2023 might have started with gale winds, atmospheric rivers, flooding, and power outages, but that didn't stop our intrepid lecturers from continuing to pursue their intellectual and creative pursuits during winter quarter! Read on to be impressed by the achievements of our friends and colleagues.
Nissa Cannon presented two papers at January's MLA conference: the first, on the Paris Tribune's reporting on African American artists in the 1920s, as an invited participant in a panel celebrating the 100 year anniversary of Jean Toomer's Cane; and the second on John Dos Passos' 1919, as part of a panel she organized on Infrastructure and Interwar American Literature.
Norah Fahim and Jennifer Johnson facilitated a workshop at CCCC (February 18th, 2023 in Chicago). The workshop, Beyond the FYC: The Multilingual Writers Studio as a space for building critical language awareness, community and “doing hope” was part of the Second Language Writing Standing Group's half day workshop, Supporting Multilingual Writers in Diverse Literacy Spaces for Hope.
Liz Hille's student, Amanda Campos, has had her PWR 1 RBA accepted for publication in Intersect: Stanford's Journal on Science, Technology, & Society. Coming out of Liz's class on the Rhetoric of Resistance, Amanda's essay analyzed the dominant and resistant narratives about the Doerr school accepting big money from fossil fuel companies.
Harriett Jernigan helped Ruth Starkman host and moderate the event "Tech from the Margins," featuring Nakeema Stefflbauer, Atomico angel investor, startup advisor, and founder and CEO of Frauenloop, an organization that provides training for and supports women in making lateral moves into the tech industry. Dr. Stefflbauer spoke to enthusiastic students about her experiences as a Black woman in tech on January 27, 2023 at the Ujamaa Drake Lounge. Also in late January, Harriett gave a workshop on writing the diversity statement for the job search for the U.C. Davis Language Center.
In addition, Harriett writes, "I am really happy to announce that the German translation of the Say Their Names / No More Names exhibit is live. The translation was a collaboration with long-time colleague and friend Alexander Oertel, a lecturer based in the Language Center at Bauhaus-University Weimar. A labor of love for both of us, Alex and I picked over every word, phrase, and sentence in order to remain true to the exhibit's goals and make it accessible to multiple audiences."
Lastly, Harriet shared her participation in a storytelling event, "I was invited to participate in Mill Valley Library’s series called Naked Truth, a storytelling event they’ve been hosting for 10+ years. This was their first show since the lockdown. I joined seasoned veterans on the stage: the host, comedian Josh Healey, comedian Dhaya Lakshminayranan, performer Don Reed, and Glynn Washington from Snap Judgment. We entertained a lovely and engaging crowd of about 150. I told a story about traveling to Innsbruck, Austria, in 2006, where I ended up in a truly nutty situation." The event was attended by Ruth Starkman, Jonah Willihnganz, Laura Davis, and former PWR lecturer Donna Hunter.
Jennifer Johnson (with Katie Bernstein, Arizona State University & Usree Bhattacharya, University of Georgia) presented their work titled, "Transcription as Ethics: (Re)presenting young children’s complex communicative repertoires in applied linguistics research" at the American Applied Linguistics Conference in Portland, OR, on March 20th. Their paper was part of a larger colloquium, "Developing an ethical applied linguistics practice: Perspectives from different contexts and methodological approaches".
John Peterson reports that his winter 2022 PWR 2 student, Hannah Jeoung, has had her RBA accepted to the Stanford Journal of Public Health. Her essay is entitled "Mass Media and Menstruation."
Sarah Pittock and Kathleen Tarr led a two-part writing pedagogy workshop for Bucknell University faculty and writing center leadership titled "Making the Rhetoric You're Already Using a Purposeful Part of Your Teaching." In this workshop, they investigated how a rhetorical framework can support students’ growth as communicators within a discipline and with varied publics, arguing a rhetorical education should be an explicit goal of undergraduate education.
Matthew Redmond's article, "Magnificent Wreck: Samuel Coleridge at 250" was published in Public Books. The article was informed by conversations with several lecturers in the PWR community.
Becky Richardson writes, "I had the chance to be part of a feature on literature and reproductive rights in the New Ohio Review (issue 32) that a former Stanford student -- Louise Stewart, now a graduate student at Ohio University -- was putting together. It was such a treat to brainstorm with Louise about a potential essay to contribute, and then to see this wider conversation in the issue about how literature can help us rethink and re-articulate what's at stake today. My piece is titled "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Birth Without the Gendered Body."
Kath Rothschild shared two papers at the College Composition and Communication conference: Inclusive Practices for Writing Knowledge Transfer and Collaborative Teaching and New Approaches to STEM Learning. In addition, her student, Vignesh Kumar, published his RBA, "Charging Forward: Creating a Productive Framework for Promoting Electric Vehicle Adoption Among U.S. Cities Based on Development Stage" in Intersect: Stanford's Journal on Science, Technology, & Society in spring 2022.
An article that Selby Wynn Schwartz wrote, "In the name of Destà: Artivism, corporeality, and 'postcolonial pathways,'" was published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, as part of a special issue on "Intersectional Italy." In addition, Selby received an ArtsCatalyst grant for Spring 2023 to bring the multi-disciplinary artist Irene Carvajal to give workshops in her PWR 1 class, "Radical Acts of Art in Public: Rhetoric of Artivism." She also received a Cardinal Course designation & Cardinal Course grant for that class. She notes that "this grant supports a collaboration foregrounding the voices of incarcerated artists, under the auspices of Prison Renaissance. My co-imaginer in this project is the artivist Mesro Coles-El."
Kathleen Tarr is engaged to co-facilitate Stanford's April 21 Superfest Disability Film Festival Showcase. She also celebrated Women’s History Month with California Lutheran University's Film and Television Department as a Women In Film Summit panelist (Thousand Oaks). Kathleen with other women in the film industry discussed "the advancements in the industry and the needed changes for women and other minority groups."
Roberta Wolfson writes, "I have two exciting professional accomplishments that I'd like to share. The first bit of news is that I presented twice at the 2023 Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco this past January. I presented my first talk, "Cultivating Antiracist Praxis in a First-Year English Writing Classroom," for a pedagogy-focused panel on teaching identity and anti-racism in global language classrooms. In this talk, I provided an overview of how I teach my PWR 1 course, 'Writing for Liberation: The Rhetoric of Antiracism.' It was a great privilege to share about my pedagogy with a room of over 30 teacher-scholars from around the world! I presented my second talk, 'Testifying, Witnessing, and Mourning: Care-Based Labor in the AIDS Memoir,' for a panel organized by the MLA Life Writing division, in which I shared research from a chapter of my current book manuscript.
My second bit of news is that my latest research article was published in the most recent edition of College Literature. In this paper, entitled '"A Man of Two Faces and Two Minds": Just Memory and Metatextuality in The Sympathizer's Rewriting of the Vietnam War,' I examine how Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer (2015) represents the Vietnam War from an inclusive perspective of remembrance that Nguyen calls 'just memory,' which strives to recognize the shared humanity and inhumanity of the self and other."
