as a film library in Yamagata, located three hours north of Tokyo.

The initial objects I focused on were film documentaries made during the sixties and the seventies, but during the course of my research, the scope was extended to include the early production of installation art, which emerged during the mid 1960s, and the video art that began during the early 1970s.  These objects have all concerned themselves, to some extent, with the notion of the environment in relation to nature, as well as information technology.  The existing literature on art produced during this period had only focused on the political nature of these objects, therefore, the environmental tendency was made secondary, or even dismissed as utopian, nostalgic, or naïve.  My intention was to reconsider this traditional reading to offer a different picture of the use of environment/nature in Japanese postwar art.

Click here to read the rest of Yoshida's piece