English alumnus Marshall Mort '05 (English, French, and Accounting) spoke to a packed audience of students, parents, and faculty at the event, “The Power of a Humanities Degree in the Workforce.” The event, which took place on the evening of April 25 in Vari Hall, drew a large audience and included speakers who have graduated from SCU humanities programs in the last several decades, including Anna Mascoli ’12 (History), Victor Republicano ’13 (Classical Studies), and Brittany Worley ’03 (Art History and Marketing). Mort is currently an Associate at Fenwick and West, LLP as well as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Leavey School of Business. In his comments, Mort highlighted the close connections between the creative, analytical, and social modes of thinking cultivated in his English courses, and those that are needed in his work as a tax lawyer. According to Mort, English and humanities courses were unique in providing these opportunities. As a lawyer, Mort said the experiences in his English and humanities courses helped scaffold some of his everyday practices, including engaging with other lawyers, clients, and stakeholders in critical thought, as well as deliberative and persuasive discourse. Mort also described how his English and humanities education helped prepare him for interpreting legal texts, suggesting that he regularly practices close reading.

Perla Luna '19 (English and Sociology) will be earning her Master’s in Education and teaching credential at Stanford upon graduation, after having been accepted to Columbia, Northwestern, and Harvard. Perla also presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in March about research she conducted as a research assistant with Cruz Medina.

Cruz Medina published an article called “Decolonial Potential in Multilingual FYC” in the spring 2019 issue of Composition Studies. This article includes student writing on the topics of isolation and insecurity as multilingual speakers and writers. The student writing came from a Bilingual CTW course Cruz cotaught with Juan Velasco, who developed the course with Sharon Merritt.

Michelle Burnham published her book Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific in May. In preparation for the publication, she also gave talks on her book at the Society of Early Americanists, and at the Translating America/ America Translated Symposium.

Miah Jeffra was appointed the Philadelphia Writers Conference Nonfiction Fellow, where they will facilitate in early June a workshop on life writing in the age of social media. Additionally, the literary magazine they founded, Foglifter, was shortlisted for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Best Literary Anthology. Foglifter publishes queer and POC voices that transgress what is typically celebrated in the literary canon. Jeffra’s ethnographic manuscript, The Violence Almanac, has been selected a finalist for the Prairie Schooner, St. Lawrence and Robert C. Jones Book Awards. A piece from the collection, “Babies”, is featured in the Spring 2019 issue of The North American Review. “Babies” explores mediated representations of motherhood and mental illness, specifically concerning the Andrea Yates case and the Medea Complex, and how news narrative shapes perception. Miah’s collection of visual criticism/memoir, The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! is forthcoming from SRP in Fall 2019.

Julia Voss co-authored (with Tricia Serviss) an article in College Composition and Communication, titled “Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise in Action: A Case Study of Collaborative Problem Solving as Transdisciplinary Practice.” The article draws on the work of SCU’s Success in Writing, Information, & Research Literacy (SWIRL) Initiative to theorize writing program administration (WPA) expertise as a problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, and applies the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to the SWIRL Initiative’s campus-wide work to support writing in the disciplines. The article argues that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow for better understanding, representation, and leveraging of rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education.

Danielle Morgan published the article, “The Queer of Color and AIDS Performance at the End of the Millennium” in Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory. Additionally, her article “Visible Black Motherhood is a Revolution” was published in the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Her article addresses ways that society imagines parenthood and the child to be “sacred,” “innocent,” and “worth protecting” seemingly until it considers parents and children of color, in which cases these bodies are always already criminalized. She argues ultimately that public black motherhood and maternity disrupt racist narratives of absenteeism and the destruction of black familial connections and, as such, are constantly under attack as threats to the American racial hierarchy.

Amy Lueck co-authored (with Beth Boehm) an article in Composition Studies, “Beginning at the End: Reforming Doctoral Education by Imagining a Different Dissertation Committee” in April. The article forwards a perspective on interdisciplinarity and diversity that reconsiders the notion of expertise in order to unstick discussions of graduate education reform that have been at an impasse for some forty-five years. As research problems have become increasingly complex so has demand for scholars who specialize narrowly within a discipline and who understand the importance of contributions from other disciplines. In light of this, they reimagine the dissertation committee as a group of diverse participants from within and beyond the academy who contribute their knowledge and skills to train the next generation of scholars and researchers to be members of interdisciplinary teams. Graduate students, then, are not expected to be interdisciplinary themselves, but to work in interdisciplinary and diverse teams to discover new insights on their research areas and to prepare for careers interacting with a range of academic and non-academic stakeholders.

Giannina Ong '18 (English and WGST) was admitted to the University of Toronto for an MA in women’s and gender studies with funding. Giannina will be starting in September, and credits her senior seminar in English with offering formative space to think about gender theory.

Tim Myers published his book Yao Bai and the Egg Pirates.

Nicolas Leither published a story/ narrative essay called “The Darwinian” in the interdisciplinary journal, Writing on the Edge.

Andrew Keener has been directing the Santa Clara Early Modern Book Initiative (SCEMBI), a collaborative project combining literary studies, book history, rare book cataloging, and digital humanities. In April, Keener spoke on the NextGenPlen panel before the Shakespeare Association of America in Washington, DC. He was also recipient of the SAA’s J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize.

Reyna Grande read from her new memoir, A Dream Called Home, a sequel to her award-winning memoir, The Distance Between Us, which focused on her life before and after immigrating —on her own at age ten — to the United States from Mexico. Grande is also author of the novels, Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies. She has won the American Book Award, International Latino Book Award, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. The reading and Grande’s campus visit was organized by Kirk Glaser. Juan Velasco led the Q&A.