Emily Deering Crosby, Assistant Professor of Communication, presented her research last Thursday and Friday at the National Communication Association Conference in Baltimore, MD. The title of her research presentation in the Feminist and Women's Studies Division was "'She went too far': Exploring Patriarchal Critiques of Feminist Comedians Michelle Wolf and Samantha Bee," which discussed patriarchal themes of manufactured catfights, double standards, and protection in critiques of feminist comedy. Crosby's second presentation was titled "Framing Racial Innocence: Media Literacy and the Cases of Brock Turner and Owen Labrie" in the African American Communication and Culture Division, which used visual rhetoric scholarship to analyze news media bias and call for media literacy in communication and digital studies curriculum. Her second presentation was alongside leading panelist and fellow UMW faculty member Adria Goldman, Assistant Professor of Communication. Their well-attended panel … [Read more...]

Last Friday, November 15, Adria Goldman, Assistant Professor of Communication, presented at the National Communication Association's 105th Annual Convention in Baltimore, MD as part of the session "Beyond the Journal: Discussions of Media Narratives about Youth and Race and a Call for Media Literacy." Her presentation, titled “From Cartoons to Reality Television: Examining Images of Young Black Females in Reality Programming,” was a review of her analysis of two competition reality shows with child/adolescent casts--Bravo's Top Chef Jr. and Lifetime's The Rap Game. In her dissertation research, she found that representations of Black women in reality television were more flattering when the cast was predominately Black. The goal of the current study was to (1) identify how young Black females are presented in reality television programming and the implications of such, (2) identify similarities and differences between the two competition shows, noting the different racial background of … [Read more...]

Brenta Blevins, Assistant Professor of English, recently presented at the 2019 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference her project “Composing New Public Rhetorical Possibilities Using Augmented and Mixed Reality.” Blevins analyzed installations of traditional epideictic rhetoric, such as memorial statues and artwork, at institutions that began as schools for women, and, after examining other Augmented Reality (AR) projects, contended that AR compositions, such as class assignments, could offer additional means for expanding campus historical interpretation. … [Read more...]

Eric G. Lorentzen, Professor of English, contributed a paper, "21st-Century 'American Notes': Charles Dickens and Popular American Culture" at the annual Victorians Institute conference this November in Charleston, SC. This year's conference theme was Transatlantic Influence, and Lorentzen's talk first surveyed quickly the multitude of modern-day Christmas festivals that are grounded in Dickens’ text across this country, before he turned to visual media. He made brief connections with some of the cultural manifestations that obtain on screen, from the fairly obvious A Muppet Christmas Carol, to the far more esoteric connections to be made with seemingly non-holiday fare such as films like The Game, Groundhog Day, and the more recent Disney blockbuster film, Christopher Robin. These connections led to a discussion of the ways in which Dickens’ somewhat Wordsworthian ideas of the crucial formative years of childhood, and the necessary project of philanthropy for social justice in A … [Read more...]

Maya Mathur, Professor of English, presented the paper “Desiring Violas in Tim Supple's Twelfth Night and Atul Kumar’s Piya Behrupiya” at the conference Women and Indian Shakespeares: Exploring Cinema, Translation, Performance. The conference was held at Queen’s University, Belfast, from 29 October-1 November, 2019, and is the first gathering of international scholars to focus exclusively on the topic of women and Shakespeare in India. … [Read more...]

At the 2019 Western States Rhetoric and Literacy conference at Montana State University, Assistant Professor of English Brenta Blevins presented a paper as part of the “Contemplating Rhetorical Futures in a Post-Desktop Computing World” roundtable with Jacob Greene, Arizona State University; David Rieder, North Carolina State University; Shannon Butts, University of Florida; and Jason Crider, University of Florida. Blevins's presentation, “Approaching the Event Horizon of a Digital Black Hole: Contemplation in Augmented Reality in an Era of Technological Change,” explored the tensions in post-desktop composing between attention and preservation, on the one hand, and, on the other, between distraction and deprecation. Taking augmented reality as one example, she explored how digital information risks falling into an information black hole where technology change renders digital texts inaccessible to future audiences. The digital black hole is a risk not just for augmented reality, … [Read more...]

Emily Deering Crosby, Assistant Professor of Communication, recently presented her research at the International Communication Association Preconference "Sports Communication and Social Justice" held at American University. Her research, entitled "Larry Nassar and Rhetorical Monster-Making: Political Subversion in the #MeToo Sports Era," explores the rhetorical process of “monster-making” (Ingebretsen, 1998) as it unfolded during the 2018 Larry Nassar criminal case, when the former US Gymnastics doctor was tried and convicted of sexual assault. By analyzing the survivors’ televised courtroom testimonials, this research contributes to scholarship on the #MeToo movement that rarely engages sports culture. … [Read more...]

Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently presented “Fear and Loathing in São Paulo: Trash Metaphysics in the Cinema of Jose Mojica Marins” at the Literature/Film Association's annual conference, entitled "Reboot Repurpose Recycle" this year and held in Portland, Oregon. … [Read more...]

Shumona Dasgupta, Associate Professor of English, recently presented a paper titled  “Everyday Trauma: Memorializing the Indian Partition” at the 3rd annual Memory Studies Conference (MSA) at the Complutense University Madrid, Madrid, Spain (June 25-28, 2019). … [Read more...]

Among other activities, Zach Whalen, Associate Professor of English, gave two professional presentations over the summer. In June, he gave a talk titled “Against Blogging” at the Domains 2019 conference. He reflected on the decline of blogging as a digital writing assignment and speculated on possible futures for digital writing in the classroom. In July, he went to Cork, Ireland for the 2019 conference of the Electronic Literature Organization. There, he presented about his ongoing research on computer-generated text, specifically the "National Novel Generation Month" community of practice (NaNoGenMo). He will be continuing that project this fall as a URES 197 project with the help of undergraduate research assistants.   … [Read more...]