Faculty Notes for January 2020

CHRIS ANSON

Chris Anson, Chen Chen, and Ian Anson’s research article on “Talking About Writing: A Study of Key Terms Used Instructionally Across the Curriculum” has been published in (Re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy (Utah State University Press).

Anson’s article “Storyboarding Your Writing Projects” was published in Explanation Points: Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition (University Press of Colorado).

Anson has been invited to serve as vice chair of the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research, which sponsors the Writing Research Across Borders (WRAB) conference. 

Paul Fyfe was among the contributors to The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata: Reports from Oceanic Exchanges, by M.H. Beals and Emily Bell. (Loughborough, 2020). The atlas is an open access guide to digitized newspaper collections around the world, including their production histories and technical interoperability.

With Buckey Grimm, Marsha Gordon published an article on early motion picture camerawomen in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Gordon’s latest Movies on the Radio segment on WUNC’s The State of Things was about the best films of 2019. 

Gordon presented two book/screening events in January for Screening Race in Nontheatrical Film, one at the Hammer Museum/UCLA and one at USC.

On January 20, Melanie Graham and Derek Ham (College of Design) spoke at St. Mary’s School in Raleigh about feminist/civic activism, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., and the women’s suffrage movement. They shared video of their collaborative project with Peter Askim (Department of Music), the virtual reality/orchestral composition Our Voices Will Be Heard.  Then, using Ham’s virtual reality application, Graham and St. Mary’s teachers guided the students to create their own expressions of activism in virtual reality, which were then shared in assembly.

Kyesha Jennings presented “#Hashtag Activism: Kanye West, The Sunken Place and the Rhetoric of Black Twitter” on January 9 at the MLA conference in Seattle. 

On January 13, Jennings was the keynote speaker for Averett University’s Virginia Humanities Convocation Series, speaking on “Hip-Hop Don’t Stop: Cultural Identification and First Generation College Students.”

Jennings was awarded the Heldrich-Dvorak Travel Fellowship in the amount of $500 for the 2019 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference. In February, Jennings will present “City Girls, Hot Girls and the Re-imagining of Black women in Hip-Hop and Digital Spaces” in New Mexico. 

Jennings wrote two pieces for the Indy Week: “Challenging yet Humane, Just Mercy Wrenches a Victory from the Tragedy of Capital Punishment,” a film review published on January 14, and “Haitian Storytelling and Generosity Power Flutist Nathalie Joachim’s Fanm d’Ayiti,”, an interview published on January 8.

HANS KELLNER

Hans Kellner spoke at MLA 2020 in Seattle at the session “Remembering Hayden White.”

JASON MILLER

As Scholar-in-Residence at the African American Cultural Center for 2019-20, Jason Miller and curator Kelsey Dufresne (TA in English) opened the gallery exhibit “When MLK and the KKK Met in Raleigh” on January 15. Installed with the expertise of John Robinson-Miller, the exhibit runs through February 7 at the Witherspoon Student Center.  The exhibit has been covered in part by ABC 11, WUNC News, Spectrum News, WPTF, The Technician, and Capital Tonight with Tim Boyum. The exhibit is also the subject of three podcasts, First in Future (Episode I), First in Future (Episode 2), and Podcast: 1966—MLK and the KKK in Raleigh.   

Complete with 36 photographs, Jason Miller’s new critical biography on Langston Hughes is now available from the University of Chicago Press.  He will launch the book nationally at Busboys and Poets on February 10 in Washington D.C. and will promote it locally at Quail Ridge Books on February 11. He will also be at the Richard Thornton Library on February 16 and The McKimmon Center on February 17. He will present to Wake County Public School System social studies teachers on February 18.   

MARIA ROUPHAIL

Maria Rouphail served as a judge for the 2020 Nazim Hikmet Poetry competition.

JON THOMPSON

Jon Thompson published Issue 30 of Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics (Poetry — Jennifer Atkinson, Sarah Blake, Nancy Gaffield, Martial [translated by Tyler Goldman], Fady Joudah, Peter Larkin, Nathaniel Tarn, and John Sibley Williams; Essays and Reviews — Nick Halpern [on Robert Duncan] and Jon Thompson [on Peter Riley];  Recent and Notable on Ilya Kaminsky, Allen Stein, Nathaniel Tarn, and Tracy Zeman; cover image by Bob Trotman). Read issue 30 at the newly redesigned site.