Published in the on-line science fiction magazine 365 tomorrows, Pigno’s flash-fiction story “Atompunk Wife” stems from his fascination with science-fiction and  resides in a literary sub-genre centered on alternate versions of our  own history teeming with anachronisms and fantastical elements. Flash fiction is a kind of short story that is described as sudden, ultra-short, micro fiction. Pigno’s story  describes a day in the life of a suburban housewife who, faced with her  own internal unrest and a mysterious threat, decides to act upon her  feelings in a radical manner and empower her gender in a most  unconventional way. A commentary on women’s roles during the 50′s, Cold  War tensions, and the blossoming feminist sentiments of the post-Word  War II generation, “Atompunk Wife” marries its historical context with a ray-gun wielding beauty set on making a statement in just under 600  words.

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The panel members thank history professor Dr. Lori Weintrob and the office of Campus Life for helping to organize the event.

Dr. Erica Johnson is an associate professor in the English department at Wagner College. She has published two other books, both on Farleigh Dickinson Press: Caribbean Ghostwriting in 2009 and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro in 2003. She teaches classes on world literature, comparative literature, modernism, literary theory, and postcolonial literature.

Recently profiled by Forbes, Jeannine is an entrepreneur whose journalistic ethics and branding skills helped her build her own business.  She began her writing career at Cosmopolitan and now writes and edits the beats of beauty, style, health and fitness. Her work has been published in iVillage.com, Glamour.com, DailyGlow.com, HollyBaby.com and Makeup.com.

Jeannine has worked as a TV and event host as well as a spokesperson participating in one-off campaigns with mass and prestige brands.  She also filmed a makeover web-series with SheKnows TV, where she helped two women gain confidence, what Jeannine believes is the ultimate accessory.

Jeannine´s authoritative voice in beauty, lifestyle and celebrity has given Jeannine the opportunity to appear on the Emmy red carpet for the E! channel as well as The Today Show, E! News, Wendy Williams, Good Morning America, NBC, FOX, BetterTV and WPiX.

About two months after his arrival, his essay “Taxing Tobacco and the Metonymies of Virtue: The Poetics of Thomson, Browne, Byrd, and Cooke” was published in a book entitled Global Economies, Cultural Currencies of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz. This interdisciplinary book collects essays by scholars of literature, history, and art history that examine the cultural responses to eighteenth-century economies. Dr. Thomas’s essay in particular seeks to change the way we typically think of both eighteenth century British literature and early American literature by revealing how both are responding to the same debates about the transatlantic trade.

The regulation and taxation of the tobacco trade was so controversial in the 1730s that it led to violent street riots in London and the burning of inspection warehouses in Virginia. Dr. Thomas’s research reveals not only that poets cared about this issue, but that they actively attempted to intervene through their writing. In England, James Thomson’s long poem Liberty presented a political position against the new taxes. Another poet, Isaac Hawkins Browne, ridiculed Thomson’s poem in his own parodic satire, A Pipe of Tobacco.  Across the Atlantic, the Virginian William Byrd II emphasized his scientific and moral authority for judging matters of trade in his belletristic account of a survey expedition to settle boundary disputes, The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina. In Maryland, Ebenezer Cooke satirized the debate in his poem Sotweed Redivivus: The Planter’s Looking Glass. Before Dr. Thomas’s essay, no scholar had revealed the extent to which writers on opposite sides of the Atlantic were so connected to each other through their involvement in the same trade dispute.