Panels & Presentations

Amanda Klein presented "'Let's take 'em back': Reconstructing an Authentic Los Angeles in the Contemporary Hip Hop Video" at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 6-9, in Philadelphia.  Also, Klein presented "Postmodern Marketing, Generation Y and the Multi-Platform Viewing Experience of MTV's The Hills" at Console-ing Passions: An International Conference on Television, Audio, Video, New Media, and Feminism hosted by the University of California at Santa Barbara on April 24-26.

Anna Froula presented "Archiving Realities of National Trauma" on the panel titled "The Struggling of Memory against Forgetting: Using and Generating Archives in Freshman Composition" for at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans, LA.  Also, Froula's "Visualizing American Women at War" was an invited lecture at Southampton Solent University in Southampton, UK, as part as a Visualizing War lecture series for Dr. Karen Randell.  Froula's presentation focused on representations of America's women in uniform in popular literature, magazines, and film, from World War II through the current "war on terror.'  Moreover, she presented "Anticipating the 'War on Terror': 28 Days Later ... and the Culture of Fear" as part of a two-day seminar on "The Arrival of a Departure: 9/11 and the Antinomies of Postmodernity" at the American Comparative Literature Association in Long Beach, CA.

Whichard Distinguished Professor Anne Goodwyn Jones presented "The Burden of Southern History: Southerners Rewrite the Civil War"  on April 16, at 5:30 in Bate 1028.   Dr. Jones's books include Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 for Louisiana State U P (1981) and co-editor of Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts for U of Virginia P (1997).  Jones is also a co-editor for the 5th edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

Su-ching Huang presented "Gender Negotiation in Taiwanese American Literature: Interracial Desire in Yu Lihua's Fiction" at a panel on Taiwanese Americans on April 17 at the AAAS (Association for Asian American Studies) Annual Meeting in Chicago.  Yu Lihua is the author Between Parting and Goodbye (2002) and Farewell to Slingerland (2000).  Yu Lihua was born in Shanghai and educated in Tawian and the US, and her books have been published in English and Chinese.  According to the panel description: "Literary scholar Su-ching Huang questions narratives of the 'third-world damsel in distress' by revealing how gender roles continue to be articulated both in terms of US immigrant norms and also in terms of diasporic Sinocentrism as well.  Taiwanese/Chinese American writer Yu Lihua, representative of the highly mobile transnational elite crisscrossing the Pacific, has captured a large Chinese-speaking audience in both Asia and the US with her portrayal of the trans-Pacific intellectuals.  Huang proposes to read the female protagonists in Yu Lihua's fiction as 'sexual model minority,' who through self-exoticization and pragmatic use of their sexuality are able to access resources usually unavailable to Asians in the US."

On March 22 at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's 2008 national meeting in San Francisco, Don Palumbo presented "The Monomyth in Some Less Celebrated Science Fiction Films" -- specifically, the cult films Tron, Dreamscape, The Last Starfighter, and Escape from New York, all of which were released between 1981 and 1984.  He also moderated a conference session titled "Thou Shalt not Perish!: Publishing Science Fiction and Fantasy Scholarship with McFarland," and attended the meeting as the PCA Film Area Chair (having organized 105 papers into 30 conference panels), as a member of the Journal of Popular Culture's Editorial Advisory Board, and as a member of the PCA/ACA Executive Board.

C.W. Sullivan III, currently a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Debrecen University, Hungary, gave an invited lecture at Veszprem University on April 14.  His lecture "The Frontier Legend in American History and Culture" looked at frontier legends as part of the nineteenth-century westward movement, discussed the ways in which those legends became part of American popular culture in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, and suggested that Americans still have something of a "frontier" cultural worldview.  In support of his last point, Sullivan cited John F. Kennedy's "New Frontiers," newspaper and magazine articles about "new frontiers" in science or medicine, the "Space: the final frontier . . . " opening of Star Trek, and George W. Bush's go-it-alone cowboy foreign policy and his statement that Osama Bin Laden was "Wanted: Dead or Alive."  On April 8, he also presented "St Patrick's Day: The Truth and Traditions."  Please see Sullivan's Notes from Hungary.

On April 4, Tom Shields presented "John Lawson's Indians: Early Eighteenth-Century Portrayal of Native Americans of the Southeast in a Comparative Context" at Prophetstown Revisited: A Symposium on Early Native American Studies held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists.  Shields discussed how the portrayal of Native Americans in John Lawson's 1709 A New Voyage to Carolina compared and contrasted with the portrayal of Native Americans in other works by English and Spanish writers of the period from what is now the southeastern United States.  Shields, also, led a tour of the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Saturday, April 12, for presenters at the symposium "Raleigh and the Atlantic World" held at ECU.  The tour highlighted the archaeology done at Fort Raleigh, but also included the various commemorative aspects of the site such as the Elizabethan Gardens and the Waterside Theatre, where the symphonic drama "The Lost Colony" is presented each summer.

Resa Crane Bizzaro presented "Real Indians Writing: Identity, Trauma, and Representation" at the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans, LA, on April 3.  In addition, she chaired the annual meeting of the Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarships.

Ellen Arnold presented "Teaching Native American Literatures in the South" for a panel on "Teaching Alt. Souths" at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, April 17-19.  She also participated in the Executive Committee and Business meetings of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures as the Association Treasurer at the Native American Literature Symposium, March 27-29, in Minneapolis, MN.

Donna Kain and Catherine Smith presented "Researching Risk and Emergency Communication for Multiple Publics" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Decision Application Division's third annual Symposium on Risk Analysis, Effective Risk Communication: Tools Theory and Applications in Santa Fe, NM, March 11-13. Kain and Smith also presented "Storm Stories:  Narrative in Everyday Hurricane Risk Analysis" at the 2008 Georgetown University Roundtable in Linguistics, Washington, DC, March 15.  On December 11, 2007, in a workshop held in Manteo NC for Dare County Emergency Management Joint Information Center staff, Kain and Smith led three activities related to their 2006-07 pilot study of hurricane risk and hazard communication in that county.  Smith and Kain reported findings on residents' perceptions of risk likely to complicate emergency managers' efforts to inform the public during emergencies.  Kain led participants in a hands-on exercise to test the usability of a hurricane preparedness guide.  Co-researcher John Howard (Dept. of Communications) led a roundtable discussion by guest radio, television, and newspaper reporters on differences in the ways that news media and government agencies inform the public about storms.  The workshop was supported by a Research and Graduate Studies Division research development award and the RENCI Engagement Center at ECU.

Mike Albers gave a poster presentation titled "Detecting Cognitive Overload Points to Improve Information Architecture Designs"at the Information Architecture Summit in Miami, FL on April 12-14.

Margaret Bauer delivered her paper "'Call me Paul': The Long, Hot Summer of Paul Green and Richard Wright" at the UNC Richard Wright Centennial in Chapel Hill on April 13 and then again at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference in Williamsburg, Va, on April 20. In Chapel Hill, she appeared on a panel with Richard Wright's daughter, Julia Wright, and Wright scholar Jerry Ward; respondents were Trudier Harris, Randall Kenan, and Mae Henderson.

Stephanie West-Puckett presented "Writing For, With, and About the Community: An Exploration of Cultures and Values" at East Carolina University 5th Annual Service-Learning Conference on March 25.  This poster session allowed conference attendees to explore how service-learning is used in the composition classroom.  Sample student writings and reflections, texts composed with community partners, and the collaborative digital service-learning quilt constructed by English 1200 students were featured. According to West-Puckett: "The service-learning quilt was the highlight of the poster session and was constructed from a classroom activity that had students use mudcloth techniques to symbolize artifacts found in their community partner agencies.  The students created visual symbols of their chosen artifacts and used those symbols as catalysts for articulating and constructing verbal interpretations of their community partners' cultures and its values.  The mudcloths were scanned to digital format and the students' artifact analyses were linked to the scanned images on the course wikisite thanks to the web design work completed by English department graduate student Michelle Wood.  A laptop was available so that participants could experience this interactive exhibit and leave comments about their experience."

Lida Cope presented her research at two international conventions  in April -- "Second Language Acquisition Theory and Teachers' Perspectives" at the annual convention of TESOL Inc. (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) in New York, April 2-5, and "Investing in a Child's Dual Language Immersion Education: A Parental Satisfaction Survey in Context and Children's Views" at the annual convention of AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) in Washington DC., March 29-April 2.

Tom Douglass presented "The Appalachian Affinity of James Agee" at the SSSL biennial meeting held at the College of William and Mary in Williamsbrg, VA, April 19th.  He argued that the author's composition of A Death in the Family (1957), posthumously edited by David McDowell, was influenced by Agee's adaptation of Appalachian writer Davis Grubb's The Night of the Hunter in the spring and summer of 1955 for Charles Laughton's directorial debut.

Joyce Irene Middleton participated in the pre-convention workshop "What is Cultural Rhetorics: a Collaborative Definition of an Emerging Field" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans, LA, on April 3, organized and chaired by American Indian scholar Malea Powell.  She also chaired the panel "Rhetorics, Cultural Logics, and Agency" on April 5.  Also, Middleton presented "Shifting the Gaze: Reframing Oppositional Arguments" at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference in Seattle, WA, May 23-25.

John Hoppenthaler gave a reading at Columbia-Greene Community College on April 25 as part of National Poetry Month.  Hoppenthaler also gave readings of his poetry at Hollins University, Virginia Intermont College, Davis & Elkins College, and J. Sargent Reynolds Community College in April.