Colin Rafferty, Associate Professor of English, recently published an essay on Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary Shoah in the new issue of Wig-Wag, a literary magazine on film edited by UMW graduate Brad Efford. Rafferty also gave a talk on “Writing the Travel and Food Essay” at this weekend’s Rappahannock Writers Conference, sponsored by the Central Rappahannock Regional Library and held at UMW’s Stafford Campus. … [Read more...]

Elizabeth Johnson-Young, Assistant Professor of Communication, has published a co-authored essay "Assessment of Pediatric Residents’ Attitudes toward Anticipatory Counseling on Gun Safety" now available in the peer-reviewed journal Children. This project was completed in conjunction with research colleagues in emergency pediatrics from University of Maryland, Kaiser, and The Herman and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai and is part of a larger set of data and projects. The current publication is the first among a few upcoming publications from the project and presents data and conclusions regarding pediatric medical residents’ attitudes towards anticipatory guidance counseling about firearms and firearm safety. Survey items asked residents about their knowledge of current gun safety campaigns, as well as their own gun safety counseling practices. Overall conclusions are that residents support the idea of counseling patients on firearm safety as part of their anticipatory … [Read more...]

Sushma Subramanian, journalist and assistant professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, has published a story in The Atlantic about an emerging form of depression in Japan, colloquially called "modern-type depression." In her piece "A ‘Modern’ Depression Is Creeping Into Japanese Workplaces," she explores the work of Japanese scientists studying the social changes that have contributed to this condition.   … [Read more...]

Associate Professor of English Zach Whalen has just published an article in a special issue of The Journal of Creative Writing Studies on "Creative Making as Creative Writing." His article, "The Many Authors of The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex: Authorship, Agency, and Appropriation," is an artist's statement reflecting on how creating a computer-generated book like Whalen's 2017 work The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex invites readers to reconsider the idea of what it means to be an author. Whalen's book draws on several different databases to create an essentially infinite variation on the nursery rhyme "This is the House that Jack Built;" these databases contain the work of hundreds of contributors, so Whalen argues in this article that the novel is best considered a collaboration among many instead of the work of a single individual or computer. … [Read more...]

Adria Goldman, Assistant Professor of Communication, is one of three guest editors of a special issue of The Journal of Hip Hop Studies devoted to Kanye West. According to the abstract, “The goal of this project, ‘I Gotta Testify: Kanye West, Hip Hop, and the Church,’ is to add a new perspective to the scholarly discourse on Hip Hop and Christianity within classrooms, religious institutions, and popular culture by focusing on Kanye. We chose to focus on Kanye because he has been one of Hip Hop’s most influential artists in the past decade. Furthermore, Kanye is one of the most polarizing celebrities in America and across the globe. His music, fashion, political views, and family (which includes the Kardashians) dominate discourse on social media, blogs, television, and other forms of mass media. With the exception of Julius Bailey’s 2014 edited book, The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, there has been little scholarly work published on Kanye. Bailey’s book contained just one essay, … [Read more...]

Professor of English Chris Foss has published a 1500-word book review of Jay Timothy Dolmage’s watershed work Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, one of the top two scholarly journals in the field of disability studies today. The book’s charge is “not just to recognize where and how ableism happens, but to ask what the impact will be of exposing it, what the cost might be of assigning blame, and what the forces are that make it imperceptible, what the euphemisms are that disguise it, and how it comes to be normalized, even valorized in academia” (58). Dolmage sets up his argument in a superb Introduction that exposes “the university as a rhetorical space that holds a history of injustice in its architecture” (9). After noting higher education’s inextricable imbrication with the shameful histories of eugenics and colonial science, Dolmage transitions into a disheartening assessment of the state of the … [Read more...]

Professor of English Warren Rochelle recently  published  his flash fiction short story “Ever After”  in Migration, a queer science fiction annual flash fiction anthology. … [Read more...]

Mara Scanlon, Professor of English, served as invited Guest Editor for a special issue of the journal Humanities called “The Sister Arts Since 1900: Poetry and the Visual Arts.”  The issue is prompted by the fact that the relation of poetry and visual art to each other, to imitation, mimesis, and the “real,” to pleasure and analysis, to ethics, to the senses, and to craft prompted rich dialogue and debate through at least the 18th century but is oddly flagging in contemporary critical conversation, possibly replaced by or transformed into an emphasis on multimodal and multimedia writing.  Inviting essays on ekphrastic poetry and its opposite, photos or art inspired by poems; illuminated text and the art of the book; illustrated poetry for adults and children; the work of artist-poets; collaborations between artists and writers or installations, exhibits, and volumes that combine poetry and photography/visual art; broadsides; concrete and visual poetry; and unique conceptions like the … [Read more...]

Zach Whalen, Associate Professor of English, recently had his article “Teaching with Objects: Individuating Media Archaeology in Digital Studies” published in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Whalen's article describes a Digital Studies 101 assignment where students take apart old technology and endeavor to map the origins of individual components. … [Read more...]