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Annual Grad Student Symposium

Wrap-Up: W.I.T 2018 MA English Symposium

On Tuesday 5/15 the graduate English program hosted it’s 2018 Writing Image Text (WIT) symposium. Because most of our MA students live in other parts of the country and even in other countries, we know that it’s impractical for many of our students to travel to attend. Hopefully this post can give those of you at a distance a feel for the event, of which I hope you know that all of you were a part in spirit. Turnout was good as a number of students and alumni (mostly from around the north-east) made it to campus to attend and enjoy some friendly conversation with each other, faculty, and the school Dean.


The picnic area outside Maher Hall. The calm before the storm: literally, our area was hit with a massive storm just a few hours after the event ended.

Our first panel of presenters consisted of Dr. Kristen Keckler, who started the symposium off by reading several of her “flash fiction” pieces. Dr. Keckler (who in addition to teaching in the MA program is also our undergraduate English program director) discussed “flash fiction” a bit and we talked as a group about what we thought one of the stories was really about. After that we switched to hearing some scholarship from two graduate students: Richard Kovarovic presented “The River, the Tiger, the Fire: Borges and the Reimagining of Modernist Time in Ficciones“; and Daniel Campbell then presented “The Literature of the Celtic Periphery: The Commonality of Constituent Elements.”


L-R: Dr. Keckler reading flash fiction; Dr. Loots, Richard, Daniel.

After some lunch (in the picnic area featured above!) Dr. Celia Reissig-Vasile, Chair of the Department of Literature and Language, gave a talk on research activities she recently performed in Argentina while researching the film Tunel de Los Huesos/Tunnel of Bones and the historical events it depicts.


Dr. Reissig-Vasile discussing her on-site research in Argentina. Dr. Dana Horton (right) watches on.

The lights were turned low, and Dr. Dana Horton discussed her poster-presentation “‘Where One Time I Served, Now I Got Others Serving Me’: Women as Post-Neo-Slave Owners in 12 Years a Slave.” Dr. Horton discussed not just the topic of her poster and related research but the whole idea of a poster-presentation, which has long been a standard presentation method in the sciences but has only recently sprung up as a method in literary fields.


Dr. Horton discussing her poster-presentation (the projection was bright and clear in the room, not washed-out as it looks in this photo).

Throughout the event the audience sat enraptured!


L-R: Kari; Dr. Sax (a bit of his shirt at least); Lynne; Richard; Dr. Tamara Jhashi, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts; Dr. Fran Biscoglio (just peeking up above Dean Jhashi’s head); Dr. Keckler. Not depicted: Daniel sitting to the left (sorry Daniel, too far to the left!). Dr. Dugan and Dr. Medoff were present for the event but also out of the frame (alas!).

At this point we switched over to poetry readings. Gloria Buckley, who recently completed her degree as part of the MA English class of 2018, read two selections: “Tide of the Mind” and “November Night Woods.”


Gloria introducing her first poem. Dr. Horton watching on.

After Gloria’s reading Dr. Boria Sax closed out the event with several of his poems, each of which shared a common theme relating to leaves. They included “Which Leaf?,” “Death of a Tree,” and “Sing Sing Prison at Night” (Dr. Sax teaches classes to inmates at Sing Sing as part of Mercy College’s outreach in association with a project called Hudson Link).


Dr. Sax, on the right, having just finished his poetry reading. Gloria, Dr. Reissig-Vasile, and Dr. Horton sit together with Dr. Sax here at the end of the event answering questions related to their presentations.

The symposium was overall just filled with interesting ideas, scholarship, creative fiction, poetry, and research; as well as with good humor, laughter, conversation, and camaraderie. (And food!) In addition, our student-presenters earned a valuable line-item to list on the scholarship section of their CV. Altogether it was a very good day. Thank you, everyone, who attended. And to everyone else in the program who for understandable reasons could not attend (distance, obligations, etc.), please know that you were there with us in spirit, that this event involved each one of you; because we are all in this together, all of us in this graduate English program. This time next year we’ll be having the 2019 symposium. Start planning for it now! We in the faculty hope to see as many of you there as can possibly attend. Until then, cheers to you all.

Course Information

Summer Book Orders

The book orders for the two summer courses are:

ENGL 510 Theory and Practice of Expository Writing:
  • Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1999. ISBN: 9780743273565.
  • Miller, Susan. The Norton Book of Composition Studies. 2009. ISBN: 978039393158.
  • Oates, Joyce Carol & Robert Atwan, eds. The Best American Essays of the Century. 2000. ISBN: 9780155873.
  • Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. 2003. ISBN: 9780743477123

RECOMMENDED:

  • Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide. 2006. ISBN: 0415974100.
  • MLA Handbook, 8th Ed. 2016. ISBN: 9781603292627.
ENGL 540 Mastering the Past:
  • Di Lampedusa, Guiseppe. The Leopard. 2007. ISBN: 9780375714795.
  • Faulkner. The Portable Faulkner. 2003. 9780142437285.
  • Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Buried Giant. 2016. 9780307455796.
  • Sebald, W.G. On the Natural History of Destruction. 2004. ISBN: 9780375756573.
  • Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. 2008. ISBN: 9780451228147.
Student News

2018 Thesis of the Year, and Christie Bowl Program Honoree.

The MA program now has two distinctions that it awards in May at the end of the annual school-cycle: the Thesis of the Year award, and the just-inaugurated Christie Bowl Program Honoree award.

All theses completed for ENGL 599 Master’s Thesis Tutorial courses during the summer and fall of 2017 and spring of 2018 were eligible for the Thesis of the Year title. The final paper is selected by program faculty who have no thesis students’ papers in the running, and who read over drafts of thesis papers from which the authors’ names as well as mentor’s names have been removed.

The winner of the 2018 Thesis of the Year award is Matthew Christoff for his paper “Surrealism and the Dissociation of Internal and External Experience.” 

The Christie Bowl Program Honoree award is named for the late Joannes Christie who established and for a long time chaired Mercy College’s English Department. The annual awarding of a Christie Bowl (it is an actual bowl) to an undergraduate English program-honoree has long been a tradition at Mercy College. The Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, Dr. Tamara Jhashi, has created this graduate award to extend the distinction into our graduate program. The award, selected by the combined graduate faculty, recognizes one graduating person for her or his outstanding academic excellence and contributions to the MA program, to our graduate learning community, over the course of her or his time in the program.

The winner of the 2018 Christie Bowl is Gloria Buckley.

I hope everyone in the program will join the faculty in congratulating Matthew and Gloria. These were not easy decisions for the faculty to make, as the quality of theses produced across the 599 sections each year is exceptional; and all of our graduating class each year demonstrates excellence. As we recognize Matthew and Gloria let us also recognize all members of the graduating MA class of 2017-18 for their hard work and dedication.

Annual Grad Student Symposium

Graduate English Symposium Attendee Info

We’re one week away from our 2018 symposium here at Mercy College’s Dobbs Ferry campus. The event is on Tuesday May 15 in Maher Hall from 11am to 2pm. For those attending here is some info you might find useful:

If you’re driving to campus you have a few options. You can take 287 to Exit 9 (Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow) and then take Route 9 south to the campus. The college is about three miles directly south of 287. Or you can take the Saw Mill River Parkway to Exit 17 then head about two miles west to campus. In all cases WATCH YOUR SPEED, especially if you’re coming south on Route 9 from 287. That stretch of road goes through three different villages (Tarrytown, Irvington, Dobbs Ferry) and each will have its own speed traps. People get pulled over all the time up and down those three miles between the college and highway. The speed limit is usually 35 but drops to 30 at times.

There is a security booth at the entrance to the college parking lot. Security is aware that people without parking passes will be arriving for this event. Just stop at the gate and tell the guard that you are here attending the Graduate English Symposium at Maher Hall and they will let you in.

For those using Metro North take the Hudson River Line to Ardsley. Once outside the train station turn right and walk up the hill to campus.

The symposium will be in Maher Hall, which is an old mansion on the north side of campus pointed-at by the arrow in the map below. The car entrance is at the bottom-right of that map, and the Ardsley train station is at the top-right. If anyone gets lost you can call me at 914-674-7423 or the English office administrator, Linda Dubiell, at 914-674-7353.


There are numerous hotel options in the area. The hotel the college uses for visitors is the Tarrytown DoubleTree Hilton which is up by Exit 9. A few miles further away on White Plains Road there are three different Marriots (why three?), a Sheraton, and a Hampton Inn. There’s also a very nice boutique hotel, the Castle Hotel & Spa, right nearby in Tarrytown.

If anyone has any questions about the symposium please contact me at cloots@mercy.edu. I and other program faculty (and Dean Jhashi) look forward to seeing all of you who can attend.

 

 

Annual Grad Student Symposium

2018 Mercy College Graduate English Symposium: Call for Papers and Attendees.

It’s that time again! This year’s Writing/Image/Text (W.I.T.) Graduate English Symposium will be held on Tuesday May 15 here on the Dobbs Ferry NY campus. May 15, in case it should matter to some of you, is the day before the School of Liberal Arts and the School of Education commencement ceremony. You can read about last year’s symposium here, if you’re interested.

The symposium is a casual mini-conference at which interested MA English students or alumni gather to read aloud a scholarly or creative paper (a paper that you’ve written for any of your MA courses will do just fine, though it must be edited to no longer than 10 pages), as well as to meet some fellow grad students and program professors. Family and friends are welcome to attend too. And MA students interested in attending but not reading aloud a paper are of course welcome to do so. Graduate students and professional scholars often attend and read at local, regional, and national conferences, so this symposium provides a friendly small-scale introduction to the conference experience. And for anyone who reads a paper, it becomes a line-item you can list under the scholarship section on your CV (click here to read more about the CV).

The symposium title “Writing/Image/Text” signals that you don’t have to just focus your presentation on literary analysis, as you traditionally would at an English conference, but might instead present work involving other media, other types of texts.

Anyone interested in attending, and in reading a paper, please let me know by sending a note as soon as possible to cloots@mercy.edu. I need to establish asap who all will attend, how many people will present, and how many overall to expect so that I can reserve the appropriate room space, order the right amount of catering (lunch provided courtesy of the MA program), and establish the necessary time-length for the entire event. Right now I have it as 11:00-3:00 but that could change depending on how many people respond. So please let me know soon, by mid-April at the latest, if you can attend, if you will read a paper, and how many people overall you will be bringing. Contact cloots@mercy.edu for answers to any questions you might have.

Faculty News, Student News

Recent Student and Faculty Achievements

I’d like to take a moment to recognize some recent achievements of current MA program students and alumni, as well as a recent faculty publication. In no particular order:

♦ Professor Emeritus Donald Morales recently published “An Afropolitan 2017 Update” in the Journal of the African American Literature Association. (https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2017.1375659)

♦ Active MA student Lynne Leibowitz-Whitehead has been awarded a Schiff Travel Grant to present a paper on John Updike’s Couples at the Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference at the University of Belgrade in Serbia this summer. Lynne has also been accepted to present a paper at the International Hemingway Conference in Paris this summer.

♦ Recent alum Gloria Buckley has been busy as well. She will be continuing her education in the Masters in Gaelic Literature program at University Cork College of Ireland. In the meantime she’s published two papers in the Journal of English Language and Literature: “Merlin the Political, Spiritual and Romantic Shape-Shifter in Robert de Boron’s Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene”; and “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: A Symbol of the Crumbling Borders of American and Psychic Consciousness and the Birth of Gothic Transcendence.” She also has a study of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando published here on the Virginia Woolf Blog.

♦ Alum Nicholas Cialini has been accepted into the PhD English program at Temple University. He will also be presenting at the International Hemingway Conference in Paris this summer.

♦ Alum Patricia Turner has been accepted into the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program at the University of Denver.

♦ Alum Wayne Catan is aiming to present his scholarly paper “A Comparison of  Dreiser’s ‘Free’ and Hemingway’s ‘Mr. and Mrs. Elliot’” at the American Literature Association (ALA) and is working with faculty member Dr. Miriam Gogol on it.

Congratulations to everyone. If I have neglected to include news recently shared with me about our students’ or graduates’ activity please let me know at cloots@mercy.edu. And please, now or at any point in the future, keep me informed of any activity you’ve been up to, including conference presentations, publications, acceptances into doctoral or other subsequent programs, work activity, and the like. It’s important for us here in the MA program to maintain a view of how our students and graduates are faring beyond the program, and to celebrate your achievements.

On a semi-related note, in the next week or so I will be making the announcement here on the blog about the date for this year’s Graduate English Symposium. It will fall around the 5/16 commencement, most likely on the Saturday before or perhaps that Monday or Tuesday. I’m working out the scheduling details now but if anyone hopes to attend and has a preference for one of these days, please email me immediately at cloots@mercy.edu and let me know. I will make a more specific call for papers, to get a sense of who and how many people will be attending and presenting, along with the forthcoming symposium announcement. Stay tuned.

Course Information, Useful Program Info & Tips

A Note About Courses Coded 514, 515, 540, and 560.

Registration has recently opened for summer and fall 2018 courses. For those who might not know, the program has four course numbers (514, 515, 540, and 560) which are not coded to specific courses, but instead work as shell numbers under which we cycle an assortment of different courses, sometimes our more experimental or newer courses. You are free to take as many instances of courses by these four numbers as you like to meet your field requirements or electives, including multiple instances of courses running by the same number: as long as the courses aren’t actually the same.

So in other words a student can take ENGL 540 Magic in Literature and ENGL 540 Mastering the Past, two different courses running at different semesters by the same 540 course code. Or, a student taking ENGL 560 African and Caribbean Lit. this spring semester can take ENGL 560 Hemingway: Modern Cryptography in the fall. As long as you’re keeping your ten-course/30-credit requirement in view, and are adhering to it, all will be fine. As a reminder, here’s that ten-course/30-credit degree requirement:

I should note that when you have multiple instances of the same course number on your transcript, it doesn’t immediately show up on your self-service degree audit in DegreeWorks (accessible in Mercy Connect, in case you didn’t know). We here go through the audits every year and manually flip a switch in the computer system that makes multiple instances of the same course number apply to the degree. That’s only to explain why if you do take multiple instances of courses running by one of these four numbers they might not immediately show up on your audit.

Student News, Useful Program Info & Tips

More info on Joining Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honors Society

Hi all, in response to my post from 2/12 a number of you have already been in contact with Dr. Horton about joining Sigma Tau Delta. Great! Here’s some more information about the organization, the membership process, and, for anyone who can attend, the induction ceremony:

Sigma Tau Delta was established in 1924 to confer distinction for high achievement in English language, literature, and writing. It now includes 825 chapters in the United States and abroad. Membership in this prestigious honor society is something you can list on your resume under “professional organizations” and membership will also provide you with resources and networking opportunities in our field of English. To be eligible graduate students must be actively enrolled in a graduate program, have completed six credits of graduate coursework, and have a minimum 3.3 GPA.

PAYMENT

Lifetime membership requires a one-time fee of $40. If you are eligible and would like to join, please submit a $40 check or money order made out to Mercy College. (Just to be clear, we send the entirety of this fee to Sigma Tau Delta, but the college collects all fees and then cuts one check to send on behalf of our college’s Alpha Alpha Phi chapter. Any check or money order that is not made out to Mercy College will be returned to you as we will not be able to deposit it).

When writing a check or money order include your name and Mercy ID# in the memo-line of the check. Mail (or hand deliver) the check or money order to:

Dr. Dana Horton
Mercy College
Maher Hall #208
555 Broadway
Dobbs Ferry NY 10522

Students may also pay in cash but you cannot send cash through the mail. You must hand-deliver cash to Dr. Horton or to the department administrator, Linda Dubiell, in Maher Hall on the Dobbs Ferry campus.

The deadline for receiving this payment of $40 is Tuesday, March 20, 2018.

INDUCTION CEREMONY

Inductees, along with family and friends, are cordially invited to Mercy College’s Honors Day Induction Ceremony taking place on Tuesday, May 8, 2018, beginning at 5:00pm in Lecture Hall on Dobbs Ferry campus with a dinner reception to follow in the Main Hall Cafe. There is no limit to the number of guests you may invite; we only ask you to let Dr. Horton know now how many will attend so that we can order adequate catering. Attendance at the May ceremony is not required for membership.

We of the English literature faculty at Mercy College hope that you will join the Alpha Alpha Phi chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, a tradition here at Mercy College since 1991. If you have questions, please reach out to Dr. Dana Horton at dhorton1@mercy.edu.

Course Schedules

FINAL Registration Update: Fall and Summer 2018 Registration Opens 3/7.

The Registrar has now finalized the registration-opening date for fall and summer 2018. March 7, 2018, is the day. The only possible variation is for veterans, who can register early on 2/28. If you indicated on your college application that you are a veteran I am assuming that your account will be green-lit for registration on 2/28. If anyone is a veteran and is not able to register on 2/28 let me know.

Student News, Useful Program Info & Tips

Interested in Joining the English Honors Society, Sigma Tau Delta?

If you’re interested in joining Sigma Tau Delta, which is the International English Honors Society, registration is about to open. To be eligible graduate students must be actively enrolled in a graduate program, have completed six credits of graduate coursework, and have a minimum 3.3 GPA. Dr. Dana Horton (dhorton1@mercy.edu) is the Sigma Tau coordinator this year and is the one to contact about this, but please let me know as well if you intend to join (cloots@mercy.edu). There is a one-time membership fee, the payment of which you would coordinate with Dr. Horton. A Sigma Tau induction ceremony takes place at the end of each spring semester on the Dobbs Ferry campus. Inductees and any families/friends are invited and encouraged to attend though attendance is not required for membership.