Announcement
As we move into the home stretch of the spring 2022 semester, please share with students the wonderful array of awards our department has to recognize our them, including a new award, The Joan Nessan Creative Writing Prize in Children’s Literature. More information is available through this link; all materials are due on April 29 and can be submitted through the Department’s English Majors and Minors Canvas Page.
Reminder
Please continue to take advantage of — and remind your students of — CSUN’s free and convenient on-campus Covid-19 PCR testing, available in front of the Extended Learning Commons (next to parking lot B4) and at the USU from 11am-7pm on weekdays. Appointments are recommended but walk-ups are always accommodated for students, faculty, and staff.
Opportunity
The Office of Community Engagement’s 2022-23 Grants Cycle is accepting applications to support community engaged teaching, scholarship and creative activity, including a seed grant for newly developing projects. For FAQs and an overview of the grants, please see this video.
Achievements
Kelan Koning was inducted into the Susan M. Daniels Diversity Mentoring Hall of Fame on March 30th. The Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame was established in 2015 to carry on the legacy of disability champion and lifelong mentor, Susan M. Daniels, and to spotlight individuals and groups around the country who are making a significant difference in the lives of youth and adults with disabilities through mentoring.
On Saturday, April 9, at 6:00 p.m., Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore will present a staged reading of Rick Mitchell’s Greetings From Puerto Rico 3.0, a new play (with Puerto Rican percussion) about crypto colonialism and taking back the power. Admission is free, and spectators are required to wear masks. Tía Chucha’s is located at 12677 Glenoaks Blvd. in Sylmar. Follow this link for more information!
Brandy Underwood, 2022-2023 CSUN College of Humanities Faculty Fellow, has been named an ACLS Carl and Betty Pforzheimer Fellow for her monograph, “”The Black Crowd: Leadership, Affect, and Racial Uplift in African American Literature,” which recently received an advance contract with Columbia University Press. “The Black Crowd” engages with literary texts that address prominent outbreaks of black crowd violence in the twentieth century: The Harlem riots of the 1930s and 1940s, the tumult of the 1960s, and the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Each historical moment is paired with an affect. This book project argues that following WWII, African American writers ranging from Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952) to Walter Mosley in Little Scarlet (2005) rendered the negative affective responses of middle-class black protagonists who witness black violent crowds in order to challenge the validity of contradictory racial uplift ideologies.
Congratulations, all!
In Memoriam
We remember with fondness our colleague Anne Kellenberger’s husband, Jim Kellenberger, who passed away last month. Jim was a faculty member in the Philosophy Department for over 40 years. The author or editor of, among other works, God-Relationships With and Without God (1989) and Inter-Religious Models and Criteria (1993), Jim was a scholar and teacher of ethics and the philosophy of religions, among other subject areas.