| Departmental Activities
Highlights from academic year 2000-2001 (including activities and events our department sponsored, produced, or participated in):
- We held our annual World Poetry Day (an event celebrating poetry, with community members reading poems of their choosing);
- We sponsored (with the Humanities Division and the college at large) a Medieval Symposium;
- We celebrated the publication of Cantilevers 2001 (our creative writing magazine) with readings from our guest poet, Cara Chamberlain, and from Cantilevers contributors;
- We awarded the Wesley Ryals Creative Writing Awards to James Garrett Ziegler (poetry) and Frank Hodges (short fiction);
- We taught classes in the May Option/Travel Abroad Program;
- We taught courses in the Honors Program;
- We began teaching in our new computer laboratory;
- We taught courses in the Women's Studies program;
- We celebrated the 50th year of Psi Epsilon, our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society;
- We taught courses in the various community outreach programs like Upward Bound;
- We celebrated the advancement of Dr. Margaret Taylor to full faculty status and the hiring of Dr. John Crow as a member of the English Department;
- We enjoyed a lecture on "Beyond the Ebonics Debate" by Dr. Annette Kashif, who also taught a course on African Literature;
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| Dr. Kashif lectures to some 50 faculty and students. |
- We had students and faculty volunteer their time and energy with such charitable organizations as Paint Your Heart Out and Habitat for Humanity;
- We had faculty members make various presentations to the college community, to the families of students, and to the community at large.
Faculty Achievements
Dr. Peter Schreffler will supervise and coordinate a summer research project, working with student Michael Heider on a study of the kinds of writing done in several local workplaces. The professions represented in this study are ones which, for the most part, are not typically associated with significant writing demands. This faculty-student research is funded in part by a grant from the Jesse Ball duPont Foundation.
Dr. Alexander Bruce began his tenure as Assistant Academic Dean, published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education and had three other items accepted for publication, including his monograph Scyld and Scef: Expanding the Analogues. He also received the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church award for exemplary teaching at a United Methodist-related institution of higher education and was inducted into Phi Eta Sigma.
Dr. Mary Pharr published a review of The Return of the Repressed in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Dr. Pharr has continued her work on a variety of other scholarly essays and books. She will also direct a student, Sarah Lanius, in a summer research project (funded by the duPont Foundation) focusing on representations of the epic in contemporary film.
Dr. Bernard Quetchenbach published Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (UP of VA) as well as several poems in BlackWater Review and Pleiades. Dr. Quetchenbach also published his essay "Sauntering in the Industrial Wilderness" in Thoreau's Sense of Place and served as a Contributing Editor for The River Review/La Revue rivière and as a member of the editorial board for a new electronic journal, Common Ground.
Dr. Keith Huneycutt presented a public lecture on "The Comedy of Errors as Comedy" and, having made the most of his sabbatical, will publish with Dr. Mike Denham (History Department) "Our Desired Haven: The Key West Letters of Corinna Aldrich" in the upcoming summer issue of the Florida Historical Quarterly.
Dr. Claudia Slate published "Looking for the Glass Slipper in Jane Austen’s Persuasion" in A Companion to Jane Austen Studies. Ed. Robert and Laura Lambdin.
Dr. Catherine Eskin published "Kairos in Aristotle's 'Art of Rhetoric'" (co-authored with James L. Kinneavy) in Written Communication 17.3 (July 2000) and "Sit You Down Huswife and Fall to Your Needle: A Woman's Authority in Lodge's Rosalynde," Cahiers Elisabéthains (April 2001); her "Hippocrates, Kairos and Writing in the Sciences" will be included in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. by Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin.
Various professors read papers at conferences:
Dr. Bruce read papers at the Twelfth International Conference on College Teaching and Learning, at the Salve Regina University conference on "Ancient Studies–New Technology: The World Wide Web and Scholarly Research, Communication, and Publication in Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval Studies," and at The Medieval-Renaissance Conference XIV at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.
Dr. Slate read "Self Images of African-American Writers" to The Fifth Annual Women’s Studies Conference:[Re]presenting Woman at Valdosta State University.
Dr. Pharr read her paper "Deus ex Hogwarts: Harry Potter and the Epic" to the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts. She chaired a session on speculative film at that same conference. Dr. Pharr also gave a lecture on Eva Peron as a Postmodern Icon to the Spanish Language/Spanish History club.
Previous Years: 1999-2000 |
