Monday Missive

Arrival and Departure — If you have driven to the Charlotte Douglas International Airport lately, you may have noticed the new control tower that is currently under construction.   This spring the tower topped out at 370 feet, making it the second tallest control tower in the United States.   The new control tower will not be operational anytime soon, but its exterior appearance is already pretty close to what it will look like when it replaces the current control tower in 2020.

My interest in this topic stems in part from my short-lived ambition to become an air traffic controller when I was in high school.  I had read Arthur Hailey’s Airport, and I was intrigued by his depiction of the inner workings of a busy airport.  For some peculiar reason, the prospect of overseeing the arrivals and departures of lots of planes struck me as the perfect career choice.  In fact, back then I thought I couldn’t ask for anything more.  I never dreamed of becoming a pilot, like the cab driver in Harry Chapin’s hit song “Taxi.” However, like the cab driver in Chapin’s song, I sort of got what I “asked for such a long, long time ago.” Chapin’s cab driver imagines that he is flying in his taxi, and I spend part of my time dealing with arrivals and departures.

If I had an “Arrivals and Departures” sign in the lobby of the English Department, I would list Clayton Tarr on the arrivals side of the sign.  In fact, Clayton has already touched down in Charlotte, and he will soon be arriving at his gate.  Well, it’s not actually a gate; it’s a freshly painted office.  Clayton is joining the English Department this fall as a lecturer.  He has a joint appointment with the English Department and the University Writing Program.  On the departures side of my make-believe sign, I would list Kailan Sindelar.  Kailan has taught in our English Department as a visiting lecturer in our technical communication program for the past year, but she will soon be taking off to begin Clemson University’s PHD program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design.

I welcome Clayton to our English Department, and I wish Kailan all the best as she pursues her doctoral degree.

On Sunday, August 5, the Charlotte Knights is sponsoring Women in Baseball Day at BB&T Park. As part of this event, Chis and some of the contributors to her book will be on hand to sign books. Chris informed me that the Charlotte Knights are offering a special ticket offer. She wrote, “For twenty bucks you get a really great seat and a book.” Game time is 5:05with the Durham Bulls.

Chris’s interest in baseball is also reflected in her teaching.  For example, this coming fall semester, she is teaching a special topics course called “Baseball in Film.”  In her official description of this class, she writes, “Students will examine, analyze, and write about the ways baseball in film has served as a cultural barometer and reflection of American life.” In addition to covering a number of classic baseball films, she will have her students read the literature that has often inspired these films.

In the world of academia, sports are often seen as extracurricular activities, which means that they exist “outside the regular curriculum.”  However, at least in our English Department, baseball is finding a place within the the work of the department.  If one were to think of the English Department as a ballpark, the story of Chris’s baseball-related activities is an inside-the-ballpark story.

From Graduate Students to Teachers — My career as a university administrator can be traced back to the fall of 1990 when I became the English Department’s Director of the Graduate Programs.  In the process of serving in this position, I learned a lot about the demographics of our graduate program.  At the time, most of our graduate students were teachers.  Back then, many North Carolina school districts incentivized their teachers to go to graduate school by providing them with raises once they completed a master’s degree.  As a result, we had many high school English teachers in our graduate program.  Such incentive programs disappeared years ago, but our graduate program still attracts some students who plan to pursue teaching careers, and these students often go on to experience success in their careers as teachers.  I was reminded of this aspect of our graduate program when I received excited emails from two recent graduates of our M.A. program.

A few weeks ago Melody Vaughn sent me an email message. Melody was my teaching assistant last year, so I got to know her pretty well.  Throughout last semester, she kept telling me that she was applying for positions involving the teaching of English at high schools in her native state of Virginia.  In her email, she wrote, “I have officially accepted an offer to teach high school English (and yearbook) at Thomas Dale High School in Chesterfield County, VA. Chesterfield was my top choice, so I’m very excited!”  A week or so later, I received an email from Kevin Chauncey, who, like Melody, completed his M.A. in May.  He wrote, “I just wanted to update you and let you know I have been offered and have accepted a job working as a Writing Coach at Gaston College’s Writing Center.  I’m really pleased to be able to continue working with students in a college environment.  I can’t help but feel just how fortunate I am to have been a part of our group there in the English Department.”

I know that all of us who taught Melody and Kevin are pleased that they succeeded in getting teaching positions in their fields.  Their successes are but two examples of the many fine teachers who have graduated from our M.A. Program over the decades.  I am proud of them all.

Learning Community News — Tiffany Morin attended the 20th Annual National Summer Institute on Learning Communities at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, last week. The institute is designed to help teams develop a two-year action plan for their Learning Community Program through in-depth workshops and cluster meetings. UNC Charlotte’s team of seven members developed a plan in conjunction with Housing and Residence Life that aims to give students a more holistic first year experience to improve student satisfaction and aid in retention rates. The English Learning Community is recruiting for the 2018-19 academic year and is pleased to report that we already have twenty members. Please let Tiffany know if you would like to include the ELC in any of your programming this fall.

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Meghan Barnes recently had a book chapter titled “You Can’t Un-see Color: A PhD, a Divorce, and The Wizard of Oz ” published in Feminism and Intersectionality in Academia: Women’s Narratives and Experiences in Higher Education  (Palgrave Macmillan). She also just learned that she received the 2018 Outstanding Reviewer Award for English Teaching: Practice and Critique.

Pilar Blitvich recently published a co-authored article titled “Relational Work in Multimodal Networked Interactions on Facebook” in the journal Internet Pragmatics. This is a new journal published by John Benjamins. Pilar was invited to be a member of its editorial board, and she accepted this invitation.

Kirk Melnikoff delivered the welcome address at the 8th annual conference of the Marlowe Society of America in Wittenberg, Germany. As President of the organization, he also helped plan and run the meeting.

Tiffany Morin served as a mentor for English major Makalea Bjoin as part of the Charlotte Community Scholar Program this summer.

Quirky Quiz Question — The current Teacher of the Year in the United States is a high school English teacher who graduated from our M.A. program.  Can you name this celebrated teacher?

Summer of Research — Teaching is not just about conveying information to students;  it is also about developing students’ research skills.  This aspect of teaching often takes the form of mentoring, and it can involve including students in faculty members’ own research projects.  UNC Charlotte sponsors several summer programs that are intended to facilitate the development of students’ research skills by having them work closely with participating faculty members.  These programs include the Charlotte Research Scholars Program (CRS) https://uge.uncc.edu/OfficeofUndergraduateResearch/charlotte-research-scholars-program/, the Charlotte Community Scholar Program (CCS)https://ccs.uncc.edu/, and the Charlotte Teachers Institute’s Summer Research Experience for Teachers (SRET) https://charlotteteachers.org/science-research-experience-for-teachers-2017/2018-sret/.  I am pleased to report that faculty members in our English Department are participating in all three of these programs.

Janaka Lewis is participating in both the CTI’s Summer Research Experience for Teachers and the Charlotte Community Scholar Program.  I recently asked her about her involvement with these programs, and she provided me with the following information:

I am mentoring two teachers in the CTI Summer Research Experience for Teachers and one Charlotte Community Scholar (they are working as a team for three weeks) on the project “Black Girlhood, Literature, and Community Engagement.”  The CTI participants, Effuah Sam and Tiffany Craig, are CMS educators who teach theater and Special Education, respectively, and they are working with me to develop K-8 course lists featuring literature that represents black girlhood in connection with various (local and global) communities.  Kim Sanders, the CCS participant, is developing a reading list specifically for middle school girls in the Charlotte community in connection with two local organizations (Girl Aspire and LEAP).  The final list will be workshopped with community students this summer and topics discussed have included adapting literature for performance, creating writing prompts, and helping students find themes of empowerment in the selections.  We have been fortunate to have ImaginOn library and the Center City Campus as our “labs.”<

Jen Munroe is working with an undergraduate student this summer as part of her involvement with the Charlotte Research Scholars Program.  In a recent email that she sent to me, Jen summarized the nature of this student’s summer research project:

I am serving as a faculty mentor for Gabrielle Cuffee, a CRS student, who is also an English Honors (and University Honors) student. Her project, which helps advance the broader research efforts of EMROC (Early Modern Recipes Online Collective), uses the 17th-century English manuscript recipe book by Margaret Turner as it aims to position women’s domestic labor as a scientific endeavor. She focuses on how women’s domestic medicine and cookery employs methods and demonstrates knowledge that is akin to that related to early modern scientific discourse, even though women’s labor was largely devalued as an amateur activity.

Quirky Quiz Question — In addition to participating in the Charlotte Research Scholars Program, Jen Munroe is also serving as the faculty advisor for a student organization known as EMPS.  What does EMPS stand for?

Last week’s answer: The Alamo

A Room for Anita Moss — Shortly after Anita Moss’s passing, I contacted the leadership of the Children’s Literature Association and shared with them the sad news about Anita.  I knew that Anita had been a very active member of the Children’s Literature Association during the late 1970s and ’80s, and I was sure that the current leadership of the Association would want to know that Anita had died.  The chair of the 2018 Conference Planning Committee and I exchanged several emails about Anita, and she informed me that she was going to do something to commemorate and celebrate Anita during the 2018 Children’s Literature Association Conference, but she did not tell me exactly what she was planning to do.

Just before Balaka Basu, Ralf Thiede, and I left for San Antonio last week to attend the conference, we were sent an electronic copy of the conference program, and we all noticed that one of the meeting rooms was named the Anita Moss Room.  The conference planners not only named one of the rooms for Anita, but they also provided an official sign and a poster listing some of her accomplishments.  Throughout the conference, children’s literature specialists gathered in this room to share their research and discuss children’s books.  I cannot think of a more fitting way to remember Anita and her many contributions to the field of children’s literature studies.

One of my last conversations with Anita was about the Children’s Literature Association Conference.  She informed me that she had a paper accepted for presentation at this conference, and she said that she was looking forward to attending the conference along with her daughter Pamela Hausle.  Anita was not able to present her paper or attend the conference in a physical sense, but in a non-corporal way, she very much was a presence at this year’s Children’s Literature Association Conference.

Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this exhibition features photographs, original letters, and memorabilia related to A. A. Milne’s Pooh stories, but what makes this exhibition so special to me are the dozens of original sketches and illustrations by E. H. Shepard, the illustrator of the classic versions of the Pooh stories.

The exhibition provides visitors with insights into Shepard’s creative process.  In many cases, visitors can see a series of preliminary sketches leading up to the final published illustration.  The exhibition also includes greatly enlarged versions of some of Shepard’s illustrations, and these giant versions help visitors see some details that are hard to notice in the originals.  I especially liked seeing the original and enlarged versions of the illustration of Pooh standing at the entrance of Owl’s home.  I based one of my yard art projects on this particular illustration, so I felt a personal connection when I viewed these images.

Visiting the exhibition reminded me that I am not the only member of our English Department who has taken an interest in the Pooh stories.  Both Paula Connolly and Sarah Minslow have written scholarly works focusing on Milne’s Pooh stories.  Paula wrote about the Pooh stories in her book Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner:  Recovering Arcadia, which is part of the Twayne’s Masterwork Studies Series.  She has also published two essays related to the Pooh stories in edited collections.  Sarah wrote an essay titled “A.A. Milne (1881-1956):  Influencing American Childhood after World War II.”  Her essay will be published this fall in a collection titled Shapers of American Childhood.  

In their scholarship, both Paula and Sarah comment on the ongoing appeal of the Pooh stories.  Observing the enthusiastic responses of the many children and adults at the Pooh exhibition this past weekend, I, too, am convinced that these books continue to resonate with countless readers of all ages on both sides of the Atlantic.

Last week’s answer: Rita Moreno

The character Carmen Sandiego has appeared in several computer games and television programs.  In one of the television programs, her voice is provided by one of only twelve performers to win all four of the biggest awards in show business (an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony, which is known collectively as the EGOT).  This performer is most famous for playing the role of Anita in West Side Story.  Can you name this performer?  

Linguists on the Loose — It is sometimes difficult to keep track of the whereabouts of the linguists in our English Department, for they are often trotting around the globe, presenting papers at various international conferences.  There is, however, one person who has made it her business to monitor and report on the professional travels of these footloose faculty members, and that person in Liz Miller, who herself is something of a globetrotter.  Much like Winston Churchill, who followed troop movements by putting pins in maps, Liz uses a bulletin board, a world map, thumbtacks, and yarn to keep track of where our linguists have been giving their presentations.

To see Liz’s amazing bulletin board, you don’t have to go to London and tour Churchill’s War Room.  You just need to go through the main entrance of the English Department, turn left down the first hallway, and keep a lookout for the bulletin board on your right that is marked “Applied Linguistics.”  My guess is that they use the word “applied” because they all have applied for the new “Global Entry” system that is so popular with international travelers, but I am not sure if that’s true.

What I do know is true is that next to the “Applied Linguistics” label there is a smaller label that reads, “Where in the world have UNC Charlotte applied linguistics faculty been?”  The phrasing of this question reminds me of another globetrotter, the famous PBS character Carmen Sandiego.   I contacted Liz to learn more about her bulletin board and see if there is some secret connection between our applied linguists and the elusive Carmen Sandiego.   Here is her response:

In Summer 2017, I decided that the linguists’ bulletin board was badly in need of an update and thought that it could serve as a site for letting students and other visitors to the department learn about some of the work we linguistics professors do outside the classroom. Students often don’t realize the international impact of the English Department, and the linguists–like all professors in the department–contribute to that through their participation in international academic conferences. Drawing on the title for the 1990s TV game show for children Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, I decided to make a bulletin board with the title “Where in the World have the UNC Charlotte Applied Linguists been.” (I know, not nearly as catchy!) With the help of a world map and some yellow yarn, I was able to create a visual representation of the linguists’ far-reaching conference activity from Fall 2016 to the present. You will now find tags on the map to Athens, Helsinki, Shanghai, and Toronto among many other domestic and international cities.

The Child in Southern Literature and Film Update — Sarah Minslow, Consuelo Salas, Amy Arnott (recent MA graduate), and Savannah Woodell (English major) facilitated a book club on Saturday at ImaginOn as part of the NC Humanities Council funded project The Child in Southern Literature and Film. The group includes 13 middle school students from CMS. They discussed endangered species in the Southeastern United States and how kids can help protect them in relation to Carl Hiaasen’s novel Scat, which is set in the Florida everglades.

Sequential Art and Storytelling — This coming weekend, fans of comic books, graphic novels, and manga will gather in Charlotte for the annual Heroes Convention, also known as HeroesCon.  One of the largest such conventions in the country, HeroesCon will take place at the Charlotte Convention Center from June 15–17.  The fact that this event is big enough to fill Charlotte’s largest venue for conventions is a clear indicator of the importance of these forms of popular culture.

Comic books, graphic novels, and manga all use sequential art to tell stories.  Most examples also include text, but the text is generally subordinate to the visual images.  The use of sequential art as a way to convey narratives can be traced all the way back to cave paintings.  Over the years, this approach to storytelling has developed its own conventions and rhetorical devices.  Understanding the nuances of comics and similar forms of culture requires consumers/readers to have a grounding in a specialized type of visual literacy.  Well, this sounds like a job for super professors. In fact, several professors in our English Department cover sequential art in their classes and/or their scholarship.

Paula Connolly covers the inner workings of comics and graphic novels in a graduate course she teaches on the visual semiotics of children’s literature.  She also regularly includes graphic novels in her various children’s and adolescent literature classes.  In an email message she sent to me she wrote, “This year the graphic texts in my classes range from fantasy to realistic discussions of civil rights, including Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman (one of the earliest wordless graphic texts in children’s lit), John Lewis (et al)’s March series, Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, and Brian Bendis’s Ultimate Comics:Spider-Man Vol 1 (aka ‘Black Spiderman’ issue). What’s particularly fascinating is the development of hybrid novels, like Kate DiCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, in which graphic and traditional forms intersect as a way to create new narrative possibilities–in DiCamillo’s book, for new character points of view.”

Alan Rauch’s interest in comics and graphic novels stems from his childhood.  In an email message to me, he wrote, “I read comic books from an early age (much to my father’s chagrin).  I did do a lot of illustration and contemplated a career as either an artist or illustrator.  In college, I did illustrations and cartoons for the school newspaper, The McGill Daily and I continued to do work as a designer/graphic artists well into my doctorate. Two of my illustrations are in a Tech Writing textbook (Scientific and Technical Writing, Harcourt, 1984).  And I did a couple of illustrations for the sloth book.  Even though I was fascinated with illustration and design, and addressed both in all of my classes, I didn’t really consider the graphic novel as an important genre, until I read Spiegelman’s Maus. Since then, I have taught classes on the Graphic Novel in general and in Jewish Identity and the Graphic Novel. For the latter course, I draw on ‘traditional novels’ such as The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. I am fascinated by graphic novels that address science, such as the books by Jim Ottaviani, Jay Hosler, and more recently physicist Clifford Johnson’s Dialogues, published by MIT Press.”

Juan Meneses’s scholarly and teaching work with comics takes a global approach. His publications in comics studies demonstrate this approach, such as his article titled “Reconsidering International Comics: Foreignness, Locality, and the Third Space,” in which he considers the possibilities of comics to establish global links between modes of representation (images and text) as well as aesthetic traditions. In the classroom, this work has translated in the course “Graphic Novels and Animation from Around the Globe,” in which he and his students study a number of global topics such as immigration, globalization, and war.  He also incorporates comics in other courses, such as Peter Kuper’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which he assigns in his “Modern World Literature” course in tandem with Kafka’s text.  More recently he has developed an interest in the representation of environmental issues in comics.

Balaka Basu teaches “Superheroes on Screen,” at the 2000 level, which explores how comics travel from panel to cineplex and television and uses these immensely popular movies designed for young people (of all ages) to introduce film and literary theory. She also advises graduate students who study or create superhero comic books for their thesis projects. Superhero comics both reflect and effect important moments in American culture and politics, as is evident from the enormous impact that Black Panther (2018) has had on diversity in film, with its proud Afrofuturism. Black Panther is part of the groundbreaking effort begun in 2008 by Marvel Studios (in association with Disney) to create a shared, continuous universe called the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with storylines culled and adapted from the original comic books, a phenomenon that Balaka is exploring in a chapter of her current book project.

As these aforementioned examples illustrate, our English Department is at the forefront of the field that is sometimes referred to as comics studies.  For students who want to study comics and graphic novels, our English Department is the place to pursue this interest.  For anybody who wants to participate in a comics-related convention, HeroesCon is the place to go to this coming weekend.

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Jeffrey Leak and Malin Pereira presented papers, with two other colleagues from France and Austria, as part of a panel on Transnational Cultural Kinships and the African American Experience at the biennial conference sponsored by the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas. The conference took place at Karl-Franzens-Universitat in Graz, Austria (May 30-June 2). Jeffrey’s paper is titled “The Kin You’re Born With, the Kin You Find: Rosey E. Pool, Transnational Kinships and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.”  Malin’s paper is titled “Flying Home? Race, Identity, and Transnational Kinship in Contemporary Black Poetry.”