Panels & Presentations

The ECU Student Chapter Society for Technical Communication hosted its first Professional Development Conference on April 12, 2002 in Greenville. The conference was organized to inform interested students about technical and professional communication issues. Guest speakers included former ECU faculty member Dr. Jo Allen, Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies of NCSU, who spoke on career opportunities.  Johanna Owens, Director of Communications for Institutional Advancement of ECU, provided information about developing and presenting portfolios, and Chad Holliday, lecturer in the ECU Department of English, talked about interviewing: what to expect and how to prepare. Following the presentations, a panel was available for a question/answer period. Brent Henze, Assistant Professor, Department of English, and Robyn Turner, technical documentation specialist, joined with the presenters to answer student questions. The organization is planning for its next conference in October.

At the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) on March 19-24 in Ft Lauderdale, FL,  Jim Holte delivered his essay "Imitations of Immortality: Shadow of the Vampire."

On April 13 at the Region 6 Society for Technical Communication Student Conference held  at Southwest Missouri State University, Sherry Southard conducted a workshop, based on collaborative work with Philip Rubens, entitled "Accessibility in Web Design, Including Use of Cascading Style Sheets."

At the CCCC in Chicago on March 21, Laureen Tedesco presented "The Girl Scouts and Cultural Literacy: Teaching 'Americanism' to Immigrants," as part of a panel proposed by Wendy Sharer, entitled "Creating the Literate Female Citizen: Gender, Nationalism, and Writing Instruction in American Women's Organizations, 1880-1930," which featured three ECU English faculty members: Sharer, Tedesco, and Brent Henze. Tedesco's paper examined the ways that the early Girl Scout organization sought to appeal to nationwide concerns about immigration and urbanization in the years surrounding World War I.  In the first decade of the organization's existence, Girl Scouts participated in an Americanization program in Northeastern cities and taught immigrant women the English skills and the citizenship basics they needed to become naturalized U.S. citizens.  According to Tedesco, "While early Girl Scouts carried out their leaders' mission of shaping immigrant women to fit a particular white middle-class brand of tidy female citizenship, they also internalized a socially conscious democratic ideal."

Ellen Arnold delivered her essay "Visual Rhetoric in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead" at the Native American Literature Symposium at Mystic Lake, Minnesota,  March 11-14, 2002.

Donald Palumbo served as PCA Film Area Chair and as moderator of a Science Fiction/Fantasy session on "Publish Your Scholarly Work in Greenwood Press and FEMSPEC" at the 32nd annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association in Toronto, March 13-16. Palumbo also attended the 23rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Ft. Lauderdale, March 20-24, where he presented his paper, "Internal Allusions and Recurring Mysteries in Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation Metaseries."

Seodial Deena presented "Exploring Themes of Beauty, Love, War, Motherhood, and History in Toni Morrisonís Sulaî on April 8 in Beaufort, NC, as part of the lecture series entitled "Letís Talk About It," sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council. Deena also delivered his essay, ìPlacing Caribbean Writers in the Forefront and Center of Postcolonial Criticism,î at the Second International Conference of the United States Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, in San Jose, CA, April 26-28, where he chaired a session on Caribbean Literature.