Laura Laffrado’s chapter on teaching Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson has been published in the collection Teaching Western American Literature. Laura is also the newly-appointed Associate Editor of the journal Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Laura spoke about Ella Higginson at the Modern Language Association Convention in Seattle in January 2020.
Donna Qualley
Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien (English Literature major and PWLR minor, WWU Fall 2020) co-wrote a chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time” for an edited collection entitled Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies, edited by Peter Moe and Stacey Waite and to be published by Parlor Press in 2021. The collection focuses for the important role of student writing in composition studies research and the impact it has had on the development of the field.
Christopher Wise
Christopher Wise (along with Kristiana Kahakauwila) ran the Senegal Program for the second year, bringing 15 WWU English majors to Dakar, Saint Louis, and Saly, where they studied West African literature and culture. Wise, Kahakauwila, and Suzanne Paola co-edited a special international issue of The Bellingham Review featuring West Africa writers. The special issue is entitled “Scribes, Griots, and Poets: New Writing From West Africa,” including Wise’s translations of excerpts from the Tuareg poet Hawad’s poem ‘In The Net’ and the Senegalese author Boris Boubacar Diop’s short story “Night of the Imoko.” Wise also participated in a panel discussion in Djilor, Senegal at the Foundation Léopold Sédar Senghor, entitled “Léopold Sédar Senghor et la poésie de la négritude” (February 10, 2020). Since the coronavirus struck, he has been stuck at home recording lectures for his classes on deconstruction and animal metamorphosis. These lectures are available for public viewing on his YouTube channel, “Christopher Wise.”
Carol Guess
Carol Guess’s short story collection Girl Zoo was nominated for the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Co-written with Aimee Parkison, Girl Zoo depicts a dystopian landscape where girls and women exist only in confinement and under surveillance. Currently collaborating with Rochelle Hurt on a persona poetry manuscript, she has new work forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Juked, Superstition Review, and Western Humanities Review. Her collaboration with Suzanne Paola, speculative fiction titled “The Desk,” will appear in Tupelo Quarterly. Guess is a member of Fiction Collective Two and will be the judge of the 2020 Utah Original Writing Competition for Short Fiction.
Christopher Patton
Christopher Patton’s book of translations from Old English, Unlikeness Is Us (Gaspereau Press) received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His book of poems, Dumuzi (Gaspereau), appeared this spring 2020.
Allison Giffen
This past year Allison Giffen has been developing a digital humanities project, co-edited with Lucia Hodgson. In fall 2019 they were pleased to launch their website Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project.
This website is committed to gathering and nurturing the growing community of Critical Childhood scholars. It offers several moderated blogs that offer and review new work by scholars in the field. This year, along with her co-editor, she has proposed and moderated panels, roundtables, and special sessions at the major conferences in the field: an MLA 2020 roundtable “Critical Childhood Studies and Intersectionality: The State of the Field”; a special session at C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, titled “Critical Childhood Studies and Disability: Charting Confluences” in which she was to deliver a paper “‘one yeah older’: Narratives of Failed Development and the Figure of the Black Boy in Saint Nicholas Magazine.” (postponed until fall 2020); and forthcoming in Fall, they proposed and will moderate a special seminar session at the American Studies Association titled “Caught in Time: Black Boyhood Criminalization and Revolt.”
Geri Forsberg
Geri Forsberg is fast at work teaching, researching, and writing. This year Geri developed a new approach to teaching technical writing. Students research historical documents that have transformed culture—such documents as the Magna Carta, the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Human Rights, the Equal Pay Act, and many others. Students study what life was like before the document was written, how the document came about, and how life changed after the document was written. They also consider how the document is relevant to their lives today. Students then write magazine articles, an academic research poster, and visual presentations based on their research. Their research posters are presented at the Humanities Research Day at Western. Students have said that their appreciation of history has grown, and their critical thinking skills have developed. Geri is also presenting her research on “Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul in Dialog” at the Media Ecology Association annual conference in Toronto this June.
Greg Youmans
Greg Youmans’s essay “Greener Pastures: Filming Sex and Place at Druid Heights” will appear later this year in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, edited by Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). He also served as the film consultant for the Oakland Museum of California’s exhibition Queer California: Untold Stories. The exhibition was on view from April 13 to August 11, and he gave a talk at the museum about the film selections in June. In his teaching, he developed a new course topic for ENG 406: Topics in Critical and Cultural Theory: “Dream/Film,” a course that considers art and experimental film practices in relation to various theories of dreaming and of cinema and of the relationship between the two.
Eren Odabasi
Eren Odabasi has recently published two peer-reviewed book chapters; a study on various audience groups in film festivals included in International Film Festivals (edited by Tricia Jenkins, I.B. Tauris) and an analysis of the commercial success popular Hindi films enjoy at the American box office featured in Pop Culture Matters (edited by Martin Norden and Robert Weir, Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He also has two forthcoming peer-reviewed articles in the journals Post Script and Society and Leisure, exploring the cinematic portrayals of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires and film funds associated with major festivals. In relation to teaching, he has designed new courses on contemporary world cinema with an emphasis on diversifying the canon beyond Western European films (ENG 365), the textual and organizational aspects of international film festivals (ENG 464), and screen portrayals of immigration through different periods in film history (ENG 580).
Ely Shipley
Ely Shipley’s second full-length book Some Animal won the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender Variant Literature, is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, and has received positive reviews in Publishers Weekly, DIAGRAM, Ocean State Review, and Lambda Literary Review. Publishers Weekly calls it a “riveting exploration of what it means to come of age in a genderqueer body” that is “steeped in Anglo-American poetry and literary theory” and claims that “what sets this book apart is its focused attention to the experience of defying the gender binary, of being in a body that intimates and strangers alike are bent on denying…Shipley’s book is one of hard truths, lovingly rendered.” Some Animal was listed as one of the best poetry collections of 2018 by Entropy, as well as poet CA Conrad. Ely has been having a blast teaching poetry and multigenre workshops, as well as a course on Anne Carson.