Dr. Jellenik
UCA English and all of our friends in the UCA College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences celebrate Dr. Glenn Jellenik, associate professor of English at UCA, who continues to emerge as a major scholar of Adaptation Studies.
Adaptation Studies is one of the most exciting areas of interdisciplinary inquiry within the humanities today. Earlier this month, Palgrave Macmillan, in its Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture Series, published Jellenik’s “Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century.” You can learn all about the book here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-09596-2.
Dr. Jellenik co-edited this book with Dr. Lissette Lopez Szwydky of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The collection curates a set of scholarly conversations that center an historical approach to Adaptation Studies. In so doing, the book decenters a still-dominant film/novel binary. Likewise, the book’s chapters examine adaptation as an act that long-predates the advent of cinema.
In addition to editing the book’s 13 chapters, Dr. Jellenik contributed two chapters to the collection: “Introduction: Adaptation’s Past, Adaptation’s Future,” which lays out and contextualizes the book’s approach, and “Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy: Romanticism and the Rise of Novelization,” which looks at the ways that both William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft novelized their democratic philosophy in order to reach a wider audience.
In addition, Dr. Jellenik will publish essays in two edited collections in adaptation studies next month — one called, “Adapting the Monstrous Other: del Toro Re-Shapes ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ in The Eternal Future of the 1950s,” and the other, “Bowdlerizing for Dollars, or Adaptation as Political Containment.” Finally, his article, “Adaptive Entropy: The Victorian Birth of Caliban,” recently was accepted for publication in the Summer 2023 issue of The South Atlantic Review.
