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Justin Askins
reports that he
“was awarded a Professional Development Leave in Spring
2009 to work on my book of humorous essays, several of
which have been aired on WVTF.”
Mark Burnette
has been busy “grading papers and working on making the
perfect mint julep (an affectation picked up while
reading Percy).” When the semester ends, Mark plans on
“driving along the Mississippi River from Memphis to
somewhere in Louisiana – taking photos, sleeping in my
truck, eating jar after jar of peanut butter, and
hopefully meeting a few interesting people.”
Ricky Cox
says “As soon as the semester is over I’ll be working to
complete a history of Floyd County grist mills, Water
Over the Dam: Water Powered Grist Mills in Floyd County,
Virginia, 1800-2000.” Ricky is completing research
begun by his co-author, the late Frank F. Webb.
Don Cunningham
finished “a new professional development seminar,
‘Writing Construction Specifications,’ which is
registered with the American Institute of Architects (AIA)
Continuing Education System for 7.0 HSW Learning Units
and the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI)
Construction Education Network for .7 HSW Continuing
Education Units.” Over the summer, Don “will present
one-day seminars to licensed architects and engineers in
Charleston, WV; Chapel Hill, NC; Egan, MN; Chicago, IL;
and Toledo and Cleveland, OH.” Don will also be
“presenting a paper at the IEEE International
Professional Communication Conference 2008 (IPCC 2008),
‘Opening the Information Economy,’ in July at Concordia
University in Montreal, Canada.” In August, Don will be
“traveling to Nagoya, Japan, to give a special one week
lecture on professional writing to information
technology graduate students at Aichi Prefectural
University. In between he’ll be “touring backroads on
his Harley-Davidson 1200 Custom Sportster and promoting
his third book, Samurai Weapons: Tools of the Warrior,
released in April by Charles Tuttle Publishing.”
Renee Dickinson
says that over the summer she will be “converting my
dissertation to a book to be published in 2009 by
Routledge, preparing for a research trip to London to
unearth more news articles by Olive Moore, contributing
a chapter to a collection on Musical Modernisms on Olive
Moore’s Fugue, proposing a collection of essays
on Olive Moore, and preparing for three conferences:
International Virginia Woolf Conference, Rocky Mountain
MLA, and Modernist Studies Association.” She’s also
“reading a lot about Darwin, genetics, and British
Literature for a collaborative course with Bob Sheehy in
Biology” for the spring.
Louis Gallo
is on sabbatical next
semester, “so I hope to get a lot of writing, editing and
reading done. In May I will again judge the NEA Al
Smith Poetry Competition in Kentucky. My story 'Aliens'
(first chapter of the novel Breakneck) will
appear in the May issue of Glimmer Train. I have
more stuff on Amazon Shorts, and a piece of creative
non-fiction will appear at some point in an anthology to
be called 'Confessions.' The story/essay is called
'Whitney,' and it's about an encounter I once had with a
very strange girl. New story also coming out in The
Hurricane Review. Started a new novel, no title
yet, about three chapters into it. Takes place in New
Orleans and Philadelphia, with one set of characters
thriving in the mid-seventies, and the younger set, in
2008. Going to New Orleans and Florida this
summer to visit family and do some more field work for
fiction and poetry. Touring the ruins, as they say down
there. And of course, the constant house renovation and
repair.”
Rosemary
Guruswamy will be “working on
a paper on the Renaissance roots of Anne Bradstreet to
be presented at the American Literature Association
conference in San Francisco this May.”
Scott McDarmont
regularly contributes to Geoff
Klock’s blog: Remarkable: Short Appreciations of
Poetry and Popular Culture. He’s “currently doing a
series of postings on the Giffen-Dematteis-Maguire run
on Justice League in the late 80’s: a look at the
lighter side of superheroics that should be taken more
seriously and, at some point, I will finish that story
about Mortimer, the angel of death, featuring special
guest star Johnny Cash as God.”
Jim Minick
will be “editing Rita Riddle’s All There Is to Keep
and organizing the book release celebration here at RU.”
Jim will also be working on his “first book of poetry,
Her Secret Song, tentatively accepted for
publication by Motes Books.” In addition, James will be
“revising a second collection of essays, Lucky Dog
Farm, and working on a second collection of poems.”
James also “started a novel, Healing Fire, and
then there is always the garden, the mulch pile, and the
firewood to work on.”
Michele Ren
is “working on a presentation for the Building A New
World Conference (May 22-25 here at RU). My
presentation is on Denise Giardina’s novel Storming
Heaven; it’s part of a panel with colleagues Theresa
Burriss & Dana Cochran on Appalachian Women Artists as
Activists.”
Don Samson
"presented papers at the Association for Business
Communication Southeast Regional Conference in Columbia,
South Carolina, and the Conference on College
Composition and Communication (CCCC) convention in New
Orleans. On sabbatical, he has been studying what ten
widely-used first-year composition texts say about
career writing and do to prepare students for writing in
business and government. He has been helping coach the
Radford Men’s Rugby Club, who won the Mid-Atlantic
Division II Championship and played in the Elite 8
tournament in Albuquerque for a chance at another
national championship.
Also, Don has prepared program
proposals for the Association for Business Communication
national conference at Lake Tahoe in October, the
National Council of Teachers of English convention in
San Antonio in November, and the CCCC 2009 convention in
San Francisco in March 2009. He was awarded the Greek
Life Advisor of the Year award for his work with Alpha
Sigma Alpha sorority. He has been teaching courses in
Shakespeare and in English Literature and London for
Study Abroad program and will direct the three-week stay
in London during Maymester. When he gets back from
London, he’ll be surf-fishing in Florida with Joy,
camping and fishing in Yellowstone for two weeks in
July, and then hiking and fishing in the White Mountains
of New Hampshire with his son and daughter-in-law.”
Jeff Saperstein
is “working on how to relax.” He also works on making
himself “something of a poet (that is, he tries to write
poetry on a regular basis).”
Rick Van Noy
is working on “an essay for a collection on the creative
nonfiction of Loren Eiseley and the release of A
Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature
Through the Seasons (due out in June). I'll be
reading June 3rd at the Highland Summer Conference and
June 12 at a conference honoring Rachel Carson in
Boothbay Harbor, Maine.”
Jolanta Wawrzycka’s
“most recent academic adventures include daily
preoccupation with Study Abroad Ireland/Italy program, a
labor of love that keeps me perennially busy. I’m also
conducting a number of digital experiments in my classes
by implementing Adobe Connect in my wireless Honors
classroom, and iTunesU server where students can access
course files in PDF, PPt, and mp3 formats.”
“Professional/publishing work never ends: I’m finalizing
a book tentatively titled
Joyce-in-Translation-in-Joyce. In addition, I’ve
been invited to guest-edit a volume of European Joyce
Studies on translation (my contributors are Joyce
scholars from Iceland, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary,
Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Spain and France).”
“My shorter
publications this year include an article on “Textual
Implications of Re-Languaging Joyce” (in Joyce and/in
Translation: Joyce Studies in Italy No. 10. Rome
2007, pp. 38-51). I also wrote a chapter for a book,
James Joyce in Context, forthcoming from Cambridge
University Press; the book offers perspectives on Joyce
that range from historical, religious, biographical,
psychoanalytical, cultural to literary, etc.; my context
was “translation,” a new category, and my chapter is
titled “Translation: ‘Latin me that my Trinity
Scholard’. In addition, James Joyce Quarterly
and ELT (English Language in Transition) will
publish my reviews of recent books on Joyce.”
“I also traveled a
little; in addition to my usual Ireland/Italy Study
Abroad travel, I attended a few Joyce events at such
great places as the University of Texas in Austin
(courtesy of RU Summer Grant), Hamilton College,
Clinton, NJ, and the University of Rome III, Italy,
where I was invited to be a respondent on
Joyce/translation panel. I will be on the road for most
of the summer 2008: Ireland/Italy with my students in
May; Tours/Paris, France, for the Joyce Symposium in
June; and Zurich, Switzerland, for the Joyce Workshop
and research in August.” |
