News and Notes: Department of Language and Communication
Fall 2009
OCTOBER EVENTS!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 3 PM on the Northwestern State University Leesville-Ft. Polk Student Lounge: Fred Taulbee hosts an event featuring Poems by Edgar Allen Poe, children's poet Adam Rex, and others. This event is open to the public, and children are welcome. For more info call Fred L. Taulbee Jr. 337.392-3120
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 5 PM at the Library Faculty Reading Room: Michelle Pichon and Lori LeBlanc present the Fall 2009 Fall Read Event. Come hear readings by university faculty, staff, and students. The event will have a Halloween theme!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 7:00 PM in the Kyser Television Studio: Dr. Allen Bauman and Dr. James Crank present the first screening of the new "Classic, Rare, and Unseen Film Series:" Night of the Living Dead (1968, Romero). There will be a brief introduction before the film from Dr. Crank and Kristina McBride as well as a short roundtable discussion at the end. Come enjoy some zombie fun from the original master.
Boils and Ghouls! The shambling horde invites you to Natchitoches's Parish First Annual Zombie Walk! The Zombie Walk is presented by Southern Gothic and is a charitable event to begin at five thirty Wednesday October 28th 2009. Ghouls wishing to partake in this historic event will bring three non perishable can food items to the event at the Natchitoches Riverbank and together the horde will march from Front Street to the NSU campus. Face painting and candy will be available for children and a night of fun frights is in store for Natchitoches. All food items will be donated to a local food drive just in time for the Thanksgiving Holiday. If anyone wishing to participate in this event has any questions or comments they can call Southern Gothic President John Staton at 601-529-0273 or email him at jabinbooth@gmail.com.
FACULTY NEWS!
Dr. Allen Bauman and Dr. James Crank received the news in the spring of 2009 that their grant proposal "STRENGTHENING NEW CONCENTRATION IN FILM STUDIES THROUGH A DEPARTMENTAL FILM LIBRARY" had been funded by the Board of Regents for over 5,000. The proposal intended to provide support to the film studies concentration in the most practical way possible: by providing a film library for the department consisting of movies that have been requested by faculty as primary sources to be used in classes. The grant promotes the newly developed "Film Concentration" within our department's major curriculum. Second, the departmental film library (the result of the grant monies) serves as a resource within the university, and will allow the expansion of our "Master of Arts in Entertainment Technology." Finally, the Board of Regents' grant also helps establish Northwestern State University and its Department of Language and Communication as one of the only sites for training for the constantly-expanding film industry in Northern Louisiana. We hope to train and educate future directors, lighting designers, grips, and foley artists to work for Louisiana's film industry.
Dr. James Crank has had a busy spring and summer. In April, he traveled on an NEF grant to Jackson, MS, to the Eudora Welty Centennial where he delivered his paper, "'They Came in a Body': Imagining and Vocalizing Class in Welty's Ponder Heart." He visits the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in Atlanta this November where he will chair the session "Southerners in Contemporary Film." His publications this year include: "Paternal Nightmare: Violence and Masculinity in the Restored Edition of A Death in the Family" in the Southern Literary Journal; "'A Piece of the Body Torn Out by the Roots': Failure, Language and the Limits of the Fictive in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." in the Mississippi Quarterly; Reviews of Tim Ryan's Call and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery Since Gone With the Wind, Lovalerie King's Race, Theft, and Ethics: Property Matters in African American Literature, Peter Schmidt's Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865-1920 all in the Southern Literary Journal. His article "The Saddest Joke: Sherman Alexie's Blues" will appear in Bloom's Literary Themes: Dark Humor (2010). He is currently working on two manuscripts, The Collected Short Prose of James Agee, and one tentatively titled Taking out the Trash: Representations of Class in Contemporary Southern Literature. He is also contributing an article, "The Cinema of South-Sploitation," to McFarland Press' Contemporary Southern Literature (2011). In September, he received word that the manuscript for his article, "Racial Violence, Receding Bodies: James Agee's Anatomy of Guilt" has been accepted for publication in the collection Agee at 100 (U of TN Press, 2010).
Dr. Julie Kane's new poetry collection, JAZZ FUNERAL (Story Line Press, 2009) was launched this past summer with a reading on June 10 at the West Chester University Poetry Conference in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The book won the 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, judged by David Mason. On June 18, there was a wine and cheese reception/signing for the book at The Book Merchant Book Shop in Natchitoches, attended by many NSU personnel. On July 11, Julie gave a reading in the Powow River Poets series at Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport, Massachusetts. She also signed books afterward. July 25 brought a reading and book signing at the Garden District Book Shop in New Orleans, and the following weekend Julie read on a double bill with poet Robin Kemp at The Maple Leaf in New Orleans. August 5 brought a reading before the "Young at Heart" group of the First United Methodist Church of Natchitoches at their monthly luncheon meeting. Coming up this fall for Julie will be appearances at the Southern Festival of the Book in Nashville on September 9, where she will read with poets Grace Bauer and Diann Blakely, and at the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge on September 16, where she will share a bill with Darrell Bourque and Peter Cooley. Also since the end of the spring semester, Julie introduced poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, the winner of the 2009 Poets' Prize, at the Poets' Prize awards ceremony May 21 at the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City, and interviewed Kiem Do, the co-author of her nonfiction Vietnam book (COUNTERPART: A SOUTH VIETNAMESE NAVAL OFFICER'S WAR) during a narrative stage session of the Natchitoches/NSU Folklife Festival on July 18. A poem from JAZZ FUNERAL, "Particle Physics," was featured on Poetry Daily (http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14500) and will be read by Garrison Keillor on the September 16, 2009 broadcast of Writer's Almanac. You can purchase the book directly from the publisher here. Also, please visit Dr. Kane's professional webpage here.
Susie Kuilan's work on a new edition of Kate Chopin's The Awakening has been accepted by Broadview Press. Forthcoming in 2010. Her paper entitled "Charles Brockden Brown's Theory of the Novel as Reflected in Wieland; or the Transformation," was accepted and will presented at this year's SCMLA in Baton Rouge. She was also recently accepted and started in distance learning version of the Army War College. Upon graduation in 2011, she will be awarded a Master's of Science in Strategic Studies. In November, she will run her 1st marathon.
Dr. McFarland's publication this year include: Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, eds. Brill Academic Press: Leiden and Boston, 2009. Includes: "Approaching the Agency of Other Animals: An Introduction." Sarah E. McFarland with Ryan Hediger. Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. McFarland and Hediger, eds. Brill Academic Press: Leide and Boston, 2009. 1-20, and "Dancing Penguins and a Pretentious Raccoon: Animated Animals and 21st Century Environmentalism." Sarah E. McFarland. Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. McFarland and Hediger, eds. Brill Academic Press: Leiden and Boston, 2009. 89-103. She presented: "Selkie Skin and the Human Within: Human/Animal Natures in Island Lore." The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment conference, Victoria, Canada, June 2009, and "Encountering the Face of the Absolute Other: Toward Radicalizing Animal Subjectivity." Animal Studies Seminar at The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference, Victoria, Canada, June 2009.
Michelle Pichon was one of the selected Regional Writers for the Country Roads magazine Regional Writers Edition in June; she had two haikus selected and published.
Shane Rasmussen is pleased to announce that the Louisiana Folklife Center has received a generous grant for $3,965 from the Shreveport Regional Arts Council in support of the 2010 Natchitoches-NSU Folk Festival. The grant is designated to pay for some of the craftpersons and musicians that will attend the Festival.
Thomas Reynolds delivered his paper "Derrida's Post Card and the Erotic Triangle: Homosociality, Power, and Beyond" in March at the Louisiana Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture in Lafayette, LA, where he earned the Darrell Bourque Award for the Most Outstanding Paper. Also in March, he travelled on an NEF grant to the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco, CA, where he delivered his paper "Franklin's Autobiography as a Model of Empirical Rhetoric." Thomas ended the Spring 2009 conference season in April at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference in New Orleans, LA, where he delivered his paper, "'They're Not Paternity Pants; They're Fat Pants:' The Growing Discourse of Maternity Literature for Men."
Fred Taulbee is currently involved in a documentary about a uniquely made bartop with about twenty frames in which items were placed and covered with shelac. One frame contains coins from all over the world. Another frame contains pins. Several have beach themes with miniatures inside them. One actually has a miniature bowling lane. Some have advertising, personal pictures, stained glass, etc., most of them with tropical or beach themes since the name of the bar is Paradise. He will also present a Halloween poetry reading on October 27, 2009 at 3pm on the Northwestern State University Leesville-Ft. Polk Student Lounge, featuring Poems by Edgar Allen Poe, children's poet Adam Rex, and others. This event is open to the public, and children are welcome. For more info call Fred L. Taulbee Jr. 337.392-3120
Robert Tummons is writing a chapter for a book tentatively titled "iRhetoric," which features aspects of classical and contemporary rhetorical views on the developing web and (especially) Apple Inc.'s advertising and hardware/software additions and their affect on society. His chapter is entitled "'Hi, I'm a Mac...and I'm Aristotle': How the Ancient Rules of Rhetoric Influence the Mac vs. PC Advertisements." This book is planned for publication sometime next year (though hard dates are still unavailable)
