09.23.09

2009 – 2010 at UCSB

Posted in Job Market, Research at 12:41 am

2009 – 2010 promises to be an exciting year.

I was awarded the Graduate Opportunity Fellowship at UCSB, so I will have the luxury of spending the entire year focused on finishing my dissertation. In addition to dissertation work, I am currently preparing materials for the job market and working on a team that is re-designing the Department of English’s website.

And as if all of this weren’t enough, I’m also excited to be attending two conferences this Fall. The first is the Society for Literature, the Sciences, and the Arts’ annual conference in Atlanta, GA. The theme this year is “Decodings” and I will be presenting work from my second dissertation chapter on viral video. In late December I will travel to Philadelphia to attend the annual conference of the Modern Language Association.

This is conceivably my last year as a graduate student and I am really looking forward to all of the new experiences ahead!

2008-2009 at UCSB

Posted in Research at 12:32 am

Somehow 2008-2009 came and went and I never did manage to update this site with my status.

In Fall 2008, I was most fortunate to be granted the Brython Davis Fellowship for a second time. I received an additional fellowship for Winter 2009 from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB. I used this time to continue work on the first chapter of my dissertation, Media Epidemics: Viral Structures in Literature and New Media. A portion of my first chapter, “Mutating Media: Transmission of the Ring Virus,” is available online.

During Spring quarter 2009 I returned to The Transliteracies Project in my former role as Project Coordinator. Transliteracies had a lot of very exciting developments take place during the Spring quarter and it was great fun to be back on the project. In addition to my work administering the project, I collaborated with my colleague Renee Hudson on a research paper entitled “Social Book Cataloging: Humanizing Databases,” which can be found on the Transliteracies site.

During Summer 2009 I continued work on my dissertation and began preparation for the job market. I was also heavily involved in a re-design of the Department of English’s website, which we hope will launch by the end of the year.