GradShow, a one-day conference showcasing Colorado State University’s graduate student research and creative work, will take place from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Feb. 25 in the Lory Student Center. More than 300 graduate students will be presenting their work from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., followed by presentations and a guest speaker. The GradShow is a one day graduate conference at CSU that provides an opportunity for graduate students to showcase their talents, connect with other graduate students, and enjoy the possibility of winning a cash award.
Alan Rudolph, vice president for research at CSU, will present the keynote, “Challenging Boundaries: Experiences and Opportunities in Interdisciplinary Creative Artistry and Scholarship” at 1:30 p.m. Following Rudolph, brief talks will be presented by John Simmons, founder of C3 Real Estate Solutions; Brian Ashe, director of business development at Riverside Technology Inc.; Corkie Odell, co-founder of Odell Brewing Company; Jeff Poore, president of Numerica; and Gino Campana, Fort Collins District 3 City Council member and founder and president of Bellisimo Inc.
Breakout sessions on the theme of “Expanding the Graduate Experience through Interdisciplinary and Innovative Approaches” will take place from 3 to 4 p.m. The sessions, led by guest panelists, will focus on creating and nurturing diverse teams from composition to integration and synergy.
Graduate presenters will also compete for cash awards, presented at a reception from 4-6 p.m. Awards will be given in the general two areas of “Great Minds in Research” and “Distinction in Creativity.” In addition, there will be awards for submissions in areas such as global impact, alumni and diversity/social justice. More than $9,000 will be awarded.
The Graduate Student Showcase will be held in the Grand Ballroom of the Lory Student Center on Wednesday, February 25 from 10:00 A.M. – 6:00 P.M. More specifically, the schedule is as follows:
10:00 A.M.: Check-in for Graduate Student Presenters
10:30 A.M.: Check-in for Judges
10:30 A.M. – 1:30 P.M.: Poster Presentations, Artwork, and Performances
12:00 P.M. – 1:30 P.M.: Lunch is Served
1:30 P.M. – 4:00 P.M.: Connecting with Graduate Students, Faculty, and Community Partners. Presentations and Talks will be sponsored by the Vice President for Research.
4:00 P.M. – 6:00 P.M.: Awards Ceremony. Cash prizes and recognition to awardees. Light hors d’oeuvres and beverages.
The event is free and open to the campus and community. For more information, read about the event in SOURCE, or visit gradshow.colostate.edu, or click here to view a PDF of the 2015 Showcase program.
We are so proud of the English department students whose work will be presented at the Showcase. Please consider showing your support for them by visiting the Showcase, talking with students about their projects, being in the audience for the creative and performing arts presentations between 11:00 am and 12:15 pm, attending the Awards Ceremony starting at 4:00 pm, and staying for the reception to congratulate and celebrate with the participants.
English department GradShow participants and their projects:
KRISTIN GEORGE BAGDANOV
Department: English, MFA Creative Writing
The Somatic Wager: Just as the mere naming of the Anthropocene has enabled productive discussions across academic fields, naming a new category of ecopoetics will encourage reflection on the role of poetry in the wider sphere of environmental communication. This category is the “anthropocenic lyric.” This lyric helps us cultivate an ecological self through form and content, enacting and professing methods of sustaining this self in the Anthropocene. My critical paper expands upon this lyric by looking at contemporary poets Bin Ramke, Juliana Spahr, and Brenda Hillman, while my collection of poems, “The Somatic Wager,” engages the anthropocenic crisis formally and conceptually.
LARA ROBERTS
Department: English, MA English/Literature
Performing Identity Discomfort: Writers’ identities are delicate façades, constructed from essays, poems, and artist statements, and performed at conferences and readings. These are spaces where we can be comfortable in the accuracy of our own self-portrayals, but I am more interested in the spaces where our pieces are open to be read (and misread) by others. By recording myself reading aloud others’ works and inviting others to read mine, I hope to create a space of discomfort to explore the intersections between our own performances and others’ perceptions of us. Here, we might see a facet of ourselves that we have not before.
JESSICA HILL
Department: English, MA English/Creative Nonfiction
India’s Daughters: “India’s Daughters” discusses the fear of rape a woman encounters on her solo travels through India. She arrived three weeks after the worldwide media scandal of Jyoti Singh Pandey’s gang rape and subsequent death, and the author couldn’t let her story go as she made her way through the country as a solo, white, female traveler. It sheds light on the way media upholds Orientalistic ideals by covering rape in India differently than rape in the U.S., and how this shapes Americans’ inherent fear of “other.” This essay is an excerpt from a memoir-in-essays titled, “The People We Meet.”
ABBY KERSTETTER
Department: English, MFA Creative Writing
She Took Her Power from the Water: In 1901, Michael Chabitnoy, an orphan and full-blooded Aleut, was sent to the Carlisle Indian School and subsequently married a non-native, took a factory job, and settled in Pennsylvania, far removed from his Native Alaskan heritage. This body of poetry not only explores family history and the Aleut culture, but also incorporates personal and Native American myth and addresses questions of the relationship of culture, place, and the individual. Heavily influenced by research and documentary poetics, this work provides witness to and seeks understanding of the Aleut people, the history of Native Americans, and historical acts of acculturation and appropriation.
CEDAR BRANT (Undergraduate Choice Award, Creative, 2nd Place)
Department: English, MFA Creative Writing
The Hidden Hinge: Mapping Memory and Myth through Poetry: Both science and poetry are organizational nets that I place over the erratic natural and emotional worlds and begin to track patterns, growth, and unlikely relationships. I explore the movement between external and internal experience of place, using landscape as a lens to the more difficult-to-access inner emotional world. I’m compelled by poems as a manifestation of memory and myth unearthed from the body, and as a subconscious compass that informs our actions. Using the tools of language and imagery of landscape, I seek to navigate the process of symbolic transformation through poetic storytelling.
PAUL BINKLEY
Department: English, MA English/English Education
Science Fiction and the STEM Fields: Interdisciplinary Education: The presenter outlines his work and research in designing a high-school-level English course aimed at using science fiction as a tool for interdisciplinary learning. Taking advantage of this unique and often marginalized form of literature can open new avenues for engaging students’ existing passions and hooking student interest into learning in the science fields. Based on ongoing and existing research, this hypothetical course is intended to support an interdisciplinary approach to both learning and teaching by using science fiction novels, informational science writing, and critical theory to foster inquiry, language skills, and science proficiency in those students.
LESLIE DAVIS
Department: English, MA English/TEFL/TESL
Anti-Racist and Anti-Linguicist Action in the CSU Writing Center: This paper looks at the work done in the CSU Writing Center, and how racist or linguicist attitudes may manifest themselves in the interactions between consultants and students. While these attitudes may take the form of microaggressions, they may also show up covertly in staff discussions of working with English language learners (ELLs). While it is important to recognize the ways that we at the Writing Center may be perpetuating racist or linguicist attitudes during consultations, the CSU community as a whole must also be brought into the process of self-examination and reflection, specifically regarding academic writing standards.
JENNA FRANKLIN
Department: English, MA English/English Education
Write OPEN: Developing Open- Mindedness in High School Youth: Being critically open-minded is essential to successfully collaborating cross-culturally in our increasingly globalized society and within the microcosm of multicultural school environments. I plan to experiment in pedagogy and praxis by asking if open-mindedness can be developed in high schoolers and result in increased cross-cultural understanding and civic activism. As a pilot project for developing future curriculum, I am proposing a 2-week summer course, called Write OPEN (Writing for Open Perspectives and Engagement Now), for 10-15 voluntary students at Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, Colorado in the summer of 2015.
REYILA HADEER
Department: English, MA English/TEFL/TESL
How to Eat Well in Fort Collins?: The number of international students in the US is increasing sharply nowadays. International students are coming across different difficulties in terms of language, culture, daily life, relationship with others and so on. Among various difficulties, food is one of the major issues for international students. In this paper, I would like to design an ESP (English for specific purpose) course for Chinese students in Fort Collins in order to help them eat well and live more smoothly in such a foreign city.
JONI HAYWARD
Department: English, MA English/Literature
Woman as Rebel: Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Throughout his career, Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier has gained a reputation for his misogynist depiction of women in his films—and Nymphomaniac Volume I & II is no exception. The examination of female characters in a medium as popular and widely consumed as film creates a dialogue about current trends in culture surrounding the treatment of women, and parallels well with a study of current feminist criticism. Looking specifically at Sara Ahmed’s feminist theory in her book The Promise of Happiness, one gains insight into current issues in feminist thought and how women are depicted in film.
EMILY LAPADURA
Department: English, MA English/Rhetoric/Composition
Reconstructing Social Futures: Current first-year composition (FYC) research proves many students write daily on digital platforms like social networking sites (SNS). As we move from a page to screen society, most SNS writing is visually oriented as students produce and consume digital photography. My study seeks to discover how designing and teaching an FYC class exploring SNS use develops students’ critical digital literacies. I applied a critical approach to CSU’s FYC course by introducing students to ideology, and how social norms produced by systems of power can effect on their rhetorical choices when posting personal photos on popular SNS like Facebook and Instagram.
ANGELINA MAIO
Department: English, MA English/Literature
Immigration Policies and Human Consequences in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians: Ana Castillo’s The Guardians centers on a family who is occupying the space on the U.S.-Mexico border and having to occupy that space within given rules and regulations that protect the border. This project focuses on Gabo, a sixteen year old who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. I argue that the character of Gabo serves as a critique and analysis of borders, spaces and policies.
KAREN MONTGOMERY MOORE
Department: English, MA English/Literature
Embodiment in Absence: Representation of Loss in the White Spaces: Carole Maso’s The Art Lover and HR Hegnauer’s Sir strategically use white space in order to represent the textually unmarked body of their subject. Such formatting is a deliberate choice which allows space to consider the physical body- whether a character or memory of a someone known to the author- on the part of both the reader as well as the author. This space for consideration becomes temporal as well, by creating a pause in the writing, and also works as a prompt: if this space is so empty, what (or who) should be here to fill it?
COURTNEY POLLARD
Department: English, MA English/Literature
Creating Public Literacy: Reading Text and Image in Broadside Ballads: This project is an exploration of how English broadside ballads of the seventeenth century are multimedia texts that create and propagate public literacy. The font, language, and literary devices used in the texts of ballads made them readable by people of varying textual literacy levels. Additionally, the text-image relations of ballads allowed illiterate audiences to become visually literate through “reading” the images of the ballads. Since broadside ballads were most accessible and most commonly read in the public sphere, they contributed to the creation of public forms of literacy.
OLIVIA TRACY
Department: English, MA English/Literature
“Rise up through the words”: Postcolonial Haitian Uncoverings of Anacaona : This work analyzes historical representations of Anacaona– Columbus’ Four Voyages, de Las Casas’ History of the Indies and A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies– and postcolonial representations– Jean Metellus’ play Anacaona, Danielle Legros Georges’ poem “Anacaona,” and Edwidge Danticat’s young adult novel Anacaona, Haiti, 1490. Through textual analysis of these works, I argue that these three postcolonial authors are bringing Anacaona’s narrative, obscured in many narratives of first contact, to the surface in order to posit the figure of Anacaona as new symbol of postcolonial Haitian identity, one that is grounded in place and a pre-Columbian origin.
JOHN WHALEN, ALHASSANE ALI DROUHAMANE, and NATE WILL (Undergraduate Choice Award, Research, 3rd place)
(John Whalen) Department: English, MA English/TEFL/TESL
(Alhassane Ali Drouhamane) Department: English, MA English/TEFL/TESL
(Nate Will) Department: English and Foreign Languages, MA English/TEFL/TESL and MA Languages, Literatures, and Culture/Spanish
The Utilization of Web-based Resources for Computer Assisted Vocabulary Learning: Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) plays an important role in the field of teaching English as a second language. However, increasing specialization within the field means that CALL resources are sometimes perceived as accessible only to specialized researchers. This presentation will outline a recent migration of CALL technologies into accessible, web-based platforms and discuss how three CALL websites in particular, Vocab Sushi, Storybird, and ESLVideo.com, can be incorporated into an existing ESL classroom with minimal teacher training. An example syllabus will be modified for illustration, and the benefits to teachers and students will be discussed.