News about awards and events from around the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
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Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons Honored with Quiet Courage Award
Religion professor Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons was one of five Gainesville residents awarded the Quiet Courage award by the Rosa Parks Quiet Courage Committee for 2009.
During the Civil Rights movement, Simmons participated in sit-ins as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1964, she organized a voting campaign in 1964, traveling in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
Dr. Simmons was also interviewed by the Independent Alligator about the award.
High School Students See STARS
The Department of Astronomy hosted a two-day workshop for high school and beginning college students called STARS (Student Training in Astronomy Research Skills). This workshop was funded by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute for astronomy outreach.
This year's workshop was held on November 13 and 14 and drew 22 students from 5 school around the state of Florida. The students were given the opportunity to visit UF's Astronomy and Physics Departments and interact with professors and UF Astronomy graduate and undergraduate students.
The students enjoyed a series of lectures on topics from extrasolar planets to cosmology. They toured the Astronomy instrumentation labs, where infrared instruments are being built for some of the largest telescopes in the world including the recently completed Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary Islands. In addition, the students conducted laboratory exercises on the nature of light and each build their own telescope to take home. In the evening, the workshop participants visited UF's Campus Teaching and Rosemary Hill Observatories for night-sky viewing.
This was the second STARS workshop hosted by the Department of Astronomy with the goals of fostering an interest in astronomy and encourage students to consider careers in science.
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: English Creative Writing Alumni in the New York Times Book Review
Rhoda Janzen's new book, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, has been reviewed by Kate Christensen for the New York Times Book Review. Janzen is an alumni of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
News from English
English
November 16
- With Arthur B. Evans (DePauw University), Rob Latham (UC Riverside), and George Slusser (UC Riverside), Terry Harpold is co-editor of a Special Sequence of Verniana (2009–10), collecting a dozen selected papers originally presented at the 2009 J. Lloyd Eaton Science Fiction Conference, “Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne & Beyond.”
- On November 5, Judith Page lectured on “Shylock’s Turquoise Ring: Jane Austen, Romanticism, and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice” at the Higgins School of Humanities, Clark University, Worcester, MA.
News of Current Students
- Stephanie Boluk received the Bruns Graduate Student Essay award, presented by N. Katherine Hayles, at the 2009 SLSA in Atlanta.
- Lisa Dusenberry presented “The Handheld Sleuth: Mystery Series, HerInteractive, and the Nintendo DS” at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Convention in Atlanta, GA. She was confirmed as the secretary of the SAMLA Children’s Literature Discussion Circle for 2010.
- These undergraduate English majors have been elected to UF’s chapter
of the national honor society Phi Beta Kappa:
- Hananie Albert
- Erin Lindsay Dykstra
- Kayla Leigh Graham
- Leah B. Greenblum
- Emily L. New
- Brittany L. Quintana
- Carly R. Roach
- Brittany R. Roberts
- Justine M. Shubert
- Joseph Quoc Tchen
- John C. Washington
- Daniel R. Widboom
- Casey A. Wilson
- Horacio Sierra’s review of Ana de San Bartolomé: Autobiography and Other Writings, edited and translated by Darcy Donahue, appears in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4 (2009): 284–86.
News of Former Students
- Eric Otto’s “On the Fakahatchee and Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief: An Interview with Mike Owen, a Park Biologist” appears in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 10.2.
STARS Program Encourages Astronomy Careers for High School Students
Astronomy
November 12
Dr. Vicki Sarajenidi and a group of Astronomy undergraduate majors are hosting the second Student Training in Astronomy Research Skills workshop the weekend f November 14th. 23 hish school students from across the state will have the opportunity to interact with the faculty, participate in different Astronomy labs, and carry out observations. This workshop is possible through a HST Grant (Hubble Space Telescope) for which Dr. Sarajedini is the Principal Investigator and Dr Anthony Gonzales is the Co-PI.
News from English
English
November 2
- John Cech’s retelling of the E.T.A. Hoffmann 1816 story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” has been published by Sterling Publishing. The book is illustrated by the French artist Eric Puybaret. On August 30th, Cech presented the lecture “Picture Books, in the Abstract” for the Harn Museum’s exhibition of the art of Esphyr Slobodkina. A chapter by Cech appears in Everything I Need to Know I Learned From A Children’s Book (Roaring Brook Press), ed. Anita Silvey.
- Gregory Ulmer’s essay “The Object of Post-Criticism,” originally published in The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), was translated into French and published in Images et (Re)Présentations: Les Années 1980, Seconde Partie (bilingual edition), in Magasin: Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble (2009): 12–47.
- Phil Wegner had an exceptionally busy Halloween weekend at the Thirty-fourth Annual Conference of the Society for Utopian Studies. He presented “‘The Mysterious Qualities of This Alleged Void’: Transvaluation and Utopian Urbanism in Rem Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL,” served as one of the respondents to Fredric Jameson’s keynote presentation, chaired a panel on Las Vegas that saw the premiere of a new major research project by Susan Willis and Jane Kuenz, witnessed exceptional presentations by current and former graduate students, Stephanie Boluk and Nicole LaRose (PhD, 2006), had the honor of presenting Fredric Jameson with the Society’s Lyman Tower Sargent Award for Distinguished Scholarship. Finally, he was elected the President-Elect of the Society, and he would like to invite all our colleagues and students past and present to submit an essay to next year’s meeting to be held October 29–31 in Milwaukee.
News of Current Students
- J. Stephen Addcox presented “The Memorial Manor House: Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and the Right of Property through Memory” at the South Central Modern Language Association’s conference in Baton Rouge, LA.
- Wesley Beal’s essay “Conspiracy, Theory, Genre: Collecting, the Paralysis of Interpretation, and Lyrical Truth in John Sayles’s Silver City” appears in Genre 41 (Spring/Summer 2008): 151–69.
- Daniel Brown presented “‘Not as She Was’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Realism and Photography” at the “Creativity and the Arts in Victorian Culture” conference sponsored by the Victorians Institute at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC, October 16–17.
- Thomas Cole presented “The Prisoner of Indefinite Detention in Kafka and Gitmo: The Kafkaesque Space for Punishment, Law and the Individual” at the South Central Modern Language Association’s conference as part of a panel on German Literature in the 20th century in Baton Rouge, LA. Cole was elected Secretary for the upcoming year’s session. In March, Cole presented “Bodies, Bikinis and Bombs: Conflating Body, Space and Land as the Culturally Marked” as part of a panel on science fiction and gender at the 8th Biennial Associated Colleges of the South Conference, held in Memphis, TN.
- Chad Newsom presented “Long Lost Film Theory” at the South Central Modern Language Association’s conference in Baton Rouge, LA.
