Happy summer to all! Another semester is in the books!
CWS Administrative Team Update
We are happy to announce Bruce Kovanen as incoming CWS AD! Bruce is a PhD student in English/Writing Studies and has been an active member of the community, and we know he’ll make wonderful contributions as AD. He will be replacing Niki Turnipseed, whose tenure as AD is over this semester, and who is incredibly grateful for all she’s learned from and with her CWS colleagues in this position. Autumn West will return as AD and Paul Prior will continue as CWS Director.
We’re hard at work planning for next semester, including a continuation of this spring’s new brownbag structure. If you have comments or suggestions for programming, please let Autumn West (awest@illinois.edu) know. We would love your input for next semester. In the meantime, keep an eye out for announcements on social media and on our listserv.
We hope you’re all gearing up for a rejuvenating, minimally disruptive, summer “break.” This semester was a full one with many accomplishments.
Ongoing Initiatives
Members of the CHAT Chat reading group and Social Justice Education Praxis Working Group continued to meet regularly. These ongoing affinity groups afford members opportunities to broaden and deepen their understanding of and participation in personally and professionally enriching fields with passionate colleagues. They’re a cherished coming-together place for our community. If you’d like to know more about these groups, or have an idea for a group you’d like support facilitating (you can see some earlier groups here), check out our earlier blog post here, or shoot Bruce (kovanen2@illinois.edu) an email!
WAC/WID
We led our usual two-day intensive WAC seminars for TAs before the semester began, continued our semesterly seminar with Education Justice Project’s Writing and Math Partners and, in conjunction with our ongoing work with the College of Engineering’s Strategic Instructional Innovation Engineering Writing Project, facilitated a focused seminar for the instructional staff of PHYS 280: Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control. Following last semester’s Writing Across Engineering faculty learning group, the team, comprised of Engineers and Writing Studies faculty and grad students, carried out in-depth mentoring with faculty members interested in making specific changes to their course materials and teaching practices. We also co-hosted Virginia Tech Engineering Education’s Marie Paretti, who gave stimulating talks with various Engineering and Writing Studies groups. The Center, in conjunction with a standing working group also made progress toward revising the campus plagiarism policy toward meaningful, theory-backed, pedagogically-geared language and resources. We look forward to continuing this important work. Dominique Clayton’s graduate research forum Black Students’ Resistance against Erasure in Writing Spaces documented the intense challenges AAVE speakers face in the university. Her research has motivated us to tackle language ideologies in our upcoming WAC work. Stay tuned!
WAM
In our WAM staff development meetings this semester, we got to see some amazing student projects, discussed issues of access and disability, and reflected on the changing landscape of multimodality. Past instructor Logan Middleton led the way on our IRB approved research and presented a slice of his rich data at the Kirsch Graduate Student Symposium. We also have a few instructor changes for next semester. This was the last semester of teaching for Evin Groundwater and Hannah Harris. Evin and Hannah are off to new adventures, and we are very grateful for their unique contributions to the course. We also welcome Niki Turnipseed and Bri Lafond to our teaching community in the fall. We are incredibly thankful for all our WAM instructors and the innovative work they do in their classrooms.
Faculty News
We are happy to announce Liv Dávila (Curriculum and Instruction) as new affiliated CWS faculty, and John Gallagher (English) as new CWS core faculty members. We congratulate Lindsay Rose Russell on being named 2017-2018 Helen Corley Petit Scholar, an honor given annually to exceptionally successful faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, based on their work as scholars and teachers. Though we’re incredibly sad to see him go, we thank Eric Pritchard for his dedicated mentorship and ground-breaking (and highly awarded!) scholarship and teaching, and wish him the best in his new endeavor as Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).
Alumni Honors
Our amazing alums continue to make their mark in their institutions and the field. Here are just a few of the great things they’ve been up to:
Recent alum Katherine Flowers (Mississippi State University) was awarded the 2018 CCCC James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award for her dissertation “Local Language Policy: Shifting Scales in the English-Only Movement.”
In June 2017, Samantha Looker was granted tenure and promotion to Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. In October 2017, she published her Bedford Spotlight Reader textbook, Language Diversity and Academic Writing.
Kaia Simon (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) was invited to participate in the 2018 Peter Elbow Symposium for the Study and Teaching of Writing at UMass-Amherst. Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is the Director of this year’s symposium, and it will explore transnational perspectives on language, literacy, and activism.
Jon Stone (University of Utah) received a prestigious NEH Fellowship in December for his book project, Listening to the Lomax Archive AND was named a 2018-2019 University Research Committee Faculty Fellow at his institution.
Jenell Johnson (University of Wisconsin) was awarded a named professorship: the Mellon-Morgridge Professor of the Humanities. Check out Jenell’s forthcoming book from Penn State Press: Graphic Reproduction.
Amy Wan (Queens College, CUNY) has been selected as a Distinguished Research Fellow (Spring 2019) for the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and she's been elected to the MLA Forum on History and Theory of Composition.
Also check out forthcoming books by Rebecca Bilbro - Applied Text Analysis with Python, and Sunday Cummins - Nurturing Informed Thinking: Reading, Talking, and Writing Across Content-Area Sources).
Amazing accomplishments all around! Have something special to share? Send your news our way!
Finally, we would like to give a big thank you to YOU! Yes, you. Your interest and engagement makes CWS the wonderful community it is. Thanks a million.
Health and happiness to you from the CWS Admin Team,
Paul Prior, Niki Turnipseed, and Autumn West
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Twitter: @UofIllinoisCWS
Web: cws.illinois.edu