Thursday's Notes

Announcements:

• Tony Arthur will speak about his book, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, to the Association of Retired Faculty at 2 p.m. Sept. 13 in the University Club. He spoke this summer at Chautauqua and also gave the keynote address at an Agriculture Department celebration in Washington of the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Chautauqua talk was filmed by C-SPAN Book Notes. That program is posted on his home page at http://www.anthonyarthur.net, along with reviews of his book, including a recent one in The New Yorker.
• Sharron Kollmeyer-Gerfen, a part-time Lecturer, has completed 25 years of service teaching in the English Department and Humanities. The Department extends its deep gratitude for her years of dedication and service.
• On top of the excellent assistance and support provided by Herby Carlos and Damon Luu, the English Department welcomes three new student assistants: Joshua Beard, Cecilia Lu, and Marianne Maun.
• The Honors Program is hosting an informal “welcome back” reception for Honors students from 3 to 4 p.m. Sept. 13 in JR 319. This would be a good opportunity to reconnect with students after the summer break and to recruit new students to the Honors Option.
• Due to a vacancy, the Faculty Senate is accepting nominations for senator-at-large (one year term). All full-time faculty who wish to run, and who have not yet been nominated, may submit to the Faculty Senate Office (mail code 8221 or delivered to OV10) a petition with 15 faculty signatures by 5 pm, Sept. 20. Please contact Heidi Wolfbauer, x3263 or email heidiw@csun.edu if you have any questions.
• The College of Humanities is calling for proposals for Fall 2006 Academic Programming Support. All full- and part-time faculty in the college are invited to submit proposals. Funding from this source will be supplemental only; projects will not be funded in full from this source. This fund provides supplementary support for academically related activities and events only (e.g., guest lecturers, workshops, performances). Funding from this source will not be allocated to support individual faculty stipends, curriculum development, travel, faculty research or creative projects, materials or resources for faculty or student training, and/or to hire student assistants. The deadline for Fall 2006 semester proposals is 5 p.m. Sept. 29. Contact the College of Humanities for more information.
• CSUN will sponsor a panel discussion open to the community on the U.S. Constitution at the Sierra Center on Constitution Day, Sept. 16. A continental breakfast will be served from 8:30 to 9 a.m., with the panel following. Dr. Stephen Shortell of Political Science and Dr. James Sefton of History will discuss “how a document written for and by a sparsely populated agricultural democracy has survived for 219 years to remain viable as the constitution of an industrial nation of nearly 300 million people,” according to the CSUN announcement.

Reminders:

• If you have not already done so, please put a copy of your course syllabi in Jennifer Lu’s box. The syllabi will be filed in the notebooks in our Conference Room for reference by other faculty teaching similar courses in the future.
• Thursday’s Notes is also published weekly on our department webpage. Please submit items for upcoming Thursday’s Notes to Scott Andrews, the Associate Chair, or to the Thursday’s Notes folder in Martha Alzamora’s office.

Faculty/Student/Staff Achievements:

• Scott Andrews published a review of Vietcong at Wounded Knee: On the Trail of a Blackfeet Activist by Woody Kipp in Studies in American Indian Literatures.
• Ian Barnard published his article titled “The Language of Multiculturalism in South African Soaps and Sitcoms” in the premiere issue of Journal of Multicultural Discourses this past summer. The article treats current popular culture in South Africa in the contexts of apartheid and the politics of language. Ian thanks the members of the Department’s Faculty Research Group for their invaluable feedback on earlier versions of the article, and he thanks Barbara Kroll for introducing him to JMD.
• Kent Baxter presented "Coming of Age in the Realm of Possibility: Sexual Identity and the Novels of David Levithan" at the 17th Annual American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco in May; and "YA Lit. Left Behind? Reading Habits of Middle and High School Students" at the 33rd Annual Children’s Literature Association Conference in June.
• Dorothy Clark chaired a panel titled "'Radical Change': Narrative Innovations in American Children’s Literature" at the 17th Annual Conference on American Literature in San Francisco in May. She also presented a paper, "Children’s Literature in a Graduate Seminar: An Evil Crossover," at the Children's Literature Association Conference in Manhattan Beach in June; and she chaired the following two panels: "Self-Reflexivity and Intertextuality: Creating Identity through Text" and "Remediating Children’s Texts: Graphic and Digital Innovations." She was one of the organizers of the conference.
• Joseph Galasso gave a special invited lecture in May to the acquisition lab at the University of Massachusetts: 'The nature of the input: Tracing the INFL affix through the Dual Mechanism Model of Language Development Some Points on Borer and Rohrbacher.”
• Beth Wightman received a fellowship from the University of Notre Dame Keough Center for Irish Studies to participate in the Center's 2006 Irish Seminar, held in Paris July 1-15. She was also awarded a CSUN College of Humanities Faculty Fellowship Travel Grant to support her work at the Seminar.

New Items in the Thursday’s Notes file (ST708) or on Bulletin Board (Outside 710)

Competitions and Fellowships

• Glimmer Train Press is offering a prize of $2,000 and publication to the winner of its Winter Fiction Contest. The first runner-up will receive $1,000 and the second runner-up will receive $600. The submission deadline is Jan. 15. Online submission procedures are available at http://www.glimmertrain.org.
• The National Humanities Center offers 40 residential fellowships for advanced study in the humanities during the academic year, September 2007 through May 2008, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Applicants must hold a doctorate or equivalent scholarly credentials. More information can be found at http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us. Applications are due Oct. 15.

Compiled by Scott Andrews, Associate Chair

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