Although the last year, and even just the last semester, were trying at times, our English Department instructors continued to showcase their excellence with their achievements!
Dr. Deb Barker’s essay titled "The Aesthetics of Justice and Redress in Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves will be coming out this fall. Hers is the lead essay in the critical collection titled Louise Erdrich's Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts, published by Michigan State Press.
Dr. Barker just signed a book contract for Post-Indian Aesthetics: Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty. This edited essay collection includes her essay on Lakota writer Joseph Marshall, titled "Not All Indians Dance: Counterhistorical Aesthetics in the Work of Joseph Marshall, III." It will be published by the University of Arizona Press in 2022.
Dr. Barker was interviewed for the May 12 WQOW story “State of the Tribes address bring attention to culture, history, issues.”
Dr. Dorothy Ka-Ying Chan is pleased to share the news that her literary journal, Honey Literary, has debuted its inaugural issue. Honey Literary is a BIPOC-focused journal founded and created by all women of color. In addition, Chan’s poem “Psychic Crush of the Week” has been published in the latest issue of Passages North.
Dr. Chan recently had her poetry showcased in a variety of publications, including: an interview with Ruben Quesada about her second full-length poetry collection, “Revenge of the Asian Woman,” (Diode Editions, 2019) in his “Poetry Today” feature on Kenyon Review; her triple sonnet, “Triple Sonnet Triple Sonnet, Because You Are Not My Home, You Are Not My Home, You Are Not My Family” is part of Foglifter Press' anthology “Home is Where You Queer Your Heart,” now available for pre-order; and “Revenge of the Asian Woman” was reviewed in Hayden’s Ferry Review. In addition, Chan was a poetry reader March 6 for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) offsite virtual reading “On Line, Off Site with The Adroit Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review and Passages North.” She also read and presented during the Pleiades Visiting Writers Series at University of Central Missouri for their Feb. 25 event, “Making a Writing Life: A reading, panel conversation and Q&A with award-winning writers F. Douglas Brown, Dorothy Chan and Ashley M. Jones,” and read for the San Francisco-based “Something Ordinary” reading series March 12.
Dr. Chan has had her new triple sonnet, “Triple Sonnet for Dennis Rodman, #91, on my Television Screen” published in The Margins, the literary journal of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
Dr. Chan had her new triple sonnet, “Triple Sonnet for Chinese Girls with No Humility,” published in ALL Review, a publication of the Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, for National Poetry Month.
Dr. Chan co-wrote a proposal, titled “Intersectionality and Radical Empathy: Delivering Inclusive Online Learning in a Year of Crisis,” which has been accepted for inclusion in the program for the 2022 Modern Language Association International Symposium, to be held in partnership with the University of Glasgow. Chan will present with Dr. Rita Mookerjee (organizer/leader) of Iowa State University, Dr. Ruxandra Marcu of Iowa State University and Christina Giarrusso of Arizona State University.
Dr. Chan is pleased to report that her literary journal, Honey Literary Inc., now is officially a 501(c)(3) organization.
Dr. Chan is pleased to announce that Diode Editions will publish her forthcoming chapbook, “BABE,” in winter 2021. Additionally, Chan’s poem “Triple Sonnet for Oversexed and Overripe and Overeager” has been published in the inaugural issue of just femme & dandy, a biannual literary and arts magazine.
Dr. Heather Fielding has had the following works published: “Marina Lewycka, Women’s Work, and the Figure of the Ukrainian Woman as Economic Migrant” in Euxeinos: Culture and Governance in the Black Sea Region 30 (2020) and “Marina Lewycka” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature, ed. Richard Bradford (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2020), pages 181-188.
Dr. Karly Grice co-authored an article, titled “‘Mismatched Yet Perfectly Puzzled’: Collage and/as Black Girls’ Literacies in Piecing Me Together,” which was published in the spring 2021 volume of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. In this article, the authors use Muhammad and Haddix’s Black girls’ literacies framework to analyze Watson’s text for how she uses collage — the action, the artwork and the conceptual metaphor — to address identity and history (re)making in the Black diaspora.
Dr. Grice received a 2021 Faculty Research Grant for $800 from the Children’s Literature Association for her research project, “Just Say Know: The Entanglement of Drugs and Adolescence in YA Literature and Media.” The project is a broad, interdisciplinary discussion of the way young adult literature in the 21st century deals with drug issues in critical and holistic ways that are representative of the developing scholarship surrounding education, addiction, the cultural crises of various drug epidemics, the legalization of certain drugs, and the social justice and racial reckoning movements of the late 2010s and early 2020s.
B.J. Hollars won an award in the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s annual Better Newspaper Contest for his columns in the Leader-Telegram. Hollars won first place for column writing while See took second.
B.J. Hollars and UW-Eau Claire alumnus Michael Perry were guests on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Spectrum West” Feb. 25. Hollars discussed the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild’s March 4 “All Creatures Great and Small” event, and Perry shared details about his March 10 fundraiser for farmland conservation/water-quality initiatives. Learn more and listen.
B.J. Hollars was a guest on BYUradio's Constant Wonder. He shared insights from his book, “Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country." Listen to the conversation here.
Dr. Lucy A. Johnson was a guest remote speaker for two digital design courses in February at San Francisco State University and the University of Northern Iowa. Johnson's talks focused on ethical image design and default users through her research on emojis.
Dr. Johnson was an invited (remote) speaker March 30 for over 200 employees at Sony Interactive Entertainment (mainly those working at PlayStation). Her talk, titled “How We Look Dictates What We See: The Politics of Image Design,” discussed the ways in which design has never been neutral. Looking specifically at the ways in which images serve as lexicons for both representation and ideology, Johnson analyzed the tension between image and word as rhetorical symbol systems, focusing on the ways in which image design becomes hegemonized to reflect the dominant discourse in her analysis of emoji characters. Johnson extended her critique of emoji to other ubiquitous image communication systems such as GIFs and memes, attending to the significance of cultural origin and rhetorical intention as a way to enact digital ethics at both the level of form and content.
Dr. Johnson (remotely) presented her research “Digital Literacies, Labor, and Access Amidst a Pandemic” at the (virtual) 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication, held April 7-10.
Dr. Theresa Kemp co-authored a chapter titled “Accounting for Early Modern Women in the Arts: Reconsidering Women’s Agency, Networks, and Relationships” published in “Challenging Women’s Agency and Activism in Early Modernity,” edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pages 283-308.
John Price will have his essay titled "Melville and Ford: Ahab and the Duke" published on August 14, 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan in a collection of essays called Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media.
Dr. Cathy Rex presented her paper, titled “Remembering and Forgetting Plantation History in Jamaica: Rose Hall and Greenwood Great House” at the Society of Early Americanists 12th Biennial Conference (held virtually) on March 4. The paper was part of the panel “Public Memory, Race and Heritage Tourism of Early America” that Rex both proposed and chaired — and that was selected to be a featured part of the conference’s Anti-Racism and Equity Panel Stream. This paper is part of a forthcoming collection from Routledge (Public Memory, Race and Heritage Tourism of Early America) edited by Rex and Dr. Shevaun Watson (UW-Milwaukee).
Dr. Jonathan J. Rylander had his article “Embracing the ‘Always-Already’: Toward Queer Assemblages for Writing Across the Curriculum Administration” published in College Composition and Communication.
Dr. Kaia Simon presented her research in a roundtable discussion called “Teaching for Justice for Multilingual Writers” at the virtual 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication, held April 7-10.
Dr. Stacy Thompson had a book chapter, titled “A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife,” published in “The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature,” edited by W. Michelle Wang et al., New York: Routledge, 2020.
Dr. Thompson presented his paper “A Disney Death: ‘Coco,’ ‘Black Panther,’ and the Limits of the Afterlife” March 18 at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, a virtual event.
