Panels & Presentations

Resa Crane Bizzaro presented "Folkloric Elements of Native American Story and Poetry" at the annual American Folklore Society meeting in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 2002.

In December 2002, Angelo Restivo read two papers at the MLA Convention in New York.  His essay, "The Conformist and the Ephebe," explores "the ways in which Bertolucci's key film from 1971 subverts the project of politically modernist filmmaking through an appeal to a plasticity in the image which undermines the authority of 'the idea,' (or the Hegelian 'master narrative'), a plasticity which is connected to the figure of  Mediteranean homosexuality."  His essay, "The Taiwanese New Wave and the Event of Modernization," discusses "the ways in which the films of the Taiwanese New Wave blur the boundaries between the spaces of the everyday and the spaces of 'the event,' symptomatic of the trauma underlying processes of modernization."

Rick Taylor and Marie Farr attended a Southeastern Women's Studies Association (SEWSA) Steering Committee meeting on January 18-20 in Savannah, GA, where the 2004 Conference will be held.  ECU will sponsor the 2005 conference in Greenville, in part recognizing ECU Women's Studies twentieth anniversary.

In November 2002, Christine Cranford, Philip Rubens, and Sherry Southard presented "Establishing Community in Academic Distant Education Environments" at the transdisciplinary and international online conference 2002 Teaching Online in Higher Education (TOHE).  Creating a classroom community is essential in fostering a positive web course experience.  This paper presents different methods for creating a classroom community in a distant education course.  Threaded discussion, web pages, and chat rooms approaches are examined.  Examples and additional outside web links are included in the paper.  Before the conference, participants could access their paper from the internet.  Then Cranford, Rubens, and Southard, each at their own computers in their ECU offices, led an hour-long synchronous discussion of the paper in an online chat room.

Peter Makuck read from his new book of short stories, Costly Habits (U of Missouri P, 2002), recently nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, at Barnes and Noble on January 30 at 7:00 p.m.

Seodial Deena presented "Colonial and Postcolonial Implications for African Diasporic Evangelization in an Era of Globalization," at the Modern Language Association's 118th annual convention in New York, December 27-30, 2002.  Deena also organized a special session, "From Around the Globe: Secular Authors and Biblical Perspectives."

Ahmar Mahboob presented "9/11 and Pakistan: a Case for Multitextuality" on January 29 as part of the English Department Colloquium series.  Mahboob addressed the global spread of English among bilingual, multilingual, and ethnographically diverse populations.  Analyzing the speech of Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf delivered only a week after the events of September 11, 2001, Mahboob outlined a model of multitextual interpretation.

Reginald Watson presented, "The Stronger Sex, Images of Rape, Nature, and Beasts: Positive and Negative Images Related to Sex and the Black Woman in Toni Morrison's Beloved, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Alice Walker's Third Life of Grange Copeland at the Middle Atlantic Writers Association's (MAWA) 23rd annual conference on October 18, 2002.

On December 10, 2002, Tom Douglass narrated an hour-long program on West Virginia Public Radio about writer Davis Grubb as part of the "In Their Own Country" radio series developed and directed by singer-songwriter Kate Long.