English Faculty Flash Research Panel
May 5th, 2023
Medium Shapes Message: What the New Era of Screen-to-Screen Communication Teaches Us about Language Structure and Use
Jenny Lederer, Linguistics
My current research …
In 2018, I designed a 1st year Social Science GE class on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)
I am a contributing author to a book series on Inclusion in Linguistics (late 2023), in which I make the case to other linguistics programs to use CMC courses as gateways into linguistics
For the last two years, I’ve been drafting a crossover textbook on cool patterns in CMC, and how they can help us understand introductory linguistics concepts
Dynamic Activities for First Year Composition: “Question Clouds”
Dan Curtis Cummins, Writing Program
Dynamic Activities for First Year Composition: “Question Clouds”
In June 2021, I presented “Question Clouds,” an adaptation of the ‘Question Paper’ activity, at the Young Rhetorician’s Virtual Conference.
Myself and colleague Jolie Goorjian are contributing authors to a collection of active learning activities in First-year Composition (“Dynamic Activities” 2023). In my activity, I introduce an idea-generating and inquiry-based workshop in visual brainstorming. Students love this activity, which combines “mindmaps” with “wordclouds” through an “inquiry-lens” that helps them choose a semester-long research topic.
“There is an End of the Thresher’s Labours”: Stephen Duck’s Enigmatic Death
Bill Christmas, Literature
[Forthcoming in British Working-Class and Radical Writing Since 1700 (University of London Press)]
Santos, M., Showstack, R., Colcher, D., Martínez, G., & Magaña, D. (2023). Health Disparities and the Applied Linguist. Routledge.�
Maricel G. Santos, TESOL
The vowel space as sociolinguistic sign
Journal of Sociolinguistics (2023)
personae
affect
style
“One World, One Life”: Three Guineas as Feminist Political Ecology
Loretta Stec, Literature Program
A talk for a panel on “Ecologies and Economies” at the International Conference on Virginia Woolf, June 2023
The “pleasure of dominance” must be distinguished
from “the pleasure of a country walk” (TG 181).
Woolf argues that women need to reject the systems that perpetuate domination, and to make an alternate space for what some theorists refer to as “the commons.”
Elmhirst, Rebecca. “Feminist Political Ecology.” pp 519-530 in Perreault, T., Bridge, G., & McCarthy, J. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.jpllnet.sfsu.edu/10.4324/9781315759289
The Mysteries of Modern Life: Popular Narrative and the Politics of Vision
Sara Hackenberg, Literature Program & Coordinator of MA in English Literatures
Book manuscript in revision
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Modernity of Looking: the “True Mystery” of the Visible
Mystery as a narrative genre
Modern mystery, visual fetishism, and kaleidoscopic vision
From urban mysteries to detective fiction
Chapter One: Modernizing Mystery: Les Mystères de Paris
A prince of perception and deception
The paradox of the faceless Schoolmaster
Mistress of disguise versus oxymoronic oppressor
Chapter Two: “Paradoxopolis!”: Urban Mysteries and the Politics of Vision
Microscopic eyes
Asmodeus vision
Mystery and melodrama
Cabinets of melodrama and character-history chapters
Chapter Three: Mystery’s Social Kaleidoscope
The painful excitements of the confidence character
Confidence in kaleidoscopic commonality
Kaleidoscopic vision and detection
Marks of Cain
Chapter Four: Seeing as Reading: Poe’s Urban Mysteries
Dupin as a Mysteries master-perceiver
Seeing as reading, solving as storytelling
Dupin(g), diddling, and the paradox of the defaced letter
Chapter Five: Murdering the Urban Mysteries
The Dead Man’s secrets
Mr. Tulkinghorn’s secrets
Count Fosco’s secrets
The Good Schoolmaster’s secrets
Chapter Six: Detective Fever
Captain Delano’s ague
Gabriel Betteredge’s complaint
Irene Adler’s disorder (and Sherlock Holmes’s limits)
Chapter Seven: “Beyond Fashion, Beyond Taste”: Mystery into Cinema
Sherlock Holmes, baffled
Asmodeus, mystery, photogénie
Kaleidoscopic vision and emancipated spectatorship
“‘The Magician of Civilised Life’: The Literary Detective in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Early Penny Fiction.” Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, Special Issue, “Reappraising Penny Fiction,” Eds. Rebecca Nesvet and Stephen Basdeo (4.2, Fall 2022)
“we come at last to look upon the detective police officer as the magician of civilised life”
—Braddon, The Black Band; or, The Mysteries of Midnight (1861-62)
Abstract: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s responses in her earliest novels to the mid-century city mysteries genre—an internationally popular form of penny fiction—allowed her to develop the detective genre in important ways. While attention to Braddon’s early work usually considers how it helped to establish the “sensation” fiction of the 1860s, this essay examines how Braddon’s embrace of the earlier urban mysteries narrative both advanced the evolution of the Mysteries genre in the second half of the century and brought its maverick, socially marginal detective characters to new audiences. I argue that because of their roots in the penny Mysteries, Braddon’s detective characters act as agents of social equity rather than figures of surveillance, and they work to challenge many of the social hierarchies, stereotypes, and prejudices that form and undermine “civilized life,” often by magically dismantling or overcoming them.
“Sisterhoods, Doppelgangers, Republicans: Reynolds’s Radical Mysteries.” G.W.M. Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830– 1870, Eds. Jennifer Conary and Mary Shannon. Routledge: 2023, 205-227.
Diana and Eliza declaring their sisterhood, as Eliza goes to Diana for help in eluding Montague Greenwood. Illustration for the chapter “Diana and Eliza,” opening the twentieth number of The Mysteries of London, 1844.
The Resurrection Man haunting Richard, while Richard walks with Isabella. Illustration for the fourteenth number of The Mysteries of London, 1844.
Richard in prison, meeting both Republican political prisoner Thomas Armstrong and Anthony Tidkins, the Resurrection Man. Illustration for the chapter “The Republican and the Resurrection Man,” opening the tenth number of The Mysteries of London, 1844.
Will Clark / Literature Program
ASAP/ Journal, September 2022 Issue