The Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship

The Center for Regional Studies and the English Department at the University of New Mexico announce the Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship for Fall 2015-Spring 2016.

The Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship supports graduate research and scholarship in the English Department directly related to the late Dr. Hector Torres’ fields, as well as the mission of the Center for Regional Studies. These 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).

The award amount ranges from $10,000 to $15,000 a year, depending on availability. Renewal is not automatic. The Fellowship is housed in the English Department but sponsored by the Center for Regional Studies. Fellowship funding pending final budgetary approval.

Qualified graduate student applicants must meet the above criteria; be graduate students in good standing (3.0 GPA or better); maintain full-time graduate student standing during the tenure of the award; and complete a CRS application, which includes a letter of intent; transcripts; resume; two letters of recommendation; and proof of enrollment. Preference will be given first to advanced doctoral students (post-exams); doctoral students in coursework; and advanced MA students. Highly qualified applicants to the English doctoral program in American Literary Studies will also be considered for the fellowship for recruitment purposes. Submit all inquires and all application materials (in hardcopy) to Dr. Jesse Alemán, Professor, Department of English.

Deadline: 5pm, May 4, 2015

ALS Elizabeth and George Arms Fund for American Literature Research Assistantship for Dissertation Completion

American Literary Studies (ALS) announces the 2015-16 Elizabeth and George Arms Fund for American Literature Research Assistantship to assist and facilitate research and writing toward the completion of a doctoral dissertation in American Literary Studies.

The assistantship pays $16,500.00, depending on budget, over one academic year to support the completion of the dissertation. UNM Graduate Studies will provide dissertation hour tuition remission and heath care coverage for the ALS-Arms RA. The research assistantship must be held in lieu of a teaching assistantship granted in English or other UNM departments.

Duties for the ALS-Arms RA include: conduct research related to the dissertation; write dissertation chapters; submit written chapters to dissertation director and committee for review; revise research and writing; and submit final dissertation for review by the end of the assistantship year.

Qualified applicants must be ALS doctoral students completing a dissertation in American Literary Studies. At least two dissertation chapters must be completed and vetted by the dissertation director. Send hardcopy or electronic letter of application, CV, proof of completed chapters, proposed research and writing schedule, and two letters of recommendation, one of which must be by the dissertation director, to Dr. Jesse Alemán (jman@unm.edu). Deadline to submit materials: April 1, 2015.

Letters of application should describe the dissertation project, its significance, and detail the plan for the project’s completion. The dissertation director’s letter must address the student’s ability to complete the dissertation by the end of the assistantship.

The Elizabeth and George Arms Fund for American Literature is an endowed graduate award fund with the UNM Foundation in recognition of research in American Literature within the College of Arts and Sciences Department of English.

Send inquires to Dr. Jesse Alemán.

Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship

The Center for Regional Studies and the English Department at the University of New Mexico announce the Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship for Fall 2014-Spring 2015.

The Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship supports graduate research and scholarship in the English Department directly related to the late Dr. Hector Torres’ fields, as well as the mission of the Center for Regional Studies. These 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).

The award amount ranges from $10,000 to $15,000 a year, depending on availability. Renewal is not automatic. The Fellowship is housed in the English Department but sponsored by the Center for Regional Studies. Fellowship funding pending final budgetary approval.

Qualified graduate student applicants must meet the above criteria; be graduate students in good standing (3.0 GPA or better); maintain full-time graduate student standing during the tenure of the award; and complete a CRS application, which includes a letter of intent; transcripts; resume; two letters of recommendation; and proof of enrollment. Preference will be given first to advanced doctoral students (post-exams); doctoral students in coursework; and advanced MA students. Highly qualified applicants to the English doctoral program in American Literary Studies will also be considered for the fellowship for recruitment purposes.

Submit all inquires and all application materials (in hardcopy) to Dr. Jesse Alemán (jman@unm.edu), Professor, Department of English.

Deadline: 5pm, April 4, 2014

Summer Study in Germany -- Botany, Society & the Revolution in Taste

SUMMER STUDY IN GERMANY

(no knowledge of German required)

Botany, Society & the Revolution in Taste

Study abroad in Germany for 4 weeks (June 2 – 27, 2014):
•    Learn about the history of botany and its impact on medicine, horticulture, politics, and economics in Western Europe
•    Examine the botanic imagination of 18th & 19th century writers whose works transformed how we think about and act in relation to nature
•    Travel to Berlin, Weimar, and Düsseldorf to visit botanic gardens and explore Goethe’s world
•    Stay at a monastery “Nikolauskloster” and study at the historic castle “Schloss Dyck” and its famous landscape garden near Düsseldorf
•    Earn 6 UNM credits in 2 linked courses:  ENGL/COMP 330 and BIOL 402/502

Estimated program cost: $2,600-2,900 plus airfare, GEO application fee, insurance, and UNM summer tuition.  Summer scholarships available (Regents’ International Travel Grants, ISI Summer Scholarships).

For more information, and complete syllabi for all classes, visit the Wiki site
http://unmgermansummer2014.pbworks.com/ 
and/or contact:
•    Prof. Gary Harrison, English Department, garyh@unm.edu
•    Prof. Tim Lowrey, Biology Department, tlowrey@unm.edu
•    Prof. Christine Sauer, Associate ISI Director, sauer@unm.edu
•    Jazmin Knight, ISI Operations Specialist, jkknight@unm.edu

Course Description
ENGL 330/556, COMP 330: The Botanic Imagination: Goethe, Rousseau, Charlotte Smith (3 credits, cross-listed as INTS 410 and ARTH 429)
Taught by Gary Harrison, Professor of English & Presidential Teaching Fellow, garyh@unm.edu

This first course in the Schloss Dyck program will examine the “botanical imagination” in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head and Other Poems.  Examining the changing perspectives on landscape, gardens, and human sensibility in these three works, we will also discuss the way that the burgeoning discourse of botany in part shapes the literary and cultural imagination of these writers whose work marks a major transformation in the ways we think about and act in relationship to nature.  To that end, we will also read excerpts from a few important works on the aesthetics— of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque —by such writers as Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and William Gilpin; as well as selected readings from a few recent scholarly articles on botany and romantic (and pre-romantic) literature.  Taking advantage of the park and gardens at Schloss Dyck, you will be encouraged to keep a “walking journal” to reflect upon your own experiences in the gardens and landscapes you encounter in your travels, as well as to write a critical and comparative analysis of the works we read during the program.  We will take field trips to the Goethe Museum at Schloss Jägerhoff and the Heinrich Heine Institute and Museum in Düsseldorf.  On a multi-day field trip to Weimar, we will visit the Goethe National Museum and tour Goethe’s cottage and gardens at Ilm Park; the palace at Weimar, which Duke Carl August redesigned in a neo-classical style under the guidance of Goethe; and Goethe’s residence on Frauenplan.

Requirements:  One six-page paper, a “walking journal,” and one 15-20 minute presentation.

What Can You Do With a Degree in English?

Scott Sanders is a former Chair of the English department, who gave this speech at Graduation Convocation, 2013, a speech pertinent to all English majors:

Thank you, Professor Houston. 

What a great pleasure it is to be back at this podium, here at Woodward Hall, and looking at you, the graduates of our department for this Academic Year, 2012-13. 

I’m sure you know the commonplace (and completely mistaken) assumption that anyone who majors in English can only become a teacher. Certainly teaching at any level is a high calling, an absolutely vital profession, and teaching English is centrally important in every curriculum at every level in every school in our country. 

But teaching most certainly is not the only profession your English degree has prepared you to enter.

More than 40 years ago the major professional organization for post-secondary English faculty, the Modern Language Association, began a focused study of what undergraduate English majors did with their degrees after graduation. 

Fewer than 25% ever taught at any level for any length of time over the several years of that study, which extended for more than two decades. That means 75% never taught, and neither were they unemployed.

The study confirmed that English majors have many skills, and that many different professions value those skills.

In my own experience over the past 30 years, I’ve talked with hundreds of managers, owners, and supervisors at dozens of businesses and organizations and corporations large and small in New Mexico, our neighboring states, and beyond.

For the most part, these are the people who mentored our interns in their workplaces, and, in many cases, also hired our graduates. You can see a snapshot, a slice, of the range of employment available to English majors by looking at the list of internship placements available today on our departmental web site.

One person I corresponded with at length was a senior manager for a large national corporation headquartered in Ohio. He told me his company actively sought English majors as the “most skilled” of the liberal arts graduates his company was seeking to recruit and hire more and more in recent years. It seems they were becoming disenchanted with business majors.

He wrote a one page document with a catchy title and sent it to me:

Why XYZ Company Hires and Promotes People with English Degrees

He listed six categories of skills, which were somewhat repetitive (the document needed editing at the sentence, paragraph, and headings levels, making his point about their need for English majors). His six categories really came down to three familiar core skills: communication skills (writing and speaking); research skills (the ability to find information); and critical thinking skills (the ability to assess the value of information for different users). Let’s consider these three skills a bit further.

Communication Skills

My correspondent wrote, “[English majors] are rarely intimidated by deadlines and the prospect of creating multiple documents.”

New hires in their the first 3-6 months at XYZ were routinely asked to write two to three 150 to 250 word abstracts of information they could find about new clients, and these one-to-three-paragraphs-long documents were due on rolling deadlines about every 1-2 weeks. All but the English majors found this amount of writing and the associated deadlines daunting. The English majors thought, “Hey, this is less work than I used to do years ago in English 101. No sweat.” Echoing Oliver Twist, I imagine that they all but said, “Please sir, may I write some more?”

Research Skills

My correspondent wrote, “[English majors] are organized and experienced in the methodology of retrievable storage activities that result in research and information compilation.”

Translation:  English majors know how to search more sites than just Google; they keep accurate records of the URLs they consult; and they know how to cut and paste. 

Supervisors reading the abstracts produced by English majors not only found the information they wanted, but they could follow the path taken by the writer, and then branch off of that path confidently on their own to find still more information of use. Good stuff, my contact told me.

Critical Thinking Skills

Again, my correspondent wrote, “[English majors] execute a disciplined approach to situation analysis while implementing a critical thinking approach to problem resolution.”  I suspect one has to have a business degree to write a sentence like that.

Translation: English majors actually thought about what information would be more important, more useful, for their supervisors, and they placed that information in more prominent positions in their abstracts. Finally, they offered explicit conclusions about the significance of that information, about how it might affect their employers’ future actions with their new clients. 

More good stuff, and very, very rare among new hires, my contact told me.

I’m here today to tell you that you made the right choice about your major a few years back, that you are on the right track, and that your study of English has prepared you for a wide range of meaningful professional careers.

You have the skills you need to succeed.

You have the will you need to succeed.

And, more important than any skill, you have been building something my corporate correspondent never directly addressed, although I see it everywhere in everything he praised about English majors.

You have a measure of character, of maturity, and of wisdom that, no matter how many years you may actually have now, is certainly beyond any norm associated with that number of years.

This is so because you have read widely and you have read well the stories that really matter, the stories that the writers of great literature have given to us, stories about lives and worlds real and imaginary that you have lived and inhabited and shared in the fullest sense in your own generative imaginations that you engaged in the act of reading.

Although it is not so easily recognized, and it is far too often taken for granted, reading is the one true foundation for all of those other skills.

From the time you were first read to, and then eventually began reading on your own, you started on a path that has led you to where we are today, in Woodward Hall, at your graduation.

You are more than ready, and, finally, it is time.

Go out there beyond the classrooms where you have done so well and make something great and good happen for yourself and all of us in the new worlds that, through your actions, you will create.

Congratulations to you all.

Linwood Orange, English: The Pre-Professional Major, 1972; 4^th edition 1986.

Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship

The Center for Regional Studies and the English Department at the University of New Mexico announce the Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship

The Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship supports graduate research and scholarship in the English Department directly related to the late Dr. Hector Torres’ fields, as well as the mission of the Center for Regional Studies. These 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 USMexico borderlands, and the greater southwest).

The award amount ranges from $10,000 to $15,000 a year, depending on availability. Renewal is not automatic. The Fellowship is housed in the English Department but sponsored by the Center for Regional Studies.

Qualified graduate student applicants must meet the above criteria; be graduate students in good standing (3.0 GPA or better); maintain full-time graduate student standing during the tenure of the award; and complete a CRS application, which includes a letter of intent; transcripts; resume; two letters of recommendation; and proof of enrollment. Preference will be given first to advanced doctoral students (post-exams); doctoral students in coursework; and advanced MA students. Highly qualified applicants to the English doctoral program in American Literary Studies will also be considered for the fellowship for recruitment purposes. Submit all inquires and all application materials (in hardcopy) to Dr. Jesse Alemán, Professor, Department of English.

Deadline: March 18

Jonathan Davis Secord has received funding for a Manuscripts lab

Professor Jonathan Davis Secord has received a Teaching Allocation Grant, for a “manuscripts lab,” consisting of a high-powered computer workstation, to facilitate undergraduate and graduate education in the Middle Ages.

Manuscripts are one of the best teaching tools available for medievalists, engaging students in unique ways by providing direct access to real historical materials. Guarded by European libraries, manuscripts are difficult to access physically, but many are now available digitally. The manuscripts lab will provide the computing power necessary to utilize the huge digital images these new resources produce. For years to come, the lab will bring the Middle Ages to life before our students’ eyes.

Scholarship Information 2010 Now Posted

This year's deadline is April 21, 2010 so students are highly encouraged to prepare their applications early.

Undergraduates should email their materials in Word or pdf formats to Associate Chair, Dan Mueller, dmueller@unm.edu

Graduates should email their materials in Word or pdf formats to Associate Chair, Anita Obermeier, AObermei@unm.edu

See full details on English Department scholarship opportunities here.