2006-2007

English Department Faculty accomplishments reported in 2006-2007

May 2007

Valerie Anderson was awarded a PSC-CUNY
Grant for her project, "Laura Matilda Towne: Abolitionist and
Founder of the First Freedman's School."

Helen Andretta was invited to be a Keynote
Speaker for the annual Northeast Regional Conference on Christianity
and Literature to be held October 26-28, 2007 at Regis College,
Weston, Massachusetts. The theme of the conference is "Making
Peace in Our Time."

Janice Cline was awarded a PSC-CUNY Grant
of $2000 for the purpose of training tutors to tutor students in
reading.

Michael J. Cripps has arranged for the Department
to participate in the CUNY Graduate Center's Teaching Intern Program
beginning Fall 2007. Professor Cripps will teach the inaugural practicum
on the teaching of writing at York College.

Linda M. Grasso was awarded a PSC-CUNY Grant
to support research and writing of her second book, Georgia
O'Keeffe and Feminism.

Professor Grasso gave a talk about her book
in progress at Yale University on April 18, 2007. Grasso was awarded
a 2007 Visiting Fellowship to work in the Alfred Stieglitz-Georgia
O'Keeffe Archive, housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library at Yale.

Kelly Baker Josephs was awarded a PSC-CUNY
Grant to conduct research in the V.S. Naipaul archive, held at the
McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. This research will enable
Professor Josephs to complete an article on Naipaul's work, entitled
"Manias and Messiahs: The Madness of Miguel Street" and
a chapter of her book project.

March 2007

Helen R. Andretta has an essay publication
in a recently published anthology of studies on Flannery O’Connor,
Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental,
and the Sacred in Her Fiction, ed. Joanne Halleran McMullen
and Jon Parrish Peede (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007).
Her contribution to the collection, “The Hylomorphic Sacramentalism
of ‘Parker’s Back,’” explores the philosophical
aspects of one of O’Connor’s last stories.

Valerie Anderson was once again accepted to The Penn Center
Gullah Studies Institute on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.
She will be at the Institute over Summer 2007.

Michael J. Cripps delivered a paper, “Code Switching,
Hypertext Skins, and (Inter)Active Audiences: Using Cascading Stylesheets
to Incorporate Visual Rhetoric in New Media Compositions,”
at the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication
in New York City.

Glenn Lewis reported that Karline Hamilton (English
major and York graduate) recently accepted a position as a media
relations person at Maimonides Hospital.

February 2007

Deep Bisla has a review of Clare Pettitt’s
Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and Victorian Novel
forthcoming in the next issue of Studies in the Novel.

Glenn Lewis hosted and co-taught a three-day, intensive
seminar on Freelance Writing for the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
from January 3-5. It was the inaugural event for the new January
Academy at the Journalism School. Lewis conducted or took part in
eight workshops and had a hand in planning all the activities. Twelve
prominent journalists contributed to the event.

Professor Lewis is currently teaching the Feature Writing
Class at the CUNY School of Journalism. He has also been appointed
to the Committee on Academic Review (Grade Review and Dismissal)
at the School and is conducting Admissions interviews this semester.

Professor Lewis continues to serve as Journalism and
Media expert for Channel 5 News (Fox 5 News @ 10 p.m.). He recently
contributed to his third on-air story on CIA recruitment.

On February 27 Mychel Namphy screened the 1987 film
"Ethnic Notions" and delivered a lecture on the film for
a Black History Month event at Planned Parenthood Federation of
America in Manhattan. His lecture was titled "Caged Birds,
Masks, and the Tears of a Clown: Racist Stereotypes and a History
of Resistance."

On March 22 Professor Namphy will be speaking at a Women's
History Month event at Franklin High School in Somerset, New Jersey.
His talk is titled, "We Are Your Sisters: The History of Black
Women's Activism."

On April 21, for the third time in four years, Professor
Namphy will be the keynote speaker at a day-long celebration
of the life and work of Harlem Renaissance author Jessie Fauset
sponsored by the Lawnside Historical Society in Lawnside, New Jersey,
Fauset's birthplace.

Finally, closer to home, on February 26 Professor Namphy
was part of a panel of faculty and community leaders that led a
discussion titled "Divorcing the N-Word" here at York
as part of the Monday night "Barbershop" discussions sponsored
by the Black Male Initiative run by Jonathan Quash. He was invited
to speak about the history of linguistic transformations and revolutionary
movements.

December 2006

Glenn Lewis was interviewed about current
media events on two TV programs.

November 2006

Alan Cooper's recent review of Naomi Alderman's
novel, Disobedience, appeared in Jewish Book World.

In July 2007 Charles Coleman will present
a paper, "The Boondocks: A Merging of Social Identities and
Affective Responses," on a panel titled "The CrossCultural
Pragmatics of Racialized Discourse in the USA" at the 10th
International Pragmatics Conference in Goteberg, Sweden.

On Thursday, November 16, Mychel Namphy
served as the discussant for a book talk given at the College by
Flores A. Forbes, a former member of the Black Panther Party and
the author of the recently published book, Will You Die With
Me: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Atria, July 2006).

October 2006

Valerie K. Anderson presented a paper entitled,
"Slaves, Freedmen and Freemen: An Overview of the pre-Civil
War African-American Population," at the Fifth Annual Institute
for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean
Work-in-Progress at CUNY Interdisciplinary Conference on Friday,
October 20, 2006 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Helen R. Andretta presented an aspect of
her Flannery O’Connor research on October 7, 2006, at Flannery
O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism: An Academic Conference on
Violence and Grace, October 5-7, 2006, Grand Valley State University
in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her paper, “‘A View of the
Woods’—A Morality Play” was well received in a
first of its kind gathering of O’Connor scholars, including
Frederick Asals, Bruce Gentry, William Sessions, Ralph C. Wood,
and other such notables. It is being considered for publication
in a collection of essays, emanating from the conference.

Professor Andretta's recent publications
include “The Mystery of Redemption in Flannery O’Connor’s
Wise Blood,” Proceedings of the Northeast Region Annual
Meeting Conference on Christianity & Literature: The Redemptive
Act: Sin and Atonement in Literature, October 16, 2004, ed.
Marc Ricciardi (St. Joseph’s College, Patchogue, New York,
2006) 73-85; “A Medievalist's View of Chaucer and Flannery
O'Connor, Part II” in Pro Ecclesia 37.2 (2006): 12-13;
“A Medievalist's View of Chaucer and Flannery O'Connor, Part
I” in Pro Ecclesia 37.1 (2006): 13-14; and a book
review of Flannery O'Connor and the Christ Haunted South,
by Ralph C. Wood, in Studies in the Novel 38.3 (Fall 2006):
380-81.

Michael J. Cripps recently learned that
his paper proposal for the 2007 Conference on College Composition
and Communications has been accepted. “Code Switching, Hypertext
Skins, and (Inter)Active Audiences,” explores the potential
for externally linked Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) to enable hypertext
authors to engage principles of visual rhetoric while simultaneously
inviting reader involvement in the construction of meaning. He will
appear on a panel entitled, Technological Re-Presentations of Identities:
Interactivity, Visual Rhetoric, and the Use of New Media in Rhetoric
and Composition.

Glenn Lewis co-hosted and helped organize
"Meet the Editor Night" on October 5, 2006 at the CUNY
Graduate School of Journalism. Approximately 20 local newspaper
editors from around the city talked about internship and freelance
opportunities.

September 2006

Valerie K. Anderson taught in the 2006 (two-week)
Summer Gulla Studies Institute, held in St. Helena Island, SC.

Theresa Rooney is currently serving as the
2006 President of the Northeastern Educational Research Association
(NERA) and will deliver the Presidential Address at this year's
annual conference, scheduled from 18-20 October at the Hudson Valley
Resort in Kherhonksen, NY.

Michael J. Cripps had a chapter accepted
for a collection edited by Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, and entitled,
From A to <A>: Keywords in HTML and Writing. Professor
Cripps' contribution, "Envision with <DIV>ision: Marking
Boundaries and Writing the Visual in CSS-based Design," explores
the role of division in writing and its use in hypertext design
and authorship.

Together with James Cherry (former York College CUNY
Writing Fellow), Professor Cripps discussed and presented
a clip from Three Writing Fellow Tales at the CUNY WAC
Professional Education Symposium in August. Three Writing Fellow
Tales is a video production undertaken by the WAC Program at
the College, with invaluable support and assistance from the York
Television Studio and members of the College's Film Club. The presentation
was part of a panel discussion that included speakers from CUNY
Central Office, LaGuardia Community College, and Baruch College.

Linda Grasso organized the Nineteenth Century
Women Writer's Study Group. Focused on family letters of an 1820s
white New Englander who ran mission school and married Cherokee.

Glenn Lewis was a guest speaker at the CUNY
Graduate School of Journalism.

Jim Papa's opinion piece about gentrification
appeared in Newsday. His feature essay, about LIPA's windmill
project, ran in the Fire Island Tide.