Professor Robert Bray was featured in the Winter 2010-11 issue of Illinois Wesleyan University Magazine in a story that is also available, sans pictures, in an online version.

“The Literary Lincoln: Discovering what Abraham Lincoln read offers important clues about who he was, according to a new book by English professor Robert Bray,” by Rachel Hatch and Tim Obermiller, deftly summarizes Bob’s most recent book, Reading with Lincoln, which is available at the IWU Bookstore and online at Amazon.com. The book, which explores the relationship between Lincoln’s reading and his speeches, writings, and political policies, is this year’s selection for the Sigma Tau Delta Book Club.

New Research on the Bayeux Tapestry: The Proceedings of a Conference at the British Museum, edited by Dan Terkla with two colleagues, will be published by Oxbow Books on December 31, 2010. The collection features 19 of 26 papers delivered at a July 2008 conference which was also chaired by Terkla, Michael J. Lewis, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker.

All papers focus on the Bayeux Tapestry, one of the most famous medieval artworks, which tells the story of the Norman invasion of England. The 230-foot long embroidered artifact is on display in Bayeux, Normandy. The papers cover a wide range, including current research and conservation, the social history of the tapestry, and pictographic studies.

December still seems far away, but you know it’s getting close when Amazon.com lists the book.

Professor Michael Theune‘s playful challenge of John Keats’ term “Negative Capability” has been published in Jacket magazine #40, and is available in full-text form at Jacket.

It’s been two years in the making, but a book on the Bayeux Tapestry that Professor Dan Terkla co-edited with several colleagues finally arrives on August 20.

The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations features 11 news essays on the most famous medieval tapestry, along with an introduction and selective bibliography. Dan and his co-editors, Martin Foys (Assoc. Professor of English, Hood College, and Visiting Professor of English, Drew University) and Karen Eileen Overbey (Asst. Professor of Art History at Tufts University), feature critical essays that demonstrate the value of more recent interpretive approaches to this famous and iconic artifact by examining the textile’s materiality, visuality, reception and historiography, and its construction of gender, territory and cultural memory. According to a press release from Boydell & Brewer, the essays “frame discussions vital to the future of Tapestry scholarship and are complemented by a bibliography covering three centuries of critical writings.”

In addition to co-editing the book and compiling the bibliography, Dan also contributed an essay on “From Hasting to Hastings and Beyond: Inexorable Inevitability on the Bayeux Tapestry.” Other essays included are “Problematizing Patronage: Odo of Bayeux and the Bayeux Tapestry (Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Stephen D. White), “Auctoritas, Consilium et Auxilium: Images of Authority in the Bayeux Tapestry” (Shirley Ann Brown), “Taking Place: Reliquaries and Territorial Authority in the Bayeux Embroidery” (Overbey), “On the Nature of Things in the Bayeux Tapestry and its World” (Valerie Allen), “Making Sounds Visible in the Bayeux Tapestry” (Richard Brilliant), “Anglo-Saxon Women, Norman Knights and a ‘Third Sex’ in the Bayeux Embroidery” (Madeline H. Caviness), “Behind the Bayeux Tapestry” (Gale R. Owen-Crocker), “Embroidery Errors in the Bayeux Tapestry and Their Relevance for Understanding Its Design and Production” (Michael Lewis), and “Pulling the Arrow Out: The Legend of Harold’s Death and the Bayeux Tapestry” (Foys).

The 248-page book comes with 45 illustrations, 34 of them in color, and is selling on amazon.com for $59.85.

Dan is a recognized expert on the Bayeux Tapestry. He was invited to co-organize “The BT @ the BM: New Research on the Bayeux Tapestry: An International Conference at the British Museum” in July of 2008, and he co-organized a conference on the Tapestry for the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, England. A frequent nominee for Student Senate Professor of the Year, Dan joined the IWU English department in 1995.

All the world’s a blog, and Professor Michael Theune has found a virtual second home on James Geary’s blog, “All Aphorisms, All the Time.” Mike has just posted his latest batch of aphorisms. But be warned, before you check them out: if you read them, you’ll probably also want to write a few!