May 2020

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Dear Colleagues,

I hope your summer is off to a good start and that you are finding some time for yourself after the extraordinary semester we just finished. Planning for Fall 2020 continues, so more updates will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead. Liz Miller sent out an email earlier today about the process underway for making changes to the fall schedule. Thank you for your patience as we work on submitting the schedule changes and on other tasks related to reopening this fall. 

Letters will soon be going out to each of our 2020 graduates with our congratulatory messages and a link to a YouTube video of a special reading of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! that Mark West made as a tribute to English Department graduates. Alan Rauch has posted it to the departmental website, which you can view here:  https://english.charlottewp.psapp.dev/.  Thanks, Mark and Alan, for helping the department celebrate and honor our recent graduates.  I’d also like to thank Angie Williams for her assistance with the letters.  

I will set up an English Department Happy Hour for Friday 5/29/20 at 4:00 pm via Webex.  Stay tuned for a calendar invitation and please join us! 

KUDOS

Meghan Barnes received QM (Quality Matters) Certification for MDSK 5104, which she regularly teaches for the College of Education in addition to her English Department courses. She recommends the QM process to anyone who might be interested in “developing a really effective online course.” Meghan said she would be happy to share her QM experience with English Department faculty. 

Pilar Blitvitch announced that a new issue of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (Vol. 8, No. 1) has been published. You can view the contents here: https://benjamins.com/catalog/jlac.8.1 As co-editor in chief, Pilar  has worked with the journal since 2012 to increase its international recognition and indexing (Scopus). JLAC attracts diverse authors who work on critical discourse analysis, political discourse, racial and gender equalities, and other areas of language aggression and conflict. More issues are in the pipeline, including a special issue forthcoming on conflict on Greek social media. You can see the contents of all the volumes and issues that have been published here: https://benjamins.com/catalog/jlac 

Pilar was recently asked to join the editorial boards of Elements of Pragmatics Series (Cambridge University Press) and Corpus Pragmatics journal (Springer).  

Kirk Melnikoff’s edited edition of Robert Greene’s James IV was published in The Routledge Anthology of a Early Modern Drama (Routledge, 2020).

Maya Socolovsky received a research award from Children’s Literature Association to work on her  project titled Citizenship and Migration in  in U.S. Latino/a Children’s Literature, 1996-2018.

Ralf Thiede received a research award from the Children’s Literature Association to further his study of Dr. Suess’s linguistics background.

Best wishes,

Paula