English Undergrads: Call for Papers

Check out this call for papers for the inaugural edition of Ellipsis...A Journal for Undergraduate Research in the Humanities.

This call for papers is strictly for undergraduates and those who have graduated within the last year. Papers should be between 10 and 15 pages in length, and they must be accompanied by an abstract (250 words max). MLA Format. See the above link for more information on submission guidelines.

View the journal here.

View the full guidelines and forms here.

Address all questions to Patricia, editor of Ellipsis, at ellipsisscholar@gmail.com.

Attention Grads!

A reminder to all graduating English students:

Dr. Ahmad and Dr. Lubey have organized an informal reception on Sunday, May 15 following the commencement ceremony. Many of the faculty will be in attendance and hope to congratulate you on earning your degree! Light refreshments will be served. Drop by the seminar room B40 with your family and friends after the ceremony.

Good luck with all of your final classes, exams, and papers. And congratulations!

Events for Victorianists

Dr. King has kindly shared some upcoming events with us. If you are interested in Victorian Lit, both of these events are great opportunities to mingle, network, and expand your Victorian horizons.

On Monday, May 2, Tanya Agothocolous of Hunter College will be giving a talk entitled "Comparative Criticism, Cosmopolitanism, and Neutrality in the English Language Colonial Press in India." The talk will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Liberal Studies Room (Room 4108). There will wine and snacks at 6:00 p.m. The talk begins at 6:30 p.m. All are welcome.

CUNY is also hosting their one-day annual Victorianist Conference. The conference is being held on May 6 at the CUNY Graduate Center and is on "Victorian Boyhoods." For anyone who was in Dr. King's George Eliot class last fall, you may be interested particularly in Karen Bourrier's talk on "Tom Tulliver's Schooldays."

Follow this link for more information.

Please feel free to comment on this post if you are interested in attending!

Call for Proposals for a collection

Environmental Rhetoric: Ecologies of Place

Peter N. Goggin, editor

Essay proposals are invited for a collection of original papers titled Environmental Rhetoric: Ecologies of Place. This collection invites scholars of rhetoric (in English studies and elsewhere) to address locales as rhetorical places/spaces for examining complexities and discursive constructions of change, resilience, and sustainability in the natural world. Of particular interest are essays that focus on issues of ecology and the human/nature relationship as situated, place-based concepts. This collection will forefront environment and place as powerful agents in their own rights that inform the crucial contexts for rhetorics of environmental (and social) justice, and sustainability. Environmental Rhetoric: Ecologies of Place will contribute to an emerging and growing field of scholarship in environmental rhetoric for research and teaching in the humanities.

What Do Your Professors do on Sabbatical?

Mostly we write books or work on other long-term projects during our time away from the classroom, but this spring I've also got a couple of local-ish academic events to which I'd like to invite any St. Johnnies who are interested.

This weekend I'm going to a two-day conference at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown U. in Providence that I organized on "The Hungry Ocean: Literary Culture and the Maritime Environment."  Lots of great speakers plus live sea music in the library on Saturday mid-day.  Please come if you're at all nearby.  Details are on my blog (www.stevementz.com/blog), or here's the flyer --

After that, next Friday 4/29, I'll be part of a six-speaker mini-conference at Columbia on "Commons and Collectivities."  Here's the description, grabbed from the Columbia website:

Friday, April 29
A colloquium: COMMONS AND COLLECTIVITIES: RENAISSANCE POLITICAL ECOLOGIES
Speakers: Crystal Bartolovich (Syracuse), Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins),
Jonathan Gil Harris (George Washington), Bryan Lowrance (Columbia),
Steve Mentz (St Johns), Henry S. Turner (Rutgers)
523 Butler Library
All welcome
Organized by: Bryan Lowrance and Emily Shortslef

Should be a fun event, and also interesting because it was entirely organized by two graduate students.  Something for some St. John's students to consider for the future, perhaps?

Please come to either or both of these events.  Email me -- mentzs@stjohns.edu -- if you'd like more information or help with logistics.  I think the Columbia event starts around 9:30 am and runs into the mid-afternoon.

See You Next Year!

I just wanted to take the time to congratulate everyone who participated in the Grad Conference this past Saturday. The discussions were quite interesting and there was a lovely turnout. Our English community certainly shined!

If you were unable to make it this year, please do try to make it next year. It's a wonderful place to hear what your peers are working on and how they may align with your interests. Better yet, why not submit your work for the conference and get your interests heard!

Again, Congratulations Grads. Well Done.

Reminder!

The English Graduate Conference is this Saturday, April 13, 2011.

The conference will take place on Saturday, April 16 in St. Albert Hall B70 & B75.  This year's conference features an exciting mix of scholarly and creative writing panels.  Morning sessions take place from 9:15-12:00, while afternoon sessions take place from 1:00-3:45.  Lunch will be available at 12:00.

Please come out to hear some very interesting discussion and support your peers!

Stony Brook Creative Writing MFA

For information about Stony Brook's Creative Writing MFA program, you are invited to attend an Open House at Stony Brook Manhattan tomorrow evening, April 12 at 8:00 p.m. The address for the Open House is 101-113 East 27th Street, 3rd Floor, Room 313 (located midway between Park and Lexington, on the north side of the street).

For further information, please contact:

Magdalene Brandeis
Faculty Coordinator
Stony Brook Manhattan Track MFA
631 749-1761
310 463-2789
mbrandeis@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Come see Adam Mansbach this afternoon!

Today at 4:00 in Bent Hall 277 A&B, Adam Mansbach, novelist, critic, and professor at Rutgers University, will be giving a talk on his 2005 novel, Angry Black White Boy.


Mansbach is the author of several novels and a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Boston Globe. He graduated from Columbia University, where he founded the hip hop journal, Elementary. He is also the New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University.

New Chaucer Society: Call for Participants

For those of you who have an interest in Medieval lit, you should definitely check out the New Chaucer Society. They have just announced a call for participants in their Eighteenth Biennial Congress, which will take place in July of 2012 in Portland.

This is membership-based, but a student membership only costs $25.

Read about the 2012 Congress here. There are many different threads listed, and you may contact each organizer (email listed below each panel description) to submit a one-paragraph abstract by June 1, 2011. You may submit to more than one session, but you may only participate in one panel.

The Hungry Ocean: Conference on Maritime Literature

A quick note for anyone who wants to travel up to Providence over Easter break, or anyone who wants to know what your professors do during their sabbaticals.  I've organized a small conference on maritime literature and culture, to be held at the John Carter Brown Library on the Brown University campus Th-Sat April 21-23.

Here's a link to the Hungry Ocean page on my website.  Th and Fri are both free, and the big event on Sat, which features lunch and live sea music by Geoff Kaufmann, will cost you $20. 

Please come if you can!  Contact me if you have questions.