• 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

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.

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).

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).