Announcement
We are in week 4! Please note that the add/drop period ends this weekend, and any additional changes of student schedule need to use late change of schedule forms.
Reminders
If you haven’t already, please share your syllabi and office hours with Vanessa Mendoza.
The Creative Writing search committee will be bringing candidates to campus between Monday, February 27 to Thursday, March 2. Stay tuned for more details!
Opportunities
Conference opportunity
CSUN is hosting the annual Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference on Friday, 2/17 and Saturday, 2/18, which is taking place in person and virtually (hyflex). For more information, please see the program information here. The keynote, delivered by Dr. Helen Deutsch of UCLA, is open to all CSUN community members regardless of registration, and will take place on Friday at 5:30 pm at the Orchard Conference Center.
Pedagogical opportunity
Join our colleagues on Friday, March 3 at 11 am and attend the first event in the “Writing Ahead Learning Lunch Series,” organized by our colleagues John Giles, Amanda Harrison, and JC Lee. The event on March 3 features Greg Knotts from Elementary Ed to talk about students’ socioemotional learning needs. There is both a lunch and stipend as part of attending this workshop.
Community service opportunity
Kim Wells has shared that local charter school Our Community School (OCS) is seeking board members. OCS is a TK-8 public charter a few miles from campus where many CSUN faculty and staff send their kids. Yi Ding, CSUN’s Director of Affordable Learning Solutions, sits on the board and is heading recruitment at CSUN. Here is a link if you wish to volunteer.
Achievements
John Gides, Amanda Harrison, and JC Lee received a College of Humanities Innovation Grant to support the Writing Ahead workshop series to support equitable writing pedagogy strategies for our students.
Deborah Gordon (BA 2022), a current MA student in our department, will give a paper on her summer transcription and digitization internship at UCSB for the Ballitore Project, at the annual meeting of WSECS.
Arpi Movsesian (BA, MA, CSUN; PhD, UCSB) has just been hired as a tenure track assistant professor in the department of German and Russian at Notre Dame. With Michael Bryson, she is the author of Love and its Critics (2017). Congratulations, Dr. Movsesian!
George Uba’s memoir, Blood Thicker Than Water (Temple UP, 2022) has received rave reviews as an important and beautiful account of post-World War II Japanese-American identity. His powerful recent blog post speaks to the energizing talk he gave in May for the Center for Public Humanities and to challenging work of remediating the archives and private and public memories.
As many of you know, George is also an active member of the ballroom dance community, and he and his wife Alice were gravely affected by the mass shooting in Monterey Park on the eve of Lunar New Year. In the wake of this horrific event, George was a crucial voice to represent the Asian American ballroom community and was interviewed in many outlets, including NPR, the Washington Post, and Time. He will be giving a talk about this topic later this semester hosted by the Center for Public Humanities.