Panels & Presentations

Christy Hallberg presented "Conjure Vs. Christianity in Linda Beatrice Brown's Rainbow Roun Mah Shoulder" at the 20th Anniversary Southern Writers Symposium at Methodist University on Friday, February 27.  The paper focused on the struggle of the novel's protagonist to reconcile her use of Hoodoo with her Christian faith.  Hallberg also moderated the Race (And Religion) in North Carolina panel at the same conference.

Amanda Klein presented “A Tale of Two Hills: Injecting Race and Class into the Projective Drama” at the Cultural Studies Association conference, held in Kansas City, KS on April 16-18.  Her talk concerned the MTV reality show The Hills based on the lives of young people living in Los Angeles.  The program first premiered on May 31, 2006.

Nicole Sidhu gave a talk on "Medieval Obscenity" on March 31 at 4 pm at  Fletcher Hall as part of ECU's Medieval and Renaissance Studies Colloquium. 

Joyce Irene Middleton and Christine Russell presented papers together on a panel at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco in March 2009.  David Blakesley, known for his work in visual rhetoric, was the third member of a well-received session on film, writing, and teaching.  The title of the session was “Film as Visual Rhetorical Texts.”  Middleton’s talk "Hyperlink Film and Rhetorical Identification” analyzed relationships between identification and persuasion in visual rhetoric (in films such as Traffic, Syriana, Amores Perros, and Lions for Lambs).  Russell’s talk "Playing in the Dark in Visual Culture" examined how the discourses of whiteness contribute to our understanding of rhetorical whiteness, class, and humor in two popular films:  Matchpoint and Legally Blonde 2.   In addition to this film session at the 4C’s conference, Middleton also chaired an engaging session on diversity in rhetoric and composition studies at an open meeting for the CCCC Committee on Diversity.  This committee plans to present a position statement on diversity at the Executive Meeting of the 4C’s organization in November 2009.

Laureen Tedesco presented  "Redeeming Ragged Dick: Pansy’s Literary Academy for Socially Redemptive Sunday Schools” at the Modern Approaches to Children’s Literature Conference in Nashville, TN on March 26-28.  Tedesco's paper "compared the depictions of street boys in novels by evangelical children’s author Isabella Alden (1841-1930; pseud. 'Pansy') to the street boy portrayals in the highly popular 'rags-to-respectability' novels by her contemporary Horatio Alger (1832-1899)."  According to Tedesco, "While both authors measure the urban boy’s transformation by his white-collar employment, his dress, and his cleanliness, Pansy moves her characters towards Christian conversion -- enabled by the self-respect engendered by the outward markers -- while Alger moves him towards a savings account, prospects for advancement, and increasingly respectable Manhattan addresses.  Pansy, unlike the best-selling Alger, wrote more for those who would seek the street boy’s redemption than for the street boy himself (Alger’s works seem to have appealed to both middle-class and working-class readers).  Popular in Sunday School libraries, her novels sought to recruit Sunday School teachers and others who would engage in tactfully uplifting the street boy towards both outward respectability and inner salvation."

Donald Palumbo presented "Red Pills, Problematical Realities, Metaphorical Dreams, and the Monomyth in Total Recall and The Matrix" and conducted a session on publishing scholarly monographs and essay collections in McFarland Publishers' "Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy" series on Friday, April 10, at the 2009 Popular Cultural Association's national meeting in New Orleans.  The series, which Palumbo co-edits with CW Sullivan III, has published 17 volumes since it was launched in 2005 and currently has over a dozen future volumes under contract.  Palumbo also attended the conference as PCA Film Area Chair -- having organized over 100 presentations on film into 28 conference panels -- and as a member of The Journal of Popular Culture's Editorial Advisory Board. 

On April 10, Randall Martoccia presented "From Egghead to Flathead and Back Again: Frankenstein's Monster in the Movies" at the American Culture and Popular Culture Associations' annual conference in New Orleans.

John Hoppenthaler presented poetry readings and visited with students at Longwood University, Penn State Fayette, Indiana University of Pennsylvania; he also read at the Upwords Reading Series in Pittsburgh in March and April.

Doug Solomon, doctoral candidate in Professional and Technical Discourse,  presented results of a recent pilot study to the American Red Cross in Greenville on May 4.  Solomon is researching the ways that messages might be improved to increase participation in blood donation especially in younger age groups.  Few studies have looked at the ways that messages designed for 17 to 25 year olds translate into donations.  Identifying factors that lead to effective communication include accounting for the attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of audiences for messages. Consequently, Solomon’s pilot study begins to examine the factors that determine whether young people might become regular blood donors (people who regularly donate two to six times a year).  With the cooperation of the Red Cross and the ECU English department, a total of 195 students completed a brief survey.  The results show that compared to the population as a whole, a much higher percentage of ECU freshmen students donate blood.  While 5% of the population donates in any given year, 25% of ECU students donated during the past six months.

On April 3, Tom Shields and Matt Finch co-presented their work about editing and helping to illustrate the first book about North Carolina in "’Illuminating’ Thomas Harriot’s  Briefe and True Report."  Their paper was part of the Thomas Harriot Quadricentennial Conference in the session titled "Describing a New World: Thomas Harriot Authoring the First English Book on North America" chaired by retired English professor and Dean Emeritus of Harriot College, W. Keats Sparrow.  Also presenting at the conferences was Thomas Herron, who spoke on "Harriot's Seal and Spenser's House of Temperance," describing possible connections between the iconography of the wax seal used by Thomas Harriot and imagery in Edmund Spenser’s poem "The Faerie Queene."  The conference sessions were held not only at ECU, but also in Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Manteo, all discussing various aspects of the life and work of the man after for whom ECU’s Harriot College of Arts and Sciences is named.