Transitions — The 2015-2016 academic year is now upon us, and with this change come other transitions. Two of our long-time colleagues—Meg Morgan and Cy Knoblauch—now officially have emeritus faculty status.
Meg joined the English Department in 1987. Over the course of her career, she has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. Her strength as a teacher is reflected in the fact that she won the Bank of America Award for Teaching in 2008. Her commitment to teaching is also reflected in her two published books: Strategies for Reading and Arguing about Literature, which she co-authored, and Strategies for Technical Communication: A Collection of Teaching Tips, which she co-edited. She has served in several administrative positions, including the Director of Rhetoric and Writing from 1994 through 2003. Recently Meg has taken responsibility for the English Department’s internship program, and I am pleased to report that she will continue playing this role as a part-time faculty member.
Cy joined the English Department as Chair in 1998. During his 17 years at UNC Charlotte, Cy played several key administrative roles. He served as the Chair of English from 1998 to 2007, as the Interim Chair of the Department of Biology from 2008 to 2011, and as the Director of First Year Writing from 2011 to 2012. He has also taught a wide variety of courses in rhetoric, writing, and British literature. Over the course of his career, Cy has written or co-written six books. Perhaps his most important publication is a recently published book titled Discursive Ideologies: Reading Western Rhetoric.
Both Meg and Cy have made many important contributions to our department, and I am pleased to include them among our impressive list of retired professors who have emeritus faculty status. In the near future, the English Department’s website will provide a complete listing of the former members of our department who have emeritus faculty status. Alan Rauch and Anita Moss are working together on this project, and my thanks go to both of them.
150 Years of Alice — This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This classic work of children’s literature can actually be traced back to July 4th, 1862, when Carroll told Alice Liddell and her sisters a shorter version of the story while they were on a boating trip on the River Thames. In 
commemoration of the 150th anniversary the book’s publication, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City is sponsoring an exhibition called Alice: 150 Years of Wonderland (http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/alice).
Alice is quite at home in our department. Carroll’s classic is regularly taught in our children’s literature and Victorian literature classes, and several members of the department have written about the book. For example, Sarah Minslow devoted much of her dissertation to analyzing Carroll’s approach to nonsense literature, and Balaka Basu is writing about Alice in her current book project tentatively titled Reading Digitally with Children’s Literature.
News from Our Foreign Bureau — A few weeks ago I started featuring news about members of our department who have been globe trotting this summer. This week I am featuring Ralf Thiede.
Ralf recently returned from a trip to Germany. I asked him about his adventure, and here is what he had to say. “I saw very little of Mainz, Germany, where I went to attend (and present at) the world’s first colloquium on the linguistics of children’s literature, but thank goodness the meeting room was air conditioned. So, the Europeans are a bit ahead of us here: I took copious notes on a day’s worth of papers on such fascinating research as how adults interact with children during shared picture book reading. It’s a discipline in the making, and I thought that our department probably has the combined knowledge and skill set to become the leader in the US. Anyone interested?”
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 presented two co-authored papers at the 13th annual Communication, Medicine & Ethics conference (COMET) held in Hong Kong on June 25-27. One paper was titled “Dropped cues: Missed opportunities in the talk of tele health encounters,” and the other was titled “Politeness strategies in response to directives in the preliminary English version of the Assessment Battery for Communication.”
Paula Martinac’s short story, “Eds and Meds,” was a finalist in the 2015 Prime Number Short Fiction Contest. Prime Number is a literary journal published by Press 53 in Winston-Salem. Her story was one of the 10 stories chosen from 225 entries.
Joan Mullin recently presented a paper titled “Expanding or Limiting Access: Re-visioning the Calls For and Affordances of International English-Medium On-Line Publication,” at the European Association for Teachers of Academic Writing in Tallinn, Estonia.
Jen Munroe co-lead (with Rebecca Laroche) a workshop titled, “Teaching Recipes in the Digital Age” at the Attending to Early Modern Women Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin June 18-21.
Malin Pereira just returned from presenting a paper in Liverpool, UK, at the Collegium for African American Research bi-annual conference. Her paper was titled “The Politics of Memorializing Family and Place: The ‘Phototexts’ of Natasha Trethewey and LaToya Ruby Frazier.”
Quirky Quiz Question — In addition to writing the Alice books, Lewis Carroll spent many years teaching at Oxford University. What subject did he teach?
Last week’s answer: Charlie was Steinbeck’s dog