Showing posts with label academics. Show all posts

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Spring is Bringing Greatness: A Lecture on Lewis Carroll Coming 2015

Joseph Thomas, the Director of SDSU's National Center for the Study of Literature, interrupts your regularly scheduled web surfing for this important message:

Great news! Noted poet, musician, scholar, & Words with Friends player Michael Heyman has confirmed that he will journey from the snurfish lerds of Boston to the ersatz shores of San Diego to give a public lecture on Lewis Carroll this spring (2015) for SDSU's National Center for the Study of Children's Literature! Evidently the Alice books are turning, like, twenty nine or something, so Carroll fever is spreading like a kinder, gentler Ebola virus across the Southland.

Lecture date to be announced!

Michael Heyman will join the malfuscant ranks of poets and scholars like Yetta Howard,Charles Hatfield, Kate Capshaw, Richard Flynn, Kenneth Kidd (did he end up doing one? I can't remember--he did something, tho), & many others ... ** O frabjuous play! O merciless lay! Let ring your horns, let blare your rings! Spring's a coming! Spring's a coming! And so's that Heyman kid!

**For example, Marah Gubar gave a fantastic NCSCL sponsored talk a few years ago, as did poet, scholar, librarian, and writer of Eldritch fictions Michael Joseph. The brilliant Leonard S. Marcus is also among this esteemed crew; as are Pamela Ryan, Gene Luen Yang, Gary Soto, and a slew of others!**

Related Resources:

News about the world-wide celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
http://lewiscarrollresources.net/server/fe/index.html

SDSU's Alice Mural Restoration
http://library.sdsu.edu/support-library/mural-homepage/alice-wonderland-mural

SDSU Theatre Department's Performance of Margaret Larlham's adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
http://ttf.sdsu.edu/index.php/season_of_plays/alice

Info on Michael Heyman, visiting lecturer extraordinaire

At Berklee College of Music:
http://www.berklee.edu/people/michael-heyman

His book, The Tenth Rasa:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tenth-Rasa-Anthology-Nonsense/dp/0143100866

His Tenth Rasa Blog:
http://www.tenthrasa.blogspot.com/

The Making of the Anthology of World Nonsense:
http://jabberwokabout.blogspot.com/

Friday, March 14, 2014

Ugo Fontana: Illustrating for Children

Dr. Giorgia Grilli, professor at the University of Bologna, has just written and compiled a 200 pg volume on an Italian illustrator for children that worked from the Forties to the Eighties: Ugo Fontana. She worked on this project with Fabian Negrin (an Italian-Argentinian illustrator and candidate for the H.C.Andersen and the ALMA Award). The book is in Italian and English and is companion to an important exhibition that will be hosted in two weeks at Bologna Children's Book Fair.

She shared these details with us:

Fabian Negrin and I have been researching for some years and put together a book in Italian and English on the work of a great Italian illustrator: Ugo Fontana (1921-1985). This book – a 200-page volume richly illustrated – is companion to the exhibition on Ugo Fontana that will be hosted by the Bologna International Children’s Book Fair. This exhibition inaugurates a new section of the fair, called ‘The Lost Treasure,’ which aims at rediscovering and presenting to the world the illustrative work of old masters of illustration that have been forgotten or have disappeared from bookstores, but deserve international attention. Ugo Fontana is the first one of the series and we, as curators, have been working hard to retrace his original artwork from national and private archives, old publishers, the family, friends, etc. We have collected more than 90 tables, which will be visible at the exhibition and which are all reproduced in the book. For our critical essay, we have studied the evolution of his style, the influences of other artists on his work, his own influences on other illustrators, the relationship of Fontana's way of illustrating for children with the children's publishing industry of his days and, more in general, the socio-cultural context in which he worked.

Having shown to some Italian publishers Fontana’s work (part of which they had in their archives or in their old catalogues, but no longer knew or thought about), many of them were so enthusiastic that they each decided to re-publish a book illustrated by him. So there will be three books illustrated by Fontana as ‘new’ releases at Bologna Children's Book Fair 2014.

The book can be bought, with a discount, directly through the publisher’s website (www.edizioniets.com -- it will be available in a couple of days). Or at the exhibition, in Bologna.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Kenneth Kidd Brown Bag Session Recap!

University of Florida professor of children's literature Kenneth Kidd virtually joined a group of graduate students and faculty yesterday for a discussion about his book Freud in Oz, among other topics. SDSU Children's Literature faculty Joseph Thomas, June Cummins, Phillip Serrato, and Mary Galbraith eagerly asked questions of their UF colleague Kidd, who answered with eloquence and the occasional self-effacing humor.

Belying his modesty, though, is Kidd's work itself, which takes a thoughtful look at children's literature through a psychoanalytic lens. The chapter under discussion, "Child Analysis, Play, and Pooh," progresses chronologically through the early stages of psychoanalytic research into children's behavior, from Freud to his daughter Anna to Melanie Klein to D.W. Winnicott, and looks at the links between child psychoanalysis and the inherent themes of children's literature. Kidd aligns these links with "Poohology," which he describes as "a form of popular psychology and child analysis and literary criticism and theory"that "refashions the children's classic into a plaything for adults, supporting the interiorization of childhood and of childhood's forms." As Kidd describes, Winnie the Pooh, with its straightforward narration and its playful themes, is an ideal backdrop for examining how play shapes childhood.

Specific questions that came up during the brown bag session with Kidd focused largely on Kidd's treatment of Frederick Crews' The Pooh Perplex, which satirizes the intensity of literary criticism while also highlighting the promise of what literary criticism can uncover. The discussion with Kidd unearthed how Crews' work leans toward sarcasm and in fact shut the door on literary criticism of Pooh for years, but conversely may also have paved the way for analysis of children's literature. By illuminating the shortcomings of taking children's literature too seriously, Crews also may have inadvertently proposed a way of looking at children's literature with both intellectual rigor and self-awareness.

Also up for discussion was the idea of the "inner child" and how much of that is extended adolescence or performative adolescence. The group talked about how contemporary young adult authors in particular seem to be both adult and adolescent at once. Kidd discussed the later chapters in his book that trace the American fascination with adolescence from the 1950s onward and try to explicate a broader history of what we now call the YA novel. Kidd described YA authors as potentially "both therapists and an older young adult," an identity that makes them adept at writing for a teen audience.

In addition to fielding scholarly questions, Kidd also discussed the PhD program at the University of Florida (where a student can specifically focus on graduate work in children's literature) and the job prospects for nascent scholars in the field. While job openings specifically recruiting children's literature scholars are relatively scarce, Kidd pointed out that children's literature PhDs coming out of UF are also well-positioned to talk about their research in broader terms. His assertion supports what we all discover when studying children's literature: the themes and ideas that we analyze may start in children's literature, but they translate to numerous other genres within literature. And as the group also discussed in the brown bag session, we were all children once.

Overall this was an engaging and enlightening discussion with one of the premier scholars in the field of children's literature. Thanks to Kenneth Kidd for joining us via Face Time, and thanks to Joseph Thomas for arranging this brown bag session!

Addendum: An actual corporeal visit from Kenneth Kidd is tentatively planned for the Spring 2013 semester. Stay tuned for more details!

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

CFP for Dartmouth Conference April 19-21, 2013

From: Philip Nel <philnel@ksu.edu>
Date: Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 10:31 PM
Subject: [IRSCL] CFP: Illustration, Comics, and Animation Conference,
Dartmouth College, April 19–21, 2013

I'm forwarding the following CFP on behalf of Associate Professor
Michael Chaney at Dartmouth. This is the inaugural conference; he
plans to make it an annual event. Note that abstracts are due Dec.
1st.

Best wishes,

Philip Nel
Professor
Director, Program in Children's Literature
Dept. of English, 103 ECS Bldg.
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-6501
U.S.A.
www.ksu.edu/english/nelp :: philnel@ksu.edu

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

What is the future of illustration studies?

What can comics scholars learn from animation studies and vice versa?

Do illustrated books or graphic novels resist the supposed
obsolescence of the book? What do pictures want (now)?

These and related questions will be explored at the Illustration,
Comics, and Animation Conference at Dartmouth College to be held April
19 – 21 2013.

Scholars interested in the illustrated image in all of its mediated
guises are invited to participate in this interdisciplinary
conference. Nearly all illustrated or drawn ‘texts’ are eligible for
consideration:

*comics and graphic novels

*cartoons and animated films

*picture books

*illustrated books

And given the uniquely plenary nature of the conference, which brings
together scholarship on static and moving illustrations, preference
will be given to proposals that seek to bridge visual media. Possible
topics may include:

*Individual titles by prominent practitioners in the field

*Identity, subjectivity, authority, ideology or culture in or more
type of illustration media

*The future of particular schools of criticism (psychoanalysis,
critical race theory, phenomenology, Marxism, feminism, queer theory,
post-colonialism, formalism, aesthetic theories, etc.) and one or more
type of illustration media

The location of the conference may also be a source of inspiration for
prospective participants. Not only does Dartmouth College lie in close
proximity to the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction,
Vermont, but it is also the historic home of Theodor Geisel, Dr.
Seuss, whose illustrated books continue to awe and amuse.

Interested participants may propose individual papers or panels.
Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes. Panels shall be
ninety minutes long and should be comprised of three presenters and
one (ideally separate) panel chair. Please send 300 word abstracts and
a brief bio for each proposed paper no later than December 1, 2012.

Send all proposals and inquiries to

Michael A. Chaney <michael.chaney@dartmouth.edu>

SDSU's Jerry Griswold on Wisconsin Public Radio WBEZ, link provided

http://www.wbez.org/series/front-center/creating-culture-literacy-100004

Monday, July 9, 2012

Internatl. Research Society for Children's Literature CFP

Call for papers

The 21^st biennial conference of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature on

Children’s Literature and Media Cultures

will be hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Conference Convenor: Lies Wesseling

Conference dates: August 10-14, 2013

Conference theme:

Contemporary children and adolescents divide their time over many different media. These media do not develop in isolation. Rather, they shape each other by continually exchanging content and modes of mediation. This conference addresses the exchanges between children’s literature and adjacent media (oral narrative, theatre, film, radio, TV, digital media).

Media are best defined as cultural practices that forge specific links between senders and receivers of messages, facilitating certain types of communicative behavior. As newer media tend to imitate, if not absorb, older media, they force older media to reassert their uniqueness and indispensability in a rapidly changing media landscape. How has children’s literature staked out its own niche in these historically variable ‘mediascapes’ in the course of time? How do electronic and digital media affect children’s emergent literacy and literary competence? How have children’s books and the newer electronic and digital media impacted on children’s play? What sort of communicative behaviors are facilitated by the diverse media available to children and adolescents nowadays? Which ethical and political issues are raised by the fact that children’s literature has to share its claim to the audience’s attention with a whole gamut of alternative media? These questions are central to the 21st biannual conference of the IRSCL.

The aim of the conference is to strengthen the ever closer ties between children’s literature scholars and media experts, and to bridge the gap between hermeneutic methods from the humanities and empirical, experimental methods from the social sciences.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Adriana Bus, Gudrun Marci-Boehncke, Jackie Marsh, Kerry Mallan, Junko Yokota

For further information about the conference, the call for papers, and the submission of abstracts, go to: www.irscl2013.com

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

from Academic Keys, Job Postings

NEW! - Dean -- Faculty of Arts Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Arts
Location Hong Kong, Hong Kong	Posted May. 25, 2012

Executive Director -- University Relations Vancouver Island University University Relations Division
Location Nanaimo, BC, Canada	Posted May. 11, 2012

Manager -- Academic Administration United Arab Emirates University Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Location Al Ain, United Arab Emirates	Posted May. 7, 2012

Assoc. Vice President for Univ. Marketing and Communications Oklahoma Baptist University Marketing and Communications Department
Location Shawnee, OK	Posted Apr. 12, 2012

Vice Dean of Faculty and Full Prof. in an FHSS Discipline United Arab Emirates University College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Location Al Ain, United Arab Emirates	Posted Apr. 5, 2012

Executive Vice President and Provost Naval Postgraduate School Office of the President
Location Monterey, CA	Posted Mar. 13, 2012

Director -- English Language Centre (ELC) Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University English Language Centre (ELC)
Location Suzhou, Jiangsu, China	Posted Feb. 22, 2012

NEW! - Asst. Prof. -- Women's and Gender Studies (Gender,... Amherst College Department of Women's and Gender Studies
Location Amherst, MA	Posted Jun. 15, 2012

NEW! - Multiple Faculty Positions -- English American University of the Middle East College of Business
Location Al Kuwait, Al Ahmadi, Kuwait	Posted Jun. 14, 2012

NEW! - Visiting Asst. Professor -- Continental Philosophy Wellesley College Philosophy Department
Location Wellesley, MA	Posted Jun. 12, 2012

NEW! - Instructor of Modern Hebrew Portland State University Department of World Languages and Literature
Location Portland, OR	Posted Jun. 5, 2012

NEW! - Contract Faculty Position -- Writing Ball State University Department of English
Location Muncie, IN	Posted Jun. 4, 2012

NEW! - English Lecturer Shanghai Jiao Tong University Univ. of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Inst.
Location Shanghai, China	Posted May. 22, 2012

Lectureships Modern Chinese History (2 Positions) University of Sydney School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry
Location Sydney, NSW, Australia	Posted May. 17, 2012

English Language Pedagogy Specialist English Language Institute of Singapore (ELIS) Language Programmes
Location Singapore, Singapore	Posted May. 14, 2012

English Language Specialist English Language Institute of Singapore (ELIS) Language Programmes
Location Singapore, Singapore	Posted May. 16, 2012

Faculty Appointment -- Division of Chinese Nanyang Technological University School of Humanities and Social Sci. (HSS) -- Div. of Chi...
Location Singapore, Singapore, Singapore	Posted Apr. 26, 2012

Assistant or Associate Professor -- Spanish Oklahoma Baptist University Coll. of Humanities and Social Sciences -- Spanish Dept.
Location Shawnee, OK	Posted Apr. 12, 2012

Asst. or Assoc. Prof. -- Hispanic Literary Hertiage & Con... University of Houston Department of English -- Creative Writing Program
Location Houston, TX	Posted Apr. 10, 2012

Adjunct Faculty Position in English Composition University of San Francisco Arts & Sciences
Location San Francisco, CA	Posted Mar. 23, 2012

Instructors -- English As a Second Language American University of the Middle East English As a Second Language (EPP) Program
Location Al Kuwait, Al Ahmadi, Kuwait	Posted Mar. 13, 2012

Digital Communication Specialist (Assistant or Assoc. Pro... New Jersey Institute of Technology Department of Humanities
Location Newark, NJ	Posted Mar. 1, 2012