Fall 2007

Science and Technology Studies Brown Bag

Jon McKenzie: "Theaters of Torture, Terror, and War"
November 1
12:00pm – 1:30pm
8108 Social Science (the Havens Center Conference Room)

Jon McKenzie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches courses in performance, new media, and civil disobedience. He is the author of Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (Routledge 2001), which explores different paradigms of performance research while also theorizing performance as a historical formation of power and knowledge. His current research examines modes of performative power operative in contemporary American imperialism, ranging from executive speech acts to theaters of torture to the mining of data for “actionable intelligence.”

COMP/RHET ANNUAL FALL RECEPTION

Saturday, September. 8; 3 to 5 p.m.

Contact Deb Brandt for more information.

Spring 2007

Congratulations to Kevin Porter

CompRhet alum Kevin Porter's book Meaning, Language, and Time: Toward a Consequentialist Philosophy of Discourse (Parlor Press, 2006) has won the 2006 W. Ross Winterowd Award for best book on composition theory.

Congratulations to Eli Goldblatt

Eli Goldblatt, the first graduate of the UW-Madison Ph.D. Program in Composition and Rhetoric, is receiving Temple University's Great Teacher Award, the university’s highest honor for teaching.

Congratulations to Kate Vieira for winning a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship for Summer 2007.

Kate will be supported in her intensive study of Portuguese in preparation for a dissertation focused on literacy, immigration, and assimilation in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Congratulations to Eric Pritchard

Eric Pritchard has won a University Dissertation Fellowship for his study, "'A Litany for Survival: Black Queer Literacies.'" Eric joins a small, august number of comp/rhet alumni (Eli Goldblatt and Rebecca Nowacek) who have won this crushingly competitive award.

2007 Scholar for the Dream Award Winner

Maria Bibbs has been named a 2007 Scholar for the Dream by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She will travel to New York City in March to present her paper, "Literacy, the Word and Intersections with African American Political, Religious, and Spiritual Identity."

Congratulations, Maria!

Vilas Grant Award Winners

Congratulations to Rasha Diab, Mary Fiorenza and Eric Pritchard, all of whom have been awarded Vilas Travel Grants from the UW Graduate School to support archival research travel in connection with their dissertations. Each is working on a fascinating project.

Fall 2006

The Contemporary Literature Colloquium, along with its co-sponsors the Anonymous Fund and the Americanist Literature and Culture Research Circle, is pleased to announce a campus visit by Professor Paula Geyh (English, Yeshiva College).

All are invited to attend a public lecture:

"Cosmopolitan Interiors: Derrida, Haneke, and the Politics of Hospitality"
Thursday, November 2nd
4:00pm, 7191 Helen C. White Hall

Roundtable with graduate students:

"Postmodernism and the City"
Friday, November 3rd
11:00am, 7101 Helen C. White Hall

The discussion will be chaired by Brian Williams and the readings include Paula Geyh's "From Cities of Things to Cities of Signs: Urban Spaces and Urban Subjects in Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Dos Passos?s Manhattan Transfer" and "The Situationist City: D've and New Urban Spaces," as well George Saunders's short story "My Flamboyant Grandson," from In Persuasion Nation.

Downloads of the roundtable readings can be found on the CLC website.
More details here.

Please r.s.v.p for the roundtable by Thursday, October 26th by emailing Brian Williams.

If you have any questions about the CLC or either of these events, please contact Taryn Okuma.

Avery Anthology at Wisconsin Book Festival

The Avery Anthology, a collection of previously unpublished fiction, has a spot at the Wisconsin Book Festival this Friday at 4:00 at Avol's. Mary Fiorenza will be reading from her story "The Woman Who Became Her House," and editors Stephanie Fiorelli and Adam Koehler will be reading from other selections from the debut issue, due out at the end of this month. Visit us: Avery Anthology.

Come support your local fiction anthology!! Contact Adam Koehler for more information.

In conjunction with the Wisconsin Book Festival, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America will present two special events featuring:

Gary Taylor, Professor of English and Director of the History of Text Technologies Program at Florida State University

Both are free and open to the public.

The CHPC Annual Lecture by Professor Taylor:
What is an American Book: From Movable Type to Downloadable Files
Friday, October 20 4:00 - 4:50 PM
Auditorium, Wisconsin Historical Society-Library Mall

Panel Discussion:

New Technology in Book Publishing: Horseless Library
Saturday, October 21 10:00 - 11:30 AM
Auditorium, Wisconsin Historical Society-Library Mall

• Gary Taylor, Professor of English, Florida State University.
• James P. Danky, Director, Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Peter Osnos, Executive Director, The Caravan Project, funded by MacArthur Foundation, developing plan for multi-Platform publishing of books.
• Ken Frazier, Interim Chief Information Officer, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Gwen Walker, Acquisitions Editor, University of Wisconsin Press.

Both events are co-sponsored by the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, the Department of English, the General Library System, the Department of History, and the School of Library and Information Studies.

More details.
For further information contact Irene Hansen
Details of the Wisconsin Book Festival

Straub Symposium on Literature and Popular Culture: 'Post'-Literature: Literacy, Technology, and Culture

Friday and Saturday, October 20-21. Featured Speakers:

• Professor Carl Freedman is from Louisiana State University and works in the fields of critical theory, modern literature, science fiction, film, and 20th Century American politics. His talk will be on the two films, Double Indemnity and Body Heat.
• Professor Rita Raley from UC-Santa Barbara. Professor Freedman Professor Raley's interests are in digital texts, new media, and " Global English." Her talk will deal specifically with gaming.

Conference Website

Sonja Lanehart visit to campus

Thursday, October 5, at 4 pm, in 220 Teacher Education Building. "A Research Conversation with Sonja Lanehart."

AND

Friday, October 6, 12-1:30 in 7191 HCWhite: Sonja Lanehart will meet with CompRhet students.

Readings are available here. AND event flyers: Thursday Lunch; Thursday Research Con; Friday

Dr. Lanehart (Ph.D., University of Michigan, English Language and Literature, 1995) is author of Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy (University of Texas Press, 2002) and editor of Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English (John Benjamins, 2001). She teaches courses in sociolinguistics, sociocultural and historical contexts of African American English, and language and identity. Her website.

The event is sponsored by the WCER Visiting Minority Scholar program.

Dissertator Matthew Pearson takes position at University of California-Irvine

He recently began a research assistant position in a National Writing Project research study in the Santa Ana Public Schools.

Look for recent alum Alice J. Robison's new publication:

"What Videogame Designers Can Teach Literacy Instructors." In Reformation: The Teaching and Learning of English in Electronic Environments, edited by Rich Matzen and Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine. Tamkang University Press, Taipei, Taiwan, 2006.

Late Spring 2006

Beth Godbee has recently been elected the graduate-student representative on the executive board for the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA). (This is in addition to already being the grad-student rep on the Midwest Writing Centers Association's Board.) Congratulations, Beth!!

Comp-Rhet graduate Rhea Lathan was featured on the front page of a recent edition of the Milwaukee Community Journal. The story chronicles her journey from GED to Ph.D.

Congratulations to Melvin Hall, dissertator in our Composition and Rhetoric PhD program, who has been awarded the David L. Boren Graduate Fellowship for a year of study in Morocco, to begin Fall 2006. Mel will be engaged in intensive language study at the Ibn Battuta Language Center for Advanced Arabic, focusing on Arabic rhetoric texts, and will also be studying with Dr. Mohammed El-Ouali, a specialist in Arabic rhetoric and the comparative study of Aristotelian and Arabic rhetorics.

Best wishes to Mel as he embarks on this exciting intellectual and physical journey!

Congratulations to Melissa Tedrowe, associate director of the UW-Madison Writing Center. She received a prestigious early career academic-staff award from the College of Letters and Science.

Known widely across campus as a gifted and generous teacher, mentor, and administrator, Melissa has taught in and helped lead the Writing Center since 2001. Among her many responsibilities, she coordinates the Writing Center's satellites at the Multicultural Student Centers on campus and the Community Writing Assistance program in two branches of the Madison public library. For more
about this award, click here.

Rhea Lathan has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures Department at Michigan State University.

Alice Robison will- soon begin a 2-year postdoc in the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she will continue her research on new media literacies and videogames for teaching and learning.

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