December-January Missive
Hi all.
I hope we are all dug out after the unusual spate of snowy weather over the past two weeks. Like many of us, I was relieved that the first storm did not end up being as damaging as many forecasters were predicting. I still remember the terrible ice storm that hit Charlotte in early December 2002. Most of the city was without power for over a week. If you’re wondering, classes cancelled on January 26th and 27th do not have to be made up, but Monday and Tuesday classes this week do need to be because our accreditor mandates a minimum number of class-meeting hours each semester. If you are teaching face-to-face this semester and elected to meet virtually earlier this week, you’re good. Hopefully, these will be our only weather cancellations this semester.
Kudos!
Meghan Barnes published the article (with doctoral student Marsi Franceschini) “Teacher candidates’ assessment identity: disentangling conceptions of and emotional responses to assessment” in the Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy.
Pilar Blitvich’s new book, Forgiveness and Reintegration in Post-digital Societies: Metapragmatic and Technosocial Approaches, is now under contract with Cambridge University Press. The first volume in the Routledge book series that she edits, Autism in Interaction: (Un)masking and Impoliteness by Piotr Jagodziński, has just been published, and five other volumes are currently in the pipeline.
Boyd Davis received Southminster’s inaugural 8 over 80 Award.
Liz Miller delivered a (virtual) keynote address for the 8th Białystok-Kyiv Conference on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, hosted by the University of Białystok in Poland. The title of the presentation was “Community, autonomy, and complexity: Learning from language program administrators’ efforts to foster belonging for language teachers.” She was also invited to join the editorial board of The Modern Language Journal, a journal that’s been around since 1916! Her four-year term begins in January 2026. She also published an invited Foreword in the recently published edited volume Emotional vulnerability of language teachers in digital settings (Springer).
Becky Roeder delivered the invited talk “Stigma and Sound Change: Pre-lateral Vowel Mergers in Charlotte, NC” at the Regional Pronunciation, Attitudes and Real-Time Change (RePARC) conference at the University of Iceland on November 21st. She also received a contract with John Benjamins (with Gabriela Alfaraz) for the co-edited volume Accent, Attitudes, and Language Change.
Lore Scott, one of our BA grads, was accepted into the MA in Library Science program at Chapel Hill.
Maya Socolovsky’s new monograph The Documented Child: Migration, Personhood, and Citizenship in Twenty-First-Century US Latinx Children’s Literature received a very positive review in the latest issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.
Mark West published an essay titled “Bridging My Family’s Religious Differences with A Christmas Carol” in the Winter 2025 issue of the Early Children’s Literature and Culture Chronicle. He also posted a blog titled “E.B. White on Compassion and Globalism: A Response to the Border Patrol’s Operation Charlotte’s Web” on the ChLA Global Committee blog and was invited to be a participant in a ten-part podcast titled The Secret World of Roald Dahl.