November 15, 2024

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Richards Featured on With Good Reason

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Gary Richards, associate professor of English, Linguistics and Communication, can be heard on With Good Reason from Oct. 4 to 10 as part of an encore presentation of the “Gospel Roots of Rock and Roll.”

Here’s the description from With Good Reason: “The Broadway musical has often taken up southern themes, from Show Boat and Porgy and Bess in the first half of the twentieth century to Memphis, which hit the Broadway stage in 2009. For all their popularity, Gary Richards (University of Mary Washington) argues that these musicals nevertheless tend to have a negative view of the South and don’t reflect its diversity today.”

http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2014/10/the-gospel-roots-of-rock-and-roll-2/

Rao Presents at National Association of Communication Centers Conference

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Anand Rao, Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Speaking Intensive Program and the Speaking Center, gave two presentations at the National Association of Communication Centers conference at Arizona State University-West on Friday, April 11, 2014. The first was on “Assessment Best Practices,” and the second was on “Negotiating Identity and Place at Institutions without Communication Majors.”

Pineda Inks Contract on Third Poetry Collection

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Jon Pineda, Assistant Professor of English, has placed his third poetry collection, Little Anodynes, for publication. Nikky Finney, winner of the National Book Award, selected the collection for the Palmetto Poetry Series, and the book will be published in March of 2015 by the University of South Carolina Press.

This March Pineda was a featured panelist at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Seattle, Wash., and a featured reader at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville. In May, he will be a panelist and guest novelist at the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, S.C., and at the end of the month, he will join the creative writing faculty for the 2014 Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop at Hollins University.

Rafferty Publishes Essay, Moderates Panel

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Colin Rafferty, Assistant Professor of English, recently published an essay “This Day in History,” which appears in the newest issue of the literary journal Sou’wester.

He also moderated the panel “Organizing the Truth: Building the Nonfiction Canon” on Friday, February 28, 2014, at the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Seattle, Washington. The largest literary conference in North America, AWP celebrates the authors, teachers, students, writing programs, literary centers, and publishers of that region and saw more than 13,000 writers and readers in attendance this year.

Barrenechea Contributes to Decennial “State of the Discipline” Report

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Antonio Barrenechea

Antonio Barrenechea

Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, recently published a peer-reviewed entry that forms part of the decennial “state of the discipline” report of the Comparative American Literature Association. His contribution on “American Literature” as a hemispheric (rather than nation-centered) object of study is part of the online section on the “Ideas of the Decade”: http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/american-literature.

Richards Presents at Southern Literary Festival, Conference

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Gary Richards, Associate Professor of English, was the scholar facilitator of the Breakfast Book Club’s discussion of The Glass Menagerie at the 28th Annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival held in New Orleans March 19-23. He also presented the paper “It’s Gonna Cost You More than Supper: Mapping Gay Desire in Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carre” at “Other Souths: Approaches, Allainces, Antagonisms,” the Society for the Study of Southern Literature biennial conference held in Arlington March 27-29.

Barrenechea Selected for Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminar

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Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, has been selected to participate in one of the two 2014 Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminars sponsored by the National Humanities Center. That seminar, “Globalization and the Varieties of Modern Capitalism,” will meet June 1 to 20 in Research Triangle Park, N.C. His application was approved in conjunction with a new project on the poetics and politics of excess in the cinema of the Americas.

Whalen Presents at MLA Conference

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Zach WhalenZach Whalen, Assistant Professor of English, participated in three events at the recent Modern Language Association conference in Chicago. On Friday, Jan. 10, he was part of a reading of electronic literature, where he and colleagues read from twitter bots in a “Bot Choral.” On Saturday, Jan. 11, he was a panelist on the roundtable discussion “Electronic Literature after Flash.” His remarks were titled “Lexia to Perplexia (2000-2013)” and addressed the obsolescence of a key piece of second-generation electronic literature. Finally, on Sunday, Jan. 12, he presented the paper “Ebooks, Typography, and Twitter Art” in the session “Lit Misbehavin.” This paper addressed the poetics of twitter bots.