The Chair’s Newsletter, January 2024

 

I hope you’ve had a good break over the past few weeks and that you’ll excuse a pre-semester bulletin with several important items. 

Please find attached the report from the external reviewers. Our response is due by the end of February, and will form a major part of the business at our 31 January meeting. Please put that date in your calendars. I’m also appending the meeting schedule for the Spring semester, which includes other important dates such as candidate talks and graduation ceremonies. 

We’ll be welcoming the finalists for the position in Black Atlantic and/ or Diasporic Literatures and Cultures to campus in the first week of February: Emad Mirmotahari, Duquesne University, will present Thursday 1 February at 12.30 pm; Cristovão Nwachukwu, University of Florida, will speak Monday 5 February at noon; and Lindsay Griffiths Brown, Princeton, at noon on Wednesday 7 February. I hope you will be able to make some of those talks in person (and a big thank you to the search committee, Jessica Pressman, Diana Leong, Lashon Daley, and Blas Falconer, for their work on this). We will, of course, be looking for volunteers for lifts to campus, coffee hosts, etc. in due course. A department meeting to vote on the finalists will be held Wednesday 14 February.  

It seems likely that there will be a systemwide strike 22 - 26 January. The CFA has posted an FAQ page outlining some of the key issues, particularly as they relate to teaching, students, and other responsibilities. 

Finally, please let me know by the end of the week if you would like to attend the MLK Luncheon on Friday 19 January. The department sponsors a table at this important event and has, in the past, had a good mix of faculty, staff, and students. 

All best, 

Quentin Bailey

Tuesday 16 January: First Day of Spring Semester 

Wednesday 17 January: First Day of Classes, AC Meeting

Friday 19 January: MLK Luncheon, 11.30 am - 1.30 pm, Montezuma Hall

Wednesday 31 January: Department meeting 

Thursday 1 February: Candidate presentation 12.30 - 1.45 pm

Monday 5 February: Candidate presentation 12 - 1.15 pm 

Wednesday 7 February: Candidate presentation 12 - 1.15 pm

Wednesday 14 February: Department meeting 

Wednesday 21 February: Grad/ MFA committee meetings 

Wednesday 28 February: Lecturer meeting

Wednesday 6 March: AC meeting 

Wednesday 13 March: Grad committee (MA apps); MFA committee (MFA apps)  

Wednesday 20 March: Department meeting 

Monday 1 April - Friday 5 April: SPRING BREAK 

Wednesday 10 April: Grad and MFA committees (220 and 280 apps) 

Tuesday 16 April: MA Portfolios due

Wednesday 17 April: AC meeting  

Monday 22 April: MA Portfolio defenses commence 

Wednesday 1 May:  Department meeting 

Thursday 2 May: Last day of classes 

Friday 10 May: Commencement, 1 pm Viejas. 

Sunday 12 May: Graduate Ceremony

Quentin Bailey, DPhil

Associate Professor and Chair

Department of English and Comparative Literature 

San Diego State University 

qbailey@sdsu.edu

619 594 5271

Pronouns: he/ him/ his

Indigenous residence: Kumeyaay

literature.sdsu.edu, aka ECL, formerly ENGL Bulletin for October 9, 2023

From: Quentin Bailey, ECL Chair <qbailey@sdsu.edu>

Date: Mon, Oct 9, 2023 at 3:57 PM
Subject: Bulletin 10.9.23

Dear Colleagues, 

I imagine that, like me, you are shocked and saddened by this weekend’s attacks. As you may know, the department has hosted a number of award-winning Israeli screenwriters, scholars, and poets in recent years, including this semester, in partnership with the Murray Galinson-San Diego Israel Initiative. Our students have benefited from their expertise and kindness, and our thoughts are with them, their families, and all those affected in these difficult days.  

Reminders:  

A quick reminder that the NCSCL Grad Writing Group, which is open to all ECL faculty and staff, meets every Monday from October 9 until November 14 from 2:30pm to 4pm in AL-379. Feel free to drop in! You can contact Lashon at Ldaley@sdsu.edu to learn more. 

The department, through Humanities in Action, is hosting Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy this Wednesday, 11 October, at noon in the Shiley BioScience Center. He will speak about his book, The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University. I hope some of you will be able to make this event. 

Dates: 

10.11.23: Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, will discuss his recent work The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind at the Shiley Bioscience Center, 12 - 1 pm. 

10.18.23: RTP Committee meeting, AL 266. 

10.18.23: Tracy Badua will share excerpts from her recent novel, This Is Not a Personal Statement, at the Laurie Okuma Memorial Reading (LL 430, 7 pm). Find out more about Tracy here!

10.25.23: AC Meeting, AL 266 

10.25.23: Applications for ECL 220/ 280/ ISA positions due. 

10.26.23: Hal Jaffe reading and presentation (Love Library, 3 pm) 

10.30.23: Tools workshop–Twine and Visualizations–for Grad Students, 12-1:30 in Digital Humanities Center (lower level of Love Library). This event will be led by Dr. Pam Lach. For examples of what past students have done with Twine, take a look at Katie Chestnut's "Medusa’s Laughter" (2018), Adrian Belmes, "Recursion"(2018), or

Brenda Taulbee's "Sensational Silence: Against Erasure"  (2019)

11.6 & 11.7.23: Site visit by external reviewers 

11.23.23: Join NCSCL for the Global Renderings Research Luncheon featuring Quentin Bailey on Monday, November 27 at the Faculty Staff Club. Registration is required. To register, click here: https://forms.gle/D4Sq5NWYEpuT9rYx5. For more information, click here: https://childlit.sdsu.edu/global-renderings?utm_source=salesforce&utm_medium=email or email Lashon Daley at Ldaley@sdsu.edu.

As always, please let me know of any accomplishments or upcoming events.

All best,

Quentin

Last Bulletin of the Spring Semester, ECL 2023!

https://literature.sdsu.edu

Dear Colleagues,

We’ve made it to exam week! I know this will bring the extra strain of grading, etc. but I hope it’s also an opportunity to reflect on the successes of the past academic year. 

I hope many of you will be able to make it to the department’s pre-commencement ceremony at Scripps Cottage this coming Friday at 10 am. We’ll be recognizing the winners of this year’s outstanding essay awards as well as the outstanding graduating seniors and their most influential faculty members. A big thank you to Iris Quiroga for all her work organizing (and designing) this event. 

Congratulations to all who participated in the MFA Reading on Friday evening and particularly the MCs for the event, Stephen-Paul Martin and Blas Falconer. It was a lovely evening, and the students were clearly delighted to be able to share their work with friends, family, and mentors. A big thank you to Mary Garcia and Olivia Perez for their work making this evening such a success. 

Thank you, too, to all who attended the Graduate Student Celebration at Oggi’s last Monday, and particularly to Diana Leong, Mary, Iris, and Olivia for their organizational work. 

One final thank you and apology: to Lashon Daley, whom I inadvertently omitted last week from the list of faculty who served on MA portfolios. Thank you, Lashon, for all your hard work for the department and its students. 

source

Wishing everyone a good summer,

Quentin Bailey

Latest News from ECL aka The Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University | May 1 2023 Edition

 Dear Colleagues, 

It’s the final week of classes, with all of the attendant excitement, anxiety, and hard work. I hope to see many of you at the celebratory events in the coming weeks – from the graduate mixer at Oggi’s this afternoon to the MFA reading (Friday 5 May at 7 pm) and the department pre-commencement ceremony (10 am, Friday 12 May). 

We had a good response to our call for submissions for the department’s essay awards. Thank you to all who promoted the competition. I’m delighted to announce that Leila Bitarafan and Lucy Breitwieser have jointly been awarded the ‘Outstanding Undergraduate Essay’ prize, and Dominic Shoopmann has won the ‘Outstanding Graduate Essay’ one. A special thanks to the scholarship committee (Laurie Champion, Clare Colquitt, and Joseph Thomas) for their hard work on this at such a busy time of year. 

Thank you, too, to all who participated in the MA Portfolio Defenses last week: Michael Borgstrom, Yetta Howard, Diana Leong, Bill Nericcio, Phillip Serrato, Jeanette Shumaker, and Joseph Thomas. Thank you, too, to Mary Garcia for her work scheduling and coordinating these.

If you have some time later this week, Yetta Howard will be one of the respondents at UCSD event on Thursday, 4 May, at 5 - 6.30 pm when Juana María Rodríguez, Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley,  will discuss her latest book, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex. Comunidad Room, Cross-Cultural Center, UCSD. In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess to examine how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.

A few faculty have asked me about AT reports. Requests for these will be coming later this week. They’re another, unexpected casualty of the my.SDSU transition: the college has had to devise a new mechanism for collating this information. Thank you for your patience on this and so many related matters this semester. 

Good News: 

Carlos Kelly, a BA, MA, and MFA alum of ours and now a postdoctoral fellow in Latinx studies at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, has a just published Ready Player Juan, with the University of Arizona Press: https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/ready-player-juan

The CSU Digital Humanities Consortium has received a Mellon-funded grant from the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium to increase capacity for digital humanities scholarship and teaching within the CSU system. Jessica Pressman is a member of this initiative, as are Pamella Lach and Surishi Jayawardene. 

Dates: 

5/1 at 4 pm: MA/ MFA celebration at Oggi’s. 

5/5 at 7 pm: MFA reading at Scripps Cottage. 

5/12 at 10 am: Departmental pre-commencement celebration at Scripps Cottage. 

All best,

Quentin Bailey, Chair, ECL

Latest News from ECL aka The Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University | 24 April 2023 Edition

 

Dear Colleagues,

We are in the final two weeks of the semester, with the last scheduled day of classes next Thursday, 4 May. MA portfolio defenses are taking place this week; thank you to all participating in these important events.  

At its meeting last week, the AC decided that, since there is no pressing business, next week’s department meeting can be canceled. We hope, instead, you will be able to make it to the pre-commencement celebration at Scripps Cottage at 10 am on Friday 12 May. 

For those interested in curricular proposals, the university has just released an updated Curriculum Guide for the upcoming year: 

https://caa.sdsu.edu/_resources/files/curriculum/guide/curriculum_guide_04192023.pdf

Invitations: 

Lashon Daley and NCSCL Fellow Dani Nouriazad invite you to join their first-ever Social Media Symposium for ENGL 503 "#Kidlit for Researchers and Content Creators" on May 2 and May 4. The class meets in AH 1120 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. If you would like to learn more about the class and the student projects, click here: https://childlit.sdsu.edu/kidlit. Projects will also be available for viewing at the Annual DH Showcase on Friday, May 5 from 10:00 am to noon in the Digital Humanities Center. 

Diana Leong invites you to join her and the MA students for a celebration of thesis and portfolio projects at Oggi’s on Monday, 1 May, from 4 - 6 pm. 

Dates

4/26 at 7 pm in LL 430: Rick Barot will read from his most recent publications, including The Galleons, which has been described as “…significant, the work of a poet at the height of his powers.”

5/1 from 4 - 6 pm at Oggi’s: MA celebration event. Join Diana Leong and MA students to celebrate the completion of their portfolio and thesis projects. 

5/1: Deadline for nominations to CAL committees. See below for details. 

5/2 & 5/4 at 11 pm in AH 1120: Social Media Symposium for ENGL 503 "#Kidlit for Researchers and Content Creators." 

5/2 at 12.30 pm in HH 222 or via zoom: Paterson Joseph will read from and discuss his first historical novel, about eighteenth-century writer, abolitionist, and composer Ignatius Sancho. https://SDSU.zoom.us/j/744799561. Registration is not required.

5/5 at 7 pm: MFA reading at Scripps Cottage. 

5/12 at 10 am: Departmental pre-commencement celebration at Scripps Cottage. 

Good news

A piece of flash fiction by our former student Candace Hartsuyker, “When You’re The Contortionist,” will be published in The Best Microfiction 2023 anthology, published by Pelekinisis Press. https://www.bestmicrofiction.com/; https://www.cleavermagazine.com/when-youre-the-contortionist-by-candace-hartsuyker/. Candace will complete her SDICCCA internship this May. 

CAL committees

Below is the list of anticipated CAL committee vacancies for academic year 2022-23.

Research Committee: 3 vacancies

Professional Leaves Committee: 1 vacancy

Curriculum Committee: 4 vacancies

AP&P Committee: 3 vacancies

International Programs Committee: 4 vacancies

Teaching Committee: 3 vacancies

Diversity Committee: 5 vacancies

 

Service on the AP&P Committee is for three years. Service on all other CAL committees is for two years. Committee nominations can only be submitted by CAL chairs and directors. If you are interested in serving on one of these committees, please let me know. If you have questions about any of these committees, additional information can be found in the CAL Policy File: https://sdsuedu.sharepoint.com/sites/arts-and-letters. Nominations will be accepted through Monday, May 1. 

All best,

Quentin

Quentin Bailey, DPhil

Associate Professor and Chair

Department of English and Comparative Literature 

San Diego State University 

qbailey@sdsu.edu

619 594 5271

Pronouns: he/ him/ his

Indigenous residence: Kumeyaay