Panels & Presentations

Anna Froula presented "Visualizing American Women at War" in Lexington, KY on March 2 as part of the Kentucky Consortium of Gender and Women's Studies' Women and War series sponsored by the University of Kentucky and Transylvania University.  Speakers in the series included included Susan Bordo, Francie Chassen-Lopez, Cynthia Enloe, and Vandana Shiva.  Froula presented several images and film clips from periodicals, films, and propaganda shorts to demonstrate how popular culture represents the military woman from WWII to the present.  Also, Froula chaired the panel "The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting: Using and Generating Archives in Freshman Composition" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco, March 11-14.  According to Froula: "This panel explored the building and using of archives as a means of challenging hegemonic narratives of the past and creating new narratives for the future.  Archives, both pre- and post-digital, combat cultural amnesia by providing spaces for reconstructing lesser known or lost historical realities.  As Foucault reminds us, 'if one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism.  And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles.'  In times of conflict, archives encourage the understanding of knowledge as inflected by cultural, political, historical, and social power structures.  The speakers explored original methods of both using and creating archives as a resource for encouraging student research, literacy, and civic engagement.  Each ongoing project considered the problems of knowing in an age profoundly shaped by technologies of convenience, virtual realities, and expediency."

Liza Wieland read from her new novel A Watch of Nightingales on Tuesday, March 31, in Bate 1026 at 8 pm.  Winner of the 2008 University of Michigan Literary Fiction Prize, A Watch of Nightingales is Wieland's third novel.

John Hoppenthaler presented "Writing the Ghost," a paper on pedagogy, at  the 2009 Annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, February 11-14, in Chicago, IL.

Elizabeth Howland presented "Zadie Smith's New Definition of Multiculturalism in London and Boston" for the Virginia Tech English Graduate Conference "With Pen in Hands: Place and Identity in 21st Century English Studies" held February 20-21, in Blacksburg, VA.  In addition, Howland presented "Control of Women's Physical and Textual Bodies in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaids Tale” for the University of Virginia Graduate English Conference "Navigating the Body: Mapping, Spaces, and Embodiment" held March 20-22, in Charlottesville, VA.

Lida Cope presented "Second language acquisition theory in teacher training: What's in it for my own classroom?" at the annual convention of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Denver, CO, March 21-24.  According to Cope:  "The paper discussed the results of an action research project investigating teachers' views, expressed online, on the relevance of SLA theory to teacher training and to their own classrooms as they begin and then complete a SLA theories class, analyzing their newly gained objective and procedural knowledge in the field."

Tabitha Miller (formerly Slusher) presented "Progressing Toward a More Complete Integration of Reading and Writing in Developmental English" at the 33rd Annual National Association for Developmental Education Conference held February 25-28, in Greensboro, NC.  The presentation included an emphasis on the importance of integrating reading and writing in the developmental studies curriculum through a review of the 30 plus years of research about the developmental writing and reading curriculums.

Susan Moses presented "In Medias Res: Transformative Powers of the Midlife Crisis Portrayed in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane" at the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference held at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, GA on February 27.  Also, Moses presented "Venus at Her Mirror" (fiction) at the Louisiana Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture, University of Louisiana at Lafayette on March 7.

Kimberly Harper, Myleah Kerns, Tabitha Miller, and Wendy Sharer hosted a special interest group "The Graduate Teaching Experience: Multiple Responsibilities and Challenges" at the 60th Annual CCCC Convention held March 11-14, in San Francisco.  According to Kerns: "The group discussed how most graduate students work as teaching assistants within their department to help finance their education and gain valuable teaching experience.  In the deep waters of a teaching assistant lie several waves that must be navigated.  The group explored how teaching assistants deal with students and technology, the perception of age, professional development, work load and benefits, balancing teaching and course loads, department expectations outside of the classroom, and the value teaching assistants provide in a department."

Seodial Deena  was the invited speaker at the Fifth Conference of Servant Leadership Institute (SLI) held in Accra, Ghana, March 9-14.  His talk was titled "Marketplace Teamwork and Network." Deena was also the guest speaker at East Carolina University Religious Studies Program’s Graduation Ceremony on December 12, 2008.

On February 26, Margaret Bauer presented "Teaching North Carolina’s Rich and Delicious Literary History with the North Carolina Literary Review" at the National Association of Developmental Education Conference dinner in Greensboro.   Bauer also presented  "Four Centuries of Writers’ Connections to North Carolina: Turning NCLR's Table of Contents into a Syllabus for Teaching the State's Literary History" at the 20th Southern Writers Symposium held at Methodist University in Fayetteville.  There she also moderated the panel "North Carolina on Stage,”"which included three papers that will appear in the North Carolina Literary Review's special feature section on drama, forthcoming in 2010.

Erika J. Galluppi chaired a panel at the meeting of the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association held February 25-28 in Albuquerque, NM.  The panel titled "Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture III: Bridging Adult World Realities with Vampires" included Galuppi's paper "'Are You a Good Vampire or a Bad Vampire?': Thirst, Liminality, and Love in M.T. Anderson’s Thirsty and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight."  Galuppi also presented "'Cassandra 'Pays' it Forward': Tracing the "Mad" Desires of Toni Morrison's Shadrack through the Global Experiences of the Silenced Prophet in the Greek Cassandra Myth, Virginia Woolf's Septimus, and Ousmane Sembene's Pays" at the 8th Annual Conference on Literature, Language and Culture in Lafayette, LA, March 5-7.

Reginald Watson gave a talk titled "Importance of Black History" at Barton College in Wilson, NC in February.  Also in February, Watson presented "Black History and its significance on the Black church" at the Black History Presentation at Live Oak Baptist Church in Grifton, NC.

Helena Feder presented "Controlling Nature: Sex and Death in The End of the Affair" at the Ocracoke Public Library on February 11, as part of the "Let's Talk About It" series for the NC Humanities Council.  According to Feder: "Set primarily in Clapham Common during the Blitz, key characters in The End of the Affair go to great lengths to avoid and deny fear of death despite the bombs falling on and around London.  The novel depicts sex, and sexually driven acts, as attempts to displace and contain mortality, the final evidence of human embodiment and embeddedness.  I discussed this reading of the novel in the context of Clapham's admixture of industry and greenspace, as well as pre-war and war-time perceptions of sex and adultery, birth rate statistics, Whitehall reports, and sociological studies on both sides of the Atlantic."

Gregg Hecimovich served as the panel expert for "Prof: 101: Launching Successful Faculty Careers" -- a conference devoted to preparing PhD candidates for academic careers held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, February 21.  Hecimovich presented and answered questions for the panel “All you ever wanted to know about tenure but were afraid to ask.”