Monday Missive – September 19, 2016

September 20, 2016 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive
national-hispanic-heritage-month
National Hispanic Heritage Month — During President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, the United States began observing the Hispanic Heritage Week.  This week-long celebration expanded into the National Hispanic Heritage Month in 1988.  The current celebration takes place from September 15 to October 15, and it provides an opportunity to recognize the many ways in which Hispanic Americans have contributed to American culture.  For more information about this month-long event, please click on the following link:  http://www.hispanicheritagemonth.gov/

In thinking about the English Department’s connections to the National Hispanic Heritage Month, I quickly realized that many of our faculty members do research, teaching, or service work that relates to this topic.  However, for the purposes of today’s Monday Missive, I will focus on the work of three of our faculty members:  JuliAnna Avila, Becky Roeder, and Maya Socolovsky.

Much of JuliAnna’s service work relates to this topic.  She is serving as the Secretary for CLAS’s Latino/a Caucus this year.  Since she has been in Charlotte, she has volunteered at Hawthorne High School working with ELL students as well as with Circle de Luz, a community organization that mentors adolescent Latinas and helps them prepare for college.

Becky’s dissertation was on assimilation to local dialect norms in Lansing, Michigan, by Mexican American enclave residents. Her most recent work with the Latino population is an investigation into language use on public signage in areas of Charlotte that are more densely populated by Latinos. Both projects have given her the opportunity to interact with members of the local population, raising awareness among community residents about research at a local university.

Maya has been been conducting research in this field for almost twenty years. Initially, she worked on Chicana, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican writing about memory, migration, and history. Her most recent work is moving into U.S. Latino/a children’s and young adult literature.  She recently published an article in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly on Julia Alvarez’s Return to Sender, and she is currently studying depictions of immigration and border crossings in picture books.  She also regularly teaches courses on Latino/Latina literature for both the English Department and the Latin American Studies Program.

News from the Blogosphere — Jen Munroe is a regular participant in “The Recipes Project,” the award-nominated blog site in the UK that features an international group of scholars talking about recipes (Medieval through 19th century).  She recently posted a blog about the unanticipated consequences of teaching recipes and the birth of our student group, EMPS (Early Modern Paleography Society).  Here is the link to Jen’s blog:  http://recipes.hypotheses.org/8442
Three of the EMPS past-and-current officers (Kailan Sindelar, Breanne Weber, and Nadia Clifton) have also written a blog for “The Recipes Project.”  Their submission, which was by invitation, is titled “Cooking for a Crowd: Recipes and the Transcribathon.”  Here is the link to their blog: http://recipes.hypotheses.org/8319

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 recently published a co-authored article titled “Conversing with the Elderly in Latin America: A New Cohort for Multimodal, Multilingual Longitudinal Studies on Aging”  in the Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning.  She also presented a co-authored paper titled “Reducing Pediatric Patient Safety Risks for Families with Limited English Proficiency” at the SC Practice Network Annual Conference, Charleston.

Paula Eckard‘s book Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature has been nominated for the 2016 Warren-Brooks Award.  For more information about this prestigious award, please click on the following link:  https://www.wku.edu/rpw/navigation/rpw_bookprize_about.php

Sam Shapiro recently published a book review of Braxton Bragg:  The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy in the Charlotte Observer. 

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here is information about an upcoming event:

The English Graduate Student Association is holding its first Faculty/Student Mingle on Friday, September 23.  The event will will take place at the Wine Vault (9009 J.M. Keynes Drive) at 7:00 pm.

Quirky Quiz Question — Does anybody know why September 15 is a significant day in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua?

Last week’s answer: Winston Salem
In her guest blog, Lara Vetter discusses H.D.’s roots in the Moravian Church.  A city on North Carolina has strong ties to the Moravia Church.  Does anybody know the name of this city?