Gary Richards, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, presented “Queering Welty’s Male Bodies in the Undergraduate Classroom” on the roundtable devoted to teaching the works of Eudora Welty at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, Calif., held May 24-27, 2018.
Blevins’ Dissertation Garners Honorable Mention
The dissertation of Brenta Blevins, assistant professor of English, entitled “From Corporeality to Virtual Reality: Theorizing Literacy, Bodies, and Technology in the Emerging Media of Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities,” received honorable mention designation for the 2017 Computers and Composition Hugh Burns Dissertation Award, as announced at the 2018 Computers and Writing Conference in Fairfax, VA. This award acknowledges and supports the growth of scholarship, research, and teaching in the field of Computers and Composition Studies.
Blevins’ dissertation examines Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality texts and their rhetorical and composing strategies, situates VR, AR, and MR into a continuum of communication practices using a range of classical and contemporary theories, and concludes with pedagogical approaches for incorporating these media into classroom assignments. Blevins completed her dissertation at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro under the direction of Stephen Yarbrough and graduated in May 2017.
Whalen, Blevins, and Skallerup Bessette Present at Computers and Writing Conference
Whalen
Blevins
Skallerup Bessette
Zach Whalen, Associate Professor of English; Brenta Blevins, Assistant Professor of English; and Lee Skallerup Bessette, Instructional Technology Specialist, recently gave presentations that constituted a panel at the 2018 Computers and Writing Conference, held at George Mason University.
The session was titled “Locating Digital Writing Space,” and the presenters talked about the origins of the Console Living Room project, using Augmented Reality with students to expand and complicate their sense of that space, and the ethos of Domain of One’s Own as digital writing space.
Subrmananian Chosen as Livingston Awards Finalist
Sushma Subramanian, assistant professor of English with a focus on journalism, is a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. The award honors the best reporting and storytelling by journalists under 35 and is popularly known as the Pulitzer for the Young. The work for which she is being recognized is a cover story for Slate on a cruel medical experiment done in Guatemala in the 1940s and the subjects and their families who are still affected.
Read the piece here:
The award winners will be chosen in June.
A complete list of finalists can be found here: https://wallacehouse.umich.edu/2018-livingston-award-finalists-announced/
Rafferty Publishes Latest Essay in Presidential Series
Colin Rafferty, Associate Professor of English, had his essay on Chester A. Arthur, “Smear Campaign (#21),” to appear last week in the new issue of storySouth. This is the latest in his series of essays devoted to the U.S. presidency and the men who have held that office.
Dasgupta Delivers Two Conference Papers
Shumona Dasgupta, Associate Professor of English, recently presented two conference papers, “A Counter Discourse to Bollywood: Gender, Nation and Violence in Bengali Partition Cinema” at the Association of Asian Studies Conference in Washington, DC March 22-25 and “An(other) Story: Memory, Trauma and Identity in Muslim Narratives of the Partition” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual conference hosted by UCLA in Los Angeles March 29-April 1.
Richards Leads Discussion of James Baldwin at Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival
Gary Richards, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, recently led the breakfast book discussion of James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival held in New Orleans, La. March 21-25, 2018.
Canceled: Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Talk
A talk by this year’s annual Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lydia H. Liu has been canceled do to the weather.
The talk, presented by UMW’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, Kappa of Virginia, and the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, was scheduled for 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 22, 2018, in Lee Hall 411.
Dasgupta Publishes Essay, Delivers Talk at Columbia University
Shumona Dasgupta, Associate Professor of English, recently published an article and gave an invited talk. The article, “‘His Blood Was Pure English’: Border Anxiety, Race, and Mimicry in Post-Imperial Mutiny Fiction,” appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 85-100. The invited talk, “From the Other Side of Silence: Indian Women Write the Partition,” was given at the South Asian Millennials Conference, organized by the South Asian Students’ Chapter at Columbia and Yale Universities February 3-4, 2018, at Columbia University in New York.
Rafferty Reads at Brigham Young University
Colin Rafferty, Associate Professor of English who specializes in the writing of creative non-fiction, gave a reading at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, as part of their English Reading Series on February 16, 2018.