A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
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).
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?”
Associate Professor of English, Linguistics, and Communications Zach Whalen
Zach Whalen, Associate Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communications, recently had his article “Teaching with Objects: Individuating Media Archaeology in Digital Studies” published in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/teaching-with-objects-individuating-media-archaeology-in-digital-studies/.
Abstract: “Media archaeology presents a framework for understanding the foundations of digital culture in the social histories of technological media. This essay argues that a pedagogy focused on individual, physical artifacts of technological media involves students in constructing a constellation of insights around technology’s mineral, global, and human history as well as its ecological future. By describing and reflecting on a series of assignments and exercises developed for my “Introduction to Digital Studies” class, I show how the intimacy of specific devices can connect to the exigencies of technological media through the lens of media archaeology. The core of this experience is a group project where students take apart an artifact like an old smartphone or game console, attempt to locate the origins of each component in that artifact, and present those origins in a map and timeline. The risks and rewards of this assignment sequence actively engage students in designing their own learning and encourage them to think critically and ethically about the media they consume, the devices that provide the foundation for that consumption, and the global economy of human labor that makes it all possible. In a step-by-step consideration, I consider how the practical and logistical challenges of this assignment sequence support the learning goals I identify as crucial to Digital Studies.”
Associate Professor of English Kate Haffey
Kate Haffey, Associate Professor of English, has just had her book, Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality: Eddies in Time, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Per the summary on the back of the book, “This book explores the intersection between the recent work on queer temporality and the experiments of literary modernism. Kate Haffey argues that queer theory’s recent work on time owes a debt to modernist authors who developed new ways of representing temporality in their texts. By reading a series of early twentieth-century literary texts from modernists like Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner, and Stein alongside contemporary authors, this book examines the way in which modernist writers challenged narrative conventions of time in ways that both illuminate and foreshadow current scholarship on queer temporality. In her analyses of contemporary novelists and critics Michael Cunningham, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Eve Sedgwick, Haffey also shows that these modernist temporalities have been reconfigured by contemporary authors to develop new approaches to futurity.” Details are available at https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030173005.
Associate Professor of English Antonio Barrenechea
Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, was recently interviewed for two articles published in the web magazine MEAWW. The first was on the relationship between summer and romantic comedies. The second probed the link between intelligence and dark humor.
https://meaww.com/the-last-summer-romantic-comedies-netflix-romcom-kj-apa-summer-of-love-tyler-posey
Ben LaBreche, Associate Professor of English
Ben LaBreche, Associate Professor of English, along with Ryan Netzley of Southern Illinois University, recently coedited a special issue of Marvell Studies, which publishes the leading edge of research on Andrew Marvell, his texts and readers, words and worlds. This most recent issue is on theoretical approaches to Marvell’s poetry and contains essays by John Garrison (on object-oriented erotics in Marvell’s verse), Jason Kerr (on vulnerability as an ontological feature of humans), and Brendan Prawdzik (on the limits of eco-criticism for Marvell studies and the concept of ‘greenwashing’). In addition, this issue contains reviews of Brendan Prawdzik’s Theatrical Milton: Politics and Poetics of the Staged Body and Alex Garganigo’s Samson’s Cords: Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler.
Gary Richards, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication
Gary Richards, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, recently facilitated the discussion of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces at the Books and Beignets program of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival held March 27-31 in New Orleans, LA. This program has become a tradition at the festival, and Richards has been leading it now for over a decade, since 2007.
Danielle Hartman, Adjunct Instructor of Communication
Danielle Hartman, Adjunct Instructor of Communication, recently co-authored a piece on the arts as a great hub for interdisciplinary work and studies, entitled “Promoting Interdisciplinarity: Its Purpose and Practice in Arts Programming,” that was published in Journal of Performing Arts Leadership in Higher Education. Read more.
Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English
Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English, gave the talk “‘Spots of Time’: Wordsworthian Spirits and Dickensian Hauntings” for the special Dickens Society panel at the 50th Annual Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference in Washington, D.C. Lorentzen examined this Romantic influence in Dickens’ work as a part of the panel “Dickens and the Influences of the Past.” In his paper, Lorentzen traced the ways in which Dickens’ incorporation of the Wordsworthian philosophies of time, memory, and continuity transformed over the length of the Victorian novelist’s career. He detailed the many echoes of “We Are Seven” (Dickens’ favorite Wordsworth poem) in the early novels, and the darker cooptation of the poet’s ideas in moments of traumatic memory in the latter novels, as Dickens transformed Wordsworth from the poet of Nature, to a much more haunting figure that informs some of the more deeply psychological “spots of time” in Victorian fiction.