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Here are our latest updates for Spring 2019
Shawn Gilmore, Senior Lecturer, has had a busy year, welcoming a new human into the world, a daughter, Emmaline Lily. He continues to teach across our BTW and ENGL offerings, and in the last year has been refining his ENGL 109, Intro to Fiction, to revolve around questions of weird bodies and spaces. This Fall, he presented a paper, “What to Do About Franchise Comics?” at the inaugural conference of the Comics Studies Society, which he is a founding member of. In addition, his book chapter on Art Spiegelman’s relationship with Modernism in his pre-Maus work is supposedly forthcoming in the long-gestating volume The Comics of Art Spiegelman. His union work with NTFC Local #6546 continues, as he serves his last term as union secretary; his piece on the formation of the union in the collection Professors in the Gig Economy is available on Project MUSE for those with institutional access. He also represents our department in UIUC’s Academic Senate and continues serving as chair of the Senate’s committee on University Statutes and Senate Procedures. Finally, he maintains an ongoing project to document occurrences of the “it’s-all-connected” conspiracy wall that appears in film, television, comics, and elsewhere; this work can be found on the Narrative String Theory tumblr, and submissions or related types are more than welcome.
Kyle Garton-Gundling will be our presenter for our March 1st New Academy reading. He will discuss his book, Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from the Beats to the Present (OSU Press). In it, Kyle argues that even though works by Kerouac, Walker, Kingston, and others wrestle with issues of exoticism and appropriation, their characters are also meaningfully challenged and changed by Asian faiths. These literary adaptations, then, can help Americans reenvision individualism in a more transcendent and cosmopolitan context. Kyle also published an article, “Mindfulness as Slow Education in the Composition Classroom” in the collection Reversing the Cult of Speed in Higher Education: The Slow Movement in the Arts and Humanities edited by S. Gearhart and J.L. Chambers, Routledge, 2018. In spring 2018, Kyle won the Rhetoric Program Award for Excellence in Writing Instruction.
Mary Lucille Hays, in an effort to discover how many balls she can keep in the air, ran for local office and got her clock cleaned. She is proud, though, that her opponent did not run unopposed, as often happens in her rural county, and that he had to spend a lot of money on glossy mailings to defeat her grassroots campaign. Mary has turned away from her aggressive submission practice this year to concentrate on writing, and only published one story (“Where You Go I Will Go” in Passagers). She didn’t win any contests, but the Betty Gaberhart Prize gave her story, “Quaker City, Ohio” an honorable mention. She finished (?) her first play, Some of the Bits Got Damaged, and is now working on essays for a book of creative nonfiction. She continues to write her column, Letter from Birdland. Though the News Gazette has cut back to publishing it every other Sunday, her small local paper, The Piatt County Journal Republican, still runs it weekly. She is currently knitting a pair of socks from alpaca wool.
Amanda Bales was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Agnes & Elips,” published in Still: A Journal this past summer along with a second poem, “Mine.” Her story “A Drift: The Year She Moves Back Home” was published in The Cincinnati Review and was nominated for the Best MicroFictions anthology. Additionally, Amanda had poems appear in Frontier Poetry and The Boiler Journal. Her poem “The Gods Who Made Us” became part of the production of School for Wives (directed by Kevin Otos) at Elon University in October 2018 (see the program here). This year, Amanda became Communications Chair for the NTFC, a Mentor in the I-Promise Program, and a member of the Editorial Staff of The Raleigh Review.
Mary Rose Cottingham, besides continuing to teach RHET 105, tutor for RHET 101, edit environmental engineering articles, and write letters of recommendation for students, is pleased to occasionally act, her artistic outlet. She is currently in production at The Station Theatre (Urbana) for The Women of Lockerbie by Deborah Brevoort (directed by Mathew Green). This is a theatre piece modelled on Greek tragedy, based on a true story concerning the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988. (The show runs January 17-February 2). The Greek tragedy aspect of this play attracted Mary Rose to it–she gets to revel in some lovely, poetic dialogue. On a personal note, Mary Rose and her husband became grandparents for the first time last April, welcoming John Paul Cottingham to the world.
Kay Emmert recently joined Amasong, Champaign-Urbana’s feminist women’s choir. She’ll be performing with Amasong in their winter show on January 26th and 27th at 4pm at McKinley Memorial Presbyterian, which is located on the corner of fifth and Daniel streets.