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.

Kathryn Wichelns' article "Collaborative Differences: Marguerite Duras, Eve Sedgwick, and “The Beast in the Jungle” appears in Comparative Literature 67.1 (Spring 2015)

Marguerite Duras's 1962 theatrical adaptation of Henry James's short story offers a feminist alternative to Eve Sedgwick's famous interpretation. The precise elements that for Duras reveal James's interest in “feminine” forms of expression also are significant for queer theoretical readers, after Sedgwick, who emphasize James's style rather than his biography. However, in none of those recent discussions do notions of temporal or stylistic queerness in James's work resonate with the ideas about gendered time and language that are central to Duras's approach, and to twentieth-century French feminism more generally. Duras's adaptation, grounded in heteronormative assumptions, suffers from a parallel blind spot; James Lord, her collaborator in the project, suggests that she undermined the queer elements in both James's story and his own first draft. This article uses the unexamined resonances between Duras's and Sedgwick's readings to offer a possible counter-narrative to ongoing scholarly divisions among contemporary feminisms and queer theories.

Kathryn Wichelns' article "From The Scarlet Letter to Stonewall: Reading the Thomas(ine) Hall Case, 1978-2009," appeared in Early American Studies 12.3 (Fall 2014), a special issue titled "Beyond the Binaries in Early America"

The 1629 Thomas(ine) Hall case offers an invaluable account of seventeenth-century gender fluidity, ambiguous body presentation, and non-normative sexual behavior; since 1978 it has inspired quite a range of different readings. The point of consistency across 35 years of scholarship on the case is the fact that Hall and the other parties present before the General Court in Jamestown on March 25th, 1629, have been interpreted in ways that trace shifting models for theorizing gender and sexual identity during the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-centuries. Much of the work on Hall and her/his community is excellent; however, taken as a whole this body of scholarship implies the historical possibility of an originary feminist or queer (or both) early American community, effectively eliding important distinctions among different groups as well as downplaying their significance in our own period. The author argues that while we can and should apply the tools of gender theory and sexuality studies to early American subjects, the diversity in interpretations of the Hall case suggests that we need to be even more rigorous in avoiding descriptions that risk implying that our own notions of identity can be superimposed onto the past.

Tiffany Bourelle & co-author Evan Ashworth published in the Currents & Teaching Learning peer-reviewed journal

Tiffany Bourelle and co-author Evan Ashworth announce the publication of their article "Utilizing Critical Service-Learning Pedagogy in the Online Classroom: Promoting Social Justice and Effecting Change?" within the peer-reviewed journal Currents and Teaching Learning. This article details using critical service-learning in the online classroom, questioning how much change an instructor can expect to occur within students. You can read the article at the following link:

http://www2.worcester.edu/Currents/Archives/Volume_7_Number_1/CURRENTSV7N1AshworthandBourelleP64.pdf

Daniel Worden on “The Politics of Comics”

Daniel Worden’s essay “The Politics of Comics: Popular Modernism, Abstraction, and Experimentation” has just been published in the February 2015 issue of the academic journal Literature Compass. The essay is available at the Wiley Online Library, and the essay’s abstract follows.

Comics and graphic novels are now widely accepted to be legitimate aesthetic and literary texts, suitable for study in all manner of university classrooms and scholarly projects. Comics studies scholarship was often preoccupied with arguing for the aesthetic legitimacy and literary complexity of comics and graphic novels, and now that this debate is more or less over, comics studies scholarship has begun to consider not just why and how we should read comics but what comics might mean. The question of meaning is an inherently political question, as it asks us to think of comics in relation to our social world. This essay traces two ways that comics can be read politically: as part of popular modernism, and as a medium for experimentation with genre, narrative, and visual conventions.

Daniel Worden on “B-Side Modernism” and Joe Brainard’s experimental comics

Daniel Worden’s essay “Joe Brainard’s Grid, or, the Matter of Comics” has just been published in the “B-Side Modernism” issue of the online journal nonsite.org. The essay is available here: http://nonsite.org/article/joe-brainards-grid-or-the-matter-of-comics

With the support of the Mellon Foundation, the special issue’s release coincides with an exhibition of rare materials from the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and a two-day “B-Side Modernism” symposium at Emory University. Find out more and peruse an online exhibition of materials from the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library here: http://nonsite.org/issue-15-b-side-modernism

Professor Sharon Warner interviewed by the New Mexico Maganize

"Taos Summer Writers’ Conference founder Sharon Oard Warner talks about her new novel and tending to D.H. Lawrence’s local legacy."

Please see the full article, "Sharon Oard Warnder:  Homing In", by Candace Walsh from the New Mexico Magazine.

Anita Obermeier Publishes Book Review

Anita Obermeier publishes book review of Scattergood, John, Occasions for Writing: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Politics, and Society (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010) in Mediävistik 26 (2013): 288-89.

Brian Hendrickson Published in Mosaic

Brian Hendrickson published "Irreverently Unromantic: A Rhetorical Path to Sophistic Poetics in the Poetry of Bob Hicok." in the June 2014 issue of Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary studyof literature.

"Irreverently Unromantic" is a rhetorical analysis of Bob Hicok's earliest and most recent poems in which Hendrickson reveals how the poet modifies the terms of the central problem in contemporary poetry--Romantic irony--by employing an irreverent poetics he describes as sophistic to highlight its rhetorical tendencies while differentiating it from the inverted Platonism of Romantic irony.

Todd Ruecker Publishes Article in College Composition and Communication

Todd Ruecker published an article in the September 2014 issue of the flagship composition journal, College Composition and Communication.  The article is titled, "Here They Do This, There They Do That: Latinas/ Latinos Writing across Institutions," and focuses on how writing instruction was shaped across a high school, community college, and university by a variety of internal and external forces such as standardized testing pressures, resource disparities, and individual instructors.  The article is part of a two-part special issue titled Locations of Writing.

Tiffany and Andrew Bourelle Publish New On-line Resource

Tiffany Bourelle and Andrew Bourelle have published a webtext article in the digital peer-reviewed journal Kairos: Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. The article addresses how to develop a successful multimodal curriculum in a fully online classroom, providing instructors with advice on creating instructional tools.
http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/19.1/praxis/robertson-et-al/index.html

Todd Ruecker Publishes Article in TESOL Quarterly

Todd Ruecker published a short article, "Exploring the Linguistic and Institutional Contexts of Writing Instruction in TESOL,” in the June 2014 issue of TESOL Quarterly, the top journal in the field of TESOL.  He co-authored this piece with Shawna Shapiro from Middlebury College, Erik N. Johnson from Arizona State University, and Christine M. Tardy from the University of Arizona.  It is based on a globally distributed survey of 456 TESOL members about the way writing is shaped by their particular teaching context.

Alumnus Diane Schmidt Wins Writing Award

Diane Schmidt got her MA in Creative Writing from UNM, in Spring 2002. Her MA Thesis was The Collected Works of Earnestine Thebad.

Attached is an article from the Gallup Independent, June 24, 2014.

"Freelance writer wins national award for enterprise reporting"
By Kyle Chancellor, News intern

GALLUP - An Independent columnist exposed a con man working in New Mexico and won a top award from The National Federation of Press Women.

Diane Schmidt won the first place award for enterprise reporting from The National Federation of Press Women for her articles "Who you gonna call, Ghostbusters?" and "Con man who posed as Native fooled merchants, media" which both ran in the Independent.

The first of the two stories appeared in the Independent on April 20, 2013, as the spiritual perspectives column after Schmidt received an irate call from a Native community member. The individual stated that David Rendon, at the time known as David RedFeather, who had recently been featured in the Navajo Times as a Native American healer, promoter, and savior for the merchants of the Old Town business district and who had recently been elected president of the Old Town Merchants Association, was in fact not who he was claiming to be.

The individual claimed that RedFeather was not a Lakola healer as he was claiming and also had an extensive criminal record including a civil complaint in Ramah from 1998 where Rendon was accused of failure to pay rent. The first story didn't name Rendon explicitly because Schmidt could not get absolute confirmation to match the man to the police records.

Through further investigation, Schmidt uncovered an extensive criminal past for Rendon in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico and finally confirmed that it was indeed the same David Rendon. Schmidt reported that the man had conned around $50,000 from people that believed he was a successful businessman, healer, roadman and mystic. What he really was, was a crook, who would prey upon peoples vulnerabilities, taking their hard earned money and bouncing out of town before the boys in blue could catch up to him. The second of the two stories ran on the front page of the Independent on Aug. 21, 2013.

Schmidt submitted the stories to the New Mexico Press Women, where they won first place in enterprise reporting and advanced to the National Federation of Press Women where it also won first place for the same category. The judges commented on the story by saying the stories were a "Great example of enterprise reporting with impact for the community."

Diane says, "The story was a lot of work and cost ten times more time and money than I would ever get paid, as this sort of work always does, so this was sort of my 'reward.'

"The real payback was a call I got some months later from a gal who was helping Rendon where he had resurfaced in the Carolinas, and saw my stories online about him and I was able to advise her to contact the police there instead of her trying to 'save' him."

Karra Shimabukuro Publishes Games & Dreams of Horror

Karra Shimabukuro has coming articles in two journals.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game as Liminal Space" will appear in Intensities Journal and explores the ways in which the game explores and rejects gender stereotypes, how the board game is “coded” for gender, how this compares to the target audience of the show, and how the game navigates and transverses the boundaries of both the source text, and the source genre.

"The Bogeyman of Your Nightmares: Freddy Krueger’s Folkloric Roots" will appear in Studies in Popular Culture in June.

Michelle Kells' article will be published in The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals

Michelle Hall Kells' article for the Journal of Community Literacy.: "What's Writing Got to Do With It?: Citizen Wisdom, Civil Rights Activism" has been awarded the Best of Rhetoric/Comp Independent Journals for 2013. The "phronesis" of Vicente Ximenes as a civil rights activist was the inspiration for this article, as well as the "Citizen Scholar" WAC Workshops facilitated by Dr. Kells this spring here at UNM.

Michelle Kells & La Voz Newspaper "Civil Rights Turns 50"

Michelle Kells forwarded this article from the Denver newspaper "La Voz" today "Civil Rights Act Turns 50." This is an important historic moment in U.S Civil rights history. The reporter has an insightful recognition of the role/significance of this legislation for women and Latinos (and especially women of color). From the article:

“We could not have endured much longer had the ’64 signing not occurred,” says University of New Mexico historical writer and English professor Dr. Michelle Hall-Kells. The massive and growing resistance to the status quo, including Freedom Summer, was not going away. “It pressed LBJ into doing the right thing.”

Hall-Kells says too many of the epic gains that resulted from the Civil Rights Act are today taken for granted. “I can’t imagine a 2104 without a 1964 moment,” says the UNM professor.” Without those formative policy changes our civic imagination would be so limited.”

Perhaps the biggest gain, Hall-Kells says, have been in gender equality. Women a half century ago were simply not part of the discussion in terms of career opportunities. Today, while still not exactly equal partners in many fields, woman have climbed to the top in finance, politics, science and technology and so many other disciplines once the sole purview of men. But much work remains. “The groups that are still struggling and have not benefited are women of color. There is a lot of unfinished work.”

http://lavozcolorado.com./detail.php?id=7533

La Voz  Bilingue (Denver, CO) 

A thank you to Christine Sierra for connecting La Voz reporter Ernest Gurule with me last week for an interview on Good Friday and including Latinos and women under the rhetorical umbrella of 1964 Civil Rights Act stakeholders.

Karra Shimabukuro Publishes Advice on How to Thrive in Graduate School

PhD student Karra Shimabukuro has written a guest post for Grad Hacker, a resource for grad students. Karra’s post deals with how to “thrive” and not just survive in graduate school. It can be found here: http://www.gradhacker.org/2014/03/31/thrive-not-survive/

Stretching for Student Success

In Sunday's Albuquerque Journal, an opinion piece, titled "Rethinking Remedial Education Is Essential to Student Success," describes two curricular initiatives within the Core Writing Program that may eliminate "remediation" courses for first year writing that do not carry college credit. As Dr. Mark Peceny, Dean of UNM's College of Arts and Sciences, writes, 

"Our 'Stretch' program extends the work of the first semester writing course over two semesters, accompanied by overall assistance in the transition to college. In a trial run last summer, 100 percent of the students completed the first semester of work. In our equally successful 'Studio' program, students began typical first semester writing immediately and were supported with an extra one-credit-hour course that provided additional assistance in college-level writing. UNM is now prepared to extend these opportunities to all main campus students in the 2014-2015 academic year."

You can read the complete article here: 

http://www.abqjournal.com/353726/opinion/rethinking-remedial-education-is-essential-to-student-success.html

Natasha Jones honored by Conference on College Composition and Communication

Dr. Natasha Jones won two awards from the Conference on College Composition and Communication! Her dissertation won the 2014 CCCC Outstanding Dissertation in Technical Communication. In addition, her article won the 2014 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award in the category of Best Article Reporting Qualitative or Quantitative Research in Technical or Scientific Communication (as lead author). 

 

Congratulations, Natasha!