CWS Brownbags

"Preparing for the Job Market"
Spring 2024; Dr. Lindsay Russell, Associate Professor & Director of Writing Studies

Graduate students at all stages and in all specialties are welcome to this overview of the academic job market. We’ll discuss what kinds of academic jobs are out there and how to prepare to apply for them. Drop in if you’re asking yourself any of the following:

• What kinds of academic jobs are out there? And how do I determine which might be right for me? 
• What graduate school extra/curriculars should I be worried about now?
• What application materials do I need to have ready? And what do those look like? 
• How do I search for open positions, submit and track applications, and survive the uncertainty of it all? 
• What happens in interviews, on campus visits, during negotiations? 
• What happens if I don’t/do get a job?

"Finding Kids in (Sometimes) Unexpected Places: Children, Comics, & Archives"
Spring 2024; Carol Tilley, Associate Professor of Information Science

"Young people’s voices in the historical record are difficult to locate because children’s experiences were often deemed inconsequential. When their voices do appear, they are often mediated by adults, such as physicians, teachers, parents, and others with their own particular viewpoints and agendas. But that doesn’t mean children are wholly absent from or invisible in archives.  

"In this talk, I’ll share a trajectory of my archival and related primary source research related to young people’s comics reading in the mid-20th century US. In doing so, I’ll relate some of the unexpected places where I have encountered children’s experiences, stories, and creations in more authentic or, at least, less-mediated forms. Additionally, I’ll share some tips for reading sideways in archives to locate similar resources and contextualizing what one finds there. More important, I will provide space for some of these young people in history to share bits of their lives with us."

"Plato's Rhetorical Universe"
Spring 2022; Bess Myers, Lecturer of English

Abstract: Plato's Timaeus is a dialogue of epic proportions, in which we learn about the creation of the universe, the origin of human beings, and the relationship between our material world and the immaterial realm of the Forms. It is an essential text in discussions of Platonic philosophy, but in rhetorical studies, the dialogue rarely comes up. This work-in-progress talk asks: what have rhetoricians missed about Plato's rhetorical theory by overlooking the Timaeus? Bess will review her article "Platonic Synergy: A Circular Reading of the Sophist and Timaeus," and will situate its argument in the context of her book project, Plato's Rhetorical Universe. She will conclude with some thoughts-but mostly questions-about "classical" rhetoric and its place in contemporary rhetorical studies.

Presenter Bio: Bess Myers is a Lecturer of English whose research engages with ancient Greek and Roman rhetorics, classical reception, and translation studies. Most recently, her work has been published in the Journal for the History of Rhetoric and in the edited collection A New Handbook of Rhetoric: Inverting the Classical Vocabulary.

"Social Justice in Writing Administration"
Fall 2021; Dr. Dana Kinzy, Dr. Dominique Clayton, and Dr. Kaia Simon

Panelists will discuss the ways they draw on their own research and implement social justice practices in administrative contexts, including Writing Center and Writing Program work, all while navigating different institutional contexts and constraints.

Panelists:
Dr. Dana Kinzy, Associate Director of Rhetoric
Dr. Dominique Clayton, Director of Academic Services & Writing Center Director at Bellarmine University
Dr. Kaia Simon, Assistant Professor & Director of the Writing Program at University of Wisconsin Eau Claire

"Recovering a Woman from the Archives: One Mutilated Piece of Paper at a Time"
Fall 2021; Cathy Prendergast, Professor of English

"In 2017, I almost gave up on a book about a woman instrumental to Carmel-by-the-Sea's famed literary colony which had been founded in the early 1900s. I had stumbled upon a searing letter by poet Nora May French to her boyfriend about her abortion, written while she was having it, but there were too few other documents to do her life justice. Unlike the well-known (and even not so well-known) men of this early twentieth literary super-group which included Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and the colony's founder George Sterling, Nora May French had few records under her name, despite being nationally known in her day. Searching collections of her male associates, I found letters that were about her or by her, but these documents had sections torn away, words crossed out, or whole pages missing. When I saw how hard men had worked to erase Nora from history, I recommitted myself to find out why. This talk is about putting in that extra mile to recover women's lives, from looking in unusual places, to making sense out of mutilated records, to connecting the dots from disparate sources." - Dr. Prendergast