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From MATX Director Eric Garberson about applications

Reminders:

·         application deadline: January 2

·         GRE scores are not required

·         a portfolio is required only for those who wish to incorporate creative work into their doctoral research

·         a writing sample is required of all applicants

 The MATX program is dedicated to assembling a strong cohort of interdisciplinary scholars for each incoming class. We welcome applications from those with Master’s degrees (MA, MS, MFA) in areas related to media, art, and text.  In addition to the English Department and the Robertson School of Media and Culture (mass communications), the program has strong ties to the Department of History and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and in the School of the Arts with Graphic Design, Kinetic Imaging, and Art History. The program is especially suited to MFAs in the visual arts who want to expand their creative practice with research and writing.

 The statement of purpose or intent is a key element of every graduate school application – and notoriously difficult to write. Here are some questions to help prospective applicants formulate their thoughts for the MATX application:

 What disciplines do you seek to combine and/or work across? How? Why? 

How does your master’s work relate to what you want to do in this PhD program?

What is your primary area of interest? How will working in or across     disciplines help you develop those interests?

What are your potential dissertation ideas? In what areas do you want to     conduct original research?  What are your research questions? 

How will interdisciplinary study prepare you for a career? Is that career     academic? professional? 

Among the faculty at VCU, whose research and teaching support your interests?  Why? Consider not just the core and affiliated faculty, but also those in departments with which MATX has strong connections. Faculty become affiliated with the program by working with students and teaching courses.

 Dr. Garberson welcomes inquiries about the program and is happy to offer advice on the application process: eggarberson [at] vcu.edu.

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The Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies is excited to announce that attorney, educator, and trans activist Dean Spade will speak at VCU on October 26.  He will give a lecture, Can We Survive Mainstreaming? Trans Politics and Criminal Punishment Reform, at 7:00pm at the W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts, followed by Q&A and a book-signing.  Admission is free and all are welcome! Dean Spade is an Assistant Professor at the Seattle University School of Law.  In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a nonprofit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color.  The second edition of his book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law was published in 2015 by Duke University Press.  For more information about Dean, see http://www.deanspade.net. Cosponsors for this event are the VCU Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, the Humanities Research Center, the Division of Inclusive Excellence, and the University of Richmond Women Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, to whom many thanks!   This event is part of a collaborative speaker series, Gender TRANSgressions, Past and Present, involving the Humanities Research Center, the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and the Department of Sociology, funded in part by the Division of Inclusive Excellence.

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VCU Visiting Writers Series

Mark Doty &

Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas

5 Oct 2017  7pm  VCU Cabell Library

Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poems including FIRE TO FIRE: New and Selected Poems, recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008, and My Alexandria, winner of the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award and the first book by an American poet to win the T.S. Eliot Prize in the United Kingdom. Among other books, he’s published three memoirs: Heaven’s Coast, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, Firebird, and Dog Years, a New York Times bestseller. A new prose book on Walt Whitman’s life and work, What is the Grass, is forthcoming in 2019, the 200th anniversary of the poet’s birth. Doty’s work has been honored by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Wallace/Readers’ Digest Fund, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers and lives in New York City.

Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas graduated with both a creative nonfiction writing and a literary translation MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown/Sever/Sing and Don’t Come Back. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation work has been featured in journals including The Bellingham Review, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, Brevity and The Sunday Rumpus among others. She won the Best of the Net, the Iron Horse Review’s “Discovered Voices Award,” has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus to Richmond.

All events are free and open to the public.

go.vcu.edu/readings or call 804-828-1329 for more information.

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VCU Annual MATX Marcel Cornis-Pope Lecture Series: Dr. Archana Pathak, Assistant Professor VCU Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies

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ENGLISH FACULTY FORUM ~ A Brown Bag Event

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Noon-1:00 308 Hibbs Hall

Please join the VCU Department of English for a lecture by Professor of English & Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs

Katherine Clay Bassard

“A Scetch of My Own Life by Fields Cook: Digitizing a Manuscript for a Virginia Ex-Slave”  

Professor Bassard will present ground-breaking research on a very special archival document: A Scetch of My Own Life by Fields Cook, likely the only surviving manuscript written by a person while he/she was still enslaved.

Fields Cook was a prominent Richmond businessman who used his ingenuity to purchase his own freedom and that of two sons. After the Civil War, he became prominent in Virginia and national Reconstruction politics before moving to Alexandria and pastoring a church there.

With student researchers, Professor Bassard has produced and edited a digital version of Cook’s 1847 manuscript, forthcoming from British Virginia (wp.vcu.edu/britishvirginia/forthcoming/). Centering her presentation upon the significance of this unique narrative to the study of slave narratives, nineteenth-century African-American literature, and nineteenth-century literature and history more broadly, Professor Bassard will also briefly share some of her wisdom about the digitizing process itself. * [See attached file: 4.19.17 Bassard EFF and Press Release.pdf]

For more information about English Faculty Forum: http://english.vcu.edu/about/english-faculty-forum/

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VCU Department of African American Studies Presents: The Black Panther Party: Legacies and Lessons

VCU’s Department of African American Studies Presents:

The Black Panther Party: Legacies and Lessons A Forum Featuring Former Panthers Jihad Abdulmumit, Pamela Hanna, and Sekou Odinga

Tuesday, April 11, 7:30pm

The Depot (814 W. Broad St), Second Floor Space Free and Open to the Public

The Black Panther Party (BPP) burst onto the national scene on May 2, 1967, when members of the Oakland-based organization marched into the California State Assembly chambers—armed with pistols and rifles—to protest anti-gun legislation meant to curtail the activities of the group. By the end of the decade, Panther chapters had opened across the country, and an International Section had been established in Algiers, Algeria. The organization’s powerful critique of “internal colonialism,” its community programs, and its uncompromising stand against racism, imperialism, and capitalism earned the Panthers widespread respect among allies at home and abroad. The Panthers’ commitment to armed self-defense and revolutionary transformation also attracted the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who declared the organization “the greatest internal threat to the internal security of the country,” and made the Panthers the primary target of his agency’s secret Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), established in August 1967.

Much of what has filtered down about the Panthers in popular memory remains incorrect or incomplete—a product, in part, of the determined efforts of Hoover and his agents to discredit and undermine the legitimacy of the organization among prospective sympathizers. This is a shame, not only because the BPP was one of the most important protest organizations of the twentieth century, but because its basic critique of the conditions facing black ghetto residents—police harassment and brutality, structural poverty, widespread neglect—have remained fundamentally unaddressed in the years since the Party’s destruction. In our current, post-Ferguson era, it is worth understanding why the Panthers’ demands went unmet in 1967, and how we might use this knowledge, fifty years later, to build a more just and more equitable future.

To explore the lessons and legacies of the Black Panther Party, VCU’s Department of African American Studies has invited three former members of the Party to campus to engage in a discussion with members of the VCU and broader Richmond community:

Jihad Abdulmumit is a former member of the Plainfield, New Jersey chapter of the Party, and later joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA). He currently serves as national chair of the Jericho Movement, which advocates for the release of former Panthers who remain in prison, and for the release of other political prisoners. Abdulmumit himself was a political prisoner, incarcerated for more the two decades for his activities with the BLA.

Pamela Hanna is a former member of the New York chapter of the Party.

Sekou Odinga is a former member of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a founding member of the New York chapter of the BPP, and the section leader for the Bronx. He later joined the Black Liberation Army. Odinga was released from prison in 2014, after spending more than two decades behind bars for, among other things, assisting in the escape of exiled BPP and BLA member, Assata Shakur.

The event is free and open to the public.

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Tomorrow - Moveable Feast: Thesis Reading by Ryan Bonner and Scott Bugher

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Lecture: Dr. Scott Manning Stevens, Associate Professor of Native American Studies, Syracuse University: “Memory and Memorials in Indian Country: How Living Memory Creates the Past”

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Lecture: Peter Manseau, Lily Endowment Curator of American Religious History, NMAH: “Objects of Devotion: Religion at the Nation’s History Museum”

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Dabney Professor to host lecture on journalism in the Trump Era

The Robertson School's Distinguished Dabney Professor Bob Levey will hold a lecture entitled, "The Future of the Media," on March 23 at 2:30 p.m. in the VCU Commons Theater. In the lecture, Levey "will touch on the business issues that have reshaped the industry, as well as the outlook for responsible journalism in the Trump era." He also plans on discussing what the next decade will look like for the media. This event is open to VCU faculty, staff and students, as well as the public. There is no admission charge. Mr. Bob Levey, Virginius Dabney Distinguished Professor of Journalism in VCU’s Robertson School for the 2016-2017 academic year, has been a working journalist in Washington, D.C. for nearly 50 years. He was a reporter and columnist at The Washington Post for 36 of those years. For 23 years, he wrote a daily column, “Bob Levey’s Washington,” for The Washington Post. Seven times, Bob was named one of the most popular columnists in Washington by Washingtonian magazine for his Post column. In addition, he has been a prize-winning commentator on radio and television.

#matx #vcumatx #upcoming events #upcoming #Boblevey #Media #VCUmedia #vcurobertson

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Digital Pragmata: Information in Motion

March 30 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

This installment of the Digital Pragmata series examines how animation and motion graphics can be used to visualize and explain data. The speakers all come from different backgrounds in animation as well journalism, science and graphic design. See how the worlds of science and art collide when it comes to how we absorb data.

The panelists will be:

Whitney Beer-Kerr, science producer at Pixeldust Studios Donna Desmet, medical illustrator & animator Josh Gunn, founder of Planet Nutshell

The event is free and open to all, but please register. Parking is available for a fee in the West Broad Street, West Main Street and West Cary Street parking decks. If special accommodations are needed or to register by phone please call the VCU Libraries events office at [phone].

This series is presented by VCU Libraries in collaboration with the VCU Office of Research and Innovation. Learn more about this and other Digital Pragmata events, past and future, in the official blog.

#vcumatx #matx #upcoming #upcoming events #upcoming event

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Catapult: Copyright 3.0: Scholarly Communications

March 24 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

In the digital age, everyone is a publisher or a maker or a creator. With the success and popularity of last year’s series, VCU Libraries, in concert with the VCUarts, presents Copyright for Creators, a series on the nuances of copyright for artists, designers and art scholars.

This session explores:

Reuse of images in scholarly publications

Publishing and media agreements

Protecting author’s rights and open access

This event is part of the ongoing Copyright for Creators series, which take place in room 303 of the James Branch Cabell Library. Events are free and open to all, but registration is required as lunch will be provided. Parking on the Monroe Park campus is available for a fee in the West Broad Street, West Main Street and West Cary Street parking decks. If special accommodations are needed, please call Gregory Kimbrell, events and programs coordinator, at [phone].

#matx #vcumatx #upcoming #upcoming events