More "Recent Achievements"

Recent Achievements in English (August 2012):

Dennis Allen gave the following conference presentations during the past academic year: “Queer Subjects: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home," Queer Places, Practices, and Lives: A Symposium in Honor of Samuel Steward, May 18-19, Ohio State University; “Horror, Comedy, and Shaun of the Dead," Professors Vs. Zombies: A Symposium, April 14-15, 2012, University of Louisville; "’No Way’: Skepticism and the Possibility of Truth in Internet Commentary,” Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, Feb. 23-25, 2012, University of Louisville; “Kathy Griffin as Fag Hag,” MMLA, Nov. 4-6, 2011, St. Louis; "The Short Session,” ACL(X), Sept. 29-Oct. 1, 2011, Penn State University.

Amanda Cobb’s poems “They Got Themselves Up Killingly,” “The Creature Regarded Her Balefully,” ”She Believes in the Afterlife,” and “Alcohol is In It!” appeared in Verse online http://versemag.blogspot.com/ 

Lara Farina gave talks this summer at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI and the meeting of the New Chaucer Society (in lovely Portland, OR). She recently finished editing a special issue of the journal Postmedieval, one dedicated to "The Intimate Senses" and scheduled to be published this December.  

Ryan Fletcher will be presenting a paper at the Rocky Mountain MLA convention this October in Boulder, CO. The paper is titled, "'Where Our Sins Lie Unatoned:' Violence, Family, and Flannery O'Connor in Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska," and it is part of a special session on the works of Springsteen.  

Catherine Gouge’s essay “Multiple Literacies in the Technical Editing Classroom:  An Approach to Teaching Copyediting” was published in The Journal of Literacy and Technology, 13:2 (June 2012): 55-80. http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/index2.htm 

Rosemary Hathaway gave a lecture to the University of Missouri-Columbia's English Department at the invitation of their  Student Folklore Society.  The talk was titled "'Re-Mapping' Nella Larsen:  Hybridity,  Liminality, and Transnational Folklore (or, Death By Folklore)."  Her article titled “Reading Art Spiegelman’s _Maus as Postmodern Ethnography” appeared in the Journal of Folklore Research 48.3 (2011).  

Kirk Hazen notes that The West Virginia Dialect Project spent 14 months creating “sound slides” from interviews of the 67 speakers in the West Virginia Corpus of English in Appalachia (WVCEA). Altogether, the process took anywhere between 25-40 hours to align each interview and over 2,000 hours to manually time-align the entire corpus. This work was supported by two National Science Foundation grants, “A Sociolinguistic Baseline for English in Appalachia” (BCS 0743489) and “Phonetic Variation in Appalachia” (BCS-1120156). The primary research assistants on this project were Jaclyn Daugherty, Jacqueline Kinnaman, Lily Holz, Kevin Walden, Jessi Jones, Madeline Vandevender, with assistance from Mandy Clark, Emily Justiss, Shannon Goudy, and Evan Chapman.

Kirk Hazen, Jessica Deshler, and Vicki Sealey, both Assistant Professors of Mathematics, have received funding for an ARTS project (Awards for Research Team Scholarship). The nearly $27,000 award will fund research designed to examine the mathematical language of undergraduate students at WVU. The precision of mathematical language directly contrasts with the imprecise language of normal conversations. This contrast can become the source of difficulties when these students are expected to read, write, understand and graphically interpret mathematical language while moving between these methods of communication freely in an undergraduate mathematics classroom. The project team combines the qualitative methods of mathematics education with the quantitative methods of linguistics to provide a more thorough picture of our students’ difficulties. The research is motivated by the need to develop a greater awareness of our students’ specific understanding of mathematical language.  

Kirk Hazen is also a Sponsor for the Advance program (http://advance.wvu.edu/) for Juliana De la Mora. Professor De la Mora is just starting her second year at the World Languages department. Importantly, she is also a quantitative sociolinguistic variationist.  She was eligible for the WVU ADVANCE Sponsorship program, and she and Kirk together were able to convince the powers-that-be that Kirk could be her Sponsor (the program is set up to have external mentors).  Kirk has met with Juliana frequently to help her develop a research program and an external NSF proposal to the linguistic program. 

Renée Nicholson recently joined the book review staff of Los Angeles Review, where her monthly reviews appear both online and in the print journal. Her interview with Steve Almond is forthcoming in Fiction Writers Review. As well, she was just made a voting member of the Dance Critics Association.  

Courtney Novosat’s essay "Outside Dupin’s Closet of Reason: (Homo)sexual Repression and Racialized Terror in Poe’s 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'" will be in the journal Poe Studies this academic year.  She is currently co-authoring a revised instructor's manual for the ninth edition of Bedford/St. Martin's Rereading America.  

Christina Seymour's poem "It's Just a Dark Hill" will be published in the upcoming issue of Third Wednesday. 

Ethel Smith was invited to the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen to read from and discuss her recently published book Reflections of the Other:  Being Black in Germany.  She served as a guest professor while in residence at the University. 

Andi Stout has a poem forthcoming in Scissor and Spackle; it will appear online and in print.  Her one-line poem was selected by Nicelle Davis for a poetry in motion project; the poem has been made into a car magnet and is traveling around Southern California this summer. She'll post photos of where it's traveled on the Bees Knees blog in mid-August.  Andi opened for current U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway at the Connotation Press Reading at the AWP Conference in Chicago earlier this year.  Finally, she took second place in the Hungry Poets Contest in April. 

Jeffrey Yeager has two articles forthcoming: "How this World is Given to Lying!: Orson Welles's Deconstruction of Traditional Historiographies in Chimes at Midnight," which will be part of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference's 2012 proceedings; and "The Social Mind: John Elof Boodin's Influence on John Steinbeck's Phalanx Writings: 1935-42," has been accepted and will appear in the Fall edition of Steinbeck Review.