Monday Missive – January 18, 2016

For young people who want to know more about Dr. King as well as several other African American leaders, I highly recommend Hand in Hand:  Ten Black Men Who Changed America by Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney.  Published in 2012, this beautiful volume won the Coretta Scott King Book Award.  In addition to covering the life of Dr. King, the Pinkneys include chapters on Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X, and President Barack Obama.  Hand in Handis a companion book to Let It Shine:  Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters.  A few years ago, I taught Hand in Hand in my graduate seminar titled Children’s Literature Award Winners, and my students and I all agreed that this book provides lively and engaging introductions to the lives and contributions of these important players in American history.

Collaborations — It is often assumed that scholars in the humanities work alone while those in the sciences work collaboratively.  In our English Department, however, many of us take collaborative approaches to research and teaching.   I could list at a least a dozen examples, but today I want to draw attention to the work of three of our professors who are currently engaged in collaborative projects with fellow UNC Charlotte faculty members from other departments.

Janaka Lewis is collaborating with Tehia Glass of the College of Education on a research project that will create resources for caregivers and educators of preschool and early elementary aged children to use African American and multicultural literature in discussions about race. They are assessing how literary texts (including Janaka’s picture book titled Brown All Over) are beneficial in discussions about race. Janaka and Tehia were recently awarded a joint Faculty Research Grant to support this research project.

Kirk Melnikoff has for the last three years taught the LBST course Sexing Shakespeare with Religious Studies professor Kent Brintnall. The class reads Shakespeare on the stage and page through the lens of gender and sexual theory, introducing students to the ideas of Girard, Foucault, Bataille, and Butler in the context of plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream andRomeo and Juliet. With Jen Munroe, Kirk has also worked for the last decade with Theatre professor Andrew Hartley on the UNC Charlotte Theatre Department’s Shakespeare in Action Initiative, planning events, running talkbacks, and giving public lectures on Shakespeare and early modern British culture. This semester, SIA is concluding its six-year Thirty Six in Six project with events dedicated to The Comedy of Errors,Cymbeline, and As You Like It.

Ralf Thiede and Dan Boisvert of the Department of Philosophy will be teaching LBST 2213 ‘Language: Where it can take us’ (a Prospect for Success course) for the third time this Fall. Ralf and Dan share interests in logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind (Ralf started out as a double major in English and Philosophy at the University of Münster). Their course combines current perspectives from philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive science and explores linguistic cooperation; the language of power and the power of language; and language as a resource that can be shared, denied, or fought over. They adopt the emerging metaphor of the brain as a narrating device and are completing the first draft of a book manuscript on language and cooperation.

These three examples demonstrate that our English Department is not an isolated academic silo, nor are do we always fly solo.  As I see it, one of the many strengths of our department is our willingness to reach across disciplines and work collaboratively with colleagues across our campus and beyond.

January 21 — The last day to add/drop with no grade.

January 22 — The English Department meeting will take place on January 22, 2016, from 11:00–12:30 in the English Department Conference Room.

Quirky Quiz Question — Our culture is replete with famous examples of collaborative works.  Listed below are five such works along with a list a famous collaborators.  See if you can match each work to the collaborators who created it:

William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge

Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert

Carole King and Gerry Goffin

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

John Lennon and Paul McCartney