Letter from the Chair – September 2024
Hi all.
As promised, I’m sending out my first department missive. I’m planning on sending one of these out every month, so please email details to me about your recent achievements and about upcoming events. I will not only include this information in missives, but I will also forward it to CHESS for possible college promotion and to Gina for dissemination to faculty, students, and alumni through the department’s social-media accounts. Thanks!
Kirk
FYI
The Charlotte Film Festival begins tomorrow at the fabulous Independent Picture House and will end on September 29th. For more information on films that will be screened as part of the event visit the IPH’s event website.
CharlOz will be kicking off on September 26th and running through September 29th. Planned by our own Dina Massachi and Mark West, the event includes invited talks, gallery exhibits, multimedia presentations, and a showing of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz accompanied by the Charlotte symphony. For information on this exciting opportunity, visit its website.
Dean Boyer and CHESS will be hosting social gatherings for CHESS faculty and staff at Armored Cow Brewing (8821 JW Clay Blvd #1) from 4:30-6:30 on the first Friday of the month for the rest of the calendar year. Those dates are Oct. 4, Nov 1, and Dec. 6.
As part of CHESS’s Witness in Residence Initiative, Dr. Margaret Price (English Professor at Ohio State University) will discuss her work having to do with disability and mental health narratives on October 7th at 5:30pm at the Charlotte home of Tom and Ellen Ruff (1312 Biltmore Ave.). Two English Department alumni will be participating in the project as Witnesses in Residence–community engaged writers/authors, Ashley Nickens (editor of Sistories magazine, recent recipient of $50k Arts and Science Council grant) and poet Luther “Cole” Kissam V.
University Communications (UCOMM) offers professional headshots on the second Tuesday of each month and the location is at Foundation 110 (across HWY 49 at the stoplight at Cameron Blvd) to have it done. The next session is on Tuesday, October 8th. If you want professional photos, please plan on signing up for a time on this sheet.
Becky Roeder will be presenting “Understanding Accent, Perspective, and Change” on Friday, October 18th in Fretwell 290B from 1 until 2pm. Her talk is sponsored by the English Department Development Committee.
Finalists for the Atkins Library Dean position will be on campus in November and early December. English Department faculty are encouraged to attend their talks which will be announced in the coming weeks.
Congratulations!
JuliAnna Avila published (with M. Rice) “Online Information: Theorising Pedagogical Attunements through Technofeminist Perspectives.” Digital Culture & Education, 15 (1), 54-70.
Pilar Blitvich’s co-edited volume Evaluating identities online: Case studies from the Spanish speaking world was recently published by Palgrave. She co-authored one of the book’s chapters as well as its introduction.
Angelina Brooks presented a paper at the Punch Bucket Lit Inaugural Literary Festival in Asheville, NC on Saturday, September 21st as part of “Poetry Support Groups: A Conversation About How Charlotte Writers Make It a Habit” with Amy Bagwell, de’Angelo DIA, and Lisa Zerkle.
Katie Hogan presented the paper “Trans Plants: Resisting the Human Exceptionalism/More-Than-Human Binary” at the Summer Virtual Symposium of the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association on August 3, 2024.
Katie Holly was awarded a scholarship to attend the California Rare Book School at UCLA this past August to attend an intensive course on Descriptive Bibliography, led by Dr Aaron Pratt.
Kirk Melnikoff participated in a roundtable on the forthcoming co-edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Christopher Marlowe at the recent Marlowe Society of America International Conference in Deptford England.
Liz Miller presented two co-authored papers at the Second Language Teacher Education conference (SLTED2024) held in Brno, Czech Republic. One was titled “Transformative English language teaching practices: Insights into one adult ESL instructor’s identity and agency negotiation” and the other “Learning from experienced teachers: How and when belonging matters.” She also had an invited Commentary article published in a Special Issue of the International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. The title of her article is “Exploring ‘the pinch’ of emotion labor in language teacher research.” Over the summer, she was invited to join the editorial boards of two journals: Journal of Education for Multilingualism and Profile: Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development.
Matt Rowney presented a paper titled “From Plantation to Resort: Touring the Plantationocene with Frankenstein” at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) conference at Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
Clayton Tarr placed his monograph Victorian Legs: Degeneracy, Disability, Decorum, Desireby with Manchester University Press. It will be published in June 2025
Lara Vetter presented “‘What is your reason / to this wild unrest?”: H.D.’s Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion,” at the Emerging Perspectives in H.D.’s Hellenic Modernity and the Future of New Modernist Studies conference at Thessaloniki, Greece, May 25, 2024.
Mark West and Dina Massachi’s co-edited edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was recently published by Broadview Press.
Greg Wickiff delivered the paper “Computational Thinking in Students’ Research Projects.” The Mathematics Education at the Future Project, Bologna, Italy, on August 10, 2024.