1. Announcements
It is with a considerable sadness that we note the recent passing of Charles Hatfield’s father-in-law. Charles is away back east with his family, but he and his family are also here in our thoughts and hearts during this time of loss.
The New Oviatt Library Learning Commons goes live! Please mark your calendars for October 3, 2013, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m., to celebrate the ribbon cutting and reception of this important new campus resource. Tour the Commons with its open and flexible technology-enhanced study spaces including ergonomic, modern furniture, laptop checkouts and new interactive digital signage. Also showcased will be the expanded new Freudian Sip Coffeehouse. The Learning Resources Center in its on the Oviatt Library 3rd floor, East Wing. Welcome and opening remarks by Oviatt Library Dean, Mark Stover, with additional program remarks by President, Dianne F. Harrison; Provost, Harry Hellenbrand; and VP for Student Affairs, William Watkins. RSVP at http://library.csun.edu/GrandOpening by September 25th. For more information contact Sarah Sayeed (818) 677-7629.
The date of the Wings/New Voices Awards Ceremony has been changed. Please make a note of it. The new date is October 11th, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the Grand Salon. The event itself remains an important and moving one and we hope to see everyone there to help celebrate these special student achievements.
And while we are on the subject of showcasing student achievement, you won’t want to miss the inaugural evening of the Graduate Reading Series. This Friday, September 13, the GRS will feature readings of fiction by Laura Dunlap and Chris Espinosa and of poetry by Lusine Makarosyan.
Take 2: CSUN Stretch goes YouTube live (again). Please take a moment to watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6qN0bj7go0.
CSU Fullerton’s chapter of the internationally affiliated English Honors Society, Sigma Tau Delta, will be hosting the Far Western Regional Conference for the second year. The conference, “Visions of Texts: Representations of Textual Symbols, Images, and Motifs,” will take place on Friday, November 15, and Saturday, November 16, and be focused on the visual representations of symbols, motifs, and texts, as well as on the way texts are portrayed or changed in adaptations and translations. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students, the weekend will be provide a great opportunity to introduce students to conference environments and to encourage academic involvement off campus. The full CFP can be found here. Conference fee, $25.
The Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research (SCURR) will be hosted this year at Whittier College and will feature two creative writing panels to be made up of undergraduate creative writing students. These two panels, one for poetry and one for fiction, will be juried by award winning poet, Tony Barnstone. To apply, students should submit either one poem or a selection of poems (max 40 lines) to SCURRpoetry@whittier.edu or one story of up to 3,000 words to SCURRfiction@whittier.edu. Submissions must include the student’s full name, undergraduate institution and genre of their work, and a page number in the top right corner of every page. Registration is now open and the deadline for submissions is October 7th. Students will be notified of their acceptance on November 1st and the Conference is set for November 23rd.
In conjunction with W. W. Norton’s publication this year of the Centenary Edition of Robert Hayden’s Collected Poems, the University of Michigan will be holding a conference on November 1 celebrating Hayden’s life and poetry. The keynote address of the conference, to be held in the Rackham Amphitheater, will be delivered by Harryette Mullen, Professor of English and Creative Writing at UCLA, a Guggenheim Fellow (among other honors), and a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other luminaries scheduled to prevent promise to make this an exciting event, especially for Hayden fans.
The Peace Corps is looking for English majors! With thousands of volunteer positions available worldwide, 43% of which are in education assignments, the Peace Corps provides an excellent opportunity for our graduates to live and work abroad, gain practical job experience, use benefits like grad school partnerships, and do a little good in the world. A BA in English qualifies candidates for secondary Education English teaching assignments. Please let your students know that there are currently 670 openings for these positions, some of which may be filled by them!
Errata: The last edition of these notes announced that for the second year in a row, had won the Jewish Studies Interdisciplinary Program writing prize had gone to an English major, Anna Isikikian. In fact, it’s the sixth year in a row that an English major has won this prize. Many thanks to Audrey Thacker for keeping better track of these things than I do.
2. Reminders
Travel requests are due with Tonie by Friday, October 4. Forms are available at http://www-admn.csun.edu/travel/. Don’t forget to get yours in. You’ll be glad you did
Safety on campus is a shared responsibility. Here, again, is a link our “Emergency Operation Desk Reference for Faculty,” http://www-admn.csun.edu/dps/emergency/ppt/faculty/html/index.htm . Read it and be prepared! And make sure to stock a pair of earthquake shoes and a sweatshirt in your office, just in case. My sister keeps a hard hat with her car supply kit. Won’t you look smart rescuing your colleague when the time comes.
Selling books to buyers on campus is against University policy. Don’t sell them books and tell them, please, to go away so we will not need to remind them, yet again, about our University policy
Do, however, donate books to AGSE, which will be having their annual book sale, starting September 17. Just think of it as that much less to dusk, and it’s for a good cause.
Don’t forget these important deadlines from Faculty Development: for the Fall 2013 Faculty Development Competition for Attending Teaching Conferences, is September 11, 2013; and for the Probationary Faculty Support Program, October 1, 2013. Probationary faculty, you know who you are and what an important opportunity this is. Go get those units; you’ll be glad you did. For additional information, please see the faculty Development website. And good luck.
And it’s Open Enrollment period again. From Monday, September 16 and to Friday, October 11, 2013, you have to opportunity to revaluate your benefits and make changes that make better sense for you and your family. This is an opportune time to evaluate your benefits and what makes the most sense for you and your family. Any changes made during the Open Enrollment period will be effective January 1, 2014. For details, see http://www-admn.csun.edu/ohrs/benefits/enrollment/open-enrollment-2014.pdf.
3. Opportunities
Anyone interested in teaching for the GE Aesthetics and Culture Path, this is just a reminder that proposals are due this Sunday, September 15, to gepaths@csun.edu. They are interested in particular in lower division courses that are going to be taught next Spring but all proposals will be welcome. Course proposal forms are available at http://www.csun.edu/gepathways/faculty.html, The stipend for participating in the path is $750 for two semesters of path teaching and attendance at a few path meetings.
The Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for its MA/PhD graduate program. A medium-sized department with internationally recognized strengths in many fields, and UCSB offers funding packages for every graduate student in the program. With a particular focus on guiding each our student towards innovative and often groundbreaking research is reflected they have eight research centers where students and faculty are able to work collaboratively on projects, talks, and conferences. Each center focuses on different specialties, including digital humanities and the culture of information, American cultures, early modern studies, modernist and postmodern Anglophone literature and the cultures that produced it, Hemispheric methodologies and research, literature and the environment, literature and the mind, materialism and aesthetics, and medieval literatures. These centers frequently collaborate together on events and projects, and students are encouraged to be involved with more than one. This work across periods and areas of specialization nicely dovetails with the interdisciplinary PhD emphases on campus. English Department application deadline for Fall 2014 is December 15, 2013.
Here’s a paying market for our undergraduate writers! Please let them know The Blue Route is currently reading submissions for issue #11, tentatively scheduled to come out in January 2014. Please encourage your students to submit their very best poetry, short fiction, or creative nonfiction. Full archives and submission guidelines are available at http://widenerblueroute.org/, and the deadline for submission is Friday, November 8th.
Also currently seeking submissions is The Oklahoma Review, an online journal published by the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cameron University. The Oklahoma Review will be accepting submissions in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry until October 15. Submissions may be sent via email to okreview@cameron.edu. My name is Melissa Johnson and I am on the staff of The Oklahoma Review, an online journal published by the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cameron University. The Oklahoma Review will be accepting submissions in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry until October 15. Submissions may be sent via email to okreview@cameron.edu. Guidelines are attached. If you could pass this information along to any students or faculty who might be interested, the editors would greatly appreciate it.
And for those recent MA poets among you, the Stadler Fellowship offers an opportunity to receive professional training in arts administration and literary editing. Stadler Fellowships are designed to balance the development of professional skills with time to complete a first book of poems. Stadler Fellows assist for twenty hours each week in the administration of the Stadler Center for Poetry and/or in the editing of West Branch, Bucknell’s nationally distinguished literary journal. Fellows also work as staff members and instructors in the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets in June. The Fellowship stipend is $20,000. In addition, each Fellow is provided health insurance, office space in the Stadler Center, and housing. Depending on circumstances, Fellows are either housed in a furnished apartment in the Poet’s Cottage or provided with a stipend to seek housing on their own in Lewisburg. This year, the Stadler Center will select one Fellow for the 2014–15 academic year. The Fellowship will extend from August 2014 through June 2015. The application deadline is October 1, 2013. For guidelines and to submit an application, please use the Stadler Center Application Portal at http://www.bucknell.edu/script/stadlercenter/applications/.
4. Achievements
First year graduate student Angela Blair and last year’s recipient of the Joseph P. Morley and the Anna Peterson Awards, has received a Graduate Equity Fellowship! Congratulations, Angela.
Robert Chianese does it again. Here is a link to his current article in American Scientist on Agnes Denes and on of her major eco-restoration projects http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/regeneration-on-tree-mountain. This article is the last in his series on Earth Art. Stay tuned here for what Bob comes up with next.
Irene Clark‘s “Review of _A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966_, new ed. by Joseph Harris” has been published in _Teaching English in the Two Year College_ (Volume 41.1 September 2013.).
Our very own Tonie Mangum has won not one, but two graduate fellowships — the Graduate Equity Fellowship and the Jolene Koester Presidential Scholarship. Way to go, Tonie! You have well earned these important distinctions.
Alum Jacqui Meisel successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation at Lancaster University in the UK in June and was awarded the degree of PhD in Modern Literature on September 2. The dissertation title is “The Deepest South: A Comparative Analysis of issues of Exile in the work of selected women writers from South Africa and the American South.” Congratulations, Jacqui, for this well earned distinction.
5. One major: Infinite Passions/Infinite Possibilties
This from Danielle, even the New Yorker (ever the New Yorker?) is weighing in: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/why-teach-english.html?mobify=0 .
And from Bob Chianese, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/opinion/the-humanities-in-crisis-not-at-most-schools.html?_r=0.