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/
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,
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