Helen Damico Book Discussion & Signing - Tuesday, October 13th

Tanaya Winder Poetry Reading and Book Release: Words Like Love

UNM MFA alumna Tanaya Winder will host a poetry reading and book release at Bookworks (4022 Rio Grande Blvd NW) on Tuesday, September 29th, at 7:00pm.

In her debut collection, Words Like Love, poet Tanaya Winder sings the joys, glories, and laments of love. Love is defined by familial, cultural, platonic, and romantic bonds in these passionate and thoughtfully rendered poems. Winder’s voice resonates through the dark—and the light— on a quest to learn more about the most complex of subjects.

Words Like Love is her first full length poetry collection (West End Press, 2015).

Read more writing and find events @tanayawinder.wordpress.com and find her on Twitter @a_girl_on_fire.

Announcing the Inaugural ALS Seminar Symposium

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

4:00pm-7:30pm

Humanities 108

The ALS faculty invites all English Department graduate students and faculty to participate in the inaugural ALS seminar symposium and reception. The event brings together Dr. Vizcaíno-Alemán's English 610: Critical Regionalism and Dr. Coleman's English 660: Race and the African American Novel to discuss selected seminar readings with all attendees.

This year's symposium facilitates an understanding of critical regionalism through selections from Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk; Gilroy's The Black Atlantic; Stecopoulos' Reconstructing the World; an article on bell hooks and another on the global west.

Dr. Krista Comer, associate professor at Rice University, former Western Literature Association president, and leading scholar of critical regionalism, will cap the event with a lecture titled:

"Thinking Otherwise across Global Wests:

Issues of Mobility and Feminist Critical Regionalism”

All attendees are expected to read the material and are invited to participate in discussion. The following readings can be found on e-reserve: 

http://ereserves.unm.edu/eres/courseindex.aspx?&page=search

Course: ENGL610; password: lobo610

• Du Bois, "Of the Black Belt" and "Of the Coming of John" from The Souls of Black Folk;
• Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (selection)
• Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World (selection)
• Comer, "The Problem of the Critical in Global Wests”

An additional reading can be found online:

• Christina Van Houten, "bell hooks, Critical Regionalism, and the Politics of Ecological Returns”http://politicsandculture.org/2014/03/09/bell-hooks-critical-regionalism-and-the-politics-of-ecological-returns-by-christina-van-houten/

Schedule:

• 4:00-5:45pm--Welcome and facilitated discussion
• 5:45-6:00pm--Break and refreshments
• 6:00-7:30pm--Lecture, Q&A, and light reception

Food and refreshments will be available at the event.

Sponsored by the English Department, the Center for Regional Studies, and the English Graduate Student Association

Contact: Dr. Jesse Alemán 

jman@unm.edu

Alemán publishes chapter on teaching nineteenth-century US Latino/a literatures

Jesse Alemán’s chapter, “Recovered and Recovery Texts of the Nineteenth Century,” leads off Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Teaching, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and recently published by Routledge. The essay is a scholarly piece on teaching nineteenth-century US Latino/a literatures, surveying major texts to be included in the classroom, presenting approaches to themes, genres, and authors that structure the Latino nineteenth century, and most importantly, arguing for a different model of teaching American literary history to be inclusive of early US Latino/a print cultures.

Anita Obermeier publishes article on Merlin's Devil Conception in Arthuriana's special volume dedicated to "Arthur on the Stage."

In her most recent article, “Merlin’s Conception by Devil in William Rowley’s Play The Birth of Merlin” (Arthuriana 24.4 (2014): 48-79), Anita Obermeier argues that Rowley’s early modern play amalgamates both the medieval Galfridian-based and Francophone narratives of Merlin’s conception by daemon, incubus, and devil in order to engage contemporary early seventeenth-century debates on the devil’s influence in the world, to ventriloquize social commentary via the figure of the Clown, and to have Merlin hail Prince Charles as the future Arthur.

Baker Named the 2015-16 Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellow

W. Oliver Baker, an American Literary Studies Ph.D. candidate in the University of New Mexico English Department, has been awarded the 2015-2016 Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship.

Baker earned both his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In his master's program, Baker studied American literature, rhetoric and composition, while also serving as a graduate instructor, teaching and assisting with writing, literature, and film courses. Baker joined the UNM English Department in the fall of 2012. Baker’s areas of study include nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, Critical Theory, Marxist Cultural Theory, and Pedagogy. He also works as a UNM Graduate instructor in Core writing, a Freshman Learning Communities instructor, and teaches courses on American and World literature.

Baker will use the CRS Torres Fellowship to research and draft his dissertation, tentatively titled, “Literatures of Dispossession: Representing U.S. Settler Colonialism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” which examines how American literature from mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century offers a cultural history of a key period in the development and expansion of U.S. settler colonialism. The dissertation highlights the role of settler colonialism as a structure of dispossession and its relationship to the processes of U.S. industrialization and monopoly capitalism. In particular, Baker focuses on the works of Indigenous, African American, and Mexican American writers of this period, demonstrating how the form and style of their writings register the uneven development and structural violence of settler colonialism and capitalist expansion in North America. Dr. Jesse Alemán directs the dissertation.

The CRS Hector Torres Fellowship, a $10,000-$15,000 stipend, was inaugurated in 2010 by the University of New Mexico’s Center for Regional Studies in memory of the English Department’s slain colleague. The fellowship supports graduate research and scholarship in the English Department directly related to the late Dr. Torres’ fields, as well as the mission of the Center for Regional Studies. Areas include Chicano/a literary and cultural studies; theory (i.e. Marxism; post-structuralism; deconstruction; psychoanalysis; and globalization); film studies; and scholarship related to the mission of the CRS, including history; archival research; literature; and other interdisciplinary fields related to New Mexico, the US-Mexico borderlands, and the greater southwest.

Daniel Worden’s edited volume The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World published by the University Press of Mississippi

Daniel Worden’s latest book, an edited collection of essays titled The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, has just been published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book also features an essay by UNM English PhD Candidate Ann D’Orazio.

The Comics of Joe Sacco addresses the range of his award-winning work, from his early comics stories as well as his ground-breaking journalism Palestine (1993) and Safe Area to Gorade (2000), to Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and his most recent book The Great War (2013), a graphic history of World War I.

First in the new series Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, this edited volume explores Sacco's comics journalism, and features established and emerging scholars from comics studies, cultural studies, geography, literary studies, political science, and communication studies. Sacco's work has already found a place in some of the foundational scholarship in comics studies, and this book solidifies his role as one of the most important comics artists today.

Sections focus on how Sacco's comics journalism critiques and employs the "standard of objectivity" in mainstream reporting, what aesthetic principles and approaches to lived experience can be found in his comics, how Sacco employs the space of the comics page to map history and war, and the ways that his comics function in the classroom and as human rights activism. The Comics of Joe Sacco offers definitive, exciting approaches to some of the most important--and necessary--comics today, by one of the most acclaimed journalist-artists of our time.  

The book is available through booksellers everywhere, and here:  http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1764