Monthly Archives: February 2014

Stanley Ray Patten — I am pleased to announce that the Chancellor and the Provost have approved Stan Patten for emeritus status. Stan taught in our department from 1982-2000. He played a major role in building our Writing Resources Center, and he taught a wide variety of courses in writing, literary theory, and gender studies. Unfortunately, he has Myasthenia Gravis, and this disease forced him to retire early. Stan still lives in Charlotte. Please feel free to send him a congratulatory message. Here is his email address: spatten@carolina.rr.com

One Book Campaign — The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is organizing a community-wide literacy event that they are calling “One Book. One Week. One Community.” Their goal is to encourage readers throughout the Charlotte area to read and discuss a classic novel over the span of a week. The novel they selected is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. They have scheduled this week-long event to take place April 13-19. Last week, I attended their kick-off meeting, and they made it clear that they would very much like for us to participate in this One Week Campaign. If you would like more information about this event, please click on the following link: http://www.cmlibrary.org/onebook

Seuss-a-Thon — The third annual Seuss-a-Thon will take place this Saturday (March 1) at Park Road Books from 11:00-3:00. This event is co-sponsored by the English Department and Park Road Books, and it involves a continuous reading of Dr. Seuss books for at least four hours. Many people associated with the English Department will be reading their favorite Dr. Seuss books. Please feel free to come and bring children. For more information, please click on the following link: http://www.parkroadbooks.com/event/book-event-seuss-thon

Kudos— As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department. Here is the latest news:

Boyd Davis has recently published two co-authored essays. One is titled “Developing a Pilot E-mobile App for Dementia Caregiver Support: Lessons Learned.” It was published in Online Journal of Nursing Informatics (OJNI), vol. 18(1) http://ojni.org/issues/?p=3095. The other is titled “Exploring Communicative Interactions between Visitors and Assisted-living Residents with Dementia. It was published in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication (2014) http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415670432/.

Janaka Lewis convened a meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, Mid-Atlantic Chapter, on campus, and scholars from George Mason to UT-Knoxville were excited to spend the morning in Atkins Special Collections looking at rare books by African American and American women writers and the afternoon discussing texts published by black women writers from North Carolina.

Erika Romero, a graduate student in our children’s literature concentration, recently presented a paper titled “Product or Subject?: Identity Creation in the Corporation Controlled World of M. T. Anderson’s Feed ” at the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here is a date to keep in mind:

February 26 — The Children’s Literature Graduate Organization will sponsor a screening of The Wizard of Oz at the Student Union Movie Theater at 4:30 pm. Mark West will delivery a brief introduction to the film.

March 11 and 12 — English Major Days. For more information about the this event, please click on the following link: http://english.uncc.edu/sites/english.uncc.edu/files/media/pdfs/English-Majors-Days-2.20.2014.pdf

Quirky Quiz Question — Stan Patten received his PhD from Purdue University. We have several other members of the English Department who who earned their doctoral degrees from Purdue. Who are they?

Visiting Brer Rabbit — This weekend my wife and I went to Macon, Georgia, in order for her to do some research for a novella she is writing that is set in and around Macon. On the way home, we drove through Eatonton, Georgia, and we saw two signs. One said “The Home of Joel Chandler Harris and Alice Walker” and the other advertised the Uncle Remus Museum. On a whim, we stopped to check out the museum. Located in several former slave cabins, the museum has been in operation since 1963. I regularly talk about Harris in my children’s literature classes, so I already knew some key information about him before we toured the museum.

Harris was born in 1848 and grew up on a plantation in Eatonton, where his mother worked as a cook. As a boy, he often visited the slave quarters, and it was during these visits that he first heard the Brer Rabbit stories. He went on to become a journalist, and he occasionally wrote down some of these stories in a column he wrote for the Atlanta Constitution. In 1880 he collected a selection of these stories in a volume titled Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings. Although this book helped perpetuate racist stereotypes, it also helped introduce the Brer Rabbit stories to a wide audience.

We arrived at the museum about 4:00 in the afternoon. The two women who worked there informed us that they closed at 4:00, but they told us to come in anyway, and they went out of their way to be helpful. Both appeared to be in their 60s or 70s. One was an African American and one was white, but both clearly loved the Brer Rabbit stories. When they found out that I knew something about the Brer Rabbit stories, they started pointing out little details and sharing stories about Harris’s associations with Eatonton. At one point, they started completing each other’s sentences. My favorite part of our visit was listening to these women share their passion for Brer Rabbit and his adventures.

When we got back in the car and continued our drive home, I thought a bit about this unexpected interlude on our trip. It seemed fitting to me that we visited this museum during Black History Month. The Brer Rabbit stories play an important role in African American culture, but they also help bridge some of the racial divides that still exist in America. These trickster stories are full of humor and wry observations about human nature, and they appeal to people from many different backgrounds. These stories are obviously tied to the history of American racism, and yet they somehow transcend this history. That’s the thing about Brer Rabbit stories—they are kind of tricky to pin down.

Kudos— As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department. Here is the latest news:

Pilar Blitvich has been invited as a plenary speaker at the im/politeness conference, which will take place at the University of Athens in Greece in July 2015.

Becky Roeder has recently published two articles. One is titled “The Canadian Shift in Non-Urban Southeastern Ontario: Transmission or Diffusion?” and appeared in the Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics. The other is titled “The Phonology of the Canadian Shift Revisited: Thunder Bay and Cape Breton” and appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. Also, she has just became an editor for the Strathy Student Working Papers on Canadian English for Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines—

February 18 — The Center for the Study of the New South is sponsoring a screening of the film Pride and Joy as part of a cultural series titled “Soul Food: A Contemporary and Historical Exploration of New South Food. The screening will take place in the Student Union Movie Theater at 2:00 pm.

February 19 — The Center for the Study of the New South is sponsoring a panel discussion on “The Future of Food in the New South” as part of a cultural series titled “Soul Food: A Contemporary and Historical Exploration of New South Food. The panel discussion will take place UNC Charlotte Center City at 6:00 pm. http://newsouth.uncc.edu/

February 26 — The Children’s Literature Graduate Organization will sponsor a screening of The Wizard of Oz at the Student Union Movie Theater at 4:30 pm. Mark West will delivery a brief introduction to the film.

Quirky Quiz Question — Joel Chandler Harris’s stories are discussed at length in a scholarly book titled Slavery in American Children’s Literature. What is the name of the English faculty member who wrote this book?

New Student Award — I am pleased to announce the establishment of the Deborah S. Bosley Technical Writing Award. This new award is designed to support annually one graduate student in the English Department who is pursuing an MA with a concentration in Technical/Professional Writing or a Graduate Certificate in Technical Communication. The student who wins this award will receive $500. Deborah has provided the funding to support this award, and Mai Li Munoz, the Director of Development for CLAS, has shepherded this award through all of the official channels. As of last week, the paperwork has been processed, and we are now ready to grant this award for the first time during this year’s award ceremony. Please join me in thanking Deborah for her generosity in establishing this award.

Prospect for Success Courses — As many of you know, Kirk Melnikoff and Kent Brintnall are among the very first faculty to teach the Prospect for Success courses. These interdisciplinary courses are tied to our General Education Program, and they are administered by John Smail, the Dean of University College and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies. I recently received information from John informing me that two more English faculty members have been selected to teach Prospect courses. Ralf Theide and Daniel Boisvert from Philosophy will jointly teach a course, and Jen Munroe will teach a course on her own.

Kudos— As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department. Here is the latest news:

Balaka Basu and Juan Meneses participated in the first brown bag of UNC Charlotte’s newly formed Digital Arts, Sciences, and Technology group (DAST http://pages.charlotte.edu/dast/) on Thursday, January 30, where they talked about their research and teaching activity.

Lara Vetter has been invited to be one of two keynote speakers at a symposium entitled “Women Modernists and Spirituality” at the University of Stirling in Scotland, 22-23 May 2014.

Quirky Quiz Question — The Prospect for Success courses make reference to our region’s gold-mining history. Our university mascot also relates to this history. What is the name of our mascot?

My wife (Nancy) and I spent the weekend exploring the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia. As some of you know, Nancy is writing a series of novels set in and around the Okefenokee Swamp. This was not our first visit to the swamp, but until this trip we had never seen the swamp during the winter months. On this trip, we focused on the western side of the swamp. The western side is harder to get to than the eastern side, but it is well worth the effort. During the 1920s, many of the ancient cypress trees on the eastern side were cut down and sold for lumber, but the logging company did not harvest nearly as many of the cypress trees on the western side. The famous Suwanee River starts on the western side of the Okefenokee Swamp, and Nancy and I spent many hours exploring the headwaters of this notable river.

The entrance to the western side of the swamp is through the Stephen C. Foster State Park. Stephen Foster was America’s first prominent song writer, and the Suwanee River figures in one of his best known songs. Sometimes called “Old Folks at Home,” and sometimes called “Swanee River,” the song opens with the line, “Way down upon the Swanee River, far, far away.” This line kept running through my head this weekend, and it prompted me to think about other American songs that celebrate rivers. One of my favorites is Paul Robeson’s version of “Ol’ Man River.” Another is Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”

Pete Seeger, as you likely know, died last week. He wrote and recorded many lasting songs, and I listened to these songs for hours during my college days. In addition to “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” he wrote “If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” and “Turn, Turn, Turn.” To me, these are more than songs; they read like poetry. With the death of Seeger, I feel that we have lost a great American poet. However, as Seeger put it in “Turn, Turn, Turn,” life and death flow together. Even as we mark Seeger’s passing, we should remember, to quote Seeger himself, that there is “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”

Kudos— As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department. Here is the latest news:

Kirk Melnikoff received a contract from the Arden Early Modern Drama Guide series for Edward II: A Critical Reader. The edited collection of essays is due out in late 2015.

Stars of the Stage — Angie Williams, Janaka Lewis, and Tiffany Morin all participated in the UNC Charlotte Faculty and Staff reading of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues to benefit Safe Alliance on this past weekend. They raised much needed funds for a worthy cause, and they showed that our department is a hotbed of theatrical talent. I have attached a photograph of the cast. I should point out that some years ago Sandy Govan and Susan Gardner played roles in an earlier staging of this play.

Vagina Monologues 2014 UNC Charlotte faculty/staff cast

Quirky Quiz Question — Now that I have been recalling Pete Seeger’s songs, I remember that he was a member of a famous musical group that performed extensively during the 1950s. What is the name of this group?