Class of 2004: Congratulations and Good Luck!

To Those About To Graduate… We Salute you!

Congratulations! Please keep Ex Libris and your program directors posted on your accomplishments and adventures. We look forward to communicating your news to future generations of DePaul MA students. Come back and visit when you can (your program director is always good for a cup of coffee or a beer), and let us know if you’d be willing to participate in a panel discussion as an alumn. Please e-mail your updates to Jan Flood jflood@depaul.edu, Anne Clark Bartlett abartlet@depaul.edu, and Craig Sirles csirles@depaul.edu.

Very best wishes,
Anne and Craig

MAE Graduates: Kate Aghakan, Natalie Cirar, Kelley Clink, David Jakalski, Nora Myers, Mary Costello, Patrick Sterling, Christine Riska, Dave Rudnick, Erin Kavanaugh, Robin Avdek, Stephanie Boese, Angela Casey, Maria Cherone, Avani Kamdar, Laura Kirkpatrick-Dib, Natalie Lyon, Vicki Mansour, Elise Matson, Juliet Orellana, Jennifer Parrott, Jennifer Pohl, Randi Russert, Shannon Thomas, Nicki Zakos, Karen Zyck.
With Distinction: Mark Bennett, Ann Janikowski, Erin Moran, Tom Southwood

MAW Graduates:Jim Crowley, Diane Shearod, Eric Sundquist, Hiedi Hastings, Karen Goodfriend, Jui-Chuan Chang, Laura Bork, Melissa Downing, Emily Schafer, Alexis Maislen, Starr Nordgren, Orly Aharoni, David Maly, Jacob Wall, Marcia Faye, Lori Lyons, Mary Dollear, Torrey Cardamon, Melissa Fields, Rima Rantisi, Julia Navatsyk, Angela Pastorek, Elizabeth Rossman, Stephanie Bell, Roxanne Pilat, Jeremy Shermak
With Distinction: Robert Bailey, Alice Bain, Andy Buchenot, Wileen Hsing, Michael Marcinkowski, Christine Schwartzrock, Tracy Townsend, Tom Truesdell, Jill White

2003-04 MAE and MAW Student accomplishments:

Awards:
Roxanne Brown (MAE) winner of the Center for Black Diaspora's 7th Annual Student Scholars Essay Competition.
Roxanne Pilat (MAW) Best Student Creative work, awarded by Illinois Philological Association
Mark Bennett (MAE) honorable mention for best conference paper at Graduate Student conference, at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette
Janet Quinn (MAW) winner of Phi Kappa Phi’s Annual Writing and Creative Arts contest for her essay, “Waiting to Connect”
Heidi Moore (MAW) honorable mention for Phi Kappa Phi’s Annual Writing and Creative Arts contest for her essay, “Fax Me a Beer”

Conference Papers and Publications: Partricia McVary, Christopher Gilchrist, Mary Costello, Shannon Thomas, Mark Bennett, Greg Chavez, Casey Coin, Melissa Wiley, Roxanne Pilat, Jon Nichols, Cheryl Hagedorn, Janet Quinn, Jui-Chuan Chang, Alice Bain

Off to Study Abroad this summer:
Casandra Coin, David Morris, Allison Tyndall (UNH Summer Program at Cambridge University), Kelly Fust (Cambridge International Summer School)

Scholarships: Ryan Van Meter Summer Writing Seminar at Sarah Lawrence College

Off to PhD programs in the Fall:
Jennifer Parrott (Irish Studies, SIU-Carbondale), Mark Bennett (Modern Literature, UIC), Harry Karahalios (MAE ’99) (Comparative Literature, Notre Dame University); Andy Buchenot (Rhetoric and Composition, U Wisconsin-Milwaukee);Rob Bailey (English Studies, Illinois State University); Gail Holmberg (Queens College, Dublin)

Earned Tenure: Rob Bailey (South Suburban Community College), recently accepted to PhD program.

For Alumni updates, see back issues of Ex Libris. Our MAE and MAW alumns have accomplished extraordinary things: got great jobs, published great stuff, given great presentations, and done great things (such as getting married, having babies, moving to cool places).

As you graduate and go off and accomplish great things yourselves, be sure to keep us posted. Please update your contact info before you leave with Jan Flood jflood@depaul.edu and your program directors.

Special thanks to Jan Flood and Ceci O’Keefe for their outstanding work this year. Without Jan’s and Ceci’s above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty efforts and achievements, the MA programs in English would have ground to a halt a long time ago.

Feature Paper: "What a Difference an MA Makes" - Gina Brandolino/Department of English/Indiana University/November, 2003. Gina is currently writing her dissertation on voice, violence, and gender in medieval English literature at Indiana University.

When I received an email from Anne Bartlett this spring asking me if I would like to participate in a roundtable discussion at last year’s Midwest MLA, I immediately felt some trepidation. Though I consider myself a generally content, happy, and even pleasant person, every conference session Anne has ever invited me to participate in has somehow, through no fault of my own and certainly through no fault of Anne’s, compelled me to produce a paper that brings out my angriest, most bitter self. When Anne told me she was in need of someone for the roundtable discussion who could talk about the experience of going from a terminal M.A. program into a Ph.D. program, this conference session did not seem to hold the promise of being an exception. I earned my B.A. in 1994 and my M.A. in 1997, the same year I entered the Ph.D. program that I am still finishing. I am currently working on the second chapter of my dissertation. No one would say I am really trucking through my graduate school years, and it is not difficult, and not really inaccurate, to blame the terminal M.A. for some of my slowness.

Not really inaccurate, but a bit unfair, because without the terminal M.A., I would not be in a Ph.D. program at all right now. I decided in the middle of my freshman year of college that I wanted to earn a Ph.D. in English and become an English professor. This was a goal I pursued with quite a lot of zeal—I participated in undergraduate conferences, signed up for every leadership post the English department at my college offered, and took every English course available. I won a great many awards and graduated summa cum laude, but things did not go very well for me when I applied to Ph.D. programs. I am from a working-class background and am a first-generation college student (not to mention, on my father’s side, first-generation American), so I did not have a lot of academic resources to draw on when it came to the application process. Certainly, my family was encouraging and very proud of me for wanting to continue my education, but they lack academic knowledge and experiences, so the help they could provide for me was limited. The college at which I earned my B.A. is very small—the English department had a grand total of six professors, and while they helped me immensely as I was choosing schools to apply to and writing my statement of purpose, in the end I simply could not compete with students from more intellectually savvy backgrounds and more prominent schools. I received more rejections than I care to remember, two acceptances, and no offers of financial assistance, which posed a great problem for me. To make a very long story short, things did not work out for me at either school that had accepted me.

Frustrated that the single career plan I had, which I had pursued with such vigor and determination, was proving out of my reach and embarrassed that I could not hold my own against other Ph.D. applicants, I applied to a terminal M.A. program. I figured that it was graduate school, but not a Ph.D. program, which my application experience had made my afraid of; and it was close to home, so I could commute to school and back, keep my job, and pay for tuition; and most importantly, it accepted me. So I went. And in this M.A. program, I thrived: I did incredibly well in my course work, realized that I could match wits with my peers, found great professors willing to mentor me, and graduated with distinction. Then I reapplied to Ph.D. programs, and I got letters (plural!) of acceptance—in fact, two schools which had previously rejected me made offers and counter-offers of financial support packages. Feeling like I won the lottery, I picked one and went. Read More

Information on Secondary Education Certification

Jobs and Conferences!

The 14th Women & Society Conference will be held October 8 &9, 2004 at Marist College, Poughkeespie, NY

Paula Rothenberg, editor of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States and Director of the New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship, Curriculum and Teaching, as well as a professor at William Patterson University of New Jersey will be giving the keynote address.

W&S is a feminist multi- and inter-disciplinary conference that allows academics and activists to share theories, information and ideas on all aspects of women & gender being studied in the academy. The conference encourages mentoring of students, thus W&S supports student participation.

Please submit a 250 word abstract, panel or workshop description plus a brief bio postmarked by August 15.

For more information contact Dr. J.A. Myers, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 e-mail: JA.MYERS@MARIST.EDU

MELUS: Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States

19th Annual Conference, 7-10 April 2005, Chicago, IL
Host: University of Illinois at Chicago
Conference Committee: Natasha Barnes, Mark Chiang, Madhu Dubey, Suzanne Oboler
more info

Prospective community college teachers: Learn all you can about a workplace (and join networks there) even before you join! Click Here!

Resources for Freelance Writers and Editors:

For experienced and disciplined writers, on-line editing services can offer substantial part-time employment. I recently met a grad student at Western Michigan University who earns a good full-time salary working for a couple of these companies.

A couple of these companies include: editfast.com and editavenue.com. Some charge a sign-up fee, and most ask you to take editing tests before offering any employment.

The freelance writer's 'zine provides some helpful guidelines and resources for this kind of work.

The 2004 Graduate Student Conference: Organized and run by graduate students, the conference is interdisciplinary in scope; papers are invited in any area of medieval or Renaissance studies. It provides participants the opportunity to present their work in a collegial scholarly forum, to meet students from other institutions and disciplines who will be their future colleagues, and to become familiar with the Newberry Library and its resources. The deadline for abstracts has past, but you can still join in on the confernece. Check out http://www.olemiss.edu/conf/swsw!
More Info.

2004 M/MLA conference announcements and ongoing calls for papers.

Faculty News:

Submit citations,works in progress