Monthly Archives: April 2014

Earth Day – Today is John Muir’s birthday, and tomorrow is Earth Day. These two dates belong together, for John Muir (1838-1914) played a key role in the early days of the conservation movement.  Muir founded the Sierra Club and helped establish Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks.  He was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, President Theodore Roosevelt, and many other major figures who shared his commitment to preserving the natural environment.  Throughout his career, Muir enjoyed writing about his experiences as a naturalist and his observations of special places, such as the Sierra.  As we look forward to celebrating Earth Day, we should note that the English Department has faculty members who share Muir’s interest in promoting the natural environment.  Two who come immediately to mind are Greg Wickliff and Jen Munroe.

Greg regularly teaches a summer course called “Writing about Place.”  In this course, Greg has his students immerse themselves in a particular place and then write about that place in terms of its natural resources as well as its human inhabitants, both past and present.  This summer, Greg is having his students write about Badin, North Carolina.  Located on the Yadkin River, this small twon is about forty miles east of UNC Charlotte.  It is also a significant archeological site, and research indicates that humans have lived in this area for more than 12,000 years.

Jen has established herself as a leader in the University’s sustainability initiatives, but she has also made a name for herself in the area of eco-criticism.  Her scholarship in this area is reflected in her books Making Gardens of Their Own:  Gardening Manuals for Women, 1500-1750 (2007), Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (2008), and Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (2011).   Last month Jen received a contract for a new co-authored monograph titled Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory.  It will appear as part of the Arden “Shakespeare and Theory” series. 

The celebration of Earth Day helps us remember the importance of preserving and understanding our natural environment, but only so much can be accomplished in one day.  Through teaching and scholarship, Greg and Jen help sustain throughout the year the goals we associate with Earth Day.  I am sure John Muir would approve.

Leadership — I am pleased to report that we now have three more faculty members who have completed the leadership program offered by the ADVANCE Faculty Affairs Office.  These faculty members are Pilar Blitvich, Liz Miller, and Aaron Toscano.  By participating in this program, these and the other faculty members who have already gone through this program are positioning themselves to play leaderships roles in the department as well as the wider university.  Jeffrey Leak, for example, is a previous participant in the ADVANCE Program, and he is now one of two candidates for the position of Faculty President.  In my opinion, one of the great strengths of the English Department is the willingness of our faculty and staff to serve in leadership roles.

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:

Andrew Hartley was the subject of a feature article that ran in last Sunday’s Charlotte Observer.  Here is the link to the article: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/04/18/4850175/unc-charlottes-andrew-hartley.html#.U1VPiRlmWTg

Lisa McAlister, one of our current graduate students, recently presented a paper titled “Relational Knowledge and the Knowledge of Power between the Human and the Nonhuman in Early Modern Culture: The Knowledge of Experience and the Knowledge of Experiment” at the joint University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and King’s College London (UNC/KCL) Graduate Student Conference.

Liz Miller will be a guest speaker—via Skype—in a doctoral class at Pennsylvania State University this evening.

Jacqueline Plante, one of our former M.A. students, has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a fellowship that includes five years of funding.  She plans to study twentieth-century poetry and digital humanities.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here are some dates to keep in mind:

April 24-26 — The Shakespeare in Action Initiative is sponsoring a workshop titled “Devising Shakespeare:  The Shrew Project.”  The workshop will take place in the Black Box Theater in Robinson Hall, starting at 7:30 (Thursday-Saturday).  Andrew Hartley, Kirk Melnikoff, and Jen Munroe all helped organize this event.

April 30 — The English Department Student Awards Ceremony will take place in the Dale Halton Room in the Library from 12:30-2:00.   

Quirky Quiz Question — I first took an interest in John Muir when I was living in Madison, Wisconsin.  Muir lived in Madison and attended the University of Wisconsin, although he never graduated.  We have several faculty members in the English Department who have degrees from the University of Wisconsin.  Name one of these faculty members.

I just got back from presenting a paper at the 5th Annual Public Intellectuals Conference.  This conference has a cap of 25 participants, and it’s unlike any other conference that I regularly attend.  Everyone sits around a conference table for two days.  Each participant gives a presentation for about 15 minutes, and then the entire group discusses the presentation for another 15 minutes.  The conference is amazingly interdisciplinary in nature.  This year the participants included scholars from English, history, sociology, psychology, communication studies, political science, and philosophy.   The experience of interacting in a scholarly way with academics from such diverse backgrounds underscored for me the value of approaching problems and topics from a variety of academic disciplines.

From my perspective, one of the great strengths of our English Department is our receptivity to interdisciplinary studies.  This strength is reflected in the active participation of our faculty in the American Studies Program, the Center for the Study of the New South, the Gerontology Program, the IDEAS (Infrastructure, Design, Environment, and Sustainability) Center, the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies, the Minor in Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.   There are more faculty from the English Department represented among the directors of such programs than from any other department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Jennie Mussington and Her Super Powers — A month or two ago I was channel surfing when I came upon a show on the History Channel called Stan Lee’s Superhumans:  Real Humans with Super Abilities.  I watched for a few minutes and saw a young man jump over a car racing toward him at 60 miles per hour (do not try this at home or the parking deck).  I know only one person with super human abilities, and that person is Jennie Mussington.  Jennie has an uncanny ability to win contests.  Over the years, Jennie has won five TVs, a Jeep, a camper, a bicycle, a trip to San Francisco to watch a 49ers game, sports memorabilia, and lots of smaller prizes.  This past weekend she won $104 from a local radio station. Jumping over moving cars is impressive, but I am even more impressed with Jennie’s super powers. 

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‘s proposal to the Veterans Administration, “Story-Call: E-mobile Support for Community Caregivers of Veterans with Dementia,” has been selected for funding. This is a 3-year project.

Susan Gardner, together with Vail Carter (UNC Charlotte’s first Native American graduate), gave a presentation at UNC Pembroke this past weekend. The title of their presentation is “Why Is Telling Our Lives a Subversive Thing to Do?”  

Janaka Lewis recently presented a paper titled “A Black Woman’s Guide to Freedom and Southern Conduct” at the College Language Association Conference in New Orleans.  

Kirk Melnikoff led the workshop “Digital Resources for the Early Modern Book Trade” at the annual Shakespeare Association of America meeting in St. Louis.

Juan Meneses has an essay in the recently published collection The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World (Palgrave). The title of the essay is “‘Like in the Gringo Movies’: Translatorese and the Global in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.”

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here are some dates to keep in mind:

April 15 — Elly Bavidge from Kingston University in London will give a presentation titled “London on Film” in the English Department Seminar Room from 3:30-4:30.

April 30 — The English Department Student Awards Ceremony will take place in the Dale Halton Room in the Library from 12:30-2:00.   

Quirky Quiz Question — The faculty in the English Department serve as the directors of several interdisciplinary programs/centers.  Name the directors of the following interdisciplinary programs/centers:

American Studies Program

Center for the Study of  the New South

M.A. Program in Liberal Studies

One Book. One week.  One community— The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is sponsoring a week-long,  community-wide reading of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  This project will take place from April 13-19, and it involves many related events at the various library branches and other places in the community.  I am scheduled to lead a book discussion at the the Beatties Ford Road Branch of the library on April 17 from 6:00-7:30.  For more information about these various events, please click on the following link: www.cmlibrary.org/onebook

Fahrenheit 451 came out in 1953, the height of the McCarthy era, and the book’s anti-censorship theme had direct connections to the wave of censorship that was sweeping America at the time. However, the problem of censorship is not, unfortunately, a relic of days gone by.  Just last month In our neighboring state of South Carolina, the state’s legislators voted to cut state funding to the University of South Carolina Upstate and to the College of Charleston to punish these institutions of higher learning for assigning LGBT books.  The two books these legislators are attacking are Out Loud:  The Best of Rainbow Reading and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. As Ray Bradbury makes so clear in Fahrenheit 451, the suppression of books is really about the suppression of ideas and ultimately the suppression of people.  Bradbury’s classic is 60 years old, but the theme of his book is still very relevant to our world and our time.

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:

Liz Miller recently attended the annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in Portland, Oregon. She co-organized a colloquium on “Socially Mediated Agency and Second Language Learning: Theory, Analysis, Pedagogy” which included scholars from Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, Canada and the US. She also presented a paper titled “Social Sustainability: Is there a Definition in the House?”.  This past weekend she presented a poster titled “Starting the Conversation: Social Sustainability as Discursive Object” at the second annual conference of the Integrated Network for Social Sustainability, hosted at the Center City building in Charlotte. She also spoke on the same topic to the full assembly.

Becky Roeder and Matt Hunt Gardner (U Toronto) recently presented a paper titled “A Tale of Two Phonologies: English in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia” at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics.

Erika Romero, one of our M.A. Students, has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at Illinois State University, with full funding.  She plans to study children’s literature.

Ralf Thiede recently presented a paper titled  “Grammar for Writing: Discovering the Language of Power and the Power of Language” at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics.

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

April 11 — The EGSA Professional Day will take place throughout the afternoon.

Quirky Quiz Question — The central character in Fahrenheit 451 is Guy Montag.  What is Guy’s job?

Divine Discontent— Last Thursday marked the first day of spring, and for me the arrival of spring always brings to mind the opening chapter of The Wind in the Willows.  In this chapter, Mole is spring cleaning when he is overcome by the mood of the season:  “Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”   This weekend, I felt a sense of kinship with Mole.  I spent much of the weekend reading a dissertation written by a graduate student in the College of Education.  I am a member of the student’s dissertation committee, so I really had no choice in the matter.  Still, when the sun came out yesterday afternoon, I joined Mole as he “bolted out of the house.”  I grabbed my shovel, dug up one end of my garden, and planted some radish seeds and lettuce seeds, and my sense of discontent subsided a bit.  As we head into the final stretch of the spring semester, I hope that you are able to carve out a little time to share with Mole “the delight of spring without its cleaning.”

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 ran a workshop on “Digital Tools and Resources for Exploring the Early Modern Book Trade” at the Renaissance Association of America’s Annual Meeting in New York City.

Paula Rawlins, one of our former M.A. Students, has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Georgia, with four years of funding.  She plans to study contemporary Southern literature.

Aaron Toscano presented a paper titled “Outsourcing Technical Writing: Multiple Technical Writing Futures” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis, IN.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines—  Here are some dates to keep in mind:

April 3 — Henrietta Goodman will read and discuss her poetry on Thursday, April 3, at 6:00 pm in the English Department Lounge.   She is a 1991 graduate of UNC Charlotte’s English Department and is the author of two widely acclaimed books of poetry: Take What You Want (2006) and Hungry Moon (2013).

April 11 — The EGSA Professional Day will take place throughout the afternoon.

Quirky Quiz Question — In the beginning of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Mole bolts out of his home and ends up having a picnic that consists of “coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscressandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater.”  With whom does he share this picnic?