Monthly Archives: May 2017

Award-Winning Educators — Our English Department has a long and distinguished history of preparing future public school teachers and administrators.  Once such former student is Tisha Greene, who received both her BA in English and her MA in English Education from our department.   She is currently the principal of  the Oakhurst STEAM Academy, and she has just received the 2017 Outstanding Administrator Award from the North Carolina Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center.  The news of this award comes just a year after Bobbie Cavnar, another of our former graduate students, was named the North Carolina Teacher of the Year.    For more information about Tisha Greene’s award, please click on the the following link:  http://inside.uncc.edu/news-features/2017-05-17/university-alumna-cms-principal-named-outstanding-administrator

Meghan Barnes, our incoming assistant professor in English Education, has also just received a major award for teaching.  The University of Georgia, where Meghan has just completed her Ph.D., presented her with their 2017 Graduate School Excellence in Teaching Award.  She received the award on April 17, 2017, at their Faculty Recognition Banquet.   I am proud of Meghan for receiving this award, and I am very pleased that she will be joining our English Department in the fall.

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:

Paula Eckard recently presented a paper titled “Thomas Wolfe, Hurricane Katrina, and Lost Children in Southern Literature” at the Thomas Wolfe Conference in Indianapolis.

Sara Eudy, a new student in our MA program, was recently awarded the William C. Johnson Distinguished Scholarship from Sigma Tau Delta. The writing sample she submitted was based on the honors thesis she wrote under Kirk Melnikoff’s direction last semester.

Sarah Minslow recently published a chapter titled “The Diary of a Young Girl and Children’s Literature of Atrocity in Critical Insights:  The Diary of a Young Girl, co-edited by Pnina Rosenberg and Ruth Amir.  Sarah also recently gave an invited lecture titled “The Holocaust and Genocide Today” to the 7th grade at Kannapolis Middle School.

Jen Munroe was an invited participant at the Folger Shakespeare Library’s EMMO (Early Modern Manuscripts Online) conference (May 17-19, 2017) in Washington, DC, where she presented a talk titled, “EMROC (Early Modern Recipes Online Collective): Connecting Research Communities, Connected Classrooms.”  She was also an invited speaker at the UNC Charlotte Faculty Sustainability Workshop last week (May 16) and gave a talk titled “Teaching Sustainability and Humanities.”

Alan Rauch presented a paper titled “Italian Boys:  The Figurinai of Italy and London” at the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference held in Florence, Italy.

Quirky Quiz Question — Tisha Greene is the principal of  the Oakhurst STEAM Academy.  What does STEAM stand for in this context?

Last week’s answer: Will Shortz

Margaret Farrer was the first New York Times crossword editor.  Does anybody know the name of the paper’s current crossword editor?

Margaret Farrer

Playing with Words — My wife, Nancy, always starts her day by working the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink.  A few days ago, she mentioned to me that President Bill Clinton created that day’s puzzle.  I asked her if there was any particular reason that the New York Times published a puzzle by President Clinton, and she informed me that it was part of the paper’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of featuring crosswords.

Nancy is much better at working crossword puzzles than I am, but I still appreciate the pleasure that comes from playing with words.  Many years ago, I tried my hand at creating my own crossword puzzles.  They all focused on authors.  I even had one of them published in a newspaper called In These Times.  My published puzzle focused on the American writer Theodore Dreiser.   I enjoyed the process of trying to come up with actual words or phrases that interconnected with the other words I wanted to include in the puzzle.  I ended up scanning the dictionary trying to find words that ended with odd combinations of letters.  Why would this be fun?  I don’t know why, but I had fun doing it.

Of course, wordplay involves much more than crossword puzzles.  Two of our colleagues have delved into the ways in which authors and poets engage in word play in their publications.  Ralf Thiede is doing research on how Dr. Seuss’s creation of words reflects a deep understanding of the inner workings of language and the development of children’s language skills.  Sarah Minslow is interested in how Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll used wordplay to make fun of authority figures.

As I see it, taking pleasure in playing with words is one of the ways in which humans celebrate the amazing malleability of language.

Hearing Voices — In our teaching and scholarship, we often refer to a writer’s voice, but in the case of Maya Socolovsky’s Trauma in Literature class (Engl 4050) her students literally experienced the voice of an author.   On the last day of class, Maya Skyped in one of the authors covered in the class during the semester–Himilce Novas, author of Princess Papaya.  She talked with the students for over an hour, asking them questions, encouraging them to speak about their own creative writing process, and answering questions about her novel that they studied. As Maya told me, “It was a great opportunity to have the author’s input on a difficult and understudied novel.”

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:

Jen Munroe recently posted a new blog titled “Depending on the Season” on the Recipes Project website.  Here is the link to her latest blog post: http://recipes.hypotheses.org/9303

Maya Socolovsky presented a paper titled “Resisting the Call to Hate (Again): Borderland Ethics and the Polity of Belonging in 21st Century Chicano Picture Books” at MIT, as part of the 2017 Society for Multi Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS) annual conference.

Quirky Quiz Question — Margaret Farrer was the first New York Times crossword editor.  Does anybody know the name of the paper’s current crossword editor?

Last week’s answer: Carlo Collodi

Does anybody know who wrote Pinocchio?

Puppeteer, Dr. Mark West, with “Big Mouth” the alligator

Spanning the Generations — This past Saturday, I performed a puppet show for the children’s part of our Center City Literary Festival.  As I assembled the stage, took my marionettes out of their box, and tried to remember the show’s dialogue, I realized that 40 years had elapsed since I launched my puppetry career.

I was in my early 20s at the time and living in Madison, Wisconsin.  Like Geppetto from Pinocchio, I took an interest in carving marionettes from wood.  After designing and carving a half dozen marionettes, I decided to try my hand at performing.  I built a stage, making sure that it wasn’t too big to fit in my decrepit VW Beetle.  I then wrote a show called “The Kangaroo’s Tail,” the very same show that I performed at the Center City Literary Festival, and I started doing shows at libraries, schools, day care centers, and birthday parties.  I eventually wrote several more shows and began doing some television work.  Now I am in my early 60s, and my son is currently the same age that I was when I made my living as a puppeteer.

During my performance on Saturday, I felt as if I were traveling back in time.  I not only reconnected with a part of my personal history, but I also reconnected with the ancient art of puppetry.  I am pretty sure that I am the only member of the English Department with puppetry connections, but I am certainly not the only one whose work involves the spanning of generations.  Our linguists span countless generations when they teach students about the origins and evolution of language.  Our faculty teach courses on the history of the book and the changing nature of communication technologies.  Our literature faculty members cover the history of literary traditions and the development of genres.  Our creative writing faculty members help students make creative use of their memories of past events.  In many ways, this type of time travel is how culture is created and perpetuated.

At the end of my performance on Saturday, I brought out my alligator marionette whose name is Big Mouth.  I asked the children if they wanted Big Mouth to bite their fingers, and they all said yes.  As Big Mouth interacted with each child in the audience (and some parents, too), I had a sense that the children were connecting in a tangible way with a character, with a story, and with a cultural tradition that spans many generations.  It seemed like magic to me.​

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:

Beth Gargano recently gave the following two presentations  at the Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference in Baltimore:  “The Commonplace Book in the Wilderness: Embedded Narrative in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley” and “The Male Gaze in the Girls’ Garden: Interrogating Masculinity in Bronte’s The Professor.”

Eileen Jakaway, one of our honors students, received a Ertegun Scholarship to study at Oxford University.  Please click on the following link for more information:
https://exchange.uncc.edu/scholar-to-conduct-humanities-research-with-rare-ertegun-scholarship/

Quirky Quiz Question — Does anybody know who wrote Pinocchio?

Last week’s answer: Adam Savage

In teaching her graduate class on the history of modern science writing, Heather Vorhies drew inspiration from an experiment televised on a program called MythBusters.  One of the original hosts of this program was Jamie Hyneman.  Does anybody know the name of the other original host?

This spirit of engagement is reflected in many of the activities that the members of our department regularly perform, including volunteering.  Angie, for example, volunteered during UNC Charlotte’s Week of Volunteering. She assisted Second Harvest Food Bank putting together backpacks of food for Charlotte area schools. The backpacks are provided to children in need for the weekends. There are also countless examples of how our faculty members engage their students in the learning process.  For example, Heather Vorhies recently had the students in English 6008: History of Modern Science Writing conduct their own set of Diet Coke and Mentos experiments inspired by the Discovery Channel show MythBusters.  As part of this project, Heather had her students read Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry (1817), and traced the advent of contemporary popular science and its format to Marcet’s work in the early nineteenth century.  Below is a MP4 video of one of the experiments.

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?