Fordham professors of English Philip Sicker, Ph.D.,, and Moshe Gold, Ph.D. co-edit a Joyce Studies Annual, a collection of essays by foremost scholars and emerging voices in the field. The collection was originally a University of Texas Press publication, but has since been revived at Fordham University Press.

The advisory board of Joyce Studies Annual consists of 35 international scholars. In past volumes the collection has included a multitude of articles, with topics and titles such as “A Wakean Whodunit: Death and Authority in Finnegan’s Wake” and “1904: A Space Odyssey”. These annual volumes have created a vast, accessible resource for interested scholars and students alike.

In 2007 when the collection was moved to Fordham, Sicker and Gold took over at the helm. The two were determined to appeal to a broader audience; now included in the collection are essays more accessible to undergraduate students and non-academics, said Sicker. “Over the past ten years, we have, I think, managed to strike a balance between demanding, cutting-edge scholarship and essays of broader interest,” he wrote.

It’s the “inexhaustible nature of Joyce’s work” that motivates Sicker to co-edit this collection each year. He believes Joyce “accommodates each new critical perspective” and so remains relevant over time. Even his earlier Dubliners stories continue to inspire fervent debate in the field, while denser texts like Finnegan’s Wake have been decoded further and further still in the years since its publication in 1939.

The journal was the idea of a group of graduate students, led by Allison Adair Alberts and Rose Hill Writing Director Moshe Gold, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, who wanted to give core composition students a crack at the peer-review process and the art of crafting writing for an outside audience.

Alberts said she’d noticed that even her most talented freshmen had few outlets in which to write for an audience beyond the classroom. Last summer, she joined forces with a few English graduate students and Dr. Gold to start the magazine, which publishes entries of first-year undergraduate writing.

The eight non-fiction essays in the premiere issue were chosen by a editorial committee of graduate students, from approximately 40 anonymous entries submitted by Rose Hill faculty. Topics range from the immigrant experience to the problem of rising tuition in U.S. colleges, to a friend’s battle with cancer.

“They’re pretty weighty topics, and they represent the most outstanding examples of student writing from Fordham’s core writing classes,” said Alberts.

Once the selections were made, the student winners worked in tandem with faculty members to revise their prose.

“Not only have we tried to mimic the process of blind submission and reader response,” said Alberts, “but one of the most valuable things about this journal is that it helps the students navigate the revision process.”

Rhetorikos will be published twice annually, said Alberts. The current issue features work by members of the Class of 2014: Garrett Henderson, John McMenamin, Erin Murphy, Gabrielle Nugent, Timotheos Pariotakis, Bianca Pasquel, Venona Vilajeti and Allen Ying.

You can read their work at http://rhetorikos.org/

—Janet Sassi