Dear all,
We have reached the end of the semester! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday with friends and family. We have a few accomplishments to report before the new year!
Accomplishments
Professor Irene Clark‘s proposal titled “Literacy Narratives and Identity: Evolving Perspectives in a Post Human/AI World” has been selected for funding through the Faculty Research Project Development Initiative (FRPDI). The proposal focuses on a book concerned with literacy narratives and includes two former CSUN graduate students, Lucas Keeling and Mercedes Elycio, who are each writing a chapter. The book also involves other graduate students and lecturers who helped with research.
Beverly Cope, retired English department adjunct faculty, who won an award for her essay “Becoming Rousseau,” welcomes her third and final book of short stories December 12, 2025. Writing as Jo Rousseau, Translations from the Lost Language of the Universe was inspired by her sudden death experience in 2006; she didn’t see a light at the end of a tunnel but experienced a sort of floating through space.
Professor Stephanie Lim participated in this year’s PAMLA Conference, which met in San Francisco. She presented her paper, “The Signs/Sounds of Rage and Love: Voice, Identity, and Community in Deaf West Theatre’s American Idiot,” in PAMLA’s inaugural Disability Studies track.
Professor Amanda Harrison’s book chapter, “Everybody on Mute: Beyoncé’s Ability to Silently Slay with Queer Call and Response” is coming out on December 12th in The Renaissance Reader: Beyonce and Black Queer Popular Culture.
Professor Charles Hatfield’s essay, “Teaching Los Bros: A Reflection in Four Parts,” appears in the new anthology Snapshots: Teaching Los Brothers Hernandez, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and William Nericcio, just released by Amatl Comix, the comics studies imprint of San Diego State University Press. The essay draws from Charles’ experience teaching Love & Rockets, the classic comic book series by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, in particular his memories of a CSUN English graduate seminar in 2012 – the first-ever university course devoted to the Hernandez brothers’ work!
Professor Noreen Lace‘s long awaited novella Earth to Bella will be released this weekend. The story of an odd young woman who discovers her father’s secrets and the real truth behind her mother’s death.
Professor Jutta Schamp presented “Medea Redux? The Representation of the Vital Force and Motherhood in Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived” at the online conference Jung & Vital Force, December 5-7, 2025.
Professor Thacker also chaired and was presiding officer of her panel, “The Holocaust in Literature, Media, and Film” at the 2025 conference of PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association), held in San Francisco last month. While there, she had the thrill of meeting and conversing with literary icon Maxine Hong Kingston (pictured), who was the plenary speaker.
Professor Colleen Tripp‘s chapter, “The House That Disfigured the Land: Ecological Decline and the Postcolonial Bildungsroman in Mexican Gothic,” was recently published in the edited collection, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place (University of Nebraska Press).
Professor George Uba has had two poems, “Making Friends without a Topic Sentence” and “November,” published in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Spring 2025), 126-28.
Professor Kim Young published a piece in Alta Journal about an underground grocery network that is helping feed undocumented families in the face of the ongoing federal ICE siege in Los Angeles: https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a69112773/ice-raids-groceries/
Professor Kim Young was also awarded a 2026 Soul Land Artist Residency where she will spend two weeks in the Mojave desert finishing her nonfiction manuscript focused on her late mentor, poet Lee McCarthy.
