Mark West

Honoring the Foremothers of the Civil Rights Movement — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played a pivotal role in America’s civil rights movement beginning in 1955, when he led the Montgomery bus boycott, and continuing until his death in 1968.  However, King was not a lone voice in the wilderness.  He was part of a larger movement that had its origins in the nineteenth century.   Today, as we honor King’s many contributions to the civil rights movement, I think that we should also honor the people who helped give birth to this movement, many of whom were African American women.

In her book titled Freedom Narratives of African American Women:  A Study of 19th Century Writings, Janaka Lewis examines the writings of several African American women who wrote about the meaning and importance of freedom.  The writers that Janaka covers in her book include Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Craft, Charlotte Forten, Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Lucy Craft Laney.  As Janaka points out in her book, these women writers actively participated the national discourse about the changing definitions of freedom and citizenship.  In the process, these women helped set the stage for the rise of the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Janaka will talk about Freedom Narratives of African American Women later this month as part of the Personally Speaking Series.  Her presentation will take place on Tuesday, January 29, 2019, at UNC Charlotte Center City.  The presentation will begin at 6:30 p.m.  A book signing and reception will follow her presentation. For more information and to RSVP, please click on the following link:  https://exchange.uncc.edu/how-early-womens-writings-led-to-civil-rights-discourse/

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Bryn Chancellor recently published an essay titled “String, Too Short” in Brevity: A Concise Journal of Nonfiction.

Juan Meneses recently introduced the Irish Ambassador to the United States, Daniel Mulhall, who gave a talk titled “A Virtuous Circle:  Ireland, the E.U. and the U.S.” as part of the UNC Charlotte International Speakers Series.

Jen Munroe‘s co-edited volume titled Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching was reviewed in the most recent volume of Sixteenth Century Journal.

Lara Vetter‘s A Curious Peril: H.D.’s Late Modernist Prose was reviewed in the most recent volume of the Modern Language Review.

Upcoming Events and Meetings — Here is a list of upcoming events and deadlines:

February 1 — The 2018 Faculty Recognition Event will take place on February 1, 2019, from 3:30 to 5:00 pm in the Harris Alumni Center. 

February 7 — Grace Ocasio will participate in a poetry reading at the Waccamaw Library on Pawleys Island, SC, from 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm.

Quirky Quiz Question — One of the books that Janaka examines in Freedom Narratives of African American Women is a classic autobiography titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  This book was originally published under the pseudonym of Linda Brent.  What is the real name of the author of this autobiography?

Last week’s answer: deepest Peru
The CLGO’s “Celebration of Paddington Bear” brings to mind Paddington Bear’s origin story.  According to this story, in what country was Paddington Bear living before he moved to London? 

Coming of Age Day — Today is Coming of Age Day in Japan.  Celebrated on the second Monday in January, Coming of Age Day is a national holiday honoring all young adults who reach the age of 20 at any point during the year.  In Japan, 20 is considered the age of majority, which means that young people gain the right to vote and drink alcoholic beverages on their 20th birthday.  Throughout Japan, local governments hold a ceremony called Seijin-shiki on Coming of Age Day.   During this ceremony, young people are introduced to the rights and responsibilities associated with adulthood.

Although the United States does not have a national holiday that is comparable to Japan’s Coming of Age Day, the process of transitioning from childhood to adulthood is still an important aspect of American society and culture.  This transition is reflected in several of the courses that the English Department is offering this semester.  Henry Doss, for example, is teaching a topics course titled “Southern Childhood in Films, Stories, and Performances” in which he is exploring the coming-of-age experience for young people growing up in the South.  Janaka Lewis is offering an upper-level course on “Black Girlhood.”  In this course, she is covering several texts that deal with coming-of-age themes, including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give.  Like Janaka, Balaka Basu is also teaching a course that deals with the experience of growing up female.  Balaka is teaching a graduate-level course titled “Books for Girls and Other Young People” in which she encourages her students to examine what “girlhood studies has to do with women’s studies.”

Japan’s Coming of Age Day underscores the important role that culture plays in helping young people navigate the transitions associated with growing up.  In Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson argues that the process of maturing involves going through eight different stages, six of which take place before one reaches full adulthood.  As Erikson points out, the experience of progressing through these stages is shaped in part by one’s culture.  All societies have rituals and stories associated with coming of age, but they vary depending on each society’s cultural values and traditions.  I am pleased that our English Department provides our students with many opportunities to ponder the cultural significance of such coming-of-age rituals and stories.

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Allison Hutchcraft has published her poem “Among the Graves” in The Gettysburg Review.

Maya Socolovsky recently published an article titled “Material Literacies:  Migration and Border Crossings in Chicana/o Children’s Picture Books” in MELUS:  Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.  

Upcoming Events and Meetings — Here is a list of upcoming events and deadlines:

January 16 — Last day for students to add or drop a course with no grade.

January 19 — The Children’s Literature Graduate Organization (CLGO) and the Myers Park Library are co-sponsoring a “Celebration of Paddington Bear.”  This event will take place at the Myers Park Library (1361 Queens Road) on Saturday, January 19, from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm.

January 29 — The Personally Speaking presentation featuring Janaka Bowman Lewis will take place on Tuesday, January 29, 2019, at UNC Charlotte Center City.  Janaka’s presentation on her book Freedom Narratives of African American Women will begin at 6:30 p.m.  A book signing and reception will follow her presentation. For more information and to RSVP, please click on the following link:  https://exchange.uncc.edu/how-early-womens-writings-led-to-civil-rights-discourse/

February 7 — Grace Ocasio will participate in a poetry reading at the Waccamaw Library on Pawleys Island, SC, from 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm.

Quirky Quiz Question — The CLGO’s “Celebration of Paddington Bear” brings to mind Paddington Bear’s origin story.  According to this story, in what country was Paddington Bear living before he moved to London?

Last week’s answer: Heather Vorhies
This Monday Missive spotlights six faculty members who incorporate science in their English courses, but these faculty members are by no means the only English faculty members who draw on the sciences in their teaching. For example, another faculty member is teaching a course this semester on the “Rhetoric of Science.” What is the name of the professor who is teaching this course?

The Inclusion of Science in English Courses-– Last semester I recorded an episode for the NPR program called “The Academic Minute” in which I argued that the humanities and the sciences should be seen as overlapping circles on a Venn diagram.  I went on to discuss how professors in our English Department draw on insights from the sciences in their research.  Since I had less than two minutes to make my points, I did not discuss how our faculty also incorporate the sciences in their teaching.  However, many of our faculty members have a strong background in the sciences, and they draw on this background in their classes.  I recently contacted a number of these faculty members and asked them for information on how they incorporate the sciences in their teaching.  Their responses are listed below.

Paula Eckard regularly teaches a course called Literature of the American South.  In her response to me, she explains how she includes the sciences in this course:  “When I teach the novel The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels, I use various aspects of science and technology to examine the novel, including coal mining technologies, environmental destruction of mountains, and heavy metal contamination of groundwater and waterways.  We also discuss health implications related to these environmental issues, as well the health and social science aspects of opioid addiction, illness, and aging in Appalachia.  When I teach works by Thomas Wolfe, including The Lost Boy and Look Homeward, Angel, we discuss issues related to infectious disease in the early 20th century, including typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and influenza.  As a registered nurse, I had many courses in the sciences, so bringing those topics to bear on literary discussions seems a relevant thing to do.”

Jen Munroe has researched the roles that women have played in the history of science.  In her response to me, she discusses how this research interest relates to her teaching:  “Last spring I taught an upper-division course titled Gender, Science, and Nature. I asked the students to consider how the development of scientific discourse in the seventeenth century in England (the origins of our modern scientific methodology) cast the nonhuman world (plants and nonhuman animals) as objects of inquiry divorced from the human world and how notions of male, elite ‘objective,’ scientific knowledge was posed as in opposition to amateur experimentation and knowledge of non-male, non-elite groups and resulted in the further marginalization of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the poor. In our course, that is, we considered how studying the ways that gender, science, and nature (and their interconnections) came to mean in a certain way three hundred years ago has informed tensions between Humanities and STEM today.”

Alan Rauch has a graduate degree in biology, and he frequently draws on his background in the sciences in his scholarship.  In his response to me, he explains how he incorporates science and technology in many of the courses that he teaches:  “Book History, which I frequently teach, is always and inevitably about science and technology, to say nothing of literacy and the rise of ‘knowledge’ (often scientific) as a commodity.  The Graphic Novel, relying as it does on visual representation is enabled and driven by technologies of print and the cognitive awareness of how readers process image and text together.  Finally, Animals, Culture, & Society addresses the very essence of our scientific selves, and the cultural identities that we manufacture out of our organismal selves, and the animals around us.  My interest in animals, culture, and society stems, of course, from the many years I spent studying zoology, but also draws on a lifelong commitment to scientific knowledge.  That commitment was predicated on a model that rejects the idea of overlapping circles in a Venn diagram, in favor of a synthetic matrix in which the terms science and culture are merely different terms that describe the same idea.  Cultural studies of animals, which looks at behavioral, ecological, physiological, and anatomical variations of living beings, underscores the idea of a synthetic matrix because we can never get ourselves out from under our own interpretations of ourselves as scientific and cultural creatures.”

Matthew Rowney has an expertise in the relationship between literature and the environment especially as it relates to the Romantic period in British literature.  In his response to me, he writes about the various ways he draws on this expertise in his teaching:  “In my Romanticism and Ecology course, I ask students to consider the first published account of the life of a black woman, Mary Prince, which details ten years working in the salt ponds on Turks Island, then part of the British colony of The Bahamas. We consider the importance of this substance in part through an understanding of its scientific qualities, including its geological formation and contribution to the tectonics that shape the earth’s surface, its chemical qualities, which enable its use as a preservative throughout much of human history, and its physiological effects, particularly in terms of the epidemiology of hypertension among members of the African diaspora.  My experience has been that when students consider cultural and scientific representations side by side rather than in isolation, they gain unique insight into how we might face contemporary global challenges.”

Ralf Thiede is interested in the relationship between language acquisition and the science of brain development.  In his response to me, he comments on how this interest relates to some of the linguistics courses that he teaches:  “Since 1990, I have been teaching a course called The Mind and Language that explores how brain architecture and language shape each other (within and across brains).  This semester, I am teaching (for the fifth time) a course in the linguistics of children’s literature, this time with an emphasis on what children’s books uniquely contribute to neural development that is not already present in child-directed speech.  And in the Fall of 2019, I am going to teach an honors course that explains linguistic inequality in evolutionary terms.”

Greg Wickliff has conducted extensive research on the connections between the history of science and the development of technical communication.  In his response to me, he explains how this research interest informs his teaching:  “I integrate science into several of my English courses that examine how formal arguments are constructed through technology, writing, and illustration. For example, in my course titled Visual Rhetoric, students are introduced to material from Lorraine Datson (a historian of science) and Peter Galison (a physicist) about the history of the concept of Objectivity, then they read and discuss material from Colin Ware (a data visualization expert and oceanographer) in Visual Thinking for Design, about the physiology and perceptual psychology of vision.  Students also explore the treatment of Photography and Science by Kelley Wilder (a historian of photography) and go on to study selections from a book by the historian of science Klaus Hentschel: Visual Cultures in Science and Technology: A Comparative History. By the end of the course, questions of computer modeling and measurement come to the fore in selections from the computer scientists Julie Steele and Noah Illinsky’s Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data Through the Eyes of Experts.”

As these six examples illustrate, our English Department has many connections to the STEM disciplines, and these connections are often reflected in the courses that we offer.  At least in terms of our English Department, there really isn’t a conflict between the humanities and the STEM disciplines.  For our department, this much ballyhooed conflict is just a false dichotomy.

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Bryn Chancellor last week was a Visiting Writer for Converse College’s low-residency MFA program in Spartanburg, SC. She gave a craft lecture titled “Later, and Later Still: Exploring the ‘Nth’ Perspective and the Retrospective ‘I’,” and a fiction reading from Sycamore.

Katie Hogan recently delivered the following two papers at the Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago:  “Narrating Queer Disaster” and “Compounded Exploitation: Race, Gender, and Contingency.

Jen Munroe recently published a co-authored article titled “Becoming Visible: Recipes in the Making” in Early Modern Women Journal, 13(1) 2018: 132-142.  She was also a respondent for the “Marlowe and Ecology” roundtable at the Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago.

Upcoming Events and Meetings — Here is a list of upcoming events and deadlines:

January 9 — First day of classes for the Spring 2019 semester.

January 16 — Last day for students to add or drop a course with no grade.

January 29 — The Personally Speaking presentation featuring Janaka Bowman Lewis will take place on Tuesday, January 29, 2019, at UNC Charlotte Center City.  Janaka’s presentation on her book Freedom Narratives of African American Women will begin at 6:30 p.m.  A book signing and reception will follow her presentation. For more information and to RSVP, please click on the following link:  https://exchange.uncc.edu/how-early-womens-writings-led-to-civil-rights-discourse/

February 7 — Grace Ocasio will participate in a poetry reading at the Waccamaw Library on Pawleys Island, SC, from 3:00 to 4:00.

Quirky Quiz Question — This Monday Missive spotlights six faculty members who incorporate science in their English courses, but these faculty members are by no means the only English faculty members who draw on the sciences in their teaching.  For example, another faculty member is teaching a course this semester on the “Rhetoric of Science.”  What is the name of the professor who is teaching this course?

Last week’s answer: Apple Records

“Imagine” was originally released on a record label that was founded by the Beatles in 1968.  What is the name of this record label?