Faculty Accomplishments
From September 2009-December 2009
Jana Argersinger has edited and introduced, in collaboration with Michael Cornett (Duke Univ.), a multi-essay feature on the profession of journal editing, published in the 2009 volume of MLA's journal Profession. Topics include the intellectual work of journal editing, editing across disciplines, editing in a digital landscape, editing creative writing, and progressive political editing. Among the contributors are Marshall Brown (UW, editor of MLQ); Rita Charon and Maura Spiegel (Columbia, Literature and Medicine); Cynthia Selfe (Ohio State, Computers and Composition Online); Hilda Raz (UN-L, Prairie Schooner); and Basem Ra'ad and Hillel Schenker (Palestine-Israel Journal). The aim of the feature is to give people in the profession at large a deeper and wider look than they often get at what journal editors do and why the work is valuable--especially now that MLA is advocating a more "capacious" way of valuing scholarship that does justice to important essays and bodies of essays along with books.
Kristin Arola attended the Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference at Michigan State University, where she presented "Lessons from the Mixedblood: Complicating Diversity," part of the panel "Moving Beneath the Rhetoric of Diversity: Mixedblood Lessons, Micro-methodologies, and Exception-al Discourse." She attended THATCamp Pacific Northwest on October 17.
Nancy Bell will present "L2 Classroom Humor: Subversive, Linguistically Productive, or Just Plain Fun?" with Anne Pomerantz of the University of Pennsylvania at the 2010 American Association for Applied Linguistics in March. In addition, a paper she co-authored with Christian Hemplemann of Purdue University and Scott Crossley of Mississippi State University titled “Wordplay in Church Marquees” has been accepted for publication in HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research.
Donna Campbell presented “Making an American Citizen: Teaching Citizenship in Social Problem Films of the Progressive Era” at the American Studies Association Conference in Washington, D. C., on November 5. She also presented “She don’t want no ‘doptin’ of yours”: Stealing Children in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Annals of ‘Steenth Street” and Ann Petry’s The Street” at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) conference on October 23. Her essay, “Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s,” was published in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual (Duke University Press), and a review of Susan Kollin’s Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space appeared in Great Plains Quarterly. Campbell also attended THATCamp Pacific Northwest on October 17.
Peter Chilson chaired a panel discussion titled "Foreign Exchange: Europeans Encountering America" at the Western Literature Association Conference in Spearfish, SD, on October 1. Chilson also delivered his paper, "The Apprenticeship of an African Explorer: Henry Morton Stanley in the American West."
Bill Condon was elected Chair of the 2010 CCCC Nominating Committee. He also delivered the keynote address as Georgia State University kicked off its Critical Thinking Through Writing program. Condon followed his address, titled "Critical Thinking in the Classroom: Identifying, Assigning, Evaluating, and Assessing What We Value," with a half-day workshop focusing on assignment design and on differences between grading and assessing for critical thinking. His article, "Looking beyond Judging and Ranking: Writing Assessment as a Generative Practice," was published in Assessing Writing: An International Journal, volume 14:3. Articles included in this special issue titled "Writing Assessment as a Generative Practice," devoted entirely to the results of this study of a new kind of writing prompt for timed essays, were products of a study begun in English 508 in spring 2007.
Paula Coomer's novel Dove Creek, about a Kentucky mountain woman's search for identity on an Idaho Indian reservation, which was serialized and broadcast over Moscow's radio station KRFP (92.5 FM) last year, has been placed in syndication. It is available for download in MP3 format at http://www.krfp.org. She also presented on Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine as part of the Idaho Commission on Libraries' Visiting Scholar program "Let's Talk About It." The program was part of the fall season's thematic series, "Working," held in Sandpoint on October 24.
Michael Delahoyde’s article, “Edward de Vere’s Hand in Titus Andronicus” was published in the inaugural issue of Brief Chronicles: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Authorship Studies.
Robert Eddy’s co-authored article, “Toward a New Critical Framework: Color-Conscious Political Morality and Pedagogy at Historically Black and Historically White Colleges and Universities,” appeared in College Composition and Communication, the flagship journal in rhetoric and composition.
Patty Ericsson attended THATCamp Pacific Northwest on October 17.
Jason Farman's book project studying mobile technology's impact on the arts, gaming, and narrative is now in contract with Routledge and slated to be released in early 2011. His article, "Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and Process of Postmodern Cartography," was accepted for publication in New Media & Society. Hepresented a paper in London on locative games at the Digital Games Research Association conference (DiGRA). His article, "Hypermediating the Game Interface," was accepted for publication in Communication Quarterly. He attended THATCamp Pacific Northwest on October 17. He was selected as a reviewer for the NEH’s Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants. He received the CLA Faculty Travel Grant to present his research on locative gaming at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference at UC Irvine in December.
Dene Grigar gave several talks about social media in the Portland-Vancouver area. The first, titled “Building Presence with Social Media," was for the Camas Washougal Chamber of Commerce on October 15. She gave a two-part series of talks titled "Strategizing Social Media" and "Facebook and Twitter" at the end of October for the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce. The latter was a hands-on workshop for local organizations and businesses. For nursing students at WSUV, she gave a seminar titled "Holistic Teaching, Embodiment, and Social Media" on November 10. And on December 16 she gave the keynote to the Downtown Rotary Club on the topic of "Leadership, Community, and Social Media." She curated a media art show at North Bank Artists Gallery during the month of October. “mediartZ: Art as Experiential, Art as Participatory, Art as Electronic” featured art by ten North American digital media artists. She published a special issue of Hyperrhiz, titled “Visionary Landscapes,” that collects research, art, and artist statements from the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2008 Conference, which she hosted at WSUV in June 2008. Her essay "Hyperlinking in 3D Interactive, Multimedia Performance" will appear in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, edited by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla for Transaction Publishers in Bielefeld, Germany. She gave papers this fall at conferences for Digital Art and Culture, the Modern Language Association, and the International Digital Media and Arts Association, and participated in CPATH's workshop on “Game Computing, Story Telling, and AI.” For the Women in Networking organization, Grigar gave a talk on "Mobility and Social Media," and she is keynoting at the Washington State Recycling Association Annual Conference with a talk on "Marketing and Social Media" in May 2010. Her efforts to educate area organizations and businesses about social media have, thus far, resulted in several hires of DTC graduates as social media coordinators and professional writers for the web.
Crag Hill's article, "Birthing Dialogue: Using the First Part Last in a Health Class," appeared in the fall issue of The ALAN Review (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English). He attended THATCamp Pacific Northwest on October 17.
Linda Kittell's poem "All" has been published by The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Excerpts from Karl: Down Seemingly Endless Hallways, a book length medical narrative written with the tandem voices of Ron Goble and Linda Kittell, have been published by The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine.
Debbie Lee read the essay "Surviving the Bitterroots," a piece from her book-in-progress, at the Western Literature Association Conference held in Spearfish, SD, from September 30-October 3. She gave a paper titled "The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Oral History Archives: Embodied Narrative to Interpretive Action" at the Oral History Association Conference in Louisville, KY, October 14-18. She presented a paper at the MLA in Philadelphia on December 29, 2009 titled "'Fit to be seen': Black Single Mothers in Eighteenth-Century England."
Buddy Levy's book Conquistador was released nationally in paperback on July 28. The Wall Street Journal calls the book “An almost unbelievable story of missionary zeal, greed, cruelty, and courage.” This book has also been selected for translation and publication in a work by Italian publisher Bruno Montadori. In May, Levy delivered to his editor the manuscript for his forthcoming book River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Historic Descent of the Amazon (Bantam Dell, 2010). The book, which tells the story of the first Europeans to descend the entirety of the Amazon in 1541-1542, is slated for a fall release.
Thabiti Lewis has the following book chapters forthcoming: “Negotiating Spiritual Wholeness and Feminism in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara,” in Wholeness, Healing, and Spirituality: African American Women Writers Revision the American Past edited by Karla Kovalova (Cambridge Scholars Press); and “Don’t Believe the Hype: The Racial Representations of Iron Mike Tyson,” in Falling From Grace: Sport, Race and the Reconstruction of Once-Cherished Reputations, edited by Joel N. Rosen and David C. Ogden (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming summer 2010).
Jacqueline Lyons' poem, "Heartland," was accepted for publication in a future issue of The Journal. She has been invited to San Francisco in March of 2010 to read at the University of San Francisco in the Lone Mountain Reading Series. Her poetry chapbook, Lost Colony, is now available from Dancing Girl Press. Go to www.dancinggirlpress.com to see the cover image and sample poem.
Andrea Mason's review of The Mechanics of Falling appeared in the August 17 issue of High Country News. Her essay, "Looking at Julia Roberts' Apartment," was published in the Summer/Fall 2009 online issue of the magazine MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine. She participated in a panel titled "Vagabondage in the West" at the Western Literature Association conference in Spearfish, SD.
Kirk McAuley completed an article on “Anti-Slavery Poetry” for Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, edited by Frederick Burwick and Nancy Goslee. Also, his paper, “‘Art Transforms the Savage Face of Things’: Scottish Identity & the ’45 Jacobite Rebellion in James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane,” was warmly received at the 7th biennial Symbiosis (transatlantic studies) conference at Suffolk University in Boston this past June.
David Menchaca will present a paper at CCCC 2010 on a panel titled “Rhetoric and Political Economy: Demystifying Ideological/Material Relations.”
Barbara Monroe’s article, “Plateau Indian Ways with Words,” has been published in the College Composition and Communication, the premier journal in rhetoric and composition.
Pavithra Narayanan's article, "A Conversation with Nabaneeta Dev Sen," has been accepted for publication in Wasafiri.
Wendy Olson’s article, “The Shape of a Mother: Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Feminist Rhetoric in Cyberspace,” appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emergent Knowledge. Her article, “On the Institutionalization of Basic Writing as Political Economy,” appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Open Words: Access and English Studies.
Her article, “The Politics of Standards: The Outcomes Statement and Basic Writing,” was accepted for publication in The Outcomes Statement: A Decade Later, edited by Nicholas Behm, Gregory Glau, and Duane Roen. She will present a paper at CCCC 2010 on a panel titled “Rhetoric and Political Economy: Demystifying Ideological/Material Relations.”
Leonard Orr, Academic Director of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at WSU Tri-Cities, published his book, James's The Turn of the Screw: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2009). He was a featured poet and faculty member for Lit Fuse 09 (September 25-27). He taught two workshops, "Infusing Your Poetry with Passion" and "Escaping the Rational: Generating Poetry through Chance and Spontaneity." He also participated in a Master Class with George Bowering, 2002 Poet Laureate of Canada.
T.V. Reed was in Miami, Ohio, in October for a conference on the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, and to serve as a consultant for an NEH-funded project to create a museum commemorating Freedom Summer, the project that brought over 1,000 students from US colleges into the deep South to work on voting rights.
Augusta Rohrbach was invited to contribute a chapter to The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 6: The American Novel 1870-1940, edited by Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott. Her chapter will be called “Documenting the Real.” She attended THATCamp Pacific Northwest on October 17. She presented a segment of Thinking Outside the Book on Jane Johnston Schoolcraft at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference on October 23rd in Philadelphia.
Susan Dente Ross presented her new work of nonfiction, Arrivals, at the Duke Writers Workshop at Wildacres Retreat in Little Switzerland, NC, on October 2.
Linda Russo traveled to San Francisco to give a poetry reading at The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University and to present a paper at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association's annual conference. Her paper, "The Splendor of Self-Invention: Joanne Kyger’s Proto-feminist Parody 'Descartes and the Splendor Of,'" explores Kyger's poem/video as a feminist response to the emergence of the Modern subject as represented in Descartes' "Discourse on Method." She gave poetry readings at Open Books (a "poem emporium") in Seattle and at Portland State University.
Rachel Sanchez attended THATCamp Pacific Northwest on October 17.
Leslie Jo Sena attended THATCamp Pacific Northwest on October 17.
Anne Stiles's article, “Somnambulism and Trance States in the Works of John William Polidori, Author of ‘The Vampyre,’” was accepted by European Romantic Review and will appear in the journal in 2010. The piece was co-authored by two psychologists, Professors Stanley Finger and John Bulevich. She was interviewed for an MSNBC news story on vampires. The October 29 article, by "Sexploration" columnist 
Brian Alexander, is called "Dangerous Liaisons: Why We Find Vampires Sexy." The article can be accessed online at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33509755/ns/health-sexual_health/. She gave a talk titled “Vivisection and Vampirism: Animal Rights Controversies in Dracula” on October 30 at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. She received a Wood Institute Travel Grant to fund two weeks of research at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia in January 2010.
Dorothy Worden’s article, "Finding Process in Product: Prewriting and Revision in Timed Essay Response," appeared in Assessing Writing: An International Journal, volume 14:3.
The English Department softball team, The Run-ons, qualified for finals with a 4-2 record!
The October 17 (un)conference – THATCamp Pacific Northwest – was a success, and everyone in attendance remains grateful to the Department of English for sponsoring the event, which included numerous participants from the Department of English. Other participants were from the WSU Library, the American Studies and CES departments, and colleagues from Boise State University, Eastern Washington University, George Mason University/Center for History & New Media, University of Washington, Whitman College, Central Washington University, University of Idaho, and Lewis-Clark State College.
The English Department also wishes to thank our fabulous staff for all their hard work. You keep our department running smoothly and we could not get along without you!