Faculty News

Matthew Abraham presented "The Rhetoric of Recovery: Palestinian History Before 1948" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York in March and "Realizing Race as a Rhetoric: Racializing Institutional Critique in an Age of Racism" at the Modern Language Association Conference in Philadelphia last December. In addition, he has had the following publications released: "History, Memory, and Exile: Edward Said, the New York Intellectuals, and the Rhetorics of Accommodation and Resistance" in the MMLA special issue on "History, Memory, and Exile," and "Confronting the Politics of Evasion in an Age of Fright: Democracy, Religious Enthusiasm, and the State" in the Journal of Culture and Religious Theory [http://www.jcrt.org].

Alan Ackman, a FYW adjunct instructor, recently had a short story accepted for publication in Louisiana Literature. This is his third acceptance by a journal in the past six months, and his fourth total. He was also one of eight writers in the country awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to study at the Sewanee Writers Conference this summer in Tennessee.

Darsie Bowden's book, Writing for Film: the Basics of Screenwriting, was published last May. Also,she and Pete Vandenberg collaborated on a film, the National Conversation on Writing for the Network for Media Action (NMA), that they presented at CCCC in New York last March and are scheduled to work on and present again in July in Tempe and at the NCTE conference in November 2007. They also gave a workshop on writing and technology at the Conference for the Council of Writing Program Administrators last July, where they presented another film they had produced on Writing by Writing Program Administrators.

Laura Durnell won a 2007 Community Arts Assistance Program grant for literature through the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs. In addition to teaching part-time in the First-Year Writing Program, she also teaches part-time in DePaul School's for New Learning. One of her SNL students, Vivian Ramos, was selected as one of the winners in SNL's First Annual Writing Showcase. Ramos was enrolled in her Winter '07 College Writing Class. Durnell, along with DePaul alumnae Suzanne Lewis, helped set up SNL's first Writing Showcase. In addition, Narrative Magazine recently hired her as an assistant editor of short fiction. Eventually, she will also work as an assistant editor at SQ (StoryQuarterly), a classic short fiction journal that Narrative is also publishing . To learn more about Narrative and SQ, access narrativemagazine.com.

Allan Johnston's poetry collection, Range of Light, was a finalist in the Blue Light Press Poetry Competition.

Brenda Kilianski will have two staged readings presented at the Theatre Building Chicago (1225 W. Belmont - 1 block west of Racine). On Wednesday May 30th at 7:00, scenes from "A History of Two Broads in Two Acts" will be read as part of the Stockyards Theatre Project Play For Keeps Festival. On Monday June 18th at 7:30, a reading of "Free Radicals" will be presented by the Women's Theatre Alliance New Plays Festival. Jeff winner Laura T. Fisher and Emmy winner Robin Strasser will participate in that reading. All are welcome.

Michele Morano will be part of a panel discussion on travel writing at the Printer's Row Book Fair, Saturday, June 9 at 12:30pm in the Hotel Blake (Burnham Room). Then, on July 24, she will be reading at the Hopleaf Bar (5148 N. Clark) as part of the Bookslut Reading Series, 7:30pm.

Shaun Slattery completed his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also made the following presentations: "Writing as Remix: Coordinating Increasingly Fragmented Texts" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York; "Aligning Rhetorical Purposes and Accessible Web Design: A CSS Solution" at the Computers and Writing Conference in Detroit; and "Usable Usability in the Composition Classroom," a half-day workshop given at the Computers and Writing Conference (with Miller-Cochran, S., Rodrigo, S., and Swarts, J.).

Chris Tardy published an article in the journal English for Specific Purposes, titled "Voice in Academic Writing: The Rhetorical Construction of Author Identity in Blind Manuscript Review", with Paul Kei Matsuda. They co-presented follow-up research to this article at the American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference in Costa Mesa, CA. (April 21, 2007). She also published a book chapter (co-authored with John Swales), titled "Form, Text Organization, Genre, Coherence, and Cohesion," in Charles Bazerman's (Editor) Handbook of Writing Research (Routledge Press), as well as a book review of Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View (by Vijay Bhatia), appearing in Journal of English for Academic Purposes.

Melinda Turnley's article "The Importance of Critical Approaches to Technology in Service Learning Projects" was published in Technical Communication Quarterly. In addition, she presented "Refiguring the Interface Agent: An Exploration of Productive Tensions in New Media Composing" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York this March, and she also served as a discussion leader for the Graduate Research Network at the Computers and Writing Conference in Detroit this past May.

Peter Vandenberg presented the following papers: "Expanding the Space of Face-to-Face: Writing Centers and Audio/Video Conferencing" at the International Writing Centers Association Conference in Houston (with Melanie Yergeau and Kathryn Wozniak); "Remediating Identities of Narrative and Oral History" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York; and "Composition, Literature, and the Genre Repotoire of 'English': A Situated Analysis of Genre as Social Action" at the Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia. He also published the following: "After Words: Lore and Discipline" (afterword) in Can it Really be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy; "Program Profile: The MA in Writing at DePaul University" in Composition Forum 15.1 (2006) (With Jennifer Clary-Lemon); and "Dropkick, Handoff, or Hail Mary Pass? Letting Go of an Academic Journal" (Keynote Address, general session of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, MLA 2005) in Journal of Scholarly Publishing 33.3 (April 2007): 123-33.