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Monthly Archives: April 2017

Monday Missive - April 24, 2017

April 24, 2017 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive

Our Students’ Winning Ways — Last Friday was a remarkable day for many of the students associated with the English Department.  Not only were 25 of our students recognized at our annual Student Awards Ceremony, but a number of our students achieved recognition at two other events that also took place on Friday.

Peter Fields

During an awards ceremony sponsored by the Graduate School, Peter Fields received the Graduate School’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for his teaching in the University Writing Program.  Peter is completing his M.A. in English and has taught in the University Writing Program for two years.

The Undergraduate Research Conference also took place on Friday, and nine of our honors students participated in this prestigious event.  Three of these students received awards at the conference.  Rachel West won the departmental award for English and was mentored in her research on Twitter in the recent election by Liz Miller.  Sara Eudy won an Honors College award for her research on black cultural theater performances (and choices to produce or not to produce Shakespeare) and was mentored by Kirk Melnikoff.  Thomas Simonson won the Atkins Library Research award for his research on moving beyond the East/West binary in Pamuk’s My Name Is Red and was mentored by Juan Meneses.  Recognition also goes to Shelby LeClair (mentor Sarah Minslow), Kelly Brabec (who participated as a junior and presented work from Janaka Lewis’s Honors Seminar), Hannah Brown (mentor Lara Vetter), Rozie Khashmanian (mentor Ralf Thiede), Victoria White (mentor Mark West), and Christina Ward (another junior mentored by Heather Vorhies) for representing the department well at the conference.

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:

Jessie Cortez, one of our M.A. students, presented a paper titled “If You CAN Stand the Heat: Exploring the Rhetoric of Cookbooks as Women Have Entered the Workforce” at the UNC Greensboro English Graduate Student Association conference in March.

Carissa Wilbanks, one of our honors undergraduates, has accepted an offer with full funding from the Ph.D. in literature program at the University of Arizona.

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

April 25 — Alexis Pauline Gumbs will read new work on Tuesday, April 25 at 12:30 pm in Fretwell 205.  A signing and meet and greet will also be open to the campus community in Fretwell 290B at 1:30pm.

Quirky Quiz Question — In addition to being an excellent teaching assistant, Peter Fields is also a talented athlete.  During his undergraduate days at UNC Charlotte, Peter was a member of one of the university’s athletic teams. What team was he a member of?

Last week’s answer: Wrightsville Beach

Chris Davis’s poem “Shell Island” relates to a beach just east of Wilmington, NC.  Some people think it is named after Orville and Wilbur Wright, but it is not.  What is the name of this beach?

Monday Missive - April 17, 2017

April 17, 2017 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive

National Poetry Month Meets Earth Day —

April is National Poetry Month, and April 22 is Earth Day. As I see it, these two celebrations not only overlap in terms of time, but they also speak to each other in meaningful ways. Since ancient times poets have been inspired by the natural world. Many of today’s poets also write about nature and the relationship between humans and the natural world. Three such poets are Christopher Davis, Allison Hutchcraft, and Grace Ocasio, all of whom teach poetry in our creative writing program. I contacted Chris, Allison and Grace and asked them to share one of their poems that relates to Earth Day. Here are the poems that they sent to me:

Excerpt from “Shell Island” by Christopher Davis

It’s weathered subject matter, this boutique hotel,
a revamped Holiday Inn at the end of a sand bar

pulled this way and that, eroded by wind, rain,
currents, tides flooding the inland waterway.

To restore expensive real estate, bulldozers
added three thousand more feet of beach

a little to the north, destroying habitats
for plovers, black flyers, sanderlings.

White water fowl wings
skim breaking waves.

“Shell Island” originally appeared in December in 2016.

 

Two excerpts from “Out the Birds, Out” by Allison Hutchcraft. This poem looks to the ways in which invasive species brought by humans irrevocably changed the ecosystems of the dodo’s home, what is now the country of Mauritius, contributing to the bird’s quick extinction:

Now the hogs keep hogging
all the fruit.
The rats swing
like bats from the trees,
the monkeys

eating everything green.

The poem also addresses the transition between the original environmental conditions before colonialists landed on the island and after:

For years: a coco-tree,
a rotted branch,
a lyre of weeds.
Then those pigs—
voracious,

flattening the grass,
sending their snouts
into daybreak,
your home, uncovered,
nested.

“Out the Birds, Out” originally appeared in the Kenyon Review in 2015.

 

“Great-Aunt Ruby” by Grace Ocasio

Could it be your rant was not meant for me but for shadows tugging at your sleeves?
Paddy rollers you might have dreamed––your mind consumed by the vision of you
as Negress––petticoated, shifted, and jacketed during slavery?

I always believed your words could overturn injustice like a mother
right siding an upside-down child.

The smile you wore most days was crooked as a broken hook-and-eye door latch,
but I sought you out anyway, implored your hands to tell secrets of your girlhood
in South Carolina.

Did you seek shelter in brooks near your childhood home?
Could brooks offset flickers of white hands dismissing you
when you entered five-and-dimes?

After you departed my home, I kept your wash basin, perhaps to begin an ablution
of our past, a way to untap our trickly connection
until it teemed, fertile as a rain forest.

I wanted to consult you like an older sister, wrap my arms around you,
as though you were a live oak, infuse your sap into my veins.
At times, your glare uprooted my heart, turned its soil to soot.

But then, I discovered your artful tongue’s stories of how you apprenticed
under Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, groomed students to hammer tent poles
in front of courthouses, mechanics’ shops, ice cream parlors.

The day you left my home for the hospital I found the pixie-girl photo of you.
The pixels of your eyes shined tawny-olive as a wood thrush.

Those days you lived with me, I sunk your red clay deep into my nails,
inhaled, never exhaled it, spread your loam all over my skin
like a lotion that never expires.

“Great-Aunt Rudy” originally appeared in Poetry South in 2016.

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:

Nadia Clifton, an M.A. candidate with a concentration in literature, has accepted the offer of admission from UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. In August, she will begin an M.S. in Library Science, specializing in Archives and Records Management.

Katie Hogan delivered an invited talk at the annual colloquium for the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program at George Mason University on April 13, 2017. Katie’s talk, “Complicit: On Being a WGSS Director in the Neoliberal University,” resonates with the colloquium’s 2016-17 theme, “State of the University.” A GMU doctoral student conducted an interview with Katie. Also, Katie has just received a courtesy appointment to the graduate faculty at Oregon State University so that she can work with a Ph.D. student at OSU.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here is information about upcoming events.

Feb. 21 — The English Department meeting will take place on April 21 from 11:00 to 12:30 in Atkins 125.

Feb. 21 — The English Department’s Student Award Ceremony will take place on April 21 from 12:30 to 2:00 in the Dale Halton Reading Room in the Atkins Library.

Quirky Quiz Question — Chris Davis’s poem “Shell Island” relates to a beach just east of Wilmington, NC. Some people think it is named after Orville and Wilbur Wright, but it is not. What is the name of this beach?

Last week’s answer: Shakespeare

John McNair was one of the first professors in the English Department to deal with science in his teaching and scholarship.  However, his academic specialty was in a completely different area.  Does anybody remember John McNair’s academic specialty?

Monday Missive - April 10, 2017

April 10, 2017 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive

March for Science — On April 22, many scientists and scientific organizations plan to gather in Washington, D.C., for an event that is being billed as the March for Science.  While reading about this event, I was reminded about the English Department’s involvement with science and technology.  Our faculty members have published numerous books and articles that deal with these topics, including Alan Rauch’s Dolphin, Aaron Toscano’s Marconi’s Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology,  Lara Vetter’s Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse:  H.D., Loy, and Toomer, and Greg Wickliff’s “Draper, Darwin, and the Oxford Evolution Debate of 1860,” published in Earth Sciences History.  We also have several faculty members who are currently working on scholarly projects that relate to science and technology, including Paula Eckard’s The Medical Narratives of Thomas Wolfe and Jen Munroe’s Mothers of Science.
 
A number of our faculty members also address science and technology in their teaching.  For example, this semester Heather Blain Vorhies is teaching ENGL 6008: History of Modern Science Writing.  The students in this course recently completed a transcription/archival project using feminist research methodology. Students transcribed examples they found of science writing in various archives, including 17th-century receipts from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s digital collection, 19th-century cholera letters, 20th-century arguments for physical education (found in the UNC Greensboro Hodges Special Collections and University Archives), and a woman physician’s notebook from the Duke University Rubenstein Library History of Medicine Collection.

As I see it, the members of our English Department have a lot to say about science and technology.  Although we are not science professors, we are already making common cause with our colleagues in the STEM disciplines.

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:

Abdallah AlShuli, a student in our graduate program, presented a paper on “The Second Language’s Impact on the First” at the 41st annual conference of the Philological Association of the Carolinas on Saturday, which took place in Charlotte.
Andrew Hartley led a seminar on Shakespeare and geek culture with Peter Holland at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Atlanta, GA (April 5-8).

Kirk Melnikoff presented paper titled “English Speaking-Book Poems: Imagining Readers in a Sixteenth-Century Printed Paratext” at the Shakespeare Association of America seminar Traces of Reading in Shakespeare’s Britain.
 

Juan Meneses was a respondent and co-moderated a discussion after the screening of the film adaptation of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was organized by the Charlotte Film Society last week.
 

Jen Munroe co-lead a seminar titled “Home Ecologies” at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Atlanta, GA (April 5-8).

Ralf Thiede delivered a paper titled “The Esthetics of Entrainment: Cognitive Literary Theory” at the 41st annual conference of the Philological Association of the Carolinas on Saturday, which took place in Charlotte.

Quirky Quiz Question — John McNair was one of the first professors in the English Department to deal with science in his teaching and scholarship.  However, his academic specialty was in a completely different area.  Does anybody remember John McNair’s academic specialty?

Last week’s answer: Aimee Parkison served as the faculty advisor before Alan Rauch.  Before Aimee, Aaron Gwyn served as the advisor, and Marty Settle served as the advisor before Aaron.
Janaka Lewis and Alan Rauch are the two most recent faculty advisors for our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta.  Does anybody remember who served as the faculty advisor for our chapter before Alan and Janaka took on this role?

Monday Missive - April 3, 2017

April 04, 2017 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive

Sigma Tau Delta News — The 2017 Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society Convention took place in Louisville, Kentucky, from March 29 through April 1under the theme of “Recreation,” and UNC Charlotte students represented the English Department well.  On Thursday, Thomas Simonson, Chelsea Moore, Sara Eudy, Kelly Brabec, and Maria Lignos presented a panel that they proposed on Recreation of African American Female Identities.  On Friday morning, Carissa Wilbanks presented “Queer Utopian Potential in Literary Studies” on a panel called “Making Space for Queer Theory.”  On Saturday morning (bright and early at 8 am), Thomas, Sara, Carissa, and Shelby LeClair presented papers on a roundtable that they proposed called “The Candidacy of Gender: 2016 Presidential Election,” and that afternoon Tayler Green read “Orpheus and Eurydice” on an original fiction panel at the same time that Thomas presented “Trethewey’s Reclaiming & Reimagining of Race” on a “Poets Recreating America” panel.  Rachel West and Hannah Brown also represented our chapter at panels and events, which included author readings and keynotes by Marlon James and others, workshops, and the Sigma Con cosplay and literary trivia night (where our team advanced to the second round but not to the finals).

Janaka Lewis, who is the current faculty advisor for our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, accompanied the students on this trip.  In an email she sent to me about this trip, she wrote, “Our student-proposed roundtables were two of only eighteen accepted by faculty evaluators, and over 1000 members and 227 chapters were represented at the conference.   Many faculty from across the country noted how prepared, professional, and engaging our students were, and it was my pleasure to moderate three of their panels as faculty sponsor.  We also connected with other local and regional chapters, including the one at Johnson C. Smith (where we already have a joint event scheduled for this month).  We appreciate the generous support of the Honors College and English Department making the trip possible for these ten students. Thanks also to cosponsor Alan Rauch who attended last year to prepare this year’s group for what to expect and to the excellent chapter leadership for their organization.  We look forward to attending in Cincinnati next year.”

History of the Book, Future of the Book — The English Department hosted a two-day colloquium, “History of the Book, Future of the Book,” organized by Jen Munroe and EMPS (the Early Modern Paleography Society). On Thursday, Josh Calhoun (UW Madison) gave a lecture and offered a papermaking workshop; and on Friday, we had the 2nd Annual EMPS Transcribathon, during which we had a roundtable discussion with Josh Calhoun, Rebecca Laroche (UC Colorado Springs), Jen Munroe (UNC Charlotte), and Breanne Weber (UNC Charlotte), and we finished a full keying of the 17th-century English manuscript recipe book of Lettice Pudsey (c.1675). We had 35-40 students at the workshop on Thursday, and 75-80 at the transcribathon on Friday.

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:

Jarred Batchelor Hamilton, one of our former B.A. students, will begin the Masters of Theological Studies program at Harvard Divinity School this fall.  He plans to concentrate in Religion, Literature, and Culture; and Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion.

Breanne Weber, a graduate of our M.A. program and a current part-time faculty member in the English Department, has accepted a PhD offer from the English Department at UC Davis.  The offer includes a generous financial package: a first-year fellowship (The Provost’s Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) and five years of funding after that.
 

Quirky Quiz Question — Janaka Lewis and Alan Rauch are the two most recent faculty advisors for our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta.  Does anybody remember who served as the faculty advisor for our chapter before Alan and Janaka took on this role?

Last week’s answer: President Lyndon Johnson
The National Endowment for the Humanities was signed into law in 1965.  Can you name the president who signed this legislation?
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