Category Archives: Outside Scholars

Join us! for “Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale”

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Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The English Department is delighted to welcome award-winning illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator, Tim Fielder for a Virtual Fireside Chat (via ZOOM) on February 10 from 12:30-1:30 PM where we will be discussing his work, Afrofuturism, and his latest, best-selling graphic novel, Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale.

 Mr. Fielder is an Illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator who has worked over the years in the storyboarding, film visual development, gaming, comics, and animation industries for clients as varied as Marvel Comics (‘Dr Dre: Man With A Cold, Cold Heart’), The Village Voice, Tri-Star Pictures (‘The Mothership Connection’), to Ubisoft Entertainment (‘Batman: Vengeance).

This virtual event will include a moderated Q&A session with Fielder on Wednesday, February 10 from 1230-130 PM, in conjunction with the Introduction to English Studies Course (ENGL300). This will be among the first events where Fielder discusses, in-depth for an academic audience, his new graphic novel, Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale, available now through Harper Collins press.

Infinitum is steeped in Afrodiasporic experience and presents a unique cosmic experience, addressing issues of racism, classism, gender inequity, the encroachment of technology, and the spiritual cost of war, while exposing the history behind ancient mysteries.

If you would like to attend this Free Event or if you have any questions, please RSVP to mbdando@stcloudstate.edu.

We hope that you’ll be able to join us for what is sure to be a wonderful talk.

Sincerely,

Michael B. Dando

Call for Proposals – Minnesota Writing and English

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Minnesota Writing and English

Call for Proposals
           
for Zoom Conference Thursday-Friday, March 25-26, 2021
         
“Reinvent, Reinvest, Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020”

Proposals due Sunday midnight, January 24, 2021

We welcome your proposal–no matter your state or region of the country–for the 2021 MnWE Zoom Conference Thursday-Friday, March 25-26! Please go to www.MnWE.org by January 24 to send it to us. Registration for attending the conference will open soon.

MnWE is a warm, welcoming professional organization emphasizing friendly, respectful discussion and exchange of information. We accept almost all presentations: especially, this year, those that use the theme. The annual, two-day MnWE Conference is an Upper Midwest regional event centered in Minnesota, but open to people from any state or country. Past conferences have featured speakers and presenters from a variety of places and nations. This Zoom conference, in particular, is a great opportunity to practice presenting, prepare for a future presentation, or share your knowledge from your work or a past conference, no matter your geographic location.

This year, our conference theme is “Reinvent, Reinvest, Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020.” The year 2020 imposed an involuntary reset on academe: an opportunity to take stock of our pedagogy, adapt what needs a refresh, and create new techniques and tools for tutoring and teaching Composition, Literature, and Creative Writing. Our MnWE theme invites you to share your experiences in keeping English and Writing education vital for students during a pandemic, economic disruptions, demands for law enforcement reform, and more.

Our theme also encourages you to look to the future. Social justice, health, and economic crises have illuminated our nation’s disparities in both higher education and high schools. Health and safety concerns and financial uncertainties threaten our students, our colleagues and coworkers, and us. How will the lessons and experiences of the past year transform our teaching

We welcome proposals responding to the theme “Reinvent, Reinvest, and Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020” for teaching Literature, Writing, or ESL/ELL/MLL; tutoring students online or in writing centers; or building relationships between high school and college-level English and Writing. You may address questions such as

 

  • What have you had to reinvent for your socially distanced or virtual classrooms and individual work with students, and how might those revised strategies inform your teaching beyond present emergencies?
  • How have you made your English courses work for nonnative English speakers and other students who faced educational challenges even before the pandemic added barriers to learning?
  • How are you responding to recent and long-standing demands to end systemic racism in our justice systems and beyond?
  • How should we wisely reinvest our time, energy, and resources in schools?
  • What can we do to alleviate student debt and lift graduate students’ wages and career prospects?
  • What place do unions have in this profession, and how do we talk about labor history and economic justice in our courses?
  • With the pandemic accelerating the turn to online education, what will be the value of face-to-face campus life going forward from 2020?
  • How will we equip students with research and critical thinking skills for sifting through conflicting accounts or disinformation to make sense of chaotic times and reach informed and thoughtful conclusions?


Roundtable Breakouts

The entire conference will be held via Zoom. For this virtual event, breakouts will be somewhat different. With the goal of making the conference as interactive and engaging as possible, all sessions will be 60-minute roundtable discussions: three to five discussants will have several minutes each to address the breakout’s topic, and the remainder of the session to exchange their views with each other and respond to questions from other participants.

Proposals

You may submit a proposal on behalf of a group or as an individual; proposals by individuals will be grouped into topic-appropriate roundtables.  Groups should prepare an approximate 200-word proposal that summarizes the presentation and explains its value to teachers of English and writing. Individuals should prepare an approximate 100-word proposal.

Please submit your proposal by Sunday midnight, January 24, at www.mnwe.org. If you have questions, let us know at any email address below.

The MnWE Committee
—
Richard Jewell, General Coordinator, jeweL001@umn.edu or richard@jewell.net
Larry Sklaney, Conference Coordinator, larry.sklaney@century.edu
Danielle Hinrichs, Program Coordinator, danielle.hinrichs@metrostate.edu
Gordon Pueschner, Volunteer Coordinator, gordon.pueschner@century.edu
Jana Rieck, Communications Coordinator, janaL.rieck@yahoo.com
Heidi Burns, Registration Coordinator, heidi.burns@mnsu.edu

Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program

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Greetings loyal readers,

Check out this opportunity that just popped up in my email today!

We’re excited to offer two Zoom Open Houses for Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program.

On Monday, 11/30, at 4 p.m. EST, we’re convening a faculty panel: Secrets of a Great MFA Application. Faculty Admission Committee Members will talk about what makes an outstanding Statement of Purpose. They’ll also be giving advice regarding the all-important Writing Sample.

ID: 96348126097
Password: 334096

On Monday, 12/7, at 5 p.m. EST, we’re offering a Pop-Up Faculty-Student Reading and Q & A re: the Stony Brook MFA in Creative Writing & Literature.

ID: 92184320719
Password: 424973

Here at Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program, we’ve been impressed by the quality of our applicants and by the strength of our writing community. Stronger still in this year of virtual classes.

Here are 7 ways The Stony Brook MFA program makes a difference in a student’s creative life:

1.)  Small classes and plenty of attention: Writing workshops capped at 12.

2.)  Outstanding faculty—all of whom are working writers: Paul Harding, Susan Scarf Merrell, Ursula Hegi, Molly Gaudry, Robert Lopez, Susan Minot, Patricia Marx, Patricia McCormick, Matthew Klam, Melissa Bank, Roger Rosenblatt. Guest faculty members have included Regina Porter and Hugh Ryan.

3.)  Rigorous and supportive writing guidance.

4.)  During the thesis process every MFA student works one-on-one with an advisor for a year and a half to complete a book-length manuscript, whether a novel, collection of short stories, memoir, or poetry.

5.)  We offer a teaching practicum during which students craft 3 creative writing syllabi, then teach undergrads. A great résumé builder. Very few MFA programs offer grad students the chance to teach creative writing.

6.)  Our graduates find jobs in publishing and academia.

7.)  Our students get published! And win prizes. Genevieve Sly Crane’s thesis became her short story collection and this year she won the coveted Whiting Award. Here are a few of our other outstanding writers: Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand was an international bestseller. Tricia Rayburn has written several YA novels, including The Siren Series. This year Caitlin Mullen’s Please See Us was published to rave reviews. Alison Fairbrother is an editor at Riverhead Books and Random House is publishing her novel, The Catch, next year. Graduates Miranda Beeson and Nancy Keating both have poetry chapbooks appearing soon. Elena Gorokhova has published two award-winning memoirs, including A Mountain of Crumbs.

Other benefits? We offer Submitathons to help students prepare cover letters then send work out to literary journals. Our Writers Speak Wednesday reading series has featured luminaries such as T Kira Madden, Major Jackson, Jamil Jan Kochai, land Roz Chast. Each Spring we offer agent visits. Graduating students get one-on-one meetings with literary agents—and several have been signed on.

With our two creative writing campuses, one in Manhattan, the epi-center of the publishing world, and the other in Southampton, a stone’s throw to Atlantic Ocean beaches and the literary community of the East End of Long Island, we are able to offer students wonderful, sometimes unexpected, opportunities.

We have rolling admissions. Applications to be considered for funding are due 1/7/21. www.stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/cwl/

State tuition is a fraction of the cost of other MFA programs.

Thanks for letting your students know about our Open Houses. Please contact us if you have any questions.

With all best wishes,

Lou Ann Walker

Director

MFA in Creative Writing & Literature

Stony Brook Southampton + Manhattan

stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/cwl/

631-838-8742

Let’s talk about the humanities and liberal arts educations

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This week, we’re talking about the humanities and the liberal arts education! Buckle up! It’s a good one!

The following was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Survey on American Attitudes on the Humanities

By Elizabeth Redden

 November 9, 2020 

Just over half (56 percent) of Americans agree strongly with the statement that “the humanities should be an important part of every American’s education,” while 38 percent “somewhat agreed” with the statement, according to a new survey of 5,015 American adults from the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

The survey found differences in attitudes across educational levels, political ideologies and gender. While 68 percent of college graduates strongly agree that the humanities should be an important part of every American’s education, just 47 percent of people without a college degree do. Liberals (70 percent) are more likely than conservatives (48 percent) to strongly agree the humanities are important. Women (60 percent) are also more likely than men (52 percent) to see the humanities as being an important part of every American’s education.

The survey also found that 78 percent of Americans wish they had taken more courses in at least one humanities-related subject in school. Nearly half (49 percent) wish they’d taken more classes in languages other than English.

Eighty-one percent of respondents said they regularly use at least one humanities-related skill in the workplace, and 29 percent of respondents said they think their career advancement has been “at least partially impaired” by a deficiency in at least one humanities-related skill.

The survey also asked Americans about their engagement with humanities-related content in their daily lives, through such activities as consumption of humanities-related video or audio programming, reading fiction and nonfiction books, researching humanities-related topics online, visiting museums, and attending poetry readings and other cultural events. While 97 percent of respondents engaged at least sometimes in at least one humanities-related activity over the last year, a majority of those surveyed did not engage in any single activity often or very often.

The following was published in the St. Cloud Times, our local newspaper:

Why we need to embrace liberal arts

Carolyn Hartz (professor of philosophy), St. Cloud
November 11, 2020
Many Americans woke up the day after the election in disbelief — how could so many of my fellow citizens really have voted for the other guy? If anything is clear from this experience, it is that there is a deep divide in our country.

This goes beyond a failure to communicate; it’s a failure of understanding.

Both sides say they value freedom, for example. But neither side is very good at articulating what their concept of freedom consists in. This is a philosophical question.

Another aspect (among many others) of this divide is between a conception of persons as independent individuals and one that sees them as fundamentally connected. This is a metaphysical issue about the nature of persons, and is also a philosophical issue. But most people have little awareness of how their conception of persons underlies their political views, or even how to think about these conceptions.

There are many more issues at the heart of our failure to understand each other, issues that lie deep in our fundamental conceptions of ourselves and our values. What makes it so hard to talk about these things? The situation was not always this way, but it has been building for a while now. How did it get this way?

It’s no accident that the increase in the rancorous political atmosphere has accompanied another change: education (particularly higher education) has increasingly tailored itself to market forces. Students don’t go to college to become educated, learn how to think, expand their horizons and deepen their appreciation of life experiences. They go to college to get a job.

There are many (good) reasons for this; the cost of college and the burden of student debt is a major factor. But I want to focus on the effects of this trend.

The liberal arts have always been the place where students learned how (not what) to think about value, about their own conceptions of themselves and others. Philosophy, literature, theater, the arts and history have all centered on these fundamental issues about human nature and how we relate to each other and the rest of the world.

As interest in these issues have eroded in favor of marketability and employability, we find ourselves increasingly at a loss about how to understand or even talk to each other about political, ethical and metaphysical issues that divide us. We have no common language in which to position different views on these issues.

Even many of the liberal arts have been forced to shoehorn themselves into a model of education that sees their value only as a path to employment. We’ve just seen the result.

The problem is not so much that we don’t agree on what freedom is (for example). The problem is that we have little awareness of what these different conceptions are or how to reason about them.

The erosion of the liberal arts has fed directly into the situation that the country finds itself in today.

Carolyn Hartz is a professor of philosophy at SCSU and a champion of the liberal arts.

Very interesting stuff!
Let us know what your thoughts are on liberal educations and the humanities!

Kseniia Maksimova – Fulbright Scholar and Current Grad Student

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Kseniia MaksimovaSpecial Guest Author – Kseniia Maksimova

Fulbright Scholar Currently Studying at St. Cloud State University in the Rhetoric and Writing Graduate Studies Program

 

Kseniia is a second-year graduate student in the Rhetoric and Writing program at St. Cloud State University. She has been a tutor in the Write Place since her second semester in the university.

From early childhood, Kseniia has been hunting for thoughtful, inspirational stories that leave an imprint on a reader’s soul. Following a dream to publish her own story, she applied for a Fulbright scholarship that later brought her from Russia to the U.S. and gave her an opportunity to study Rhetoric and Writing.

Kseniia graduated from Kazan Federal University where she earned her B.A. in teaching Russian and English. Working as a journalist at the KFU student board, she contributed to the development of student media as she wrote articles for the university website and provided the informational support of the institute’s events. Besides, Kseniia presented her research on political correctness at scientific conferences. Some of her works were published in the KFU collection of scientific articles. A few years later, her fiction piece “Speech!” was published in Kaleidoscope, the SCSU Multicultural Literary Arts Magazine.

Inspired by the experience of working at the Write Place, Kseniia is planning to become a writing coach in one of the centers of academic writing in Russia, once she returns to her home country. She believes she can make a great contribution to the development of writing centers by sharing her experience of being a tutor in the U.S. In addition, Kseniia is continuing to move toward her dream to become a non-fiction writer and she is constantly working on polishing her writing skills.

Excited about traveling and learning about American culture, Kseniia hopes to continue to explore different states while living in the U.S. One of her hobbies that aligns with traveling is post-crossing (exchanging postcards and letters with people from all around the world) which, she believes, helps people to stay connected and learn more about each other. Apart from this, Kseniia likes reading, making various handicrafts, learning French, and hiking.

 

Visiting Scholar from China Researches Sinclair Lewis at St. Cloud State

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Dr. Chen in front of SCSU huskyCentral Minnesota’s literary claim to fame again attracted international attention this Spring. The author of the book Sinclair Lewis and American Popular Culture, Professor Ying Chen, came from the University of Inner Mongolia, China, to spend six months as a visiting scholar in the English Department in order to work with the Sinclair Lewis Papers in University Archives.

You won’t easily find her book on Amazon.com since it is written in Chinese, but Dr. Chen is an authority in, among other things, the reception of Nobel Laureate Lewis in China after the country’s turning to the outside world during the 1980s.

Despite disruptions to her library access during Spring 2020 from COVID-19, Dr. Chen forged ahead with three articles and her first Zoom presentation to the Sinclair Lewis Society of America. Her current research focuses on comparing the Lewis’s novel and play production versions of Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. But she has made efficient use of archive time to collect electronic copies of all the documents our library holds relating to Lewis. Encountering these original papers has transformed her understanding of the novelist and enabled to discover many Sinclair Lewises in this one writer. “Before coming here, I thought of him as a hero – and now I see him as we are, ordinary people…You would think from his novels that he was very serious and skeptical, criticizing everything, but when you read his letters you find him like a kid looking for attention from others,” she added. She sees this youthful characteristic as admirable, as a driver of his open and exploring mind.

Dr. Chen in front of Ruby Cora Webster HallThe half year here, which included sitting in on TESL classes and Monica Pelaez’s advanced Literary Theory and Criticism course was a “very difficult but rewarding experience” during an era that showed both “the best and the worst of America in an important year in American history.” Dr. Chen expressed her thanks for all the support from English and from Tom Steman of Archives. The Center for International Studies assisted her with all the unexpected COVID paperwork.

 

When at her home university in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Dr. Chen teaches the extremely popular course, Introduction to Contemporary Writers in Foreign Cultures.

If you’d like to read more about Sinclair Lewis, a native to Sauk Centre, Minnesota (roughly 45 miles from SCSU), click here!