Announcements
We are finally at that miraculous moment in the semester when we can (hopefully) pause and celebrate amidst grading, writing, and other deadlines. Please applaud yourselves for all that you have accomplished despite the ongoing public health and civic crises that we continue to endure. If you are able, please join us to recognize our students and faculty this Friday, 5/13/22:
Celebrations
Departmental Awards Ceremony – 10 AM – In Person or Zoom, JR 319
https://csun.zoom.us/j/89209923331?pwd=WldCT0xCc3pMTmw4TG5ldDRMTEZmUT09
Meeting ID: 892 0992 3331
Passcode: 199731
MA Hooding Ceremony – 1 PM – In Person, Little Theater, Nordhoff Hall
Community Discussion
Please also consider attending the first annual Center for Public Humanities community lecture, “Critical Fabulation in the Canon and the Archives,” a discussion with I.S. Jones, George Uba, Shubha Venugopal, and Maya Riles, hosted by the CSUN Center for Public Humanities (directed by Danielle Spratt).
Reminders
Information on Honors Convocation and the COH Commencement can be found here.
Honors Convocation: Saturday, May 14, 6PM
COH Commencement: Monday, May 23, 8AM
Opportunities
If you are looking to develop or further develop your online teaching skills, consider attending one of the following Quality Learning and Teaching Rubric Events: 1) Introduction to Teaching Online Using QLT; 2) Advanced QLT Course in Teaching Online; or 3) Reviewing Courses Using the QLT Rubric. There are three summer cycles between June 6 and July 25, and all are three weeks in length. Find more information here.
Achievements
Scott Andrews presented “Joussistance: Jouissance, Survivance, and Native Eroticism” at the Association for the Studies in American Indian Literatures Virtual Conference, April 7-8, 2022. The presentation discusses representations of sexual pleasure as resisting and rehabilitating from colonization in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body, Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, and Tenille Campbell’s @IndianLovePoems.
Annabelle Bonebrake (MA, BA/FYI JYI) received honorable mention for the CSUN Outstanding Graduate Thesis Award for her volume of poetry, Specter/Spectator: A Ghost Walk.
Maya Bornstein will enroll as a PhD student in UC Irvine’s English Department this fall.
Jose L. Garcia presented his graduate project, “At My Most Beautiful: The Politics of Bodily Prostheses, Disability, and Replacement in Arryn Diaz’s Dresden Codak” at the “Transitions 9: New Directions in Comic Studies Conference” at the University of London in Spring 2021 and subsequently published this work in a 2021 issue of Vector: Journal of the British Science Fiction Association.
Deborah Gordon (FYI/JYI), Stephanie Reinhart (BA, English, CSUN; current credential student), and Yvette de la Vega (MA Student in English Literature) were selected to receive fellowships to attend a summer internship at the University of California, Santa Barbara to intern on the transcription and digitization project, “Hidden Archives: Race, Gender, and Religion in UCSB’s Ballitore Collection,” directed by Dr. Rachael Scarborough King (UCSB) and co-directed by Danielle Spratt and Emily Kugler (Howard University). The fully-funded internship will involve digitizing and computationally analyzing the Ballitore Collection, an archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century correspondence held at UCSB’s Special Research Collections. The materials relate to the Quaker community of Ballitore, Ireland, and include discussion of women writers, slavery and abolition, Quakerism and religious debates, and dreams. Students will work on creating a digital database of the materials and analyze it using digital humanities techniques such as social network analysis and topic modeling.
Krystal Howard published “‘how do I protest? / my words march across the page’: The 2021 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry,” co-authored with Catherine Kyle and Rachel Rickard Rebellino in The Lion and the Unicorn vol. 45, no. 3. Find the publication here.
Kelan Koning was inducted into the Susan M. Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame this spring. Kelan’s c co-proposed panel, “Love from Margin to Center: Community and Care as Liberatory Practices in Academia,” has been accepted for inclusion in the National Women’s Studies Association 2022 conference, “killing rage: Resistance on the Other Side of Freedom,” which will take place November 10 – 13, 2022 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In addition, Kelan just earned an ACUE Credential in Effective College Instruction.
Noreen Lace‘s novel, Our Gentle Sins, will be published on June 21!
Maya Riles, an MA student in English Literature with a concentration in Victorian literature, was selected to be this year’s CSUN Center for Public Humanities Archivist Fellow. She has helped transcribe documents from the University Library Special Collections and Archives and has organized a speaker event for the public as part of her role.
Danielle Spratt published “Austen’s Menippean Experiments: Paternalism and Empire in the Juvenilia and Mansfield Park” in British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Amanda Hiner and Elizabeth Tasker Davis (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 244-261. She was also elected to serve on the MLA Delegate Elections Committee and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Annual Conference Program Committee. This spring, Danielle also served as Interim Associate Director for The Office of Community Engagement.
Kimberly Tisdale, an M.A. student and dramatist, was recently chosen to be a Berkowitz Diversity Fellow by the Association of Los Angeles Playwrights.
Brendan Walsh has a short story, “Tears of the Sinner,” appearing in this spring’s edition of The Northridge Review, and the second novel in his A Fantastic Decade series, titled The Century’s Last Word, was published by Black Rose Writing in July of 2021.
Kimberly Wells earned an Exceptional Service to Students Award for 2022-23.
English Department Awards, Spring 2022
The Linda Nichols Joseph English Merit Scholarship
Stephanie Ruiz
Kate Ridgewell
Ching Li
The Lesley Johnstone Memorial Award
Vee Nino, for their poem, “There Are Some People I Thought I Was Going to Love.”
The Joan Nessan Creative Writing Prize in Children’s Literature
Helena Mahdessian, for their young adult novel, Levi and the Dream-Eater.
Robert apRoberts English Honors Prize
Sarin Parsakhian, for their essay, “Satire and Marxism: George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the Bourgeois Takeover.”
The Kitty Nard Memorial Scholarship
Sylvia Hillo
The Professor Mitchell Marcus Prize in English
Alden Robison
The Mahlon Gaumer Award
Maya Bornstein, for their essay, “Myth as Form in Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler.”
The Harry Finestone Award in English
Jessica Mullins, for their essay, “A Creature the Capitol Never Intended to Exist: Bicultural Identity in The Hunger Games.”
The Irene Clark Scholarship for Rhetoric and Composition
Yvette De La Vega, for their paper, “Re-imagining Discourse on Pedagogical Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking as It Relates to Writing Studies.”
Celebration of Life
After almost a year, the Overman family and friends are finally able to “safely” gather to celebrate the life of their daughter, Deva Marie Overman. Please join them on June 11, 2022 from 12-3PM in Los Angeles/Encino area or by ZOOM.
The Overman family will be holding this outdoors and providing individually boxed lunches and libations.
The family is trying to get an accurate headcount. If you plan to join the celebration (in person or on Zoom), please click this link to RSVP as soon as possible. The family will send the address of the location (and the Zoom link) to those who RSVP as the date gets closer. For those in need of accommodations, the closest hotel is the Courtyard by Marriott Los Angeles Sherman Oaks.