CUNY’s Graduate Center CompComm/RhetComm Events

We welcome your attendance at our meetings, whether or not you’re a student at the Graduate Center or a member of the English department. If you’re coming from outside of the Graduate Center, please do make sure to bring a form of photo ID in order to enter the building.

Monday, September 11: Dr. Todd Craig, Associate Professor of English at Medgar Evers College,  presents “The Kurious Curator’: The Makin’ of Straight Outta English.” The talk will focus on the various ingredients that contributed to the making of the special issue of Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education entitled “Straight Outta English” (web link), which investigates the way that hip-hop has shaped pedagogy and scholarship in English Studies. The creation of this special issue, from initial idea to physical journal in-hand, spanned over the course of about 3 years. Dr. Craig will spend some time talking about the original inception, the curation process throughout, and how it culminated in what we see today.

Friday, September 15: Please join us at Baruch College, room 14-250, 4:30–5:30pm, for a keynote by Dr. Steven Alvarez: a CUNY Graduate Center alumnus and Assistant Professor of English and Director of the First-Year Writing Program at St. John’s University.  His book, Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (SUNY Press) will be published in November 2017.  This keynote is part of the inaugural Sondra Perl Research Symposium in Composition and Rhetoric. The symposium builds on Sondra Perl’s work as a composition and rhetoric faculty member at CUNY for more than 40 years.

Monday, September 25: Dr. Brooke Schreiber (Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College) and Dr. Kamal Belmihoub (Lecturer in English), who have both recently completed successful job searches in Writing Studies, join us to discuss strategies for approaching the academic job market.

Monday, October 16: In this talk, Dr. Meaghan Brewer, Assistant Professor of English at Pace University, considers how literacy ideologies and disciplinary affiliations align with graduate student teaching practices. She will discuss Writing Studies’ race toward disciplinary status and how the field’s tension to “name what we know” or to foster a more interdisciplinary approach might impact student ideologies and writing programs.

Monday, October 30: In recent years, the field of Writing Studies has built on the work of bilingual educators to advocate for a translingual approach to the teaching of writing in the college classroom. The translingual approach views language differences “not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening” (Horner, Lu, Royster, and Trimbur 2011). Dr. Ofelia García, Professor in the Ph.D. programs of Urban Education and of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at the Graduate Center, joins us to discuss philosophies and approaches of translingualism and translanguaging. She has been Professor of Bilingual Education at Columbia University´s Teachers College, Dean of the School of Education at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, and Professor of Education at The City College of New York. Among her best-known books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective; Translanguaging; Language, Bilingualism and Education (with Li Wei, 2015 British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Award recipient).

Monday, November 13: Dr. Jessica Yood, Associate Professor of English at Lehman College joins to discuss the multiple, sometimes competing, histories of the field of Writing Studies. From the political and social justice history, to the writing program / institutional history, she considers how publishers and editors commonly ask for researchers to write into or against one of these competing histories. What version(s) of the history of Composition-Rhetoric matter for moving the field forward? What versions matter to the lives of students and teachers of writing? What versions matter for getting research published?

Monday, December 4 (tentative): Dr. Baz Dresinger, Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice is also the Founding Academic Director of John Jay’s Prison-to-College Pipeline program. The program offers college courses and reentry planning to incarcerated men at Otisville Correctional Facility, and broadly works to increase access to higher education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals. Dr. Dresinger will speak about this program, restorative justice as a replacement for mass incarceration, and the role that writing and literacy teaching and learning might play in this process.

Hope to see you there!