The Department of English and the Program in Rhetoric and Composition have received funding awards to enhance the use of pedagogical technology in in our current computer classrooms as well as the Writing Center and the department at large. Notable enhancements already in place include:
- A complete updating of one of our desktop labs (State Hall 029)
- New printers for all State Hall computer classrooms
- New laptops and a new printer/scanner/fax machine for the Writing Center
- A portable media cart for capturing class lectures and talks by guest speakers
- 30 portable handheld audio recorders and 30 portable handheld video recorders for use in classroom projects
- Camtasia software for use in composing computer-based instructional videos
Professor Pruchnic’s article “Neurorhetorics: Cybernetics, Psychotropics, and the Materiality of Persuasion” appears in the latest issue of Configurations 16.2 (Spring 2008): 167-197.
Richard Marback will lead a Writing for Publication workshop for rhet/comp graduate students on at 1 PM, Friday, 11/13, in the 10th floor conference room (#10302). This is the first in a series of program workshops organized specifically around graduate student requests. All current rhet/comp students, as well as those who are interested in the program, are strongly encouraged to attend.
The second Rhetoric Reading Group Meeting of the Fall semester will take place at 3:30 PM, Friday, November 13. The location will be The Motor City Brewing Works (470 W. Canfield Street). Our text will be Bryan Garsten’s Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard UP, 2006).
The latest issue of College Composition and Communication contains articles by two WSU rhet/comp faculty members. Issue 61.1 (September 2009) features Jim Brown’s “Essjay’s Ethos: Rethinking Textual Origins and Intellectual Property” and Gwen Gorzelsky’s “Working Boundaries: From Student Resistance to Student Agency.”
At 3:30 on 10/23, Daphne Brooks will present a talk entitled “Bring the Pain: Post-Soul Memory, Neo-Soul Affect and Lauryn Hill in the Black Public Sphere” as part of the 2009-2010 DeRoy Lecture Series. Brooks is an associate professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2006), winner of the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African-American Performance from ASTR, and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). She is the editor of The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft, and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series. Brooks is currently also a contributing writer to The Nation where she has published articles on Beyonce and Amy Winehouse. She is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Feminist Musicial Subcultures from the Minstrelsy to the Post-Hip Hop Era (Harvard UP, forthcoming).
Professors Ellen Barton and Richard Marback will deliver a talk entitled “The Bodies of the Urban Public” as part of the Humanities Center Fall Symposium on “Representation of Health and Disease in the City” Friday, November 6. The conference runs from 9 AM until 5 PM at the McGregor Memorial Conference Center. Professors Barton and Marback’s presentation is scheduled from 1:55 until 2:20.
Two of the program’s graduate students will present talks at the 23rd Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (November 5-8, 2009). As part of the panel “Decoding Use: Broken and Failed, Localized and Expansive,” Jared Grogan will deliver a talk entitled “Garbage, Gospel, and Gold: Decoding User Inputs in Climate Modeling” and Kimberly Lacey will deliver a talk entitled “Decoding Kryptos and the Failure of Human/Machine Interaction.”
The first Rhetoric Reading Group Meeting of the Fall semester will take place at 3:30 PM, Friday, October 9. The location will be The Motor City Brewing Works (470 W. Canfield Street). Our text will be Collin Gifford Brooke’s Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media (Hampton Press, 2009).
