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