[Pictured above: Emily Polk, Lisa Ramee, Ruth Starkman, and Harriett Jernigan representing PWR, NSC, NCR, LSP, and SOAR at the Find Your Stanford Admit Day event in late April. Not pictured: Ruth's faithful companion, Ginger]
In the spirit of celebrating the end to a busy year, read on to get a glimpse of some of what our lecturers have been up to outside the classroom this spring.
Jennifer Johnson will serve again this year as a proposal reviewer for the Antiracism, Decolonization, and Intersectionality for Systemic Transformation and Language, Culture & Socialization strands of the American Association of Applied Linguistics Annual Conference.
Norah Fahim's and Jennifer Johnson's book collection, Linguistic Justice on Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students (co-edited with Brooke R. Schreiber & Eunjeong Lee) was nominated for the 2024 AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) Book Award. Find the e-version of the book through the Stanford Libraries here.
At the end of May, Lindsey Felt participated in a panel as part of the spring symposium sponsored by Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence) called "Creativity in the Age of AI: AI Impacting Arts, Arts Impacting AI." Lindsey's panel was titled, "AI, Disability Activism, & Arts." Adam Banks was a moderator for a panel on "AI, Music, and Ethics" at the Symposium.
Harriett Jernigan, Chris Kamrath, and Nissa Cannon participated in the USC symposium Future of Writing: Pedagogy, Process, Potential. You can read more about their presentations here.
In addition, Harriett was once again awarded the Dr. St. Clair Drake Teaching award, this time sharing the honor with Michelle Elam. She received the award at the Black Community Services Center Awards Ceremony. The Dr. St. Clair Drake Teaching award "is presented to a faculty member who has demonstrated excellence in teaching. The ideal candidate for this award has inspired students intellectually and demonstrated a commitment to enhancing the intellectual vitality / academic environment of the Black community" (BCSC website).
In addition, Harriett, along with PI Adam Banks, was awarded a Generative AI and the Future of Learning seed grant for their project, "College Writing with the BlackRhetorics Corpus for Generative Models."
Hayden Kantor attended the Sterling Award ceremony as the Stanford mentor for his student, Kayla Ryan, whom he taught in PWR 1 and PWR 2. The J.E. Wallace Sterling Scholastic Award for distinguished academic performance at Stanford is presented to the top seniors in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Each award recipient invites the Stanford faculty or staff member and the secondary school or other pre-collegiate teacher who have been the most influential in their academic career.
Meg Formato and Mutallip Anwar also attended the Sterling Award ceremony as the Stanford mentors for their own former PWR students.
Writing on the Edge, a journal out of UC Davis, has accepted Sarah Pittock's essay, "Making Science Communication Personal: Teaching Lifewriting to STEM Undergraduates." The essay is based on her experience teaching PWR91CL: Self & Science for the Notation in Science Communication. The essay should be published this summer.
Becky Richardson writes, "On May 4th, I helped with the virtual Victorian Recollections, Revolutions, and Realities Conference organized by Dr. Lara Karpenko and her English 316 class at Carroll University. I'd alerted the students I knew were working on Victorian literature about the call for papers a few weeks back, and I was delighted to see their fabulous work in conversation with others thinking about these themes! Stanford English major Malia Maxwell presented work from her thesis, 'Jane Eyre’s Lesbian Genre-Politics,' and Lavi Sundar, a first-year student, presented the research she took on in my PWR1 course this past fall, titled 'The Living Ghosts of Wuthering Heights: Gendered and Racial Tropes across Eras.'"
Selby Wynn Schwartz's novel, After Sappho, is a finalist for the Orwell Prize in Political Fiction. It was one of four books shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize in Fiction.The James Tait Black Prize – presented by the University of Edinburgh since 1919 – is the only major British book prize judged by literature scholars and students, and is the UK's longest-running literary award. In addition, After Sappho was reviewed by the Washington Post, NPR, and The New York Times, among other news outlets.
Over the past few months, Selby has been busy with speaking engagements. She participated in "Poetry and Fiction: The Artist's Influence," a Bay Area Book Festival event, in early May; she was also invited by the international research group L&GEND: Literature & Gender Identity, to talk about her article in «Intersectional Italy»: Special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 58: 5 (Routledge , Taylor & Francis, October 2022), edited by Caterina Romeo and Giulia Fabbri. She also presented a paper at the annual AAIS [American Association of Italian Studies] conference on May 18th, on a panel called "Female Voices" organized by the Women's Studies Caucus. Her paper was titled, “‘Anche la mia amica ha le scarpe rotte’: Natalia Ginzburg’s Intimate Interlocutor.”
Selby also shares that her former student Willow Herz has been selected as a winner of the Nelee Langmuir Memorial Award in Jewish Studies by the faculty board at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Willow's project, "Silence is the Enemy of Stories: The Importance of Storytelling to the Jewish Identity," was described by the judges as a creative and engaging piece of work.
Peter Tokofsky is busy writing for the Half Moon Bay Review and Pacifica Tribune on local issues ranging from surf camp equity to school district budget crises and farmworker housing. Over the summer, he'll be preparing a presentation for the American Folklore Society meeting, "Is Carnival carnivalesque?", which looks at the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on institutionalized Carnival celebrations. In addition, with a Stanford HAI subgrant, he's investigating ways generative AI can enhance public memory sites studied in his PWR1 courses. This subgrant is part of a larger grant on novel pedagogies awarded to Ruth Starkman and Russell Berman.
Ann Watters completed the Camino de Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage walk in Spain, walking the first 415 miles locally on a "virtual Camino" and the last 75miles in Spain.
Roberta Wolfson writes, "I'm excited to share a few professional accomplishments. First, research that I presented at the 2022 conference meeting of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association was recently published in the inaugural 2022 Conference Proceedings. In my paper, "Rewriting the Mixed Self: Narrative Resistance against the White Monoracial Imagination," I analyze how three mixed race authors, Sui Sin Far, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Mary Whitehead Lee, use their narrative testimonies to problematize the centering of whiteness in popular U.S. discourses about multiraciality. Second, I contributed an entry on the Chicano writer Luis Javier Rodriguez for the Encyclopedia of Latino Literature, which was recently published in March 2023. This encyclopedia provides an essential overview of the major literary works produced by Latinx authors alongside related thematic concepts. In my entry, I discuss how Rodriguez uses his writings (which include memoirs, poetry collections, and short stories) to reduce gang violence, build Chicanx community and identity, and support at-risk youth. Finally, on April 1, 2023, I had the great pleasure of participating in a roundtable discussion on "College Writing: What It Is and What It's Not," hosted by the San Jose Area Writing Project. The goal of this event was to bring high school teachers and college instructors together to dispel myths about college writing and break down what actual college writing looks like. I was joined by several other PWR lecturers, Norah Fahim, Kath Rothschild, Brittany Hull, and Kevin DiPirro, who also participated in this roundtable discussion. Many thanks to Christine Alfano for letting us lecturers know about this opportunity, which was really fun and rewarding!"
