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Joan Mullin, Sarah McHone-Chase, and Robert McLaughlin
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Departments throughout the College welcomed alumni back to campus for 2008 Homecoming activities. Alumni day guests mingled at the Meet the Dean coffee Friday morning and were later greeted by faculty and friends at an Alumni Day luncheon in the Bone Student Center. The alumni king and queen, Joe '49 MS '50 and Audrey '49 Naffziger, were crowned at the event, followed by remarks from President Al Bowman. Later, the guests enjoyed entertainment from the keynote speaker and alumnus Troy McKay '98. Homecoming festivities continued Saturday as alumni enjoyed the parade and football game. Click Read More for more photos.
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David Foster Wallace
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The Department of English at Illinois State University will hold a memorial service for author and former ISU professor David Foster Wallace on Saturday, November 1, from 1:00-3:00 p.m. in the Old Main Room of the Bone Student Center on the ISU campus. Wallace was recruited to ISU in 1993 by then English Department chair Charles Harris. He taught graduate and undergraduate courses in creative writing, language, and literature. Before leaving in 2002, he had been promoted to professor, named Outstanding College Researcher by the College of Arts and Sciences, and named Outstanding University Researcher. He is the critically acclaimed author of two novels, The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996), three collections of stories, Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), and Oblivion (2004), two collections of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005), and two nonfiction works, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990, with Mark Costello) and Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003).
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Claire Coleman Lamonica
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Dr. Claire Coleman Lamonica, Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT), is the fiftieth recipient of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE) Lifetime Achievement Award. IATE is the oldest English professional organization in the United States, having celebrated its centennial anniversary in 2008. The Lifetime Achievement Award is given to IATE members who have given extraordinary service to the organization as well as having served both the wider profession and their home schools long and well. “I was incredibly honored to receive this award,” said Lamonica. “The list of prior recipients includes so many people—colleagues here at ISU and around the state—who have had a real impact on the lives of students, the profession of teaching, and my own growth as a professional. It’s a bit overwhelming to see my name joining theirs.”
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John C. Shields, Distinguished Professor of English, recently published Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts. The book is a study of one of the most significant writers in the history of the United States. “I found her works fascinating,” Shields said. “So many others just didn’t see the classical in her writings. She was most interested in getting her freedom, and that is why liberation became a central topic in her works. I want people to know that her poetry is worth reading,” he added. Wheatley (1753-1784) was the first African American to publish a book on any subject in the United States, and only the second American woman ever to do so.
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Paula Ressler
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Professor Paula Ressler was recently reappointed to serve another year as a member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues in Academic Studies Advisory Committee (LGBT Advisory Committee) for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Dr. Ressler just completed her three-year term as chair of the committee and will begin her next term after the 2008 Annual Convention scheduled for November 20-25, in San Antonio. She also serves as associate chair of NCTE’s Gay/Straight Educators Alliance (GSEA) <http://www.geocities.com/gsea_ncte/index.htm>.
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Front row: Cheryl Ball, Jessica Huang, Jesse L'Argent. Second row: Amy Determan, Matt Wendling. Third row: Julie Zie, Ariana Haze, Tom Raehl, Andrew Chamberlain. Fourth row: Amos Rein
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Professor Cheryl Ball’s undergraduate class, English 239: Multimodal Composition, traveled to University of Louisville last week to participate in and film the Thomas R. Watson conference on Rhetoric and Composition as part of a class project. The conference focuses on the complex challenges faced by students, teachers and citizens amidst new modes of media. This year’s theme was, "The New Work of Composing," which happened to coincide with the theme of Ball’s class. The conference will produce an edited digital collection based on conference presentations, and Ball is a co-editor.
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Juliet Lynd
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Juliet Lynd joins the ISU faculty as an assistant professor of Spanish. Juliet received her PhD in Hispanic literatures and linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She specializes in issues of dictatorship and post-dictatorship culture in the literary and visual arts of South America, and she has also published on gender issues in Latin American avant-garde and popular film. She has taught at both Carleton College and St. Olaf College, as well as in Mexico, where she was the recipient of an award for course development excellence. Her dissertation was nominated for a best dissertation award, and she spent last summer at Columbia University participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar on Hemispheric American Literature, seeking to frame her work on art and politics in Latin America in a global context.
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