WCP Faculty's Latest Publications

Posted August 30, 2021

As the 2021-2022 Academic Year begins, the Writing and Communication Program Faculty are hard at work prepping classes, designing multimodal assignments, and choosing readings for their students. They've also been hard at work on their own research. Here are a few recent publications by WCP faculty members.

Second-year Brittain Fellow Eric Lewis' essay "Will a Pharaoh's Daughter Help?: Rethinking the Question of Language Through Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's 'Ceist na Teangan'" - which puts forward a new translation and reading of the poem in the context of minor-language literature - was published in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. Lewis describes the essay: "The article argues that scholarship on Irish-language literature often overemphasizes the context of the state of the Irish language and thus ghettoizes Irish-language literature. This poem is in Irish, and thus it's about the Irish language. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's 'Ceist na Teangan' is about Irish - but it generalizes its point to all languages. Speaking, regardless of the language in which one speaks, is always a surrender of agency over one's words. In a minor language that is encountered primarily through translation, that is especially the case, but a similar form of translation occurs whenever an audience tries to make sense of what someone says. The article uses the most famous contemporary Irish-language poem to argue for a more flexible approach to the field as a whole." Access the article here.

Brittain Fellows and CommLab co-assistant directors Kendra Slayton and Jeff Howard, together with Lead Peer Consultant Rocio Soto, have had an article on writing center work and finding community in isolation published in the International Writing Center Association's Journal, The Peer Review. The article argues, "During the pandemic, lack of physical proximity has the potential to disrupt our work and our communities. COVID-19 has forced many Writing Centers to rethink not only the way they conduct their everyday operations, but also the ways in which consultants and administrators interact and relate to each other and their student clients. Using technology such as Microsoft Teams and video conferencing platforms, our Center has sought to implement creative strategies, including artistic opportunities and outreach events, that allow WC staff to overcome distance and continue to interact meaningfully with their fellow staff members and clients, thus fostering and strengthening our community. As a result of creative community-building during isolation, we have been able to share ourselves with each other in ways that, while different, are still meaningful. The strategies we have practiced during the pandemic, including embracing vulnerability and sharing creativity, will allow us to improve the ways we build an inviting Center community. This will not only facilitate students’ growth as communicators but also more effectively attend to their emotional and social needs–as well as those of WC staff members." Access the article here.

First-year Brittain Fellow Rachel Robinson's co-authored essay "Embodiment, Relationality, and Constellation: A Cultural Rhetorics Story of Doctoral Writing," appears in Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing, edited by Cecile Badenhurst, Brittany Amell, and James Burford. Robinson notes "This essay offers cultural rhetorics as a methodological tool for re-imagining doctoral writing. We provide a range of stories-theories to constellate the varying steps of this re imagined dissertation writing methodology and process. Specifically, we discuss origin stories; how and why we write in community, including the importance of honoring relations/hips and reciprocity as part of the research process; the necessity of a decolonial orientation to our work and the communities we engage with; and a reflection on the process as a whole, including our embodied experiences throughout the research and writing. We conclude by discussing how cultural rhetorics method/ologies can help scholars in any field reimagine the doctoral writing process as embodied, experiential, and personal." Access the essay here.

WCP Visiting Lecturer Wendy Truran's essay “Affective Alchemy: W.B. Yeats and the Transformative Heresy of Joy,” appears in the new Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism, which redefines Irish modernism as resistance to religious, sociopolitical and aesthetic orthodoxies. Truran's work challenges the scholarly orthodoxy that limits modernism’s structures of feeling to anxiety, depression, or numbness. She argues that Yeats's affective alchemy takes in pure sorrow and transforms it into pure joy, amalgamating them into the gold of poetic language. One of Yeats’s heretical acts was to foster feelings in order to ferment change. She explores the way that joy, for Yeats, becomes a kind of discipline (like art), that must be constructed with effort in order to withstand the indignities of bodily, spiritual, and cultural disintegration. The book came out in May 2021 and is available here.

Truran has also started an open-access press, Imbricate! with two colleagues. The principal aim of Imbricate! Press is to create a place in and around affect studies for the generative ‘overlap’ of voices, practices, methods, matters, modes and more. Imbricate! publishes work that gauges how critical/creative practices can bring together discourses, worlds, sensations, sensibilities, and atmospheres that raise questions and perhaps unsettle what counts as ‘fit’ (and ‘unfit’) within and across shifting disciplinary contours. Imbricate! Press's first book, Affects, Interfaces, Events, edited by Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Jette Kofoed, and Jonas Fritsch is now available.