New English Department Website Goes Live!

The new Winter Quarter brings with it a new look for the English Department! The Department has just rolled out a new website offering all of the information you will need, including course listings, guidelines for choosing classes, faculty information, department news, and supplemental links (including a link to ExLibris). Though you can still access the site through DePaul’s homepage as you did before, it is important to note that the site itself has a new URL: http://www.depaul.edu/~english

This Week: On-campus interviews for the newly advertised faculty positions will be conducted this week and we need your help. Students are encouraged to attend not only the presentations by job candidates, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the informal conversations between students and job candidates. See the interview schedule

More Upcoming Events!

Faculty Front. . .Get the latest faculty news

Feature Essay: "Contingent Performances: Between the Acts of Adjunct Faculty" MAE Alumn Erin MacKenna delivered this paper for the panel, "Forging New Alliances: MA Students and College Teaching" at the M/MLA in November 2003.

In the early years of my undergraduate study at the University of Iowa, I had no specific knowledge of the existence of the admirable troops known as adjunct faculty. And, yes, yes, I know, as I glimpse with one eye covered, over the statistics from AAUC and the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, I should not feel pleasure in joining this arsenal of often benefitless, underpaid, inter-campus commuting, desk-sharing professors, but allow me, if only for these ten minutes, a glimmer of optimism and an illustration of the importance of language that perhaps transcends some of the difficulty inherent in teaching as an adjunct instructor.

The shelter line was especially long that day perhaps because it had snowed a horrific six and a half inches, excessive even for Chicago. As I walked into work leaving a muddy trail of slush, I noticed some of our regular women hiding behind the Pepsi Machine. The shelter kept rigid hours--no one was allowed in the building before one o’clock--but I knew they were hoping to get out of the cold early. I pretended not to see them, my usual behavior regardless of the weather, an obvious ruse since it is nearly impossible to hide as a homeless person being that you must always carry everything you own. I rushed down the corridor to the steel door of the shelter fumbling with my keys, nervous and excited, for today was the first day I would ever try to teach writing to anyone. Some of my colleagues thought it was comical that I was starting a poetry-writing workshop for women who do not even have homes. Admittedly Virginia Woolf’s words resounded in my mind, “it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry,” she said. But I did not care; I still believed some of these women needed to write as much as I did, perhaps even more.

One o’clock arrived and we opened the doors. Ninety women shuffled in shaking snow into the puddles forming on the shelter floor. I had been there for two years and I knew the stories that rattled in their bones needed to find their way to voice. I waited the endless two hours between opening and my workshop. I made three pots of donated coffee, gathered notebooks, stole pens from my co-workers desks, and printed copies of Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Finally… eleven women came. Eleven is a lot considering most refused case-management, psychotropic medication, job-training programs and substance abuse counseling. Eleven is a lot considering my women had no homes, no food, no privacy, and no rest, but still found a hungry desire to write. I gave each of my participants a notebook and a pen and each wrote. Despite fatigue, despite the intense physical and cognitive labor of decades of homelessness they wrote. Despite their fears, hungers and solitude, they wrote. Despite chronic illness and sadness that had not yet found a voice, they wrote. They wrote because expressing the quietest corners of the soul is a basic human need, and we, as teachers, must show the way to language. We must show the way in shelters, in classrooms, in our communities. We must prepare our graduate students to illuminate the way as well; we cannot reduce the importance of this task, and we should not position language as inaccessible to the communities that need it most or diminish the role of teachers who provide instruction in these communities. Read More. . .

Faculty Info

Honor Professors, Colleagues. . .
By nominating them for the Excellence in Teaching Award! This is the time of year when the College invites you to honor a colleague [or professor] who you believe has had a significant impact on the education of DePaul students. By nominating her or him for a 2004 Excellence in Teaching Award, you contribute to the University's recognition of the importance of teaching. The LA&S Committee on Teaching is soliciting nominations from both faculty and students, and will select three from the group of nominees to receive this award from the University's Quality of Instruction Council. More info

Faculty Papers Delivered at the 2003 MLA in San Diego
Dr. Anne Bartlett: "Let Me Count the Waves: The Pasts and Futures of Medieval Feminist Scholarship" for the panel "Genders and Histories"
Dr. Lucy Rinehart: "Brother Jonathan's 'Bold Example': Emulating the National Character in Royall Tyler's _The Contrast_," for the panel entitled "Performing American: Theater, Theatricality, and Nation"
Dr. Jonathan Gross: "No Sex Please, We're Literary: Reading Reviews of Byron Biographies, Re-reading Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," for the panel entitled "Byron and Gender"
Dr. Craig Sirles: "Grammar, Grammars, and the Ticking Clock on Student's Right to Their Own Language"

Submit citations, works in progress

Coming in 2004. . .

“Women and the Word” exhibit and panel discussion
Organized by Karen Scott, program director of Catholic Studies
Sponsored in part by the English Department
The panels explore women's literacy, piety, and political engagement in the Middle Ages.
Program of Events

Call for Papers -
The 3rd International Student Byron Conference
May 16-24, 2004
Messolonghi Byron Society- Byron Research Center
Honorary President, The Earl of Lytton
Theme: Byron, Romanticism, and the Olympic Spirit
More Info about the Conference and paper specifics