SUNY Geneseo
This year’s English department alumni lecture will be delivered by Jacqueline Jones, Assistant Professor of English at Laguardia Community College — CUNY.
Jones’ lecture is entitled, “A Quasi-Religious Experience: Placing August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean within the Neo-Slave Narrative Tradition.”
The lecture take place at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 22 in Doty 300 (the Tower Room).
Jones graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 2003.
A few things that our faculty, students, and alumni have been up to recently:
English major alum Rachel Svenson (2010) has been awarded Columbia University’s Writing Program Scholarship to pursue an MFA in creative nonfiction.
To see some of Rachel’s impressive work, check out her essay “Continents,” which appeared in issue 2.1 of SUNY Geneseo’s online literary journal Gandy Dancer for the debut of the journal’s “Post Script” section.
Congratulations to poet and Geneseo alum Nick Friedman, who has been selected for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. The Stegner Fellowship one of the most prestigious and highly-selective creative writing fellowships in the world. You can sample some of Friedman’s poetry on the website of The Poetry Foundation.
Last spring, we reported on Friedman’s 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship at the Poetry Foundation, his March 2013 appearance in the New York Times’ T-Magazine, and his April (National Poetry Month) 2013, interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition, during which he read his poem Not the Song, but After.
Editor’s Note: Geneseo English major alum Patrick Morgan (2010), currently a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Duke University, recently posted a profile of himself on the Geneseo English department’s alumni profile page. But he had a few more things to say than the space there would allow. In particular, he wanted to share seven points of advice for our undergraduate English majors. He asked for some space here to provide them, and we were more than happy to provide it. Below are his complete profile and his advice for undergrads.
The hardest thing about connecting the skills I learned as a Geneseo English major with my life after graduation is knowing where to stop. I could write a book on the subject. Geneseo English gave me the synthesizing tools I needed when, immediately after graduating in 2010, I wrote for the National Park Service in Acadia National Park, distilling fifty-page science reports into two-page public-friendly versions. Geneseo English gave me the expertise in clear, concise writing and proofreading that I used as a contributing writer and editorial intern for The American Gardener magazine, shouldering the responsibility for organizing several sections of the publication, such as Gardener’s Notebook and Regional Happenings. Geneseo English gave me the multi-modal writing experiences that prepared me to work for DISCOVER magazine, writing four articles daily for the in-house blogs, 80beats and Discoblog. Geneseo English gave me the public speaking skills necessary to interview geochemists, geophysicists, and geologists for my freelance science journalism articles for EARTH magazine. And Geneseo English gave me the research experience, writing feedback, and encouragement I needed to apply to—and get accepted into—a slew of highly competitive English graduate programs, such as Duke, Northwestern, Oxford, and Cambridge. I am now working toward a PhD in English at Duke University, where I have used the scholarly skills I learned from Geneseo English to co-author with Priscilla Wald a preface for American Literature’s Thoreau Symposium and to construct a collaborative book with Cathy Davidson about digital literacies in the classroom. When I say that “Geneseo English” taught me these skills, I am of course referring to the many Geneseo English professors I had the privilege of taking classes with, as well as those I interacted with beyond the classroom—the professors who are so generous with their time, who challenge you to excel in school and in life, and who stay connected with you years after graduation.
With regard to reading and writing skills, it’s easy to talk about generalities, like how the high expectations of Geneseo English professors forced me to learn proofreading and fact checking methods that I still use to this day; how researching and writing on a deadline was good practice for science journalism; and how the many blog posts I wrote for Beth McCoy, Maria Lima, and Alice Rutkowski prepared me for my journalistic blog posts for DISCOVER magazine. But there are reading and writing skills I learned at Geneseo that are simultaneously more specific and more difficult to articulate. Geneseo English, for example, gave me a sensitivity to different writing genres and to what I like to call “writing climates.” Every Geneseo English professor has high writing expectations. But to say that each professor has high expectations isn’t the same as saying that each professor has the same expectations. Part of the tacit knowledge one gains as a successful English major is the ability to quickly assess the subtly different expectations each English professor has for what exactly an essay should accomplish. The kind of essay I wrote for Rob Doggett wasn’t precisely the kind of essay I would write for Gillian Paku, or Ken Cooper, or Ron Herzman—through pre-essay meetings and discussions, each professor brings out and allows you to discover a different part of your writing voice, based on distinct conceptions regarding the kind of work an essay should accomplish. These subtly different expectations are what I mean by “writing climates,” and it’s this sense of different writing climates that’s so useful after graduation because different publications—even within the narrow field of science journalism—constitute different writing climates. Indeed, each section of each magazine is like a different writing climate: a DISCOVER blog has different expectations than a DISCOVER front-of-the-book print article; EARTH magazine’s News Notes section is different from its Benchmarks section; and there’s a difference between research, resource, and program briefs for the National Park Service—each part of a publication is looking for a different kind of voice, just as each Geneseo English professor brings out a different dimension to your voice.
There are three other specific-yet-hard-to-articulate reading and writing tools that I would like to briefly cover. One tool is the organizational abilities one needs to juggle the medley of high-stakes (conference papers, seminar papers, etc.) and low-stakes (blog posts, presentations. etc.) writing one undertakes as an English major. You’re keeping track of different genres, different writing climates, different due-dates, instructions, and expectations. It’s this type of intensive interpretive task-juggling—characteristic of being a Geneseo English major—that prepared me for the multiple roles I fulfilled, for example, at DISCOVER magazine: in addition to writing four blogs each day, I created photogalleries for the website, helped proofread certain sections of the print magazine, prepared magazine content for online publication, contributed stories to the print magazine, responded to subscribers’ emails regarding the website, and managed DISCOVER’s Facebook page. Another closely-related tool, or experience, includes the presentations and alternative writing projects Geneseo English professors expect from students. For example, I remember the challenging project Caroline Woidat assigned in her Native American Literature survey course, in which we had to integrate the standard academic essay with a creative nonfiction account of a personal family story. The science writing world is likewise full of the kinds of writing projects that force you to meet new expectations—that is, in which you dive into a project that’s unfamiliar to you, and yet you use the skills you’ve built up to tackle the unfamiliar with the familiar. Thus I knew that I could write the text for and design a poster for the National Park Service informing visitors about the vital characteristics of specific invasive insects because I’d successfully accomplished similarly unfamiliar writing projects for Geneseo’s English professors. The last specific-yet-hard-to-articulate reading and writing tool is the practice Geneseo English professors have of providing choices for term papers: you can respond to a specific prompt or you can meet with the professor to propose your own essay idea. Taking advantage of the latter option prepared me for the daily article pitches I gave to DISCOVER magazine editors—going from the idea stage to the I-need-to-convince-this-person-that-my-idea-is-viable stage.
Geneseo’s English professors allowed me to discover my writing voice, and yet there’s so much more than writing skills that I learned from these professors. In each class, they modeled the mind of a literary scholar—a discerning, critical reader, and interpreter of signs who is likewise mindful of social concerns. They generously gave up their valuable time to mentor me, whether it was in working as a teaching assistant for Rob Doggett, or participating in the slew of directed study opportunities I had with Ken Cooper, Gillian Paku, and Richard Finkelstein. The collegiality between the professors gave me a microcosm of the wider academic community—a microcosm that only expanded when Rob Doggett brought me and a bunch of other students to Sligo, Ireland, to participate in the Yeats International Summer School. The introduction to feminist criticism that Beth McCoy, Caroline Woidat, Rob Doggett, Alice Rutkowski, and Maria Lima gave me serves me well now as I complete Duke’s graduate certificate in Women’s Studies. I was introduced to Henry David Thoreau in Alice Rutkowski’s American Romanticism class, Ed Gillin’s Humanities II, and Ken Cooper’s guidance during my honors thesis—an introduction that has directly facilitated my own Thoreau scholarship, such as my 2010 article in The Concord Saunterer, “Aesthetic Inflections: Thoreau, Gender, and Geology.” And extending my interpretive skills beyond the written word—to film—through Jun Okada’s Film Classics has given me the confidence to do the same in my own classroom practices.
There are indeed many ways to succeed as a Geneseo English student, and as a graduate of the Geneseo English program. Here are seven points of advice I learned in the process of moving and growing through the program and navigated my way in the world after Geneseo English:
Some of these points of advice might be useful for you, some might be obvious, and some you might want to forget. These are just the seven points I would tell my freshman self if I went back in time.
Looking back on my time at Geneseo, I realize that I made the right choice by majoring in English. The skills I learned from Geneseo’s English professors are the skills that have brought me around the U.S. writing, from the National Park Service in Maine to The American Gardener in D.C. to DISCOVER magazine in New York City. Although Geneseo English gave me the tools I needed to accomplish my career goals, I didn’t become an English major to become a science journalist because, at the time I declared my major, I didn’t even know that I was interested in science journalism. But it was an English professor who first sparked the idea in my head that I could be a science journalist—who believed in me and my writing, and gave me the encouragement I needed to succeed after graduation. Somewhere in that mentoring experience lies the ineffable quality of being a Geneseo English major because, in the end, the only limit is your imagination.
Professor Tom Greenfield and Kaitlyn C. Allen (English ’12) have co-authored an article on “Broadway” for Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories That Shaped Our Culture, edited by Jacqueline Edmondson and published by Greenwood Press in October 2013.
According to the publisher’s website, Music in American Life “demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between this art form and our society. Entries include singers, composers, lyricists, songs, musical genres, places, instruments, technologies, music in films, music in political realms, and music shows on television.”
Three Geneseo English major alumni, all now in graduate programs in English, delivered papers last month at the 2013 International Conference on Romanticism at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. The session, entitled “Versions of Romantic Love,” was organized and chaired by SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Teaching Professor Gene Stelzig. Andrew Kay, currently finishing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, read a paper on “Keats’s Death-Centered Poetics and the Allegory of Reading”; Elly Weybright, in her second year at the CUNY Graduate Center, read a paper on “Byron’s Hebrew Melodies: Romanticizing an Old Testament Tradition of Love”; and Will Porter, in his first year at Harvard University, read a paper on “The Single Life: Love at Walden Pond.”
Two English major alums have made recent appearances in print.
Marc DiPaolo (1997), Assistant Professor of English and Film at Oklahoma City University is the editor of Unruly Catholics from Dante to Madonna: Faith, Heresy, and Politics in Cultural Studies, recently out from Scarecrow Press. Unruly Catholics is an interdisciplinary anthology featuring essays by, among others, SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Teaching Professor Ronald Herzman, who contributed the essay “Dante: Cafeteria Catholic?” DiPaolo’s own contribution to the volume is an autobiographical essay on C.S. Lewis, Madonna, and the greatness of a SUNY Geneseo liberal arts education. Other contributors include Frederick S. Roden, Darren Middleton, and John Kenneth Muir. DiPaolo is also War, Politics, and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film (2011); Emma Adapted: Jane Austen’s Heroine from Book to Film (2007); Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture (2013); and Devised and Directed by Mike Leigh (2013). You can learn more about him on the alumni profile page he recently created on our website.
Meanwhile, Patrick Morgan (2010), who is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Duke University, has contributed an essay on Practicing Web Wisdom: Mindfully Incorporating Digital Literacies into the Classroom” to a new volume on open teaching titled Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning from HASTAC.
From the website: “Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning is intended to assist anyone embarking on open teaching. It offers foundational methods, examples, and explanatory theories for how to set up the practices of a class, how to determine guiding principles, how to theorize what you are doing in the classroom, how to design the class, how to include multimedia elements and approaches such as games, and how to ensure that you have designed a class for inclusion, not exclusion. Finally, the openness of the learning should continue even after the book is published/goes public, and the chapters in the ‘Invitations’ section offer advice on how to extend your open practices to the world beyond the classroom. This is by no means the only way to set up peer-to-peer teaching, but it is an account of the way we have done it, with as much detail as possible to encourage others to try, in whatever way suits their community and purposes.”
With apologies for the protracted radio silence, we offer this roundup of important events and developments from the Spring 2013 semester:
2012-13 saw the launch of SUNY Geneseo’s student-run online literary journal Gandy Dancer. Prof. Rachel Hall serves as faculty adviser to the journal, which invites submissions from across SUNY and is published twice yearly.