On Saturday April 29 the MA program will be hosting its annual “Writing Image Text” or “W.I.T.” Graduate English Symposium. The event will be held live online through Zoom. We will begin at noon, eastern time. The event will likely run for three hours, or so, but the end-time will only come into focus once we know how many MA students will be presenting.

This call for papers (CFP) is limited to current students in the program. Active students who want to attend but not present, as well as alumni, prospective students, faculty, family, guests, etc., are all very welcome and encouraged to attend as audience members. The deadline for responding to this CFP and declaring as a presenter is the end of Saturday, April 8.

The symposium is a casual mini-conference at which active MA English students can read aloud a scholarly or creative work. A paper that you’ve written for any of your MA courses would do just fine. Full instructions and guidance for presenting will be shared with presenters after April 8. The symposium is also a community event at which you might see/meet fellow grad students, program professors, alumni, and others in the MA community.

Graduate students and professional scholars often attend and read at local, regional, national, and international 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 that you can list under the scholarship section on your CV (click here to read more about the CV).

Anyone planning to attend this year’s WIT symposium, as presenter or audience member, please let me know by sending an email no later than the end of Saturday, April 8, to cloots@mercy.edu. For all emails please use the subject line: WIT Symposium 2023. Presenters please also, in your email, let me know the title of the work you will present. I need this info in order to appropriately organize the event and create the program. I need non-presenters to RSVP as well so that I know everyone to whom I will need to send Zoom login info before 4/29.

You can read about some of our previous symposiums on the blog here, and here, and here, and here. On behalf of the MA faculty: we hope to see you all there! Please contact cloots@mercy.edu if you have any questions about any of this.

On Saturday April 30 the MA program will be hosting its annual “Writing Image Text” or “W.I.T.” Graduate English Symposium. The event will be held live online through Zoom. We will begin at noon, eastern time. The event will likely run for three or four hours (last year it ran from noon to 4pm) but the end-time will only come into focus once we know how many MA students will be presenting.

This call for papers (CFP) is limited to current students in the program. Active students who want to attend but not present, as well as Alumni, prospective students, faculty, family, guests, etc., are all welcome and encouraged to attend. The deadline for responding to this CFP and declaring as a presenter is the end of Wednesday, April 13.

The symposium is a casual mini-conference at which active MA English students can read aloud a scholarly or creative work. A paper that you’ve written for any of your MA courses will do just fine, though it might need to be edited down to a shorter length to fit into the 15 minute time-slot allotted to each presenter. Full instructions and guidance for presenting will be shared with presenters after April 13. The symposium is also a community event at which you might see/meet fellow grad students, program professors, alumni, and others in the MA community.

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). Earning line-items for the scholarship section of your CV is very important for anyone who aspires to apply to PhD programs.

Anyone planning to attend this year’s WIT symposium, presenter or not, please let me know by sending an email no later than the end of Wednesday, April 13, to cloots@mercy.edu. Presenters please also, in your email, let me know the title of the work you will present. I need this info in order to appropriately organize the event and create the program. I need non-presenters to RSVP as well so that I know everyone to whom I will need to send Zoom login info before 4/30.

I will host an optional Zoom practice session for presenters on Thursday April 21, at 2pm eastern time for anyone who wants to practice using the screenshare feature in Zoom. It’s not necessary to screenshare during a presentation; and traditionally an English conference presentation consists of a person simply reading aloud a written work while the audience listens and considers it. But screensharing visual elements (Powerpoint decks, media, images, etc.) has become more and more common in the past few years as more and more people have adapted to presenting virtually. So if you want to share your screen during your presentation, and you’re not familiar with how to do so, be sure to attend this optional practice session.

You can read about previous symposiums on the blog here, and here, and here, and here. On behalf of the MA faculty: we hope to see you there! Please contact cloots@mercy.edu if you have any questions about any of this.

On Saturday May 1st the MA program will be hosting its annual “Writing Image Text” or “W.I.T.” Graduate English Symposium. The event will be held live online through Zoom. We will begin at noon, eastern time. Tentatively we are estimating the event will run from noon to 4pm, but that might change depending on how many MA students declare that they will present a scholarly or creative work. It’s possible that because this is going to be online, and therefore more easily accessible to all of our students, that we will get an extraordinarily large turnout of presenters. We shall see. For this reason we are at this moment limiting our call for papers (CFP) to current students in the program. We hope our alumni will join us in the virtual audience; and should the CFP result in a lower-than-expected response from current students we will open the CFP to our alumni.

The symposium is a casual mini-conference at which interested MA English students can read aloud a scholarly or creative work. A paper that you’ve written for any of your MA courses will do just fine, though it would likely need to be edited down to a shorter length to fit into the 15 minutes we anticipate each presenter will have; instructions and guidance for that will be shared with all presenters after April 1. The symposium is also (normally) a social event at which to meet some fellow grad students and program professors. MA students interested in attending but not presenting 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). Earning line-items for the scholarship section of your CV is very important for anyone who aspires to apply to PhD programs after the MA.

Anyone planning to attend and/or present, please let me know by sending an email no later than the end of Thursday, April 1 to cloots@mercy.edu. You don’t need to know what you will present by 4/1. You just need to tell me on 4/1 if you are going to present something at the symposium on 5/1. And if you plan to attend but not present, please tell me that too by 4/1, so that I will have some sense of how big the online event is going to be. After 4/1 I will begin to arrange the symposium panels, virtual rooms, and the rest based on the amount of people I know will be presenting and attending.

You can read about previous symposiums on the blog here, and here, and here (we canceled it last year amid the covid outbreak). On behalf of the MA faculty: we hope to see you there! Please contact cloots@mercy.edu if you have any questions about any of this.

UPDATE: It’s official. Mercy College has announced that it will remain campus-closed through the rest of this semester at least. That means that the Grad Symposium is now canceled.

As some of you know, the COVID-19 coronavirus, which has recently been declared a pandemic and is only ramping up, appeared last week at Mercy College in one of our professors. The campus is now closed to all “non-essential” personnel; courses have all moved online at least through the end of this month; and it is highly likely that courses will have to remain online through the end of the semester (possibly longer). Colleges all around us, including all of those in the massive CUNY and SUNY systems, have moved their courses completely online for the remainder of the term and they don’t even yet have a direct-hit of the virus. All around the world authorities are recognizing that gatherings of any significant sort are bad news and need to be canceled, and are doing so. One of many unfortunate aspects of this is that it is unclear when this all might end or de-escalate to a stable scenario.

As a result, the college has moved courses and most operations online for the rest of this semester (at least), has canceled all campus events and activities, and as a result the symposium is canceled too.

Six graduate students expressed intent to travel here to present their scholarship. Several other students expressed intent to attend in the audience. Numerous faculty expressed their intent to attend and several of them expressed a hope of presenting work alongside the grad students. There were plans to bring an undergrad student or two into the mix as well. It was shaping up to be the largest symposium we’ve seen in nearly twenty years.

If anyone already purchased air tickets please let me know and please contact your airline asap to inquire about refunds. It’s possible that canceling the tickets will be a penalty-free option during this crisis. But please let me know what is happening. I want to help, as I might.

This year’s WIT Graduate English Symposium will be held on Wednesday, May 20th (the day before commencement) in Maher Hall on the Dobbs Ferry campus of Mercy College.

I am happy to also announce that the Chair of the Department of Literature & Language, Dr. Keckler, has secured a $600 travel-grant, funded by our Office of the Dean of the Liberal Arts, to help cover travel expenses for one student to attend and present a paper. We are holding a contest to determine who will receive the travel grant. The procedure for entering the contest will be detailed at the bottom of this post.

The WIT symposium is a casual mini-conference at which MA English students and 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), as well as to meet some fellow grad students and program faculty. Family and friends are welcome to attend too. 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, national, and international conferences, so this symposium provides a friendly small-scale introduction to the conference experience.

For anyone who reads a paper, it becomes a valuable line-item you can list under the scholarship section on your CV (click here to read more about the CV). Anyone who aspires to continue into a doctoral program or to pursue other professional outcomes from their graduate English studies must be working to build up even a few line-items for the scholarship section of their CV. Scholarly activities are the coin of the realm.

The symposium title “Writing/Image/Text” signals that you don’t have to just focus on literary analysis, but might instead present work involving other media, other types of texts.

The event typically involves a morning session and an afternoon session of presentations, with a catered lunch in between. If the weather is good we usually have that lunch on picnic tables under canopies on the lawn outside of Maher Hall. It is very pleasant.

• Anyone who plans to attend, whether as a presenter or audience member, please let me know as soon as possible and no later than March 20th at cloots@mercy.edu. I need to begin tallying how much catering to order, and how many presenters to schedule.

Travel-grant contest application procedures:

To be considered for the $600 travel grant, you must:

• Be an active student or graduate of the Mercy College MA program.
• Be certain that you will attend and present at the symposium, should you receive the travel grant.
• Submit one written work, whatever you feel is your single best paper produced for one of your MA courses here at Mercy College, to cloots@mercy.edu by the deadline of March 20th. Please leave identifying information on your submission, including information about the course and professor for which you wrote the paper. Note that the paper you submit for consideration does not have to be the paper you present at the symposium (but it could be, if you want it to be).

Email any questions about the symposium or the travel-grant contest to the Program Director at cloots@mercy.edu. For those considering walking in commencement on Thursday 5/21, information on that can be found here.

NOTE: THE 2019 SYMPOSIUM HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL NEXT YEAR.

Based on the responses I received to the previous post asking for date-preference, this year’s Writing/Image/Text (W.I.T.) Graduate English Symposium will be held on Monday May 20 here on the Dobbs Ferry NY campus. May 20 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 and 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 planning to attend and/or present, please let me know by sending a note as soon as possible and no later than Friday April 19 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. Because of some changes in how our facilities services operates at the college I must know the attendee numbers by Friday April 19. Contact me at cloots@mercy.edu if you have any questions about any of this.

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.

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.