Gary Richards, associate professor and chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, was a participant at the 27th Annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival in New Orleans. He was the facilitator of the Breakfast Book Club, one of the Festival’s special events. This year, the focus was on the short stories of Southern writer Eudora Welty.
Elizabeth Larus, professor of political science and international affairs, presented a paper, “Technological Change and China’s Naval Modernization: Security Implications for Taiwan,” at an international conference on Cross-Strait Relations in an Era of Technological Change on Tuesday, March 5. The conference was organized by St. Antony’s College, Oxford University (UK).
Jim Groom delivered the keynote presentation at Ohio State University’s fourth annual educational technology conference, innovateOSU, titled “Domain of One’s Own: Open Educational Experiences.” The presentation shared the work that has been happening at UMW over the past eight years, chronicling the fruits of DTLT‘s experimentations with commodity web hosting which led to innovative projects such as UMW Blogs, Digital Storytelling (ds106), and most recently Domain of One’s Own. You can see the slides for this presentation here. To see an archived video of the live presentation click here.
In his capacity as a board member of the United States section of MSF/Doctors Without Borders, Nabil Al-Tikriti, associate professor of history and American studies, participated in the annual Field Associative Debate (FAD) for MSF staff serving throughout South Sudan, in Juba on 1-2 March.
This year’s FAD topic covered arguments in favor of and against the utilization of “remote control” management in constricted relief contexts, whereby international staff avoid direct presence and leave local operations to national staff — in its extreme form, a sort of humanitarian sub-contracting. After debating this year’s topic, staff members then presented recommendations and motions for consideration by the MSF International General Assembly. After the FAD was completed, Prof. Al-Tikriti conducted a brief field visit to MSF’s child and maternity hospital intervention in Aweil, South Sudan. Upon his return, he completed a thought piece on his experience for internal review.
A brief video produced to commemorate this year’s South Sudan FAD can be accessed here: [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9SOvoufqCI[/youtube]
Zach Whalen, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Communication, presented a paper at the recent Society for Textual Scholarship hosted by Loyola University Chicago. The paper, “Videogame Typography and its Antecedents” developed used a reading of alphanumeric characters in videogames as a hermeneutic for thinking about how videogames express meaning.
