Summer 2008
Fran Paden's essay entitled "Emblematic Sculptures: The Artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres" appeared in Teaching Life Writing Texts (Modern Language Association, 2008). On June 26 she presented " From Stitch to Story," at the International Autobiography and Biography Biennial Conference at the University of Hawaii.
John Anderson led a series of writing workshops for students in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program offered by the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC). The students submitted papers based on their summer work to Nanoscape, a peer-reviewed undergraduate research journal sponsored by the center.
Michelle Greenberg was a participant in the 2008 "Art of Cabaret" workshop at Perry Mansfield, an artists' retreat and performance venue, located in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
The week-long workshop is a series of master classes led by renowned professionals in the areas of song interpretation and performance, composition, and musical direction. It culminated in a public performance at the Julie Harris Theatre, located on the rustic 76-acre Perry Mansfield campus.
Michelle was selected for the one-week intensive following auditions in Chicago, LA, and NYC. Since the founding of Perry Mansfield in 1913, among the artists who have been in residence are John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Agnes de Mille, Julie Harris, Dustin Hoffman, Lee Remick, and composer Stephen Schwartz.
Following a visit by KAIST faculty --from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology-- to the Segal Design Institute, Penny Hirsch was invited to KAIST to talk about Engineering Design and Communication, Modes of Writing, and other "integrated approaches" to writing instruction at Northwestern. Located in South Korea's research park in Daejeon, KAIST is fast becoming a global presence in science and engineering, and all of their courses are now being taught in English. Hirsch gave two talks-one to faculty in the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences and the other to graduate students in the School of Culture Technology. Below are views of the campus on a cloudy day of Hirsch with Dean Noh in her office. Click on thumbnail to view larger image of photos.
  
Phyllis Lassner hosted the tenth annual conference of The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 at Northwestern in June . A truly global event, participants came from all over the world to present and discuss their work. The conference was sponsored by the Writing Program, Gender Studies, Jewish Studies, History, and the Humanities Institute.
Fall - Spring 2007-2008
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Troubadour Poems from the South of France
Reading and Discussion
with translators
William D. Paden & Frances Freeman Paden
Refreshments and book signing to follow
January 28, 2008 at 4:00 p.m.
The Hagstrum Room
University Hall 201
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Priya Agrawal and Sabrina Sawlani, from Professor Jeanne Herrick's freshman seminar, organized a field trip to a neighborhood they know well: the Devon Avenue neighborhood in Chicago. In the seminar--Insiders and Outsiders: Reading and Writing Cultural Stories--field trips to different Chicago neighborhoods allow students to experience different cultures firsthand.
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Jeanine Casler will be presenting a paper on Irish author Maria Edgeworth at the annual meeting of the 18th and19th Century British Women Writers' Conference in Bloomington, Indiana (March 27-30). The paper is entitled, "'Let us dare to be ourselves!': The Female Education of Lord Glenthorn in Maria Edgeworth's /Ennui./"
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Phyllis Lassner published an essay, "'Words That Can't Be Spoken': Lesbian Love in the Third Reich" in War-Torn Tales: Literature, Film and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II. Edited by Danielle Hipkins and Gill Plain. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. She organized a panel and served as respondent at the Modern Language Assoc. on "Women Writers as Public Intellectuals." At the end of January she gave a talk to faculty and students at Northwestern Hillel entitled "Displaced Witnesses: British Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust."
Fall - Spring 2006-2007
Leslie Fischer developed a hybrid online and in-class course for the School for Continuing Studies' new Leadership and Organization Behavior degree program. English 205-Writing Seminar: Business Writing uses both discussion forums on Blackboard and WebEx, a conferencing program enabling all class members to interact with faculty, fellow students and documents via the internet and telephone. She refined the course during NU's 2006 Teaching, Learning and Technology Program: An Interactive Workshop for Faculty, where her project was voted "Most Learner-Centered" by her colleagues.
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Penny Hirsch presented her research on teamwork in Engineering Design and Communication (EDC at the Mudd Design Workshop VI at Harvey Mudd College in California. This is a project that she has been pursuing with Ann McKenna, the Director of Education Improvement at the McCormick School. Their paper was published in the conference Proceedings and will be coming out soon in a special edition of the International Journal of Engineering Education.
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A Writing Program committee chaired by Penny HIrsch presented their research findings at the American Educational Research Association in Chicago. Co-authors are Jennifer Cline, Kathleen Carmichael, and John Anderson of the Writing Program and Bugrahan Yalvac, formerly of the School of Education and now at Texas A & M. The article, "Teaching Science Writing in a Research University: Students' Experiences vs. Faculty Expectations," summarized the committee's year-long, IRB-approved study of science writing instruction at Northwestern, our goal being to help the WP develop new science writing resources to help both faculty and students in this area.
Fall - Spring 2005-2006
Beverly Zeldin-Palmer is the new Blues Editor at the Illinois Entertainer, a monthly magazine that covers the music scene in the Chicagoland area. Prior to being the Program Assistant for the Writing Program, Beverly was the Marketing Director at Flying Fish Records, an independent record label that specialized in recording roots music. She was a member of the Chicago Blues Festival advisory committee for sixteen years, and is actively involved in writing about and promoting Blues music.
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Engineering Design and Communication (EDC) was taught for the first time in the new Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center. Engineering Design and Communication (EDC) is a required course for engineering freshmen, who earn credits from the McCormick School of Engineering and the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. The two-quarter course is listed in the McCormick course catalog as DSGN 106 and ENGLISH 106 (Writing in Special Contexts) and is co-taught by faculty from the Writing Program and various engineering disciplines. EDC provides McCormick freshmen with a solid basis of writing instruction appropriate to their work on design projects for real clients such as patients at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Baxter Healthcare Corp. Working in teams, students write design proposals, progress reports, meeting minutes and text for posters. They also deliver Power Point presentations and participate in a WQ design fair in which they showcase their projects. A number of WP faculty teach EDC, including John Anderson, Kathleen Carmichael, Leslie Fischer, Michelle Greenberg, Jeanne Herrick, Penny Hirsch, Barbara Shwom, Deborah Wood, and Charles Yarnoff. Last year, EDC faculty and student teams participated in the building's design, such as suggesting external facades for the building, recommending EDC studio classroom configurations and designing the work tables for the EDC classrooms.
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Edith Skom taught her second freshman seminar on Mysteries and Thrillers, in Spring quarter, which inspired one student to write a suspense story. Edie enjoyed the course, and students particularly liked the choice of books.
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Phyllis Lassner presented a paper at the Comparative Literature Association conference in April in the seminar on "The Holocaust and the Idea of the Human." The paper was titled "The Erotics of Auschwitz: Sherri Szeman's novel, The Kommandant's Mistress," which she teaches in her Gender Studies course, "Gender, Race, and the Holocaust." A student in this course, Rupali Sharma, won the first Holocaust Educational Foundation undergraduate fellowship to continue her research on Nazi Sexual Politics and German Women in the Third Reich, which Phyllis will be directing. Phyllis was also awarded a Hewlett grant to research Kindertransport writers in England to further develop another of her courses, "Writing About Children and the Holocaust."
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Ellen Wright, The 2005-06 Charles Deering McCormick University Distinguished Lecturer, held a discussion-seminar punctuated by a live bluegrass performance with her husband John Wright entitled "Patterns, Patterns, Patents: Using Patterns to Teach and to Learn." Wright maintained that for centuries, people have taught writing by isolating patterns in rhetoric and urging imitation. Citing that this methodology has come into disfavor in the past few decades, Wright posed a number of thought-provoking questions about this practice that resulted in a lively discussion.
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The Writing Program's Science Writing Project: New Course and Resources for WCAS Students, was the topic of our winter quarter Speaker Series. A panel discussion led by Writing Program faculty Penny Hirsch, included Writing Program instructors Jennifer Cline, Kathleen Carmichael and John Anderson along with SESP learning-scientist and post-doctoral research faculty in the VANTH (Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard/MIT) project, Bugrahan Yalvac. They described their recent efforts to help the Program more fully meet the writing needs of WCAS undergraduates. Jennifer Cline described her innovative science course, (ENG 391-0 Professional Linkage Seminar: Science Writing), which has been well received by students. The panel then presented their research project, funded by a Hewlett grant and Writing Program gift funds, to gather information systematically about student and faculty experience in writing for the sciences.
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Yifat Ben-David Kolikant returned to the Writing Program Speaker Series to discuss her latest research in a seminar entitled "Developing a Collaborative 'Doing-History' Learning Environment for Israeli and Palestinian High-School Students." Kolikant is interested in the use of computers in history classes at the secondary level. She is particularly interested in understanding the potential decrypted in the use of computers and the Internet for the creation of fertile instruction. The study engages high-school Israeli (Jewish) and Palestinian students in a joint historical investigation of events related to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Spring - Fall 2005
Edith Skom discussed mystery writing and her freshman seminar on mysteries and thrillers
in a talk entitled "In Pursuit of a Chase Scene;" this was as part of the Writing Program's spring quarter speaker series. Edith is a noted mystery writer whose thrillers take place in an academic setting. She has written three books: The Charles Dickens Murders, The Mark Twain Murders and The George Eliot Murders. She is currently working on her fourth mystery.
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Yifat Ben-David Kolikant, a learning scientist from Hebrew University and former post-doctoral research faculty in the VANTH (Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard/MIT) project, described some of the work she has done in conjunction with Writing Program faculty: "Communicating Communication in the VANTH Engineering Research Center." VaNTH is a National Science Foundation-sponsored consortium devoted to improving curriculum, as well as the teaching of "core competencies" and professional skills in biomedical engineering.
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John Anderson is teaching two new writing classes offered through the School of Continuing Studies. The first, "Investigating Practices of Online Writing" (English 111), was offered in Fall 2005 and will be available again in Spring 2006. The second, "American Nature Writing from Thoreau to Abbey and Beyond" (English 205) is being offered Winter 2006.
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Phyllis Lassner presented a paper titled "Differences that Divide and Bind: Rebecca West and Naomi Mitchison Debate a Just War" at the Second International Rebecca West Conference in New York in September. She also lead a seminar at the Modernist Studies Association titled, "Modernism Goes to War: Barcelona to Berlin." Phyllis has also developed two new courses that she is teaching Winter Quarter 2006: "Gender, Race, and the Holocaust," which is a Gender Studies course (390), and "Writing About War and Peace," which is a special thematic section of English 205.
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Kathleen Carmichael was commissioned by the Northwestern University Organization of Women Faculty (OWF) to report on gender equity initiatives, Web sites, publications and policies related to women in the academy and sponsored by universities of stature comparable to Northwestern. Report findings will guide the redevelopment of the OWF Web site and help direct future OWF initiatives.
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Past Events (2004-2005)
Jeanine Casler attended the Midwest American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies' annual conference in St. Louis , Oct. 7-10, where she presented a paper on novelist Frances Burney entitled "The New Frontier of Old Age in Frances Burney's 'The Wanderer.'"
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Phyllis Lassner kicked off the Writing Program's 2004-2005 speaker series fall quarter with her talk on "Teaching the Holocaust as Intermediate Composition.: How do We Write What Can't be Expressed?" She also presented a paper for the Jewish Studies Program: "Imagined Memories, Guilty Identities: Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust." In October, at the Vancouver meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, she ran a session on Philosemitism and Anitsemitism.
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As a faculty fellow in IDEA, the Institute for Design and Engineering Applications, Barbara Shwom offered a new half-credit course in graphical communication: Communicating Effectively with Graphs, Tables, and Diagrams. The course attracted students from McCormick, Weinberg, SESP, Medill, and Communication. It was greeted with particular enthusiasm by students in the Business Institutions Program.
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Jennifer Hirsch , Associate Director of Study Abroad, offered a new course Winter Quarter, co-sponsored by the Writing Program, International Studies, the Study Abroad Office, and the Office of Fellowships. Designed specifically for students who studied abroad, the course encourages reflection on those experiences and teaches how to write research proposals on topics related to the host country. Chris Hager , Assistant Director in the Office of Fellowships, assisted in the development and teaching of the course.
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Fran Paden discussed her research, writing, and teaching in the second of the Writing Program's Speaker Series on February 4. Her talk focused on the archival research she has been doing on Adelene Moffat (1862-1956), a painter, social reformer, and her great great aunt: "Aunts in the Archive: Reading, Writing, Teaching."
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Robert Gundlach was recently appointed to the board of Northwestern University Press.
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Past Events (2003-2004)
Phyllis Lassner's new book has arrived: Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire (Rutgers University Press, 2004). According to one review, this book "revolutionizes modern British literary studies by showing how our interpretations of the post colonial must confront World War II and the Holocaust." The book analyzes such writers as Muriel Spark and Olivia Manning, as well as film versions of Black Narcissus, The River, and Flame Trees of Thika. Lassner's previous publications include British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own and two books on Elizabeth Bowen. Lassner will be talking about her book and her current research on Anglo-Jewish women writing about the Holocaust as part of the Writing Program's new speaker series in Fall 2004 (date and time to be announced).
At the conference on Literary London at University of London in July 2004, Lassner gave a talk on Rebecca West's reporting of the antisemitic riots in east end London in the fall of 1947 for the Evening Standard.
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Under the leadership of Charles Yarnoff, Writing Program faculty are again offering the Summer Academic Workshop for 45 incoming freshmen. This two-week intensive program, which occurs just before fall quarter, focuses on academic writing, particularly critical analysis and research. Jeanne Herrick and James O'Laughlin are working with Yarnoff in this year's program.
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The CareerBuilder section of the Chicago Tribune, July 25, 2004, featured an article by Deborah Wood about the importance of communication skills for engineers. Wood, who teaches Engineering Design and Communication and is also in the Marketing and Communications department at the Kellogg School, interviewed Penny Hirsch from EDC and sources from the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Aerotek and the Western Society of Engineers. All agreed that to be successful, today's engineers need to be good at teamwork and possess high-quality written and oral communication skills.
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Frances Freeman Paden recently concluded a trip to La Jolla (June 2004) to consult ten new boxes of materials concerning the life and times of Adelene Moffat (1862-1956), a painter and social reformer and her great-great aunt. The boxes contain mostly personal papers—letters, diaries, memoirs—that span the nineteenth century, but also include property deeds, marriage and birth certificates, and other legal items, all of which will help Paden fill out her writing project about Moffat's life. Paden, the originator of Writing Women's Lives (a popular course offered jointly by The Writing Program and Gender Studies) must now, like her students, make important decisions about the ultimate shape of this project: should it be a collection of essays and stories, a full-length book, or a theatrical piece? Paden will be discussing her research in the Writing Program's fall speakers' series (date and time to be announced).
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Ellen Wright, along with her husband John Wright, professor emeritus in Classics, have just produced their first bluegrass album together, I Shook Hands with Eleanor Roosevelt, which can be heard at www.cdbaby.com/wrightje. The Wrights performed at the dedication for our new Crowe building on May 18, 2004. Ellen Wright's current project is a biography of Roni Stoneman, legendary Nashville musician and HeeHaw star ("The Ironing Board Lady").
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Three Writing Program faculty—John Anderson, Jeanine Casler, and Penny Hirsch—-have been participating in a committee to establish writing standards for the McCormick School of Engineering. This committee is the recipient of a Walter P. Murphy grant to improve undergraduate education in engineering. A draft version of their research and findings will be available in a web site this coming academic year.
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Barbara Shwom received a 2004 Hewlett Summer Technology Grant to develop resources for freshman seminars on the Writing Place web site. She also received funding from the McCormick School's Murphy Fund to develop a 1/2 credit course on communicating data in charts, tables, and graphs for the new Institute for Design and Engineering Applications (IDEA).
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Robert Gundlach spoke recently at the Martha L. King Center for Language and Literacy at Ohio State on "The Possibilities of Writing: Understanding the Dimensions of Variation in the Development of Writing Ability." He also recently gave the keynote talk at the annual meeting of the summer faculty at Northwestern's Center for Talent Development, where he spoke on "The Significance of Writing: Two Views of Language, Technology, and the Future of Writing Ability."
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The VaNTH (Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard/MIT) Engineering Research Center in bioengineering, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, has posted a draft version of its taxonomy of communication skills on its website at www.vanth.org (under the Curriculum Project). Penny Hirsch and Barbara Shwom were instrumental in this effort, which pulls together research from other engineering schools, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (particularly their CDIO program), and from many industry representatives. The taxonomy is being used to develop writing pedagogy in several classes in biomedical engineering at Northwestern. Assessment is being done jointly by The Writing Program, the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, and the McCormick School.
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In July, Ellen Blum Barish attended Robert McKee's Story Seminar in New York, a week-long program that explored the principles of compelling story structure across the genres. In addition to her business communications projects and monthly syndicated newspaper column, Barish is working on two biographies and a collection of personal essays. Many of her columns and articles can be found on the web:
http://www.toledoparent.com/
http://www.leereilly.com
http://www.wbez.org/audio_library/848_raoct01.asp
http://www.wbez.org/programs/specials/time.asp
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune
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Edith Skom has accepted an invitation from the English Department at New Trier High School to participate in the First Annual New Trier Literary Festival—Friday, November 5, 2004. According to the invitation, the event features "a select group of outstanding local and alumni writers to interact with senior students enroled in writing courses, as well as with each other." The day will consist of readings, workshops and "opportunities to talk informally about the craft of writing." Skom is preparing a new freshman seminar for Spring 2005 that will focus on mysteries and thrillers.
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The Writing Program, Stone-Mediatore as their kick-off speaker in the Program's seminar room in their new Crowe/Kresge home (November 17, 2003). Stone-Mediatore, a member of the Philosophy Department at Ohio-Wesleyan and author of Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), spoke on "Confronting our Taintedness: Story-Telling, Structural Violence, and the Politics of Resistance." Her work in philosophy and feminist theory appears in Hypatia, Diaspora, and two collections of essays. Stone-Mediatore also spoke to students in Penny Hirsch's freshman seminar, Writing About Self and Society.
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At the national meeting of the Association for Business Communication in Fall 2003, Barbara Shwom and Penny Hirsch presented their research study in teamwork from Engineering Design and Communication (English 106). They are working with Ann McKenna, the new Director for Education Improvement at the McCormick School. Hirsch also spoke about a portion of this work at the ABC's international meeting in New Zealand (December 2003): "Improving Interpersonal Communication in Engineering Education: New Light on Teaching Teamwork."
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Phyllis Lassner presented keynotes talks this year at two international conferences: the Johannes Guttenberg University's conference on British and American Jewish Women Writers (Mainz, Germany) and Leicester University's conference "After the Deluge: British Women Writers 1945-1960." At the Modern Language Association meeting in December 2003, Lassner gave a paper that introduced her new project on Anglo-Jewish women writing about the Holocaust.
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Marcia Gealy published an article, "An American Shtetl: A Culture Transformed," in the North American Review, September-October, 2003, issue.
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Barbara Shwom presented a paper critiquing Edward R. Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint at the European meeting of the Association for Business Communication (ABC) in Milan, May 2004. Barbara served as president of the Association from 2001 to 2002. She is currently working on a book titled Graphic and Visual Communication for Managers to be published by South-Western Publishing in 2005.
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Ellen Wright's chapter on country singer and comedienne Roni Stoneman appeared in The Women of Country Music: A Reader (ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson, University Press of Kentucky, 2003). Wright's chapter, entitled "'Do You Want Mustard?' 'Yup!': First Lady of Banjo Roni Stoneman," also covers Stoneman's career as Ida Lee Nagger on the television program Hee Haw.
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