A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently presented “Fear and Loathing in São Paulo: Trash Metaphysics in the Cinema of Jose Mojica Marins” at the Literature/Film Association’s annual conference, entitled “Reboot Repurpose Recycle” this year and held in Portland, Oregon.
Assistant Professor of Communication Adria Goldman
Adria Goldman, Assistant Professor of Communication, is one of three guest editors of a special issue of The Journal of Hip Hop Studies devoted to Kanye West. According to the abstract, “The goal of this project, ‘I Gotta Testify: Kanye West, Hip Hop, and the Church,’ is to add a new perspective to the scholarly discourse on Hip Hop and Christianity within classrooms, religious institutions, and popular culture by focusing on Kanye. We chose to focus on Kanye because he has been one of Hip Hop’s most influential artists in the past decade. Furthermore, Kanye is one of the most polarizing celebrities in America and across the globe. His music, fashion, political views, and family (which includes the Kardashians) dominate discourse on social media, blogs, television, and other forms of mass media. With the exception of Julius Bailey’s 2014 edited book, The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, there has been little scholarly work published on Kanye. Bailey’s book contained just one essay, written by Monica R. Miller, dedicated to the theme of Kanye and religion. We intended to produce a nontraditional journal issue, partly because Kanye has never adhered to traditional boundaries. We also chose this method because we wanted to provide a document suitable for both academic and popular audiences. Kanye West identifies as a Christian and primarily uses Christian themes in his music, videos, concerts, and messaging.” For more information, please see: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/jhhs/vol6/iss1/1/.
Associate Professor of English Shumona Dasgupta
Shumona Dasgupta, Associate Professor of English, recently presented a paper titled “Everyday Trauma: Memorializing the Indian Partition” at the third annual Memory Studies Conference (MSA) at the Complutense University Madrid, Madrid, Spain (June 25-28, 2019).
Professor of English Chris Foss
Professor of English Chris Foss has published a 1500-word book review of Jay Timothy Dolmage’s watershed work Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, one of the top two scholarly journals in the field of disability studies today.
The book’s charge is “not just to recognize where and how ableism happens, but to ask what the impact will be of exposing it, what the cost might be of assigning blame, and what the forces are that make it imperceptible, what the euphemisms are that disguise it, and how it comes to be normalized, even valorized in academia” (58). Dolmage sets up his argument in a superb Introduction that exposes “the university as a rhetorical space that holds a history of injustice in its architecture” (9).
After noting higher education’s inextricable imbrication with the shameful histories of eugenics and colonial science, Dolmage transitions into a disheartening assessment of the state of the university in the present day. Statistics on underused and ineffective accommodations (here, for faculty/staff as well), attendance and graduation delays, heavier debt, etc. for students with disabilities—combined with the frustrating realities of how overworked and underfunded disability resource offices continue to be—reveal in very sobering terms the persistent ableism still preventing so many disabled people from fully accessing, much less successfully navigating, the world of academia. What is more, Dolmage’s observation, “The programs and initiatives that are developed in the name of diversity and inclusion do not yet deliver tangible means of addressing the ableism inherent in higher education” (26), sadly is all too true.
For Dolmage, owing to the logic of the retrofit, “disability has become the Whack-a-Mole of higher education” (91), the latter’s “structural exclusion” both “abetted and allowed by forms of temporary, tokenized, and tenuous inclusion” (85). As he elaborates at the beginning of his fourth chapter, “Universal Design is not about buildings, it is about building—building community, building better pedagogy, building opportunities for agency. It is a way to move” (118). At the same time, prone to “checklistification” (145) and the passive recycling of old initiatives (143-44), universal design is “as dangerous as it is useful” when it serves administrators’ “neoliberal justifications for cutting back on funding” (150). In the end, it is up to us to take up the mantle of Dolmage’s project (and its goal, as reiterated in the book’s final sentence, “to give [us] ways to change higher education” [191]) by building upon his indispensable groundwork.
Dolmage was our featured speaker here in August 2018, thanks to the generosity and support of Provost Mikhalevsky and Associate Provost O’Donnell. If you never got around to reading his book, remember that you may access it for free online at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/ump/mpub9708722. You also can check it out his online appendix of resources aimed at giving “teachers some places to actually begin changing the classroom and the syllabus” (150) at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/ump/mpub9708722/1:13/–academic-ableism-disability-and-higher-education?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.
Associate Professor of English Zach Whalen
Zach Whalen, Associate Professor of English, gave two professional presentations over the summer. In June, he gave a talk titled “Against Blogging” at the Domains 2019 conference. He reflected on the decline of blogging as a digital writing assignment and speculated on possible futures for digital writing in the classroom. In July, he went to Cork, Ireland for the 2019 conference of the Electronic Literature Organization. There, he presented about his ongoing research on computer-generated text, specifically the “National Novel Generation Month” community of practice (NaNoGenMo). He will be continuing that project this fall as a URES 197 project with the help of some research assistants.
Assistant Professor of English Brenta Blevins
Brenta Blevins, Assistant Professor of English, and Zach Whalen, Associate Professor of English, with Lee Skallerup Bessette, Learning Design Specialist of Georgetown University (previously Instructional Technology Specialist at UMW). recently gave presentations that constituted a panel at the 2019 Computers and Writing Conference, held at Eastern Michigan University in East Lansing, MI in June 2019.
The panel, entitled “The Digital Studies 101 Website: Developing and Using an Ethical ‘Un-Textbook,’” described teaching Digital Studies 101 at UMW using the Digital Studies 101 DGST101.net website, which is a common, free, open educational website used in lieu of a physical textbook. In describing the development and uses of the UMW Digital Studies 101 website, the panel addressed the ethical priorities, pedagogical benefits, and curricular opportunities for UMW’s Digital Studies program. The presenters described the programmatic history and impetus for the initial development of the website; presented on continuing development, instructor use, and pedagogical implications of the website; and addressed student use of the website.
Associate Professor of English Zach Whalen
The DGST101.net OER resource has had 30,000 visits since 2016 and supports the #OpenEdVA initiative and the Commonwealth’s goals around open educational resources (OER).
This trio also presented a poster on this same topic at the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) in Pittsburgh, PA, in July 2019. There they had the opportunity to talk one-on-one with Digital Humanities faculty and staff from around the world.
At the same conference, Blevins also presented her project “Developing Avatar Ethos in Mixed Reality Protests” analyzing the rhetorical strategies recent protesters in Spain, France, and South Korea employed using Mixed Reality, a medium that combines virtual elements with material objects. When in-person gatherings have been legally banned or prohibited by such existential threats as terrorism, protesters have used digital technology to create virtual avatars for demonstrating at physical protest sites. While the three analyzed protests all successfully used Mixed Reality to achieve traditional protest aims related to political and environmental activism, these technologies in the future could be disrupted or employed by counter-protesters, to attack or misrepresent protesters, or otherwise subvert demonstrations.
Finally, at the same conference, Whalen also presented a paper as part of a cross-institutional panel on “What Do We Teach When We Teach DH across Disciplines?”
Dan Dervin, professor emeritus of English
Dan Dervin, professor emeritus of English, recently published essays in the following books or journals:
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, professor of English, was interviewed by MEA WorldWide on the relevance of tragicomedies such as Netflix’s hit show, “Dead to Me.” “Dark humor responds to our absurd condition with the armour of world-weariness. Except that, of course, we also know we can’t really laugh such troubles away — which is why dark humor has a fatalistic dimension built into it,” Barrenechea said. Read more.
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea presented “Moby-Dick as Summa Americana” at the 12th International Melville Society Conference, held in New York City on June 17-20, 2019.
Professor of English Warren Rochelle
Professor of English Warren Rochelle was interviewed by Meaww.com for an article titled “Book adaptations are taking over the small screen, including ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, ‘His Dark Materials’, ‘Good Omens’ and more.” Rochelle delved into the differences between the movie and television series “His Dark Materials,” which will be released by BBC and HBO later this year. “That there is a series being released, and not another movie, is a good start for learning from the mistakes in the 2007 film,” Rochelle said. “Pullman’s world is complex and layered and dense and a series allows for this to be really explored.”