{"id":1075,"date":"2017-05-01T12:40:28","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T16:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=1075"},"modified":"2017-05-01T12:40:28","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T16:40:28","slug":"monday-missive-may-1-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2017\/05\/01\/monday-missive-may-1-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Missive – May 1, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Center City Literary Festival and the Spirit of Engagement <\/b>— One of the dictionary definitions of the word engage <\/i>is “to connect or interlock.”\u00a0 The upcoming Center City Literary Festival is an example of how the English Department is connecting in meaningful ways with the larger Charlotte community.\u00a0 Not only is this festival free and open to the general public, but it takes place in the the center of Charlotte.\u00a0 This festival, which will take place on May 6<\/span><\/span>, showcases our vibrant creative writing program and our departmental commitment to promoting children’s literature and literacy.\u00a0 For more information about the Center City Literary Festival, please click on the following link:\u00a0 https:\/\/exchange.uncc.edu\/event\/center-city-literary-festival-2017\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The planning and organizing efforts behind this festival demonstrates how members of our English Department embrace the spirit of community engagement.\u00a0 When I met with the administrators of UNC Center City last semester to discuss the possibility of collaborating on a literary festival, I had no idea that I would experience a major health crisis in the middle of the spring spring semester.\u00a0 My health crisis has made it difficult for me to participate in planning the details of the conference.\u00a0 Fortunately, Bryn Chancellor, Janaka Lewis, and Angie Williams all stepped up and took on leadership roles in the planning of this festival.\u00a0 As I see it, their willingness to help typifies\u00a0 the English Department’s commitment to engagement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This spirit of engagement is reflected in many of the activities that the members of our department regularly perform, including volunteering.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/i>.\u00a0 As part of this project, Heather had her students read Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry<\/i> (1817), and traced the advent of contemporary popular science and its format to Marcet’s work in the early nineteenth century. \u00a0Below is a MP4 video of one of the experiments.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/322\/2017\/05\/0420171742.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n

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Kudos<\/b>\u00a0— As you know, I like to use my Monday<\/span> Missives<\/span> to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department.\u00a0 Here is the latest news:<\/div>\n
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\n<\/span><\/span>Boyd Davis <\/b>recently published a co-authored article titled <\/span><\/span>“Three Approaches to Understanding Verbal Cues from Older Adults with Diabetes” in The Internet Journal of Advanced Nursing Practice<\/i>. 2017 Volume 16 Number 1.\u00a0 DOI:<\/b> 10.5580\/IJANP.46960<\/a><\/span><\/span>
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\nMalin Pereira<\/b> was a keynote speaker at the Sixth International Conference on English and American Literature at Shanghai International Studies University in China, held April 20-21. Her presentation was on Yusef Komunyakaa’s and Natasha Trethewey’s ekphrastic poetry. She especially enjoyed spending time with Professor Wang Dongmei, a visiting scholar in our department about seven years ago, who wrote her dissertation on Alice Walker. Dongmei is now associate chair of her department.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Quirky Quiz Question<\/b>\u00a0\u2014 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.\u00a0 <\/i>One of the original hosts of this program was Jamie Hyneman.\u00a0 Does anybody know the name of the other original host?<\/div>\n

Last week’s answer: The football team<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
In addition to being an excellent teaching assistant, Peter Fields is also a talented athlete.\u00a0 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?<\/em><\/p>\n
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The Center City Literary Festival and the Spirit of Engagement — One of the dictionary definitions of the word engage is “to connect or interlock.”\u00a0 The upcoming Center City Literary Festival is an example of how the English Department is connecting in meaningful ways with the larger Charlotte community.\u00a0 Not only is this festival free […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-missive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1080,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions\/1080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}