Writers from 51ÁÔĆć’s undergraduate creative writing program recently took part in a crosstown reading with Marquette undergraduates. The event, part of an annual series, was hosted by Boswell Books. 51ÁÔĆć participants included John Dewey, Noelle Gomez, Annaliese Kunst, and Abby Shroder.
Prof. Brenda Cárdenas’s book °Ő°ů˛ął¦±đĚý(Red Hen Press, 2023)  honoring the Society’s choices for the best books by Midwest authors published in 2023. Trace is also a finalist for Foreword Reviewâ€ČŮĚý for books that present work that uses language for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or instead of, its apparent communication value.
Film Studies Director Professor Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece was recently interviewed for WPR’s “Central Time” and Yahoo! News on the topics of music at the movies and the joy of massive box office failures.
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Choral composer Dr. Daniel Afonso (California State University, Stanislaus) wrote a choral score to Professor Brenda Cárdenas’s poem “Para los tin-tun-teros.” The collaboration (score with poem) was published in 2023 by Hal Leonard Music and will be performed at Carnegie HallĚý´Ç˛ÔĚýMarch 12, 2024 at 8:00pm, by the National Concert Chorus with seven other new choral compositions.
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Congratulations to 51ÁÔĆć researchers Anne Bonds, professor of geography, and Derek Handley, assistant professor of English, who were awarded a federal grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities of nearly $150,000 to continue their research into restrictive racial covenants and the resistance to them in Milwaukee County. .
My research focuses on building spaces in higher education that welcome and validate the linguistic, cultural, and knowledge-making practices of traditionally marginalized and underrepresented students. My starting point is the acknowledgement that higher education, broadly, and English programs, specifically, engage in exclusionary practices that uphold barriers for many undergraduate and graduate students. These practices include the centering of rhetorical styles and knowledge systems of white, middle- and upper-class students, and norms and expectations for academic writing which privilege the writing and linguistic resources of white, middle- and upper-class students.
One set of research questions I explore is how writing programs and writing pedagogy can leverage the resources of linguistically and culturally diverse undergraduate students. Recognizing that access to multiple languages and language varieties is an asset for students rather than a hindrance for their learning of academic writing and research, I ask how writing classrooms can make space for difference from narrowly-defined norms of academic language and writing. Further, I ask how writing classrooms can learn from multilingual and multidialectal students’ communication practices to enhance the rhetorical dexterity and multiliteracies of all writing students.
Another related set of questions I explore focuses on the experiences of graduate students as they navigate through academic spaces. A study by the research team I am part of shows that many graduate students at 51ÁÔĆć are deeply anxious about not belonging in graduate school, feeling that they lack the cultural capital and language skills that are expected of them. I ask how graduate programs can become more inclusive of non-traditional students such as those who identify as non-white, working-class, first-generation, and transnational students. For example, graduate students who are also GTAs experience that the linguistically and culturally just pedagogies they have adopted are not present in their graduate classes. How can graduate programs include the diverse knowledges, experiences, and language practices that graduate students bring to their programs rather than expect the students to assimilate to a set of narrowly-defined norms?
My research engages with communities at multiple levels: it seeks to sustain communities of undergraduate and graduate students on campus by visibilizing and validating the community knowledges and literacies these students bring to higher education. I believe this move will enrich our classrooms; create more just pedagogies and assessment practices; and more inclusive research. Further, I want my research to engage not only teacher scholars but also other stakeholders and publics in order to widen the scope of the conversation about what social justice in higher education can be.
Update: Joni is coordinator of the Writing Center and leads the Writing Fellows program at .
My field is cinema and media studies, and my work is dedicated to the rigorous exploration of our understanding of the environment, natural resources, energy, and the politics enmeshed in their mediations. My scholarship focuses in part on pedagogical, or “useful,” cinema: this distinct, albeit loose category includes documentary film, a variety of entertainment media, television programs with science-based or environmentally-geared messages, as well as advertisement, propaganda, and even industry films. For example, I have worked on 1) a historiography of environmental documentary film since 2001, 2) a study of the intersection of environmental film and activism, and 3) an exploration of the limits of experiences of nature in creating environmental awareness. I not only study the representation of environmental issues, but also the media infrastructures, data, and material outcomes of environmental media.
Most recently, I have researched two disparate, but not unrelated areas: the historical and social function of gas industry films in interwar Britain, and the present-day use of drones to aid in conservation efforts. Between World War I and World War II, the British gas industry aimed to communicate the efficiency and safety of gas as a fuel source in the home. I view these early industry films as pedagogical in nature and as reflective of a burgeoning environmental sensibility surrounding the need for efficiency and economical energy. Though vastly different in their purpose, drones are part of the desire for control and efficiency as well, being used to monitor, surveil and sense environments. While pedagogical media can be seen as a harnessing tool to convince us that we have control over the environment, my work interrogates where agency settles and how it shifts.
Update: Yasmine is a lecturer in 51ÁÔĆć’s English Language Academy working with international students and students who are not native English speakers.
In 1999, the Anishinaabe writer and critic Gerald Vizenor put forth the concept of survivance, which has been incredibly influential for the understanding of the lives, histories and creative literatures of Native American peoples. Vizenor acknowledges that survivance is related to“survival,” but it also means more than that, as the term is imbued with empowering andagential traits. In other words, survivance is a portmanteau for survival and active resistance against genocidal violence and the assimilation of Native Americans. Despite the widespread use of this term for interpreting Native American Literature, survivance has not been used so much for comprehending other world literature, and thus in my work I want to explore the value and the relevance of this concept to understanding other literatures, specifically contemporary transnational fiction.
I examine survivance in refugee novels, as well as post-colonial and historical narratives.The texts I look at are from countries such as Pakistan, Morocco, and Lebanon where their protagonists share experiences of dislocation, resettlement, and hope. For example, I apply survivance to novels such as Exit West by British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Moroccan novelist Laila Lalami. Using survivance as an analytic tool in transnational literature proves valuable for articulating how scholars, writers, and artists from different regions counteract and redress the consequences of structural violence and the destruction of their economy and habitat. Enriched by questions about gendering and power, the concept of survivance foils the construction of the marginalized “other” as a victim by dominant discourses.
Update: Zach is on the teaching faculty here at UW-Milwaukee in the Film Studies program where he also provides advising to film studies majors and minors.
My dissertation tells the story of Scottish national cinema through Scotland’s short fiction films from 1930 to the present. As a small nation within the United Kingdom, Scotland’s film culture has played a subordinate role in relation to England’s and has struggled for decades to create its own thriving film industry. However, in the mid-1990s, critics and scholars began to talk of a uniquely Scottish national cinema, rather than the traditional and all-encompassing “British cinema,” because of the success of films like Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996). In spite of some key successes, the sustainable production of feature films has eluded Scotland, and as a result, many have doubted the existence of a true Scottish national cinema. I propose that instead of defining Scotland’s film culture exclusively by its feature-length productions, we should define it in a way that includes its rich short fiction film tradition.
Short fiction films are often overlooked within the discipline of Film Studies because of the commercial and cultural dominance of the feature. The short’s relative obscurity and its limited accessibility impede analysis, as scholars must work harder simply to view the films. Nonetheless, short films are vital to national cinemas because they incubate film movements, allow filmmakers to take risks, and provide opportunities for marginalized people to make films. For example, Lynne Ramsay’s “Small Deaths” is a clear forerunner of independent Scottish films of the 1990s. “Chick’s Day” by Enrico Cocozza deals with issues like juvenile crime and poverty. Additionally, Margaret Tait’s numerous short films explore the subjectivities of Scottish women during the mid-twentieth century. Many others reveal the diversity and richness of Scottish film culture.
In addition to a chapter on the specific functions of the short film in the context and creation of national cinemas, my dissertation contains chapters on periods of short filmmaking within Scotland. By studying fourteen short films from 1933 to 2013, I reveal the range and importance of short filmmaking in Scotland. Given that these films represent the nation, they often contest dominant representations of Scots and Scotland in mainstream film history. The final chapter contains interviews with active filmmakers as they speak about their experiences and the practical difficulties of making films.
Dissertation: Guides and Guidance: Subverting Tourist Narratives in Trans-Indigenous Time and Space
Update: Shanae is an assistant professor in the Department of English at .
My dissertation argues that Indigenous American literatures are acts of worldmaking with radical possibilities for achieving a just society.
Indigenous literatures demonstrate how academic spaces are constructed around institutionalized authority at the expense of Indigenous American worldviews. However, Indigenous texts also disrupt institutionalized power dynamics and model cooperative relationships based on mutual respect and reciprocity, rather than competition. As Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson have written, “the academy is worth Indigenizing because something productive will happen as a consequence” (5). As a method for the dual process of indigenizing and decolonizing knowledge production, I use Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s definition of intervening, which seeks to change institutions, rather than “changing indigenous peoples to fit the structures” of institutions (147).
The chapters of my dissertation examine historical retellings of settler colonial–indigenous American relationships, such as those found in Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America and Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. I also study novels that feature fictionalized interventions, such as Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears. In that novel, a tour guide offers an accurate account of the Cherokee Trail of Tears on a virtual reality ride, rather than a history that is simply entertaining for the visitor. By studying the conflation of memorialization with tourism, I unpack some of the ethical and political problems that intrude on popular forms of knowledge production. While I base my arguments on literary works, such as Gerald Vizenor’s screenplay, Harold of Orange, I also draw on fieldwork at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Both of those museums circulate problematic settler colonial narratives about Indigenous people.
My goal is to challenge the authority of these settler colonial sites of knowledge production using the methods found in indigenous literatures. By changing the stories that we tell about ourselves and each other, we can reconfigure the personal, communal, institutional, national, transnational, and global spaces in which they exist. Because universities across the Americas are on Indigenous lands, implementing social justice practices at the sites of knowledge production is a crucial step toward decolonization, peaceful coexistence, and the rightful return of Indigenous lands to achieve liberation for all.