MA TESOL student Sarah Bogdan published her creative nonfiction essay, “All are Vessels,” in the Nzuri Journal of Coastline College.
Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD student RAsheda Young was awarded a research stipend from Rutgers University for her writings and contributions to an anti-racist workshop series.
Join IUP Religious Studies professor Dorcas Dennis on Monday, October 26, at 5:30 p.m. on Zoom.This discussion is part of the ongoing series of events organized by the IUP Forum for Building Social Understanding.
On October 3, 2020, the Appalachian Professional Language Educators’ Society (APPLES) hosted its annual fall event in conjunction with its fall membership meeting. This year’s event was titled “E-Portfolios and ACTFL Can-Do Statements.” Christina Huhn serves as the organization’s president.
The English Department is excited to announce a 12–15 credit ESL certificate program, open to all undergraduate majors interested in teaching English as a second or other language.
The annual celebration of Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (also known as Moon Festival) was successfully held online via Zoom in the evening of September 30, 2020.
Melanie Holm (English) has published an article on “Teaching Tristram Shandy to Undergraduates” in the Teaching Tools section of Studies in the Novel, “A Digression on three Digressive Assignments."
Melanie Holm (English) published an article, “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room: Using feminist game design to look at and beyond the male gaze in Swift’s The Lady’s Dressing Room,” on using game design theory and interactive fiction to teach eighteenth-century poetry.
Todd Nathan Thompson, professor of English, published a chapter titled “Form: an Empire of Jokes in the American Age of Expansion" in the book A Cultural History of Comedy in Age of Empire.
Join us on Monday, September 28, at 4:00 p.m. on Zoom for “An Exploration of the Hip Hop of Jasiri X with Kyesha Jennings.” This event continues the discussion to Build Social Unity.
Matt Vetter (faculty, English Composition and Applied Linguistics) and Krista Speicher Sarraf (PhD candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics and faculty at West Virginia University) published an article in the journal Interactive Learning Environments.
Bryna Siegel Finer, professor of English and director of Writing Across the Curriculum, will serve as one of four discussion hub leaders at the 2020 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium.
Matt Vetter (faculty, English Composition and Applied Linguistics) has published a chapter in Wikipedia @ Twenty: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution (MIT Press).
Tim Hibsman (English Department) published an article titled “Anecdotal Learning: Teaching Through Stories” in Relationship & Family Magazine.
Tim Hibsman (English Department) published an article titled “The Future of Teen Success Lies in Purpose, Engagement, and Practical Applications” in Relationship & Family Magazine.
Tim Hibsman (English Department) published an article titled “Escape from Reality” in the September 2020 issue of Teach Plus Magazine. The article focuses on our current out-of-the-classroom experience with the pandemic.
Gloria Park (director of the MA TESOL and Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD programs in the English Department) and alumna Kyung Min Kim ’15 have published an article titled “‘It Is More Expressive for Me’: A Translingual Approach to Meaningful Literacy Instruction Through Sijo Poetry.”
Professor of Spanish Dawn Smith-Sherwood and co-authors recently published an article titled “Multi-Institutional Survey of Faculty Experiences Teaching Capstones” in College Teaching.
Dana Driscoll (professor of English, director of the Jones White Writing Center) and S. Rebecca Leigh of Oakland University published “A Two Voice Poem on Self Care in Academia” in the spring 2020 issue of Michigan Reading Journal.
John Branscum (English Department) and Yi Yu have a new horror story, “Windows That Were Not Windows,” in the September 2020 issue of New England Review.
Under the umbrella of the IUP Forum for Building Social Understanding, recently retired Tom Slater and graduate students in the Department of English will host its first Zoom dialogue of the academic year. Focused on racial and social justice, the discussion will take place on August 25 at 3:00 p.m.
English Department students and faculty, as part of the IUP Forum for Building Social Understanding, will host another Zoom discussion of the film American Son and the poems “Churchgoing” and “Farm Garden.”
Veronica Watson virtually joined the hosts of Eye 94 on Chicago radio station Lumpen Radio to discuss her new edited collection of Frank Yerby’s writings, The Short Stories of Frank Yerby.
A Zoom discussion of Dear White People (episodes 2 and 3) and the short videos A Conversation With Latinos on Race, A Conversation With Asian-Americans on Race, and A Conversation With Native Americans on Race takes place at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 11.
Jialei Jiang, PhD (Composition and Applied Linguistics doctoral program) and her collaborator Jason Tham (assistant professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University) have received a $10,000 grant from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Please join us for a Zoom discussion of Dear White People (episode 1) and video statements from the Whiteness Project on Tuesday, July 21, at 7:00 p.m. This event continues the discussion to Build Social Unity. Dear White People is a series based on the film of the same name and follows the perspectives of Black college students at an Ivy League institution.
Professor Tom Slater presented “Connecting the Physical and the Spiritual: Understanding June Mathis’s Stage Work as a Key to Her Screenwriting Success” as part of a silent film panel organized by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Silent Film Interest Group on July 10, 2020.
Twenty-four participants representing students, faculty, and staff from across campus met by Zoom to discuss the movie Just Mercy on Tuesday evening, July 7. The talk ran for over two hours with wonderful discussion about the film and how we can work to create a more inclusive and just community on campus.
Matt Vetter (faculty, English Composition and Applied Linguistics) and co-author Zach McDowell (University of Illinois, Chicago) published “It Takes a Village to Combat a Fake News Army: Wikipedia’s Community and Policies for Information Literacy” in the journal Social Media + Society.
English Department students and faculty will host a Zoom meeting focusing on the film Just Mercy on Tuesday, July 7, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. This event will mark the beginning of an ongoing discussion series based on student interests and ideas for confronting racism at IUP and everywhere.
John Branscum and Yi Izzy Yu published “The Slope of Tigers” and “Meat Vegetables,” literary translations of the work of Ji Yun, chief librarian to the Emperor Qianglong during the Qing dynasty.
The Gabo Award is sponsored by Antioch University and Lunch Ticket Magazine. Branscum and Yu’s piece explores how history and our hearts are haunted by voices both forgotten and silenced through their exploration of the lives of a mysterious Buddhist nun and monk.
Melanie Holm published article on feminist game design in conjunction with teaching Jonathan Swift’s poem “"The Ladies Dressing Room” to teach reading poetry to undergraduates. Her article details the process of developing the interactive, digital, text-adventure game.
Undergraduate writing students Marty Weaver, Jared Swansboro, and Jared Burkhardt published three new creative writing pieces in the online international journal of weird tales, Glitch Press.
John Branscum (English Department) and Yi Yu have a new creative nonfiction piece, “Checkpoints,” in the June 2020 issue of the literary magazine Passages North. Their story is a literary retelling of an 18th century tale of immigration and ghosts.
Jiawei Xing (PhD candidate, English Composition and Applied Linguistics) and faculty member Matt Vetter published an article in the journal First Monday on a survey of over 100 instructors engaged in Wikipedia-based education practices in order to contribute a cross-disciplinary picture of instructor motivations.
Casidhe Shetter, a rising sophomore English major at IUP’s Cook Honors College, has been selected to participate in the Undergraduate Summer Opportunity for Applying Research Program (U-SOAR).
Trinity Miller, a criminology major and ROTC cadet who studied the Chinese language through the IUP Department of Foreign Languages during her freshman year 2019–20, has received admission with full scholarship from Project Global Officer (Project GO).
Veronica Watson’s The Short Stories of Frank Yerby is now available to the public via online distributors and in bookstores once they reopen.
Dawn Smith-Sherwood, Department of Foreign Languages (Spanish), recently published the chapter “Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir: An Integrated Performance Assessment Approach” in the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno.
Matt Vetter (English Composition and Applied Linguistics) and Melanie Holm (English Literature and Criticism) received an ACPAC Technological Innovation and Exploration Fund grant for their proposed project "Meeting Owl Audio/Video Conferencing Tool for Remote and Distributed Meetings in English Graduate Programs’ Professionalization."
Matt Vetter (English Composition and Applied Linguistics) has published an article, "Broadening Representations of Rhetoric in Wikipedia: Disciplinary Praxis as Graduate Pedagogy and Research" in the journal Studies in Higher Education.
The English Department and the Liberal Studies English Committee congratulate the winners of this year’s LSE Writing Awards: Tyler Sprankle, Jared Mattern, Amber Yearick, Alliana Drury, Mikayla Dokos, Sean Young, Cody Dreibelbis, and Cassidy Black.
Dana Driscoll, Mary Stewart, and Matthew Vetter of the English Department are co-editors of the peer-reviewed, open educational textbook Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. The volumes offer multiple perspectives on a wide range of topics about writing.
Dana Driscoll, director of the Jones White Writing Center and professor of English, offered an online workshop, titled “Self-Care Practices for Writing Center Professionals,” focused on creating a space for writing center professionals to discuss self-care practices that are central to healthy functioning during the pandemic and beyond.
Dana Driscoll (English, Writing Center) along with her colleagues Nadia Zamin (IUP alumna, PhD in English, 2017) and S. Rebecca Leigh, published an article titled “Self-Care as Professionalization: A Case for Ethical Doctoral Education in Composition Studies” in the flagship journal College Composition and Communication.
Matthew Vetter (faculty, English Composition and Applied Linguistics) recently gave a keynote presentation, “Wikipedia for Open Education: Pedagogy, Information Literacy, and Knowledge Equity,” at OpenCon 2020 Cleveland, held at Cleveland State University on February 28.
Jialei Jiang, PhD candidate in English Composition and Applied Linguistics, published “‘I Never Know What to Expect’: Aleatory Identity Play in Fortnite and Its Implications for Multimodal Composition” in Computers and Composition: An International Journal.
Mariah Fairley (PhD student, English Composition and Applied Linguistics) published “Conceptualizing Language Teacher Education Centered on Language Teacher Identity Development: A Competencies‐Based Approach and Practical Applications” appears in the most recent issue of the journal TESOL Quarterly.
Dawn Smith-Sherwood, Department of Foreign Languages (Spanish), and Sean Rhodes, Applied Research Lab (research associate), recently published the article “Introduction to Hispanic Literatures and the Impact of IPA-Informed Instruction on Student Writing Proficiency in the Presentational Mode: Findings from a Pilot SoTL Study” in MIFLC Review (vol. 19, Fall 2018–19).
A new edited collection, titled Transfer of Learning in the Writing Center has just been released by Dana Driscoll (director of the Jones White Writing Center and Professor of English) and Bonnie Devet (College of Charleston).
Lingyan Yang, associate professor in the English Department, presented a research paper, “Asian American Magical Realism in the Americas in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,” at the MLA (Modern Language Association) annual convention January 9–12, 2020, in Seattle.
As part of the “Hot Topics” speaker series, featuring urgent ideas from top scholars and artists in the fields of drama, theater, and performance studies, Mike Sell presented his research on the history and future of the avant-garde at Yale University on February 18.
As part of his ongoing exploration of how writers, poets, and filmmakers represent videogames, videogame players, and videogame culture, Mike Sell explores how the Oscar-nominated film 1917 by Sam Mendes adapts the visual logic of third-person action-adventure videogames.
Tim Hibsman (English Department) presented his paper “Practical Pretending and Role-Playing through Real-Life Apps” at the 2020 Scholarship of Teaching, Learning and Assessment Conference held at West Chester University on January 9, 2020.
Matt Vetter (Faculty, English Composition, and Applied Linguistics) and Oksana Moroz (PhD candidate, English Composition, and Applied Linguistics) have published a course design essay in the most recent issue of Composition Studies.
Christina Huhn, Department of Foreign Languages, has been named co-editor of the Pennsylvania Language Forum (PLF), serving with co-editor Nathan Campbell of Manheim Central High School.