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Chair: Kent Baxter
Notes compiled by: Kate Haake

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Announcements

The Spring 2019 Northridge Review is pleased to announce its upcoming launch reading and celebration, to be held on Friday, April 5, in CSUN’s Bianchi Planetarium. The event will feature an open mic reading, beginning at 6:30 p.m., with the contributor’s reading taking place from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Please save the date and plan to come out and help celebrate this stunning new production of the English Department’s Book Arts Lab. There will be food!

The 37th Annual Honors Convocation will be held on Saturday, May 11, 2019, at 6:00 p.m. on the Oviatt Library Lawn. Students who graduate in Fall 2018, Spring 2019, or Summer 2019 are eligible for participation in Honors Convocation based on scholastic achievement or on demonstrated personal achievement. This latter category is by nomination only, so please consider student whom you think should be recognized but whose GPA may not be high enough to qualify. The nomination web-form is available at https://www.csun.edu/commencement/2019-honors-convocation-personal-achievement-nomination, and the deadline is Friday, April 5, 2019, at 5:00 p.m.  Questions may be addressed to the office of Student Involvement & Development at ext. 2393.

Applications for Outstanding Graduating Seniors are now also open. Four awards will be given in the amount of $1000. These awards recognize academic excellence, service to campus and community, and/or exceptional achievements or personal life circumstances that have been overcome. For more information and/or application forms, go to http://www.csun.edu/studentaffairs/ogsa/, or call (818) 677-2391. Please encourage your most accomplished students to apply.

This Friday, March 8th, at 7:00 PM in Jerome Richfield Hall, Room 319, “The Reimagining Narrative Film Series” returns with Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), a masterpiece of surrealist cinema, described by the New York Times as “a vision of a world as logical as a theorem, as mysterious as a dream, and as funny as a vaudeville gag.” Curated collaboratively by Dr. Christopher Higgs & Katharine Mason, M.A., each film in the series will be introduced & contextualized prior to screening, with an open discussion to follow. Refreshments provided. Free and open to the public, the 2018-2019 series is dedicated to the study and discussion of identity. The series seeks to provide an opportunity for shared critical and creative thought and discussion by bringing together an interdisciplinary audience of students, faculty, and members of the community interested in narrative construction. For more information, contact Professor Higgs (christopher.higgs@csun.edu) or join the newsletter: bit.do/reimagining.

Human Resources has partnered with Admissions and Records and Student Accounting to offer a workshop on the Fee Waiver and Reduction Program. This workshop will be held on Monday, March 25, 2019, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. in the HR Training Room, Oviatt Library, Room 16. Fee waiver requests may be be submitted at the Fee Waiver website. Applications are due no later than April 26, 2019.

CSUN’s Freshman Common Reading Program cordially invites you to a discussion of our 2019/20 Common Read, The Far Away Brothers. Even if you haven’t read the book yet, feel free to join in. The following faculty/staff discussions will be taking place:

Tuesday March 12,  11:00 a.m. to12:15 p.m., in Oviatt 102C. Moderator: Jennie Quinonez-Skinner, Oviatt Library
Tuesday, March 26, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m., in SH 422. Moderator: Dario Fernandez, CSUN DREAM Center.
Tuesday, March 26, 4:00 p.m to 5:00 p.m., in JR 217. Moderator: Amanda Harrison, Department of English.
Wednesday, April 3, 11:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., in SH 422. Moderator: Celia Simonds, Department of Central American Studies.
Monday, April 8, 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m., in SH 422. Moderator: Isabelle Ramos, Oviatt Library.
Friday April 19, 12:30 p.m. to 1:45 p.m., in SH 422. Moderator: Marvin Villanueva, EOP / College of Humanities.

The Spring 2019 Composition Book will be taking place on Tuesday, April 2, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., in JR 319. Featured publishers include Norton, Macmillan, Pearson, Boradview Press, Kendall, and Hunt. Lunch will be served!

The Spring 2019 faculty general election is now open. Please take a few minutes to vote for the following positions: Vice-President of the Faculty, Secretary of the Faculty, Statewide Academic Senator, Senators at Large. Profiles for the candidates are on CSUN’s Faculty App. Links directly to each candidate’s profile are available on the election site. The election begins today, March 10th, 2019 and ends on March 15th, 2019 at 5:00 p.m.

Applications for reassigned time for faculty engaged in exceptional levels of service that support the CSU’s priorities, but who are not otherwise receiving an adjustment in workload to reflect their effort are now open. Awards are designated for workload beyond the requirements of regular faculty assignment in enhancing the student learning environment. Completed applications, including all required signatures, must be submitted to the Office of Faculty Affairs by 5:00 pm on March 29th. The Application Form and Guidelines, Procedures, and Criteria documents are available on the Office of Faculty Affairs webpage:   http://www.csun.edu/faculty-affairs. Please direct any questions to the Office of Faculty Affairs (x2962).

If you are planning to attend AWP in Portland at the end of March, Susana Marcelo, Jaclyn Hymes, Alejandra Lucero, Sara Khayat, and Melanie Shaw will be presenting a panel titled, “Emerging Female Writers on Organizing and Building Community.” This panel features five CSUN alumni from different backgrounds who organized readings, assembled conferences, led nonprofit groups, and created publications from the ground up. They will address questions of how emerging writers can work to bring communities together and how women can organize within their resources to build each other up. The event will take place on Saturday, March 30, in the Oregon Convention Center, Level 1, from 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.
Also at AWP, Dorothy Barresi and Kate Haake will present on the panel, “The Sense of an Ending: Writers Over 60 Discuss Death.” This event will take place on Friday, March 29, in the Oregon Convention Center, Level 1, D136, from 3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.

Reminders

It’s almost time for our Spring Exit Interviews! This year’s round of interviews will take place during the week of April 8th. We have an unusually large number of students graduating this semester, so your participation is vital. If you are full-time faculty, tomorrow is the deadline for filling out your Doodle poll at https://doodle.com/poll/eyehdrhbbseg2d97 to let Erin know when you can be available to conduct interviews with our graduating ESM and FYI/JYI Students.

Opportunities

The Fall 2019 Semester Service Learning Grant Application Cycle is now open. These grants provide support for a wide range of projects to support our ever-growing community of engaged faculty, students and staff who enrich scholarship, research and creative activity and enhance curriculum to prepare educated and engaged students. Applications must be submitted electronically at https://www.csun.edu/undergraduate-studies/community-engagement/grant-opportunities. The deadline is Monday, April 1st, 2019, at 5:00 p.m. Grant opportunities include:

  1. $500 Student Scholar Grant to support one faculty member by providing a student scholar to assist in community engaged research and/or service during the 2019/20 academic year.
  2. $1,000 Faculty Dissemination/Travel Grant to support one faculty member in designing and implementing a Community Engagement Course Project in the 2019/20 academic year (including the work of a student scholar for 1-2 semesters).
  3. $2,000 Faculty Community Based Research Grant to support a faculty member conducting community engaged disseminating research during the 2019/20 academic year.
  4. $3,000 Disciplinary Grant to support one faculty member in designing and implementing a Community Engagement Course Project in the 2019/20 academic year (including the work of a student scholar for 1-2 semesters).
  5. $6,000 Interdisciplinary GrantThe purpose to support two or more faculty members in implementing a Community Engagement Course Project in the 2019/20 academic year (including the work of a student scholar for 1-2 semesters).

U100, Freshman Seminar, Faculty Position Announcements for fall 2019 have been posted at the link https://www.csun.edu/undergraduate-studies/university-100/teaching-university-100. The absolute deadline for all application materials is Friday, March 29, 2019, at 5:00 p.m.

Achievements

Anthony Dawahare has published a monograph, Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature, with Lexington Books. In it, contrary to previous studies of Olsen’s writing, Dawahare analyzes the impact of one of the most important philosophies of the last century, dialectical materialism, on the form and content of Olsen’s fiction. By revealing the unconceptualized dialectics of Olsen’s work and its appreciation by scholars and casual readers, this study achieves a dialectical synthesis that incorporates and extends the insights of and about Olsen in terms of dialectical materialism. By foregrounding Olsen’s dialectical approach, it explains and largely resolves apparent contradictions between her Marxism and feminism; her depictions of class, race, and gender; the literature of her earlier and later periods; and her use of realist and modernist literary forms and techniques. Consequently, this project makes a case for the importance of Olsen’s Marxist education during the “Red Decade” of the 1930s and within the U.S. proletarian literary movement.

Dorothy Barresi and Martin Pousson have been invited to teach in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in the  University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop at Iowa University. Dorothy will teach a course on identity poetics, and Martin will teach a course on flash fiction.

Kate Haake has an essay, “Another Planet of Its Own,” in the new issue of Broad Street, available now at medium.com/rivals-players and due to be featured on the Broad Street website soon. She also published a triptych of parables, “Triptych: Teeth, Dreambreath, Us vs Them,” in the recent World in Pain issue of Fiction International.

Justin La Torre (BA, Creative Writing, 2013) has been hired by NIS America as a copy editor for their marketing team. His writing has been published in various media, including literary magazines, public relations blogs and now trailers for film and video.

Anahit Petrosyan (BA, Creative Writing, current) has had her first short story accepted for publication. “Wanted Man” will appear in the upcoming April issue of Adelaide.