Department of English Newsletter December 2015
Upcoming Department Events
Publications & Acceptances
Caterina Bernardini's essay "The Longest Day: Dino Campana and Walt Whitman Across Italy and South America" was published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33 (2015), 4-20. The full text is available on the WWQR website. (Beginning with this issue, the WWQR has become an open-access and online-only publication.)
Cameron Steele's poem "Sanctuary" was published as a special feature of the Thanksgiving edition of The Anniston Star, a daily newspaper in Alabama where Steele once worked as an investigative crime reporter.
Dan Froid's article abstract, "Satirical Conservatism in Catherine Dorset's Papillonades," has been accepted by the journal Women's Writing for their forthcoming special issue on children's literature of the long nineteenth century.
Tom Bennitt's short story "Normal Again" was accepted by Northern New England Review for publication.
Tom Lynch's article “Strange Lands: The Lexicon of Settler-Colonial Landscapes in Charles Fletcher Lummis’s and Arthur Groom’s Portrayals of the American West and the Australian Outback” has been published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment* 22.4. You can read more about it on his blog.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has just published her new book, Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film with Palgrave Macmillan. "In the book, I seek to shed light on the ways that feminism lurks in unexpected places," Foster writes. "I have always been interested in exploring less obvious feminist disruptions found in a variety of classical, postmodern, and postcolonial international films. My scope is wide; I include films from classical Hollywood, early television, and the work of international postcolonial filmmakers, to show how "disruptive feminism" lurks in unlikely and unexpected places - from the subversive work of Amy Schumer, Betty White, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Luis Buñuel, and Paul Thomas Anderson - to the postcolonial films of Carlos Reygadas and Claire Denis. Feminism is defined in so many ways that it clearly has long grown well beyond the scope of gender. As a global cultural feminist, I seek to highlight the ways that films and texts disrupt, challenge, and overturn the norms of race, gender, age, sexuality, and class. What pulls these artists together is their ability to disrupt and challenge everything from class and racism to sexism and ageism. Indeed, I hope the book disrupts feminism itself, because it can always use some shaking up." As critic Ira Jaffe writes, 'This book passionately advocates a cinema that challenges injustice and oppression across the globe by disrupting 'normative values' and 'received notions' of race and class as well as gender.'
Maria Nazos' translation of Dimitra Kotoula entitled "Mother and Daughter or Landscape in Motion" has been accepted for publication in upstreet magazine. Her poem "When a Man in the Midwest Loses a Lover" appeared online in The Fourth River's themed "Queering Nature" Issue.
Crystal Bock Thiessen, instructor in PIESL, had her presentation, "Effective Error Engagement in Academic Writing" accepted for the 2016 International TESOL Convention & English Language Expo, which will be held in Baltimore, Maryland, April 5-8.
Patrick T. Randolph's paper, “Synesthesia’s Magic: Tell Me About the Personality of You Word,” was selected and published in the competitive Selected Proceedings of the 2014 MITESOL Conference. This paper looks at how aspects of the neurological condition, synesthesia, can be applied as a pedagogical tool to help ELLs (English Language Learners) encode, store, and learn lexical items through the use of creating “word-personalities.”
Eman Hassan had a poem, "The Blossoming", accepted for the HYSTERIA anthology from Lucky Bastard Press. She also has a poem out in the current Issue of Painted Bride Quarterly, entitled "I've Come Back for My Clothes".
Jaime Brunton's poem "Iowa" has been accepted for publication in Quiddity International Journal of Literature and Public Radio Program. The poem will appear in the journal's spring issue and will be featured on Illinois Public Radio.
Conferences, Readings, Workshops & Presentations
Rachel Azima presented a paper titled "Stereotypes or Validation?: Investigating Writing Center Visits for Students in a Multicultural Bridge Program" at the International Writing Centers Association conference in Pittsburgh.
Melissa Homestead organized and chaired a panel on "On the Boundary between Public and Private: Rethinking Willa Cather's Letters" at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference in Philadelphia.
Steve Buhler presented a paper, "Kurt Weill's One Touch of Venus and the Arts of Appropriation," at the Appropriation in an Age of Global Shakespeares conference at the University of Georgia, November 12-14, 2015. Also presenting at the conference was David Moberly, UNL English M.A. 2011, currently at the University of Minnesota.
Nicole Green (and Pumpkin) recently traveled to Minneapolis where she, along with Dr. Lauren Gatti and Dr. Sarah Thomas (both of TLTE) presented at this year's Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. Their panel entitled, "Supporting Pre-Service and Practing English Teachers Through Mentoring," addressed the emotional labor and importance of professional care-centered mentorship for beginning English teacher educators. While there, Nicole also took first place at the convention's first annual and notably modest story slam contest.
Marco Abel traveled to his alma mater, Penn State, to participate in The Big Ten Colloquium on Graduate Study in the Humanities, an event that gathered chairs and directors (and some upper administrators) from across the Big 10/CIC to discuss future possibilities for humanities education. The event resulted in the forming of a number of smaller working groups that are trying to formulate concrete proposals; the goal would be to present those proposals on the local level--to departments and administration--and see what, if any traction, those proposals might get. The basic impetus behind the colloquium was the recognition that collectively the CIC institutions might be able to affect the way current conversations about the fate of the humanities (and humanities education in particular) might develop. It's too early to tell whether concrete actions will result from this gathering. Marco will brief the department in greater detail on the event at one of the next department meetings.
Maria Nazos presented a series of Greek poetry translations as part of the American Literary Translators' Association Bilingual Reading Series.
Crystal Bock Thiessen, instructor in PIESL, traveled to San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 19-23, to present her workshop “Creating Engaging, Communicative, and Creative Lessons From Limited EFL Materials” at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón for the 42nd annual PRTESOL conference. The workshop uses Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, along with Bock Thiessen’s own worksheets, to help instructors work through their own materials. Participants leave with a renewed sense of the taxonomy, how to apply it to their own lessons, and their own creative lesson plans that are ready to go.
Patrick T. Randolph has two presentations accepted and one honorable invited session for the 50th Annual TESOL 2016 International Convention & English Language Expo in Baltimore, Maryland: (1) *Cat Got Your Tongue? Inspiring Teachers While Demystifying English Idioms; (2) Breaking the Unwanted Stepchild Curse: Elevating the Image of ESL (Chris Dunsmore will also participate in this session) and (3) The honorable invited presentation for selected TESOL Press authors is titled, I Want to Write a Book! Getting Published with TESOL Press.
Jaime Brunton will present a paper at Harvard University as part of the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting. Jaime's paper, "Mommy, Mama, & Oedipus: The Freudian Family Drama in the Age of Same-Sex Parenting," is part of her book project on film and TV representations of LGBTQ parents (post-gay marriage) in the context of biopolitics.
Aimee Allard presented her paper, "'The Negative of a Person': The Institutionalized Woman as a Liminal Body in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar," at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers' triennial conference, which was held November 4-8 in Philadelphia.
Activities, Accolades, & Grants
Wheeler Winston Dixon participated in a half-hour interview for the Sirius XM Radio "Knowledge@Wharton" radio program, on Sirius Radio XM Channel 111, Business Radio, on the James Bond film franchise, with Christoph Lindner (University of Amsterdam) and host Dan Loney on November 6, 2015.
Ryler Dustin has been chosen as the Summer 2016 writer-in-residence for the Kerouac Project of Orlando. He will spend three months living in the house where Jack Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums.
Have news or noteworthy happenings to share?
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