On Thursday, May 16th from 3-4pm, UWaterloo English MA Student Thomas Hanson will be sharing his research in a talk titled “Silent Synecdoche: Humanity and Nature in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts.” The event is both in person (HH232) and online (see the event page).
Abstract: Working at the intersection of rhetoric, Marxism, and ecology, this lecture examines Karl Marx’s conception of “species-being” in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Specifically, it analyzes the synecdochal relation between humanity and nature imagined in species-being. It suggests this synecdochal vision may be relevant to current debates on Marx’s value as an ecological thinker.
Thomas Hanson is partway through his MA in the Rhetoric and Communication Design Program. He’s interested in rhetorics of decolonization and the links between rhetoric and Marxism. He can’t wait to start his PhD in Waterloo’s English Program in the Fall.
If you’re coming out of your winter shell, looking forward to spring and social events, UWaterloo English’s Dr. Sarah Tolmie is one of those participating in the Riverside Reading Series. The reading takes place April 27th at 3pm, at the Dog-Eared Cafe in Paris, Ontario.
Congratulations to Kem-Laurin Lubin, who recently appeared on the MIT Panel “How to Govern AI.” Kem is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Waterloo, where she focuses on AI Rhetoric. She is also the 2021-2022 OGS/QEII-GSST Scholarship (2021-2022) as well as President’s Graduate Scholarship (PGS) 2021. She is also the founder of Human Tech Futures.
The 2023-2024 University of Waterloo Department of English Language and Literature Awards Ceremony was held on Friday, April 5, 2024. Congratulations to all our award winners!
Undergraduate
Albert Shaw Poetry Prize: I. S. Bashirah, Honourable mention: Nadia Khan Andrew James Dugan Prize in Literature: Andie Kaiser Andrew James Dugan Prize in Rhetoric and Professional Writing: Jillian Franz Award in American Literature and Culture: Jared Cubilla Canadian Literature Prize: Hanna Freitas Co-op Reflective Report Award: Vyshnavi Rajeevan Diaspora and Transnational Studies Prize: Naomi Francis Donald R. and Mary E. Snider Literary Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction Writing: Anna-Maria Brokalakis Emerging Scholar Award: Alicia Sheppard English Society Creative Writing Award for Poetry: Kassandra Lynne Attwood English Society Creative Writing Award for Prose: Sara Funduk Janice Del Matto Memorial Award in Creative Writing: Sebrina Bank Joergensen Olive Carrick Scholarship in English: Nadia Khan Rhetoric and Digital Design Award: Aidan de Villa-Choi, Yingying Huang, Vade Lail, Emma van Weesenbeek Rhetoric and Professional Writing Award: Amaya Kodituwakku The G.R. Hibbard Shakespeare Prize: Patricia Fagan Walter R. Martin English 251 Award: Chloe Shantz
Graduate
Beltz Essay Prize, MA: Varsha Thulasi Pillai Beltz Essay Prize, PhD: Sarah Casey David Nimmo English Graduate Scholarship: Shannon Lodoen, Anna McWebb English Rhetoric Essay Award, MA: Sophie Morgan, Chinye Obiago English Rhetoric Essay Award, PhD: Carolyn Eckert, Honourable mentions: Sarah Casey, Omnia Elsakran Gladys Srivastava Graduate Scholarship: Kasturi Ghosh, Melissa N.P. Johnson, Alexi Orchard, Christopher Rogers Graduate Co-op Work Report Award: Ariel Fullerton Graduate Creative Writing Award: Maab Al-Rashdan Graduate Professional Communication Award: Alyssa Clarkson Independent Graduate Instructor Award for Excellence in Teaching: Chris Martin Jack Gray Graduate Fellowship: Fatima Zohra Lea Vogel-Nimmo English Graduate Professionalization Award: Kellie Chouinard, Kasturi Ghosh, Rency Luan, Humaira Shoaib, Fatima Zohra TA Award for Excellence in Teaching: Damilola Adebajo W. K. Thomas Graduate Scholarship: Jin Sol Kim, Dakota Pinheiro, Sabrina Sgandurra, Humaira Shoaib, Valerie Uher
Join UWaterloo English’s Dr. Sarah Tolmie and others for Evening of Poetry in Celebration of National Poetry Month. It takes place April 8 at the Registry Theatre, Kitchener, at 7:30pm. For more information, see the webpage.
The Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Communication Arts, and the Faculty of Science invite you to attend the Winter 2024 Science Communication Showcase. It’s happening Monday, 1 April (10:00am – 5:20pm), and Tuesday, 2 April (8:30am-5:20pm) in the Science Teaching Complex (STC) 2001 – 2nd Floor Foyer.
Science students in ENGL/COMMST 193: Communication in the Sciences will present science communication work they are doing in this course. Visit students as they showcase the skills they have developed, and talk to the instructors and departments.
For more information, contact George Lamont (Dept. of English) at glamont@uwaterloo.ca.
UWaterloo undergraduate student, writer, and poet Matthew Kee will provide tips on how to perform your poetry in this workshop. Hone your skills reading your own work for an audience! Drop in to the English Department Library (HH 232) anytime during the workshop hours, April 3, 11-12:30.
The PRES Lecture Committee is pleased to announce the next PRES lecture, Friday, April 5th at 3:00 PM in HH232 where PhD Candidate Shannon Lodoen will present her PRES Lecture entitled An Altered Sense of Consequence: Agency, Expectation, and Experience in the Smartphone Society. Please see below for full details.
Lecture details: Informed by the twenty-first century “return to things” in the humanities and social sciences (Barnett and Boyle), my dissertation research explores how smartphones function as persuasive agents on both a micro and macro level. In this presentation, drawing from the third chapter of my dissertation, I use the complementary lenses of captology (Fogg) and procedural rhetoric (Bogost)—two sides of what Mateus calls “empirical digital rhetoric”—to demonstrate how design logics can alter the sense of consequence associated with smartphone-facilitated interactions and actions. In some cases, the sense of consequence is greatly reduced, while in others, it is overemphasized or amplified. In both situations, it is important to consider the mechanisms through which smartphone usage affects users’ perceptions of consequentiality—consequentiality not only of what they do with their phones (communicating, shopping, gaming, etc.), but also of their broader actions and interactions with the world and other people.
Bio: Shannon Lodoen is a doctoral candidate and sessional instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature. She holds an Honours BA in English Literature and Rhetoric from Waterloo and a master’s from Western University’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. Shannon’s SSHRC-funded dissertation examines how smartphones rhetorically construct and position users as subjects. Following the completion of her PhD, Shannon will be joining Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University as an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing, where she plans to turn her research towards examining how digital communications technologies and Artificial Intelligence affect the learning experiences of university students.
PRES is excited to announce this February’s lecture will be delivered by 3rd year PhD candidate Kellie Chouinard. Entitled The Cancerland Selfies: Trauma scrapbooking as life writing, Kellie’s the lecture will take place March 1st, 2024 from 3:00 – 4:00 PM in HH232 and virtually on Webex. Please see below for the complete abstract. This month’s lecture will be followed by Socialize with Sage and we invite you to join us from 4:30-6:00 PM at the Grad House.
About the lecture: Cardboard boxes containing disconnected fragments of life, like scrapbooks, junk journals, and other forms of visual or art-based journaling, invite rummaging as a form of reading, and invite curation of excess through the collection and arrangement of objects, illustrations, photos, and ephemera of daily life. These boxes and books of curated material allow us to engage in non-linear — and sometimes non-linguistic — methods of sense-based storytelling as a way of processing traumatic events by reassembling pieces of a ruptured story into new forms of meaning.
This presentation, part of a larger work-in-progress about the many excesses of young women’s transmedia storytelling about breast cancer, invites you to rummage through a digital scrapbook project, The Cancerland Selfies, that interrogates ideas of public and private storytelling and of what it means to be a young woman with breast cancer when you are statistically too young to have received such a diagnosis.
Kellie Chouinard (she/them) is a 3rd year PhD candidate in English, where their research explores young adults’ transmedia stories about living with and beyond breast cancer. She is also the current Continuing PhD Rep and interim newsletter curator for SAGE, as well as an advocate for the breast cancer community and for cancer care reform.
The Reading Series at St. Jerome’s is a reading by poet Chris Banks, Friday 1 March at 4:30pm in SJ2 1002.
The reading is free and all are welcome!
Chris Banks is a Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator from Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, American Poetry Journal, and Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.
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