News 2014 Vol. 3

ART AND ART HISTORY: Student and Faculty Accomplishments

Graduate student Allison Connor is an instructor at Gavilan College. She will develop art history courses in the arts of Mexico and Latin America, areas explored in her forthcoming master’s thesis.

Graduate student Mary Okin was named the CSU Chancellor’s 2014-2015 Sally Cassanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar. She is also the recipient of the 2014-2015 Alumni Association Dean’s Scholarship, awarded by the Dean’s Office in the College of Humanities and the Arts.

Graduate student Jessica Yee was selected as the summer curatorial intern in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This prestigious internship drew applicants from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other Bay Area institutions.

Associate Professor Dr. Beverly Grindstaff published “The Outdoor Kitchen and Twenty-first Century Domesticity,” a chapter in the “Spaces for the Reproduction of Community” section of Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America (University of Minnesota Press, 2014); in addition, she published an entry on photographer Robert Frank in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (Routledge, 2014).

 

ART AND ART HISTORY: Fine Arts Students Honored at the DeYoung Museum

This prestigious three-day event featured a juried showcase of visual art, film, museum object talks, music, and performance art by Bay Area university and college art and art history students, inspired by both the permanent collection and current exhibitions at the DeYoung Museum. The event will take place on Friday, April 11 from 6:00 to 8:45 pm, with additional viewing time on April 12 from 9:30 am to 5:15 pm, and April 13 from 9:30 am to 5:15 pm. Featured students include: Brittney Cathey-Adams (Photography), Eliana Cetto (Photography), Nathan Cox (Spatial), Tamara Danoyan (Photography), Alyssa Eustaquio (Spatial), Patrick Kingshill (Ceramics), Isaac Lewin (Pictorial), JP Novak (Pictorial), Jay Ruland (Photography), Daniel Salcedo (Photography), Thomas Sanders (Photography), Aimee Santos (Photography/Social Practice), and John Stewart (Photography). This is the second year that SJSU students have been invited to participate and have been chosen in large numbers for inclusion.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Publishing Writing, Performing, Teaching

Since graduation, nonfiction writer Karin McKie, MFA, has been busy publishing Early Modern scholarship and alumni stories for SJSU’s Washington Square magazine. She also reviews film, theater, music, live lit, and exhibitions to publish regular arts criticism. She writes features (as Louise Adams) for the national website EdgeOnTheNet.com, now in its tenth year. She recently published the essay “Next Season” in A&U Magazine. McKie is an educator in literature, critical reading, and creative writing to Silicon Valley students, as well as an improvisational comedy performer and team-building teacher for Fortune 500 companies around the Bay Area. (www.treefalls.com)

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Leah Griesmann’s Trip to Berlin

Leah Griesmann (Steinbeck Fellow and Lecturer, Department of English and Comparative Literature) was awarded a Faculty Reinvitation Grant in Fiction and Non-fiction by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in 2013. The three-month research grant allowed her to travel to Berlin and throughout Germany and Poland to conduct research for a story collection and a creative nonfiction project.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Nick Taylor Publishes Two Novels

English professor Nick Taylor has returned from a one-year sabbatical, during which he published two novels: Father Junípero’s Confessor and The Setup Man. The latter was published in March under the pseudonym T.T. Monday, and the publisher has ordered a sequel, tentatively titled Double Switch, to be published in Spring 2016.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Recent Graduate Living the Dream

English alumna Marina Chappie’s new book, Summer in Napa, published under the name Marina Adair, was recently certified as having sold 100,000 copies. She currently juggles three romance-novel series, writes night and day, and lives the dream.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: “Our Patients, Our Selves”

English professor Karen English facilitated a Literature and Medicine discussion group entitled “Our Patients, Our Selves” at the Palo Alto Health Care System (VA) during Winter/Spring 2014. She also participated in a training workshop for California Lit and Med facilitators and liaisons in Palo Alto, CA (June 2014) under the sponsorship of the Maine Council for Humanities and the California Council for Humanities.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Former Steinbeck Fellow Reading

On Wednesday, Oct. 1, in MLK 590, former Steinbeck Fellow Julia Reynolds will read from her new book, Blood in the Fields: Ten Years inside California’s Nuestra Familia Gang. Ms. Reynolds is a reporter for the Monterey Herald, and this book was the focus of her fellowship three years ago. The reading is free and open to the public.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: San José Area Writing Project Accomplishments

The San José Area Writing Project (SJAWP) was one of six projects chosen nationally for a $15,000 Kellogg Foundation Grant on Family Literacy. The program will focus on the parents and teachers of kindergarten through third grade students at the Valle Vista Elementary School in the Mt. Pleasant Elementary School District. The San José Area Writing Project also ran eight “Open” Summer Programs and one Advanced Summer Institute for approximately 180 kindergarten through college teachers and English credential candidates. In addition, SJAWP ran two one-week programs and one two-week program for young writers at the third to twelfth grade levels. Approximately 150 students attended these programs.

Lastly, nineteen teacher consultants met for one week this summer to discuss the applicability of using Joséph Harris’s metalanguage for revision (from Revising: How to Do Things with Texts) to deepen their teaching practice. Three of these teachers, along with Professor Harris and Professor Jonathan Lovell, have been selected to conduct a session on this topic for the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. this November. All of them will be working together on this project during the 2014-15 school year.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Andrew Altschul’s Publication and Fellowship

English professor Andrew Altschul’s short story “Embarazada” was published in Ploughshares in December, and will be republished in the anthology Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Oct. 2014). He also was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, from February to March 2014.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Director of Steinbeck Center

English professor Nick Taylor is continuing in his role of director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies, a research unit of the College of Humanities and the Arts housed in MLK Library.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: SJSU English Subject Matter Program & Young Adult Literature Conference

English professor Mary Warner completed the Alignment Matrix demonstrating how the course work in the English Subject Matter Preparation Program fulfills the Common Core Standards. The Alignment Matrix is required by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing in order to maintain the status of CCTC-approved Subject Matter Programs. SJSU English Subject Matter Program has been reviewed and is officially approved. From June 2-6, Warner served as instructor-in-residence at the Young Adult Literature Conference and Seminar, “YA Lit…What is it good for? Absolutely Everything,” held at Louisiana State University. Currently, she is writing a chapter for a book on teaching YA Literature that is based on the conference workshops.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Leah Griesmann, Grants and Conferences

This past summer, English professor Leah Griesmann received a three-month grant from the DAAD to research a fiction and a creative nonfiction project in Berlin. She stayed in Berlin for three months, conducted research on several stories set in Berlin, and worked on writing projects. This year she received a scholarship to attend the inaugural Virginia Quarterly Review Writers Conference and study fiction writing with Richard Bausch and Wells Tower. She wrote reports on the fiction section of the conference for VQR online. In addition,  she will be in residence this fall and winter at the MacDowell Colony, the oldest artists’ colony in the United States, working full-time on fiction projects.

 

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: Ed Sams Publishes Article

The next Steinbeck Review will contain English professor Ed Sams’ article entitled “The Haunted Tree: Two Versions of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl.”

 

MUSIC AND DANCE: SJSU Hafez Modirzadeh—Iranian-American Jazz Great

Saxophonist/theorist Dr. Hafez Modirzadeh has performed, recorded, published, and lectured internationally on original cross-cultural musical concepts that include “Convergence Liberation” (in Critical Studies in Improvisation, 2011), “Compost Music” (in Leonardo, 2009), “Aural Archetypes” (in Black Music Research, 2001), as well as “Chromodality” (for Wesleyan University, 1992). Twice an NEA Jazz Fellow, Dr. Modirzadeh was granted a Senior Fulbright Award in 2006 to work with flamenco and Gnawan traditions in Andalucia and Morocco, and is currently a professor of World Cultures in Music at San Francisco State University. His 2012 release, Post-Chromodal Out!, is available on Pi Records. A statistical bio of Modirzadeh up to 2004, compiled by Lewis Porter, can be found online at the Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians.

 

TV, RADIO, FILM, AND THEATRE: Dr. Alison McKee Presents at Cinema Conference

From March 19 to 23, Dr. Alison McKee attended The Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Seattle, Washington. Dr. McKee chaired a panel on New Studies in Melodrama and presented a paper titled “Toward an Androgynous Spectatorship: Reevaluating Classical Hollywood Cinema via the 1940s Woman’s Film.” Congratulations Dr. McKee! Photo features Dr. Alison McKee with Japanese film scholar, Ayako Saito, professor at Meiji Gakuin University. (www.cmstudies.org)

 

TV, RADIO, FILM, AND THEATRE: Season One Green Ninja Completed!

Congratulations Green Ninja Team! We are pleased to report that Season One of the Green Ninja Show is complete. Hooray! The sixteen episodes feature animation, live action film, flash mobs, and various puppets to produce a fun and humorous look at climate and environmental topics. If you missed an episode, you can see all of them at greenninja.org.

Season Two production is now in full swing, and new episodes will roll out in Fall 2014. In the meantime, subscribe to the Green Ninja YouTube channel; we will be releasing some special content in the near future. Of YouTube note: our account recently passed 900,000 views! Here’s to 1 million and beyond.

 

TV, RADIO, FILM, AND THEATRE: Drew Todd Upcoming Publication

Congratulations to Drew Todd on his upcoming publication: “Story to Film: The Politics and Poetics of Satyajit Ray’s The Postmaster” (1961). Art of the Particular: The Cinema of Satyajit Ray. Ed. Dilip K. Basu. Ahmedabad: Mapin Press; London: BFI; Seattle: University of Washington Press. Forthcoming 2014.

 

TV, RADIO, FILM, AND THEATRE: Father and Daughter Complete RTVF Degree Together

Father-daughter duo Rick and Deila Caballero completed their Radio-Television-Film degrees together. They now hope to start a business in Learning Management Systems and Educational Video Communications. Learn more about their venture.

 

TV, RADIO, FILM, AND THEATRE: SJSU Dominates Broadcast Education Association’s Media Festival

TRFT Faculty and Students win in film production and script writing competition.

BEA 2014 is dominated by TRFT

FACULTY VIDEO COMPETITION. Award of Excellence: Babak Sarrafan, San José State University, The Green Ninja Episode 4: “Styrofoam Man”

STUDENT VIDEO COMPETITION. Best of Festival (Narrative): Robert Krakower & Jon Magram, San José State University, “Always Learning”

STUDENT SCRIPTWRITING

Short Subject: 2nd Place: Michael Quintana, San José State University, “The Blind Date”

Feature: 2nd Place: Kamran Sohrabi, San José State University, I Divorce You, I Divorce You; 3rd Place: Jarred Hodgdon, San José State University, Things are Gonna Change Around Here.

The Broadcast Education Association’s Festival of Media Arts is a competitive festival open to BEA individual faculty and student members. Last year, the festival received over 1250 total entries in 15 competitions. Separate competitions for faculty and students range from dramatic narratives to non-fiction documentary and news to the frontiers of interactive multimedia.

 

TV, RADIO, FILM, AND THEATRE: Green Ninja “Styrofoam Man” @ SF Green Film Fest

Great news and congratulations to the live action GN teamand supporters: Green Ninja Styrofoam Man is part of @SFGreenFilmFest 2014 Festival Youth Program: Future Filmmakers Going Green! Go Green Ninja! Learn more.

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