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.
Posted in creative writing, Events
Congratulations to Dr. Jennifer Harris, whose third picture book The Keeper of Stars (OwlKids 2024) has been named a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection (US) and a TD Summer Reading Club selection (Canada). Of all the traditionally published picture books in North America in a given year, “only the top 3% are deemed worthy of being named JLG Gold Standard Selections.” The Keeper of Stars comes out April 15th, and is available for pre-order. There will be a local launch Saturday, May 4th, at 10:30am at the Waterloo Public Library – Eastside Branch (2001 University Ave E.). A Toronto launch will happen at Mabel’s Fables, April 17th at 6:30pm.
Dr. Harris will be teaching ENGL 432, a special topics Creative Writing course dedicated to picture books, in Fall 2024.
Posted in Awards, creative writing, Faculty
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.
Posted in Events, Graduate students, Research
Congratulations to Dr. Heather Love, whose recently published monograph, Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data (Cambridge University Press, 2023) has been shortlisted for the 2023 British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) Book Prize! Results will be announced in April at the BSLS conference.
Posted in Awards, Faculty, Publications
Congratulations to UWaterloo English’s Dr. Clive Forrester on his co-edited volume Sounds of Advocacy, Language and Liberation Papers in Honour of Hubert Devonish (with Dr. Nickesha Dawkins) from UWI press.
As the press writes:
Honouring the remarkable career of Professor Hubert Devonish, a leading scholar in linguistics, language education, and cultural studies, Sounds of Advocacy, Language and Liberation provides a representative spread of linguistics addressing critical areas of academic and social responsibility through the exploration and analysis of theoretical and sociocultural concerns. Through his tireless research Devonish illuminated the complexities of Caribbean Creole languages and championed their rightful place in academia and society.
This festschrift reveals the impact of Devonish’s work on linguistic theory, spanning fascinating topics like implosives in Jamaican Creole and the mathematical constraints on allowable sentences in Guyanese Creole. The papers contain insightful analyses of the relationship between language, education, and culture, including Devonish’s groundbreaking work on Creole language literacy and the importance of promoting multilingualism. Provocative discussions on the intersection of politics, law, and language, shed light on Devonish’s unwavering commitment to social justice and the empowerment of marginalised communities.
More than just a collection of academic contributions, Sounds of Advocacy serves as a tribute to Professor Devonish’s dedication to intellectual inquiry, social justice, and the advancement of Caribbean languages and cultures.
Posted in Faculty, Publications, Research
Congratulations to Dr. Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, whose book On Expertise: Cultivating Character, Goodwill, and Practical Wisdom (Penn State UP, 2022) was included in the prestigious Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2023. You can read more here: https://www.choice360.org/choice-pick/outstanding-academic-titles-2023-psychology/.
Choice Outstanding Academic Titles represent the about the top 10% of books reviewed in Choice and Choice Reviews. Criteria for selection includes:
“-overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
-importance relative to other literature in the field
-distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
-originality or uniqueness of treatment
-value to undergraduate students
-importance in building undergraduate library collections”
Congratulations to UWaterloo English Professor Dr. Jennifer Clary-Lemon, who has been elected as a Director to the board of the Rhetoric Society of America. Her term runs until July 2028.
Posted in Faculty
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.
More details: https://preslectures.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/the-cancerland-selfies-trauma-scrapbooking-as-life-writing/
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.
Virtual meeting details:
Posted in Events, Graduate students, Research
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.
Posted in creative writing, Events
Join UWaterloo English as we celebrate our new Creative and Professional Writing Major with a reading by UW alumnus Antonio Michael Downing and UW English professor Lamees Al Ethari. The event will be help at the UWaterloo Grad House Upstairs Lounge on Wednesday, March 6, 4-6pm.
Antonio Michael Downing, musician, speaker and author of the novella Molasses and the acclaimed memoir Saga Boy was named a Top Emerging Artist in Nonfiction by the RBC Taylor Prize. His novel Black Cherokee comes out with Simon and Schuster in 2024, along with a children’s book, Stars in my Crown.
Lamees Al Ethari teaches creative writing here and her poetry collection, From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris came out in 2018, followed by a memoir, Waiting for the Rain (2019). She is a nonfiction editor with The New Quarterly and co-founder of The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop for Immigrant Women. She is working on a collection of short fiction titled The Fortuneteller and Other Stories.
Posted in creative writing, Events
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