English students rock!

Last week we held the English department Awards ceremony, which recognizes student achievement in all areas of their various labours: scholarship, teaching, and creative writing. It’s always such a “feel good” event. Professors, staff, family, and friends all feel proud. We are continually reminded of how darned SMART and TALENTED our students are. And it’s great to gather together in one place to hear some readings, to hear what judges have to say about excellent student work, to chat and to cheer. Oh, and the refreshments were lovely too!

Special thanks to Professor Heather Smyth who organized the Awards Ceremony, and Fiona McAlister, Jenn Crane, and Margaret Ulbrick who all helped to make this a lovely end-of-term event.

Here’s a list of the winners:

English 251A Exam Award: Sarasvathi Kannan

Albert Shaw Poetry Prize: Douglas R. Guilbeault

English Society Creative Writing Award for Poetry: Lindsay Davison

English Society Creative Writing Award for Prose: Sarasvathi Kannan

Grade Average Awards: 2A Natalie Dewan; 2B Nicole Kuiper; 3 A/B Matthew Wilson 4 A/B Daniel Etigson

Co-op Work Term Report: Jenna Hoffman; Honourable Mention: Rachel Klein

Hibbard Prize: Adam Lawlor and Jennifer Pepper (tied)

Canadian Literature Prize: Duncan Ramsay

Andrew James Dugan Prize in Literature: Justin Begley

Andrew James Dugan Prize in Rhetoric and Professional Writing: Rosabeth Birky Koehn

The History and Theory of Rhetoric Award: Amanda Ross; Runner-up: Erin Taylor

The Rhetoric and Professional Writing Award: Pravneet Bilkhu

The Rhetoric and Digital Design Award: Brittany Gregorio; Runner-up: Ken Cooper

Beltz Essay Prizes: M.A.: Jonathan Doering and Stephanie Jorgensen (tied)

Ph.D: Sarah Gibbons

Graduate Creative Writing Awards: Poetry: Morteza Dehghani; Prose: Lacey Beer

Grade Average Awards: M.A. Jonathan Doering; Ph.D: Sarah Gibbons

TA Award for Excellence in Teaching: Jay Rawding

Independent Graduate Instructor Award for Excellence in Teaching: Danila Sokolov

Congratulations to all! Here are some photos. Don’t we look awesome!

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A conferencing we go! Part 6: More graduate student work to be showcased.

The spotlight is once again on conference presentations to be given by uWaterloo English graduate students at Congress 2012.  The range of topics is fabulous! And truly represents the diversity of research being undertaken here.

Lamees El Athari will present “Recollecting Motherhood in Dunya Mikhail’s ‘Bag of Bones’” at ACCUTE. Lamees is a 2nd-year PhD candidate working on Iraqi-North American women’s memoirs.

Abstract: In her poem “Bag of Bones” (2005), Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail presents her readers with unembellished insight into the Iraqi war scene from the perspective of the Iraqi mother. Rarely voiced in past Iraqi war literature, the Iraqi mother has always been viewed as a boundless patriot who supports men’s heroisms at the battlefront, which has denied her identity as a mother figure. However, Mikhail contemplates a counter narrative to this stereotypical female role through the depiction of a woman who is forced to recollect her fragmented motherhood both literally and emotionally.

Sarah Gibbons will present her paper “Here’s to the Fatal Future”: Risk, Crisis, and Resistance in Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries” to ACQL/AQLC. Sarah is a 1^st-year Ph.D. student, and her research interests are disability studies and posthumanist philosophy.

Abstract: This paper examines the representation of crisis in Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries with reference to theoretical conceptions of history and contemporary analyses of risk. I argue that the poem undermines an ordered narrative of progress, and presents an alternative genealogy of resistance to the repression and toxicity of the contemporary world.

Kevin Ziegler will be presenting “Sketchbook Vernacular: Contemporary Canadian Graphic Narrative as Social Documentary” to ACCUTE. He is a 4^th-year PhD candidate finishing up a dissertation on Canadian Graphic Life Narratives. His research interests include life writing, graphic narratives, and Canadian literary history.

Abstract: This paper assesses the extent to which works of contemporary graphic narrative have idealized the ‘visual vernacular.’ I examine methods of authorial self-presentation that depend on the compositional strategies of the sketchbook.

Lauren Burr will be participating in two panels for the Canadian Game Studies Association. She’s a 1^st-year PhD student in the digital media stream, studying locative media, specifically location-based games and narrative. Her formal paper is entitled “Building a House of Lexia: The Displacement of Player Agency in a Locative Game.”

Abstract: In this presentation I will introduce House of Lexia, an augmented reality game and critical remediation of Mark Z Danielewski’s experimental print novel, House of Leaves. I designed and built the game using StoryTrek, the Carleton University Hypertext and Hypermedia Lab’s proprietary authoring software for locative hypertext narratives. Rendering Danielewski’s textual labyrinth as a geospatially sensitive hypertext, the StoryTrek system allows readers to become embodied, interactive players within a real-world space, configured in this particular narrative as the Navidson house. At the same time, House of Lexia denies the level of freedom and personal agency implied by most theorists of locative media. Instead, it retains the uncanniness of the novel as players naturally feel that they are being monitored by the surveillance device that alternately guides and deceives them as they move through space. This paper questions the largely unspoken, dystopian implications of these new location-aware technologies. In addition, I argue that the displacement of agency from the player onto the puppet master provides a more critical gameplay that complicates the rhetoric of reader/player/ empowerment underlying theories of both locative media and hypertext.

The second panel Lauren will participate in is a Games Institute roundtable discussion with uW colleagues Neil Randall, Karen Collins, Michael Hancock and Kent Aardse, on the orchestration of an Alternate Reality Game, which will take place at Congress.  The panel is called “Organizing a Political Alternate Reality Game: Processes and Pitfalls.”

 

 

A conferencing we go Part 5! Graduate students at Congress 2012

In keeping with the theme of professors, graduate students, and alumni going conferencing, here is some detailed information about presentations uW English graduate students will be giving at Congress 2012. I’ll be writing more than one post about their work, so please check back here in the coming days. I have asked everyone to provide a brief abstract of their papers, so that you can get an idea of what they are thinking and writing about.

We are so proud of the involvement of English graduate students in this mega-hit of a conference!

Jay Rawding is a 2^nd year PhD candidate working in the field of Canadian literature. He will be presenting “Gone Myth-ing: Reframing the Legend of Tom Thomson in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing” under the banner of The Margaret Atwood Society and ACCUTE joint panel.

Abstract: The suspicious circumstances surrounding the 1917 disappearance of Canadian painter Tom Thomson have a ghostly connection to the plot of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972). Written at a time when Atwood felt frustration concerning predominant power structures in Canada, the character of the narrator’s father, who goes missing in northern Quebec, echoes Thomson’s death and ghostly presence in the wilds of Ontario, especially in the patriarchal roles that both figures represent. I argue Atwood cleverly subverts the masculine, colonial, nation-building discourse thematized in Thomson’s myth by using the feminist postcolonial Gothic, thereby challenging a powerful hegemonic structure that is engrained in the Canadian psyche.

 His conference presentation is on May 29 from 10:45 to 12:15, and then at 12:15 Margaret Atwood herself will be speaking. So those who want their fill of Atwood on that day have the benefit of hearing some thoughts and ideas about her work and then catching her in person afterwards.

 

Lacey Beer, a 1^st year PhD candidate, is interested in examining the rhetoric of blame and criminality in contemporary works of Canadian historiographic metafiction by female authors. She will be presenting her paper “Pointing the Finger: Marie-Joseph Angélique, the Montreal Fire of 1734, and a Hidden History of Canadian Racism” at ACQL/ALCQ

Abstract: Lorena Gale’s short play Angélique liberates Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave in early eighteenth-century New France, from the chains of history. Through the use of anachronism and allusion, Angélique undoes historical configurations of Angélique as an arsonist and emphasizes Black resistance to White oppression, allowing for Black empowerment and a new history, even herstory, of Angélique.

Stephen Fernandez is a 1^st year PhD candidate and he works at the intersection of dramatic theatre, critical theory and digital media. He will be presenting a paper to the Canadian Association for Theatre Research titled “Responding to an Uncertain World: Digital Interactive Theatre and the Rhetoric of Technology.”

Abstract: The greatest challenge for theatre scholarship in the twenty-first century is perhaps its ability to respond to an uncertain world plagued by social and economic instability.  Despite the ubiquity of downloadable ‘apps’ (digital applications) that are marketed as tools that could potentially make our lives more convenient and enjoyable, the cloud of uncertainty that shrouds our world today has yet to dissipate, especially as the producers of technological devices continue to employ the rhetoric of technology in their attempt to persuade consumers about the supposed merits of their products.  Indeed, as we immerse ourselves – willingly or otherwise – into the digital age in which sophisticated technological devices such as the iPhone have come to define the way we live and interact with one another, we might have overlooked the social and psychological implications of our growing dependence on digital technology, whether for work or leisure. Thus, in examining the impact of digital media on the state of the human condition in the twenty-first century, some theatre practitioners have begun to incorporate into their theatrical artworks various forms of digital technology, ranging from 3D visual projections to the internet-based communicational platform, ‘Skype’.  Conceived as theatre performances for a ‘live’ audience, such multimedia productions called Digital Interactive Theatre, or DIT, interrogate the complex relationship between humans and digital media by foregrounding in each performance the interaction between the performers and the digital technology employed in the show.  Drawing upon Lloyd Bitzer’s concept of the rhetorical situation and Kenneth Burke’s scene-agent ratio in his “dramatistic pentad”, this paper will locate the rhetoric of technology within contemporary theatre practice by examining the ways in which such DIT performances as Troika Ranch’s Loopdiver (2009) and The Hidden Room’s 2011 production of the world’s first “Skype-play” respond to the ‘exigence’ of technological overdependence in an uncertain world.

Renaissance Society of America: Conference Report

A guest post by Professor Ken Graham

From March 22-24 doctoral candidate Danila Sokolov and I attended the annual convention of the Renaissance Society of America in Washington, D.C. The RSA is a large multi-disciplinary organization devoted to the study of all aspects of the Renaissance, including its history, literature, art, music, philosophy, and political and legal thought (see www.rsa.org). Approximately 1650 people participated in this year’s program, and the program booklet itself was over 500 pages long.

A conference of this size is incredibly diverse and exciting – an excitement we’ll experience in Waterloo soon with the Congress looming – and it includes numerous mini-conferences. On Thursday, for example, Shakespeare sessions ran all day in the same room; on Friday, four consecutive sessions were organized by the Sir Philip Sidney Society, including two on one of my favourite writers, Fulke Greville; and on Saturday there were four consecutive sessions on John Milton. I presented my paper on how Milton’s idea of church discipline informs Paradise Lost in the second of these. Danila spoke about the political rhetoric of Mary Stewart’s casket sonnets to a session on “Royal Dynasties Abroad.”

Of course we saw lots of people we know, including some with Waterloo connections. Friday morning we heard 2010 uW doctoral grad Diane Jakacki, now a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech, read a paper in a session on Shakespeare and digital teaching tools. The session chair was Christine McWebb, of French Studies and the Stratford Campus, and one of the session organizers was Ray Siemens, a Waterloo English grad who sits on the Department’s Advisory Council. We posed for this picture afterwards.

Another highlight was a Thursday evening lecture at the Folger Shakespeare Library.  The Folger boasts the largest collection of early modern books and manuscripts in North America, as well as a wide range of academic programs, which are open to uW faculty and grad students through our membership in Chicago’s Newberry Library. Afterwards there was a reception and a chance to view the current exhibit on “Shakespeare Sisters,” which features sixteenth and seventeenth-century books and manuscripts written by women. The first display, on “The Clifford Women,” included books dedicated to Lady Anne Clifford, whose diary of 1616-1619 Kathy Acheson has twice edited. (Learn more about “Shakespeare’s Sisters” here: http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/Shakespeares-Sisters/.)

There was even time for some sightseeing. The weather was as glorious in Washington as it was here last week, and the famous cherry trees, a gift of Japan to the United States exactly 100 years ago, were in full bloom. We strolled past many of the tourist sights – the White House and the Washington Monument among them – but our destination, set amidst the cherry blossoms rimming the Tidal Basin, was Washington’s newest attraction: the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, a monument to the words and spirit of a man who dwarfs us all.

A conferencing we go Part 4!

Happy Spring Friday! Here is another sampling of uW English faculty members who will be presenting their research and/or participating in roundtable discussions at Congress 2012.

Next week I’ll be post a story about the Congress participation of our wonderful, talented, smart, and accomplished graduate students. So please come back and read about that.

Professor Winfried Siemerling is presenting at the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures/L’Association des littératures canadiennes et québécoise (ACQL/ALCQ).  He will be taking part in a panel titled “The Middle Passage as Global History in Contemporary African Canadian Writing / À qui appartient l’Atlantique noir? Le Passage du Milieu en tant qu’histoire mondiale dans la littérature africo-canadienne contemporaine.” The other presenters are close colleagues: Dr. Tanis MacDonald from WLU and Dr. Veronica Austen from St Jerome’s University. This panel looks awesome!

“‘A lantern trapping light’: The Middle Passage in Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries”, Tanis MacDonald

“Witnessing and Our Contemporaneity with the Past: Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes “, Winfried Siemerling

“Eating Words: Letter-Writing and the Failures(?) of Communication in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!”, Veronica Austen.

I too will be presenting at ACQL/ALCQ. I’m co-presenting with Dr. Alan Filewod from the University of Guelph. Our paper (co-authored) is called “ Visual Silence and Graphic Memory : An Interdisciplinary Approach to Scott Chantler’s Two Generals ”

Professor Michael MacDonald has been busy. He has organized a panel about Marshall McLuhan and media war for the Canadian Communication Association. In addition to his essay, “Martial McLuhan” [great title, eh?] the panel features papers by war correspondent and photojournalist Rita Leistner (Victoria College, U Toronto), Edward Comor (Faculty of Information and Media Studies, U Western Ontario), and our own PhD student, Stephen Wilcox.

Professor MacDonald will also be presenting a paper on William Shakespeare – “‘The Words of Mercury’: Shakespeare and Sophistic Rhetoric” – at the conference of Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies.

As you can see, our faculty members are often presenting or involved in more than one event. Professor Heather Smyth is doing two gigs at the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS). First, presenting a paper titled “Overcoming Cultural and Racialized Divides.” And she is also participating in a Special Roundtable: “Stepping Forward, Looking Back: Post-colonial, Global, Transnational, and Diasporic Studies in the 21st Century” which features an international panel of scholars.

Congress is a time to get excited about our research and that which our colleagues are undertaking. It’s a time to meet up with old friends, mentors and allies who, because of the size of our country and the fact that many of us have colleagues in other countries, we only occasionally get to see. And, it’s a chance to visit the book fair and BUY NEW BOOKS. For me, that’s a major thrill!

Video treat: Esi Eduygan reading

This is so wonderful.

If you missed the reading by brilliant author Esi Eduygan at St. Jerome’s earlier this term you can watch it on video right here, right now. Thank you to Professor Jay Dolmage, Professor Win Siemerling, and everyone else who made this visit possible.

Hear the eloquent introduction by Prof Siemerling!

Hear the jazz-and-Baltimore-inflected language of Eduygan’s Giller prize wining novel, Half-Blood Blues!

Enjoy!

A conferencing we go! Part 3

Congress 2012 will be the venue where many different academic associations hold their annual meetings, and uW and SJU English faculty, sessional instructors, and graduate students will be participating in many of them. Here is a sampling of the research going on in the literature side of the English department/s that will be showcased. There will be more to come in subsequent posts, so please watch this space. Exciting times around here!

Professor Ken Graham has organized a session for the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. The session is called “Religious Mystery and Rational Citizenship in Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton,” and his own paper is titled “The Mysterious Discipline of Paradise Lost.”

uW English department Chair Professor Fraser Easton will chair a joint session co-sponsored by ACCUTE and CSESC (Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies). Colleague Professor Rebecca Tierney-Hynes will give a paper in that session called “Cruel Imitation: Sympathy and Affectation in Fielding’s Drama.”

SJU English department Chair Professor Norman Klassen has organized a panel called “Rowan Williams and the Making of the Christian Imagination” as part of the Christianity and Literature Study Group (CLSG). He will be presenting “What a World Is: Coherence in the Thought of Rowan Williams.”

And yours truly has organized a session for ACCUTE called “Mothers’ Stories of War,” which includes a paper by uW English PhD candidate Lamees Al Ethari who will present a paper titled “Recollecting Motherhood in Dunya Mikhail’s ‘Bag of Bones’.”

Oh, and another keynote speaker at Congress will be renowned author–and uW honorary degree recipient– Jane Urquhart.

A conferencing we go! Part 2

As promised, the first of a series of posts about uW English department members’ participation at Congress 2012.

Professor Marcel O’Gorman is involved in two presentations, one a more traditional panel presentation for the Canadian Communication Association, the other, well, more unusual!

Professor O’Gorman is part of a panel with Nick Rombes (former CML artist/researcher in residence) and uW English PhD candidate Danielle Stock. The panel is called “Dirty Bodies and Dead Media: Recent Projects from the Critical Media Lab.” (love it!)

Also….The Critical Media Lab goes mobile. Here’s a description of what is planned.

The Mobile CrimeLab

The University of Waterloo Critical Media Lab (CML), located in downtown Kitchener, supports interdisciplinary research-creation projects that draw on new media to investigate the impact of technology on society and the human condition. Funded by SSHRC and CFI, the CML is the home of the English Department’s new M.A. in Experimental Digital Media (XDM), and plays host to research groups, international conferences, a Visiting Artist/Researcher, and collaborations with local artists and cultural organizations.

In 2012, the “CrimeLab” will move out of its current storefront location at 158 King Street West to a new site yet to be determined. In response to the Congress 2012 theme of “At the Crossroads,” the CML will celebrate its nomadic status by relocating to a 24-foot truck this May, which will be parked on the campus of Wilfrid Laurier University during the conference. Delegates will be invited to enter the truck and examine some of the interactive projects completed by the CML collaborators, including “Cycle of Dread,” “Teat Tweet,” and “Cabs of Curiosity.”  In addition, delegates will have the opportunity to sign out handheld devices that can be used to experience some of the CML’s mobile applications, including “Geomosaic,” which makes artistic use of geotracking software, and a new project created with CML Visiting Artist/Researcher, N. Katherine Hayles, which involves Augmented Reality, biofeedback, and mobile computing.

The Mobile CrimeLab will not only serve as an on-site gallery showcasing unique critical media projects, it will also act as a screening surface for evening projections. The CML will solicit video work from students and artists created specifically for Congress 2012, and this will be showcased on the side of the truck. The entire project will be overseen by CML Director, Marcel O’Gorman.

For this project to be successful, the truck must be located in a prominent area of the conference with a high rate of foot traffic. Ideally, it would be placed close to the “beer tent,” where it will serve as a vehicle for entertainment, provocation, and stimulating discussion about the role of scholarship in an “uncertain world.”

Great news about a recent PhD graduate

If you remember, one of PhD students wrote a guest blog about her dissertation writing. And guess what? Not only did she finish the PhD but she got a JOB!

We are delighted to announce that our recent PhD graduate Stephanie Bell has accepted a tenure-track appointment to the Writing Department at York University.  Congratulations to Stephanie, and to her co-supervisors, Cathy Schryer (now an adjunct Professor after retiring from uWaterloo and taking up a new position at Ryerson) and Neil Randall.

We are very proud of our grads!

A conferencing we go! Part 1

As winter term trudges to an end–though it’s a very springy day today and there’s lightness and freshness in the air…

So let’s start this again: as winter term winds down, many of your English professors and graduate students are looking forward to conference season. Of course, conferences take place throughout the year, but the end of May/beginning of June is special. Even more special this year because CONGRESS will be here in KW, jointly hosted by uW and WLU down the road.

What is Congress, you ask? The full name is Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences and it’s an umbrella organization that brings together various academic associations for their annual meetings. It’s a big deal. It happens at a different Canadian university every year, and there’s always an overarching theme. This year the theme is “Crossroads: Scholarship for an Uncertain World.”

It is our academic fair. We attend plenary lectures by luminaries; we deliver papers and we listen to papers given by our peers; we meet up with old friends and we make new ones; we chat and network; we party! My favourite part is the book fair, where the presses bring their shiny new books and give you discounts 🙂

Over the next few posts I’m going to give you a sample of the work that uW English people will be engaged in at Congress. In the meantime, you can check out the Congress website by clicking here.

Yes, Margaret Atwood will be giving a plenary! As well as other amazing Canadians.

So exciting!