The University of Connecticut’s First-Year Writing Program will host its Twelfth Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing on Friday, April 7, 2017. Our theme for this year is “Humility and Conviction,” and we’re honored to have John Duffy, Francis O’Malley Director of the Notre Dame University Writing Program, as our keynote speaker.

Regularly updated information about this year’s conference is available at http://fyw.uconn.edu/conference/.

Please send questions to firstyearwriting@uconn.edu.

English Department faculty member Lisa Blansett gave a presentation “Information Literacy in the Age of Fake News and Alternative Facts” on March 23 to determine the credibility of today’s news sources. In the workshop, Blansett demonstrated how easy it is to fabricate a story and present it as real and accurate information, and she encouraged her students to be critical of the available news sources.

Professor Gina Barreca elected to Mark Twain House and Museum Board of Trustees.

Dr. Barreca earned her BA from Dartmouth College, where she was the first woman to be named an Alumni Scholar. She went on to receive her MA from Cambridge University as a Reynold’s Fellow and her PhD from the City University of New York. She is a professor of English and Feminist Theory at UConn, where she has been recognized for her excellence in teaching.

Barreca has also appeared on such television programs as The Today Show, CNN, and Oprah to discuss her views on gender, power, politics, and humor. Barreca is a syndicated columnist; her weekly columns for The Hartford Courant have been published in major newspapers across the country and globe, including The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, and The Independent of London. Comedian Rachel Dratch says Barreca’s latest book, “If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?”: Questions and Thoughts for Loud, Smart Women in Turbulent Times, “contains everything a good friend would provide: honesty, insight, female camaraderie, and a lot of laughs.”

“We are thrilled to have Gina Barreca serve on our Board of Trustees,” said Joel Freedman, President of The Mark Twain House & Museum’s board. “She brings a welcome energy, enthusiasm, knowledge, and good humor to the museum. My fellow board members and I look forward to working with her and know The Mark Twain House & Museum will benefit greatly from her input and presence.”

Kevin Ohi will present “‘The Make-Believe of a Beginning’: The Novel and Questions of Inception” on April 3 at 4pm in the Stern Lounge. Ohi is a professor of English at Boston College.

 

“Looking at a series of openings of novels by Sterne, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Flaubert, and Proust, the paper will ask whether the “beginning of the novel” might mark a crisis as definitional for the genre as that which, in poetics, Giorgio Agamben calls “the end of the poem.” Turning, perhaps, to the curiously self-grounding gestures of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and to Henry James’s theorization of the novel through the complex, contradictory, often baffled search for particular novels’ “germs,” it will attempt to explore some of the consequences of what Eliot calls  “the make-believe of a beginning,” in which the novel as a genre confronts a fundamental structure of writing.”

 

Contact george.p.moore@uconn.edu for questions about the presentations.

The Connecticut Writing Project-Storrs is celebrating its 35th Anniversary!

More than 500 teachers have attended a Summer Institute in Storrs since 1982, and thousands more teachers have been impacted by the work of those 500+ teachers over the last three and a half decades!  Come join your colleagues this summer for an evening of writing, music, and memories.

Rome Ballroom, South Campus, UConn.

When: Saturday, June 24, 2017, 4:00-8:00 PM

Guest Speaker: Lynn Bloom Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, former Aetna Chair of Writing

Schedule of Events:

Writing Marathon: 4:30-5:30

Cash Bar Social: 5:30-6:00

Dinner: 6:00-8:00

Buffet Menu includes Mesclun salad with candied pecans and dried cranberries with a balsamic vinaigrette; lemon pepper chicken with lemon sauce or penne pasta with spinach, tomatoes, and garlic; seasonal vegetables and potato; rolls with butter; double chocolate layer cake for dessert; coffee, decaf, and tea. Cash bar open from 4 to 8 pm.

Entertainment provided by The Quiet Corner Fiddlers

Ticket Prices:

$35 for Teacher-Consultants of the CWP-Storrs ($35 for 35!)

$25 for guests—spouses, partners, children, colleagues, etc.

Register online here:  www.regonline.com/CWP35

Or by mail.

Make checks payable to Connecticut Writing Project.

Mail to 215 Glenbrook Rd. Unit 4025, Storrs CT 06269-4025.

When registering, please indicate if you will be participating in the writing marathon.

Deadline for Registration:  June 1, 2017.cwp-35th-ann-flier

Contact Information:

Jason Courtmanche at Jason.courtmanche@uconn.edu or cwp@uconn.edu

Phone 860-486-2328 or 860-486-5772

 

Poem “Double Dutch Champion” won first-place prize of $100 in the 2017 Al Savard Poetry Contest of the Connecticut Poetry Society. About the poem, the judge wrote: Deceptively simple, this gem of a poem juggles the athleticism of rope-jumping with the exigencies of an orphan’s life. It’s as if the whirring cadences of the poem and of double Dutch itself are meant to hide and assuage Dickensian sorrows, but can’t. The sorrows, the hard facts of loss, never go away. As a winning poem, it will be posted on the Connecticut Poetry Society (CPS) website.

April 3rd from 12-1 in room 240 (American Studies Library) Miss Collegiality: A Round table on Colleagues, Community, and the Work of our Work. The goal of the round table is to demystify some of the unspoken obligations graduate students have when participating in an English department, as well as talking through some of the expectations and experiences in preparation to become junior faculty.

Laura Wright, Micah Goodrich, Dr. Steve Mollmann, and Dr. Patrick Lawrence will be speaking for a bit, and then we hope to have a lot of time for audience questions and discussions. While our speakers will have some topics prepared, others may write down some questions, concerns, and topics you’d like to hear about on the shared GoogleDoc.

March 27 4-6 p.m. in Austin 217 (Stern Room) the Writing Internship Program’s annual panel presentation and discussion for English majors: “Careers for English Majors: Strategies, Options, and Ideas.”  Students have found this event highly informative, practical, and inspiring.

Despite job market concerns and the pessimism English majors confront about their choice of major, job options open to the specific skills of English majors are now quite varied, and English majors are increasingly in demand.  The panelists below are testimony to the creative ways in which English majors are shaping careers for themselves.

Four UConn English majors (see below) will present information about their own careers and job search strategies.  Given their experiences and professions, they have valuable advice and will answer questions about job market realities as well as the logistics and anxieties of job searches and interviews. The panelists will discuss the value of the English major and other concerns about professional life after graduation.

• As everyone knows, the current job market poses numerous challenges for job applicants.
• These panelists will speak to those challenges and offer both practical advice and encouragement.

The panelists below bring a broad range of internship and post-undergraduate experience:

Carla Calandra (’16), Publisher Support and Editorial Assistant, Oxford University Press, New York City

Mary Malley (’16), Assistant Editor, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, New York City

Myles Udland (’12), Business News Reporter, Yahoo Finance, New York City

Eric Vo (’13), Health News Reporter and Editor, Aetna, Hartford, CT

Refreshments will be served.

If you have questions, please e-mail ruth.fairbanks@uconn.edu.

 

11:00am March 23 (Tues.), BUSN 204

Brenda Murphy is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at UConn.  She is the author of twenty books, the most recent being Eugene O’Neill Remembered (2017), a biography in documents. The subject of her talk will be After the Voyage: An Irish American Story (2016), historical fiction based on the experience of her immigrant family in the Boston area from 1870 until the 1930s.