January 2020

Sunday, January 26, 2020

Dear English Department Colleagues,

I hope your semester has gotten off to a good start and that your classes are going well. Each day that I come to work I am reminded what an outstanding department we have. English faculty, students, and staff demonstrate collegiality and excellence semester after semester, year after year. Thank you for contributing to these efforts and for helping to make our department such a vibrant and special place.

As indicated earlier, I want to provide you with departmental news and announcements on a monthly basis. Please don’t forget to send me information about presentations, publications, grants, special events, or student accomplishments that should be shared.  

January has brought news of several faculty accomplishments, which I describe below. You will also find mention of events, deadlines, and meetings of importance. (If you have news from January that I have not reported, please send any items to me. I will include them in the February Missive.)

Many thanks and best wishes for a successful semester,

Paula

KUDOS….

Juan Meneses organized and chaired the panel “Literature and Postpolitical Theory” at the MLA Conference in Seattle, Washington. He also presented a paper titled “Post-Humanism, animality, and Dialogue in the Anthropocene” in the “Postcolonial Studies, the Environmental Humanities, and the Limits of the Human” panel at the MLA conference.

Janaka Lewis presented a paper titled “Building Worlds of Our Dreams: Afrofuturism in Children’s Literature” at the MLA Conference in Seattle.   

Daniel Shealy was interviewed in early December for a special issue of Life magazine about Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. He is quoted in several articles that will appear in the issue, which should hit newsstands soon.

Mark West delivered a presentation and led a discussion on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in Hickory, North Carolina, at the Bethlehem Branch of the Alexander County Public Library as part of the North Carolina Humanities Council’s “Let’s Talk About It” series.

Mark also published “Charlotte and Mecklenburg County Has a Peculiar Amount of Book-related Public Art” in the online publication CLTURE. The photos in the article were taken by Mark’s son, Gavin West. Here’s a link to the article: https://clture.org/charlotte-public-art/. And, in case you missed Mark’s earlier column titled “What to Do with the Professor’s Books” in The Charlotte Observer, you can view it here: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/article239165013.html

Four faculty members from English received faculty research grants (FRGs). Their names and the titles of their projects are:

Becky Roeder (with Elise Berman of Anthropology), “Language, Race, and Changing Social Structures in new Immigrant Destinations: A Study of Rising Marshallese Kindergarteners and Their Speech.”

Liz Miller, “Exploring Language Teachers’ Emotion Management Practices and Professional Identity Development.”

Lara Vetter, “H.D.’s The Moment, and Other Stories.”

Daniel Shealy, “Louisa May Alcott and Her Publisher: A Correspondence.”