English Department Awards Day will be on Thursday, April 19 at 3:30 pm. A reception will follow. This is an opportunity to celebrate our department. Students, donors, retirees, alumni, and faculty will be there. DON’T MISS IT!
Congratulations!
Associate Professor Graeme Wend-Walker’s short story “Dirkwood Dane Stays Ahead of the Game” appears in the current issue of Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror. http://www.simegen.com/writers/dissections/
Professor Aimee Kendall Roundtree’s article “Dialogic of Social Media in Healthcare Settings: Text Mining the Rules, Attitudes, and Behaviors of Health Organizations and the Public” appears in the current issue of the American Communication Journal.
Assistant Professor Kate McClancy presented her paper “Desperate Housewives: Murdering Gendered Nostalgia in Lady Killer” at SCMS in Toronto, and at the Comics Arts Conference at WonderCon she participated on a round table on “What Is a Superhero?” and moderated a spotlight panel featuring John Jennings on race and horror in comics.
On March 13, Associate Professor Scott Mogull chaired the session “Critical Discourse Analysis of Technical Communications in Capitalist Medicine” at the 21st annual conference of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing in Kansas City, KS. Other panel participants were Dr. Susan Popham of Indiana University Southeast, Dr. Ron Lunsford of University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Dr. Christopher Lunsford (M.D.) of University of Virginia. The participants presented research on health care communications in industry.
Professor Kathleen Peirce’s latest book, Vault, is a finalist for the Four Quartets Prize from The Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation. The winner will be announced in New York on April 14th. Here’s a link to the press release:
http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/blog/fourquartetsprize/
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Miles Wilson’s fourth book, Woodswork: New and Selected Stories of the American West, is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press.
Lecturer Ray Stockstad has been accepted to Baylor University’s Ph.D. program for Literature. He will be studying British Literature (medieval). He has also been appointed a Teacher of Record.
Senior Lecturer Flore Chevaillier received an Alkek Library Research Grant to purchase books for her research/creative work. Volumes include works of experimental literature, affirmative politics, as well as literary theory on innovative modes of writing.
Flore has also been invited to participate in the 2018 Multicultural Curriculum Transformation Institute on May 21-25, hosted by the Center for Diversity and Gender Studies. The facilitators will be guest scholars and Texas State faculty with expertise in multicultural curriculum transformation. They will share ideas for implementing multicultural content and multicultural perspectives related to multicultural content, teaching strategies, classroom dynamics, and assessment. There will be many opportunities for networking.
Flore is also hosting Fulbright Scholar, Guojing Yang, from China on our campus April 3-5. He is currently working on a research project on postmodern poetics at the Department of English, UC Berkeley. He will make a presentation in Flore’s class on April 5 on W. H. Auden that you are welcome to attend. She would also like to invite you to join them for dinner on Tuesday April 3 in San Marcos. If you are interested please email Flore for more information. Guojing Yang will be at Colson Whitehead’s reading on April 4. If you see him there or in Flowers Hall, feel free to stop by and chat.
Professors Mark Busby, Paul Cohen, and Nancy Grayson from the Department of English have all been approved to be designated as Distinguished Professor Emeriti and will be recognized at the annual fall convocation on August 24.
On March 8 Mark Busby moderated a discussion in the Wittliff Galleries of “THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD.” The authors are PEN USA-winning authors Steve Davis (the Wittliff’s literary curator, B.A. and M.A. in English from Texas State) and Bill Minutaglio. About the book: This rollicking, real-life account follows the misadventures of Dr. Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor and famed LSD guru, who broke out of a California prison in 1970 with the help of the radical Weather Underground and fled to Algeria to seek refuge with the Black Panthers. Leary’s high-profile escape led an increasingly obsessed President Nixon on a careening global manhunt during the Watergate years.
Senior Lecturer William Jensen’s story “Witness to Everything” will appear in the next issue of Tinge Magazine.
Three poems by Assistant Professor Cecily Parks appear in Conjunctions Online: http://www.conjunctions.com/online/article/cecily-parks-03-13-2018
English Department nominees for Presidential Awards in Teaching, Scholarship, and Service have been selected to be Liberal Arts candidates for the award. Congratulations to Geneva Gano (Teaching), John Blair (Scholarship), Katie Kapurch (Scholarship), Deb Balzhiser (Service), and Keri Fitzgerald (Service).
This month the Southern Illinois University Press will publish The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, the latest poetry book from Professor Cyrus Cassells. He will be hosting a reading at the Wittliff Gallery on Tuesday, April 17th, at 5:00 pm to celebrate the launch of his new book.
Professor Susan Morrison was selected as February professor of the month by SLAC (Student Learning Assistance Center). Susan has also been invited to participate as a visiting scholar on a periodic basis at Rice University (2018-20) as a member of “Waste: Histories and Futures,” an Interdisciplinary Seminar.
In May, Lecturer Ryan Lopez will present an excerpt from his fiction at a graduate student research conference at the University of British Columbia, In the Shadows: Illuminating Monstrosity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture. His piece is called Borderlands.
Texas State was well represented at the 39th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in March in Orlando, Florida. Presenters included Andrew Barton (“At the Threshold: Spatial Liminality in The Lord of the Rings”), Caroline Kidd (“Odysseus is a Nobody: Modern Epic Retelling in Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book”), Levi Herrera (“‘Totems of a Discarnate History’: Disruptions of Liminal Space in B. Catling’s The Vorrh”), Suparno Banerjee (“Non-conquering Explorers: Space Travel in Indian Science Fiction”), and Graeme Wend-Walker (“‘The World is So Much Worse Than I Ever Imagined’: Shame, Surprise, and Awakening to Privilege in The Black Witch”).
Lecturer Rachel Gray’s story “All Women” appeared in the Hobart Literary Journal in March.
Lecturer Ashton Kamburoff’s essay, “Cleaning House: Poetry and Revision” is forthcoming in Far Villages: Welcome Essays for New and Beginner Poets, published by Black Lawrence Press.
Associate Professor Deb Balzhiser and Lecturer Amanda Scott from the English Department, and Assistant Professor of Curriculum Instruction Charise Pimentel, recently presented a panel titled “Matters of Form: Questions of Race, Identity, Design, and the U.S. Census” at the annual Association of Teachers of Technical Writing conference in Kansas City, Kansas.
“Fairy Tales for Truth and Justice,” an exhibit by recent MFA graduate Sarah Rafael Garcia, is currently on view in Brazos Hall. A closing reception will be held on April 10. http://www.txstate.edu/cssw/news-events/events/fairy-tales.html
Professor Kathryn Ledbetter was awarded an Alkek Library Online Resource Grant in the amount of $20,000 for Part IV of the Gale/Cengage British Library Newspapers digital database. After the award was announced, Gale offered the library a special price to allow them to purchase all five parts of the database, as well as other digital resources. Kitty also won a Curran Fellowship in the amount of $5,000 from the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals to support research for her project, “Edmund Yates, Gossip, and Personal Journalism.” In other news, Ledbetter’s chapter titled “Text and Media Replication during the US-Mexican War, 1846-1848,” will appear in a book published this month by Edinburgh University Press, Replication in the Long Nineteenth-Century: Re-makings and Reproductions, edited by Linda K Hughes and Julie Codell (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Replication-Long-Nineteenth-Century-Reproductions/dp/1474424848)