1. Announcements
This is the last issue of Thursday’s Notes until Fall 2020. It has been a challenging year yet, as Thursday’s Notes has reported throughout the year, our faculty and students have continued to be productive and successful in their creative, scholarly, educational activities. We also want to thank our administrative staff whose work is always indispensable to the success of our Department. We wish all of you a happy and heathy summer.
2. Reminders
The Office of the Chancellor’s Academic Technology Services is offering a three-week intensive program, Introduction to Teaching Online Using the QLT Instrument. This course is intended for anyone who is interested in and/or plans to teach a hybrid or online course. Faculty who can dedicate 15-20 hours total are encouraged to sign-up. Please note that not all their summer courses are available to CSUN faculty; only these two dates listed below:
● Introduction to Teaching Online Using QLT: June 8-28
● Introduction to Teaching Online Using QLT: July 6-26
To learn more about this opportunity, visit the Quality Assurance Training Page or go directly to the summer registration link to enroll in one of the sessions.
Do you Prefer Self-Paced Learning?
If you don’t have time to commit to a formal facilitated program, you can still learn the basics of teaching online. Please see a menu of options listed at Faculty Development Self-Paced Training webpage. Some of the options include:
Option 1: Online Teaching & Learning Featured Tracks
Option 2: Remote Teaching Canvas Community
Option 3: Teaching with Canvas Workshops
3. Opportunities
Grant Opportunities from California Humanities:
Quick Grants (between $1,000 and $5,000) will be awarded three times a year for small-scale public humanities activities and projects that will take place within a one-year period from the award date. Projects should be grounded in the humanities, show potential to provide high quality humanities learning experiences for participants and audiences, and demonstrate capacity for successful implementation. Appropriate formats include but are not limited to community dialogues, reading- or film-and-discussion groups, oral history or nonfiction writing or story-sharing workshops, and other types of activities. Applications due:June 15, 2020.
Project Grants ($10,000 to $20,000) will be awarded twice a year for larger public humanities projects of up to two-years duration from the award date. Appropriate programming formats include but are not limited to interpretive exhibits, community dialogue and discussion series, workshops and participatory activities, presentations and lectures, conversations and forums, and interactive and experiential activities. Applications due: August 3, 2020.
Grant Opportunities from the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipends Program:
The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer Stipends program aims to stimulate new research in the humanities and its publication. The program works to accomplish this goal by: 1) providing small awards to individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both; 2) supporting projects at any stage of development, but especially early-stage research and late-stage writing in which small awards are most effective; and 3) furthering the NEH’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in the humanities by encouraging applications from independent scholars and faculty at Hispanic Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and community colleges. This funding program is intended to stimulate new research in the humanities and its publication by supporting the work of individual scholars doing research or writing.CSUN can nominate up to two tenured or tenure-track faculty for a $6000 summer stipend from NEH. The internal selection process can be found at https://www.csun.edu/research-sponsored-programs/funding-opportunities. Emailed notices will go out from the Research and Sponsored Programs office soon to eligible faculty regarding the limited submissions procedure. Applications due: September 23, 2020
Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (National Endowment for the Humanities):
Digital Humanities Advancement Grants support innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging projects at different stages throughout their lifecycles, from early start-up phases through implementation and sustainability. Experimentation, reuse, and extensibility are hallmarks of this program, leading to innovative work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. This program is offered twice per year. Proposals are welcome for digital initiatives in any area of the humanities.
Applications due: June 30, 2020
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced $22.2 million in grants for 224 humanities projects across the country. These grants will enable the production of a 90-minute documentary on singer and civil rights pioneer Marian Anderson, support a Norman Rockwell Museum exhibition on Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series, and bolster the digital infrastructure of the Walt Whitman Archive to allow greater access to this online scholarly repository. For more information, visit NEH.
4. Achievements
Matt Bernstein’s article “The Fix Is In” on tong warriors in old San Francisco’s Chinatown is in the current issue of Wild West, and he will be presenting it before the Western History Association Conference in Albuquerque in October. An MA English alum, Matt is a frequent contributor to Wild West.
Rachel Birke (MA, 2020) will begin a PhD program in English at UCLA this fall. She received full funding to study narratives of the west from the nineteenth century to the present. She also has been selected as one of four of the recipients of the 2020 Outstanding Thesis/Graduate Project Competition. The award is for $1,000.
Grace Kimball (MA, 2020) was accepted with full funding for UC Santa Barbara’s PhD program in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies to study early modern dramatic literature.
The tenth edition of Jack Solomon’s Signs of Life in the U. S.A. (now in the proof set stage) is scheduled for publication in September 2020.
Modje Taavon (MA, 2019) will join the Comparative Literature Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2020. She is admitted with six years of funding, including a Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities & Arts and a research fellowship from the UIUC Medieval Studies program. Entering the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory, her research will focus on the Greco-Arabic translation movement and the formative role of the medieval Islamicate world in the development of western intellectual traditions, especially in medieval and early modern Europe. While at CSUN, she was a 2018-19 Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar, the 2018-19 Co-President of AGSE, the founder of Articulate, and the 1st place winner of the 2019 CSUN Distinguished Thesis/Graduate Project Award.
Steve Wexler’s short story, “Some Pill,” was a finalist for the New Millennium Flash Fiction Award.
Congratulations to all!