Honor Roll Ceremony

This past Thursday, March 27, 2008, exemplary students from Arts & Sciences received special recognition for their academic excellence.

Please help us to congratulate the following students from the Department of English who, through their hard work, are on the Honor Roll!

Isabel Abón, Emily Aguiló, Adriana Caraballo, Christopher Hernández, Marshley Márquez, Angel Matos, Leslie Mendoza, Juan Ñeco, Yolanda Padilla, Ileana Pagán, Lorianne Ramírez, Gabriel Romaguera, Katherine Rosa, Astrid Sambolín, Julio Vega, and Roxana Velázquez.

Congratulations to María Quintero!

Maria Quintero, T.A. for the English department, has had an article entitled “Life at the University of Puerto Rico’s Arts and Sciences English Writing Center,” accepted for publication in The Writing Lab Journal, an affiliate of NCTE from Purdue University. 

Her research, an ethnographic study of the peer tutors in the writing center, explores the unique ESL scenario in the only Writing Center in Puerto Rico, an island that due to its historical context, does not fall into any typical category in the tutoring of English writing. 

Dr. Mary E. Sefranek’s January/February Chronicles

At the start of the new year (January 11, 2008), I was pleased to welcome to our campus the teachers, parents, and 6^th grade students participating in my Arts and Sciences seed grant funded research “Portraits of San Sebastián: The Production of Digital Bilingual Narratives in La Escuela Nueva Elemental Urbana for a digital photography workshop with the Oficina de Prensa. This activity was reported on our institution’s homepage and is archived at http://www.uprm.edu/news/articles/as2008010.html

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Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages Publication

NIck Haydock’s book MOVIE MEDIEVALISM: THE IMAGINARY MIDDLE AGES (McFarland 2008) will be out in May of this year. It is already available for eager beavers on Amazon.com. This book provides a theoretical introduction to the study of films about the Middle Ages and what the author calls the “medieval imaginary.” Employing Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, Haydock explores images of multivalent time and looks at how contemporary society projects the past it requires in a number of recent films, including: FIRST KNIGHT, A KNIGHT’S TALE, THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, KING ARTHUR, NIGHT WATCH, AND DA VINCI CODE.

Nick Haydock is also in the process of editing with Edward Risden a collection of essays titled HOLLYWOOD IN THE HOLY LAND: THE FEARFUL SYMMETRIES OF MOVIE MEDIEVALISM (also for McFarland & Co.). This book should be out sometime early next fall.

Dr. Judy Casey Paper Presentation

In March, Dr. Judy Casey, in collaboration with Dr. Beth Virtanen, will be presenting a paper entitled “Writing Out Loud in a Bilingual Writing Center: Easier, Harder, Better, Scary, Rude?”at the Writing Centers Association Conference at the University of Oklahoma. This presentation outlines the history of the Arts and Sciences Writing Center with a focus on one particular SLA issue: the advantages and disadvantages of a situation in which students who are required to write in English often need to discuss their work in Spanish. The conference theme, “writing out loud,” addresses the talk of tutors as they go about their work. In our case, where both L1 and L2 are included, the topic is expanded for all writing center professionals who will attend because while they are aware of their growing need to be able to tutor L2 students, the concept of bilingual tutors working with students in their L2 is a new and essentially unexplored area of research. Due to the ever-changing demographic profile of the USA, this topic will soon move from the theoretical to become a reality, much in the same way that ESL teachers who are non-native speakers of English have moved from a marginalized group into the global mainstream.