New Course Sections

We have added a section of English 418, Proposals and of English 320, Advanced Expository Writing. Students are strongly urged to sign up for these sections early as these courses fill quickly.

For course descriptions and times please see our Courses page here.

Community Writing Initiatives by Students - Grant Award

The Albuquerque Community Foundation has awarded  $9500 to the service learning project, Community Writing Initiatives by Students, submitted by Wanda Martin, Valerie Thomas, and Kyle Fiore. 

Prof. Ferenc Szasz (History) died on Sunday of leukemia. There will be a memorial service for him next Wednesday, June 30th at 1:00 p.m. in the Congregational Church at the corner of Girard and Lomas. Many of you knew him and his daughter Maria Szasz, who received a Ph.D. from the English Department. Our condolences go out to the family.

eWords: Sweet Juniper

A blogger in Detroit has been documenting the city in words and pictures over the last several years. Among his most striking images are what he terms "feral houses." He has posted a new set of photos here, but you might want to check out a few earlier posts as well:

Feral Houses (first post)

Seed Bombs with the Kids of the Georgia Street Neighborhood

I Scrapper (rescuing abandoned books from a school library)

eWords posts will crop up now and then with links to blog posts, editorials, online articles etc. that might be of interest to our UNM English community. If you'd like to suggest something for Ewords please send me an email at mlva@unm.edu.

Nobel winning author Jose Saramago dies

Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, has died at the age of 87, his publisher has announced.

Read the article here.

Queen Eadgyth's remains found

Scientists have revealed that they think bones found in a German cathedral are those of one of the earliest members of the English royal family. Read the BBC news article here. Find more details here.

Todd Tietchen - Publication News

Former MA student Todd Tietchen has a forthcoming book, The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, University Press of Florida (September 28, 2010). You can read more about the book at Amazon.com here.

Todd F. Tietchen is assistant professor of English at Union County College in Cranford and Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Universal Grammar - Challenging Noam Chomsky

May 2010 New Scientist has a fascinating article on a new linguistic theory put forward by linguists Nicholas Evans (Australian National University) and Stephen Levinson (Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics) which states that language diversity is the "crucial fact for understanding the place of language in human cognition."

Read the entire article, in PDF format, here.