Wednesday, 10 November1999
READING MATTERS Vol V, No 12
Congratulations to. . .
Faith Adiele and Carolyn McConnell, current students in the Nonfiction Writing Program, have been named co-winners of the first annual Willard Espy Prize for nonfiction and will be splitting the $1000 award. Faith Adiele won for her piece "Lying Lessons" and Carolyn McConnell won for "Body of Water." The University of the Redlands (CA) sponsors the award, given for a portion of an in-progress, unpublished book project with a Pacific Northwest theme.
And to. . .
Carter Hanson, who graduated in 1998, who has just been awarded a "Distinguished Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention" by the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS) for his dissertation "Work in Progress: The British Colonial Vocation in Victorian-Canadian Literature, 1830-1900." (This means he was first runner-up.) Carter is currently a visiting professor at Valparaiso University. Teresa Mangum directed Carter's dissertation.
And to. . .
Rob Latham, who recently returned from giving an invited talk, entitled "The Cybernetic Vampire of Consumer Youth Culture," in the "Boundaries and Borderlines" series at the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Rob was kept busy during his three-day visit,also giving a lecture on technoculture issues in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot to a class in science fiction and sitting on a defense committee for an M.A. thesis on the novels of Philip K. Dick.
Departmental Consulting Group (DCG) meeting to discuss tenure and promotion casesThursday, Nov 18 at 3:45 in the Gerber Lounge. If we do not conclude discussion and voting on Thursday, the DCG will reconvene on Friday, Nov 19 at 3:45 in the Gerber Lounge. Tenure Records are available for check-out in Gayle's office.
If so, this message is probably not for you. Each year the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy addresses a random selection of universities all over the world to remind them that all professors of literature and modern languages have the right to propose candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. This right is permanent and not dependent on the receipt of such an invitation. We have been given a few official invitations for nominations for a candidate or candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2000. and asked to make them available to faculty, particularly to those faculty members whose field of interest is modern literature, which the committee limits to works by authors now living. The committee desires, but does not require, a statement of the reasons for the nomination. Ask Amy for a nomination form. Deadline for receipt of nominations is 1 February 2000.
Sara Levine's presentation previously set for Friday, November 19, will be rescheduled as the first Faculty Colloquium for next semester due to a conflict with the DCG meeting. I've apologized to Sara for having to ask her to reschedule and have promised that everyone in the Western Hemisphere will attend her presentation when we finally give her a chance to make it.
In the September 8 issue of Reading Matters (Vol 5, no 3) I reported the Chronicle article about Maresi Nerad's and Joseph Cerny's study at Berkeley of PhD Recipients in Six Fields at 61 Universities ten years after they recieved their degrees. (The Chronicle story can be read at http://chronicle.com/daily/99/09/99090301n.htm) The study tracked a total of 5,854 PhDs, including 1, 217 in English. Now, the results of that study for each field are being published, with the first field English. The first publication, "From Rumors to Facts: Career Outcomes of English PhDs" appeared in the Fall 1999 Communicator, a publication of the Coucil of Graduate Schools. (Reprints of this very important study can be purchased from the Council of Graduate Schools at $4 per copy by calling (202) 223-3791 or Faxing (202) 331-7157. And, Amy will have one copy of this report you may borrow.
In the next few issues of Reading Matters I'll be reporting what I see as some of the most important findings in this groundbreaking we should consider to which we may wish to respond. This week, however, all I want to do is to give you a shot at taking the quiz Maresi Nerad gave to English DEOs and Directors of Graduate Study at this year's ADE Summer Seminar. Fortunately, we were not actually graded on this quiz, because, based on my own results and based on the gasps and sighs from the rest of the room, I'd say we didn't do very well at all. Which is to say that way too many of us had no clear picture of what the world actually holds for our PhDs. Which is pretty much the disturbing bottom line of this study.