On Conferences in Academia and the Tech Industry

On stage at the Container Power Hour session at the 2018 AWS re:Invent conference. The session agenda is projected on a screen to the left; the session presenters are seated on stage to the right.

This is the third part in a series on the intersections of technical communication in the tech industry and the academy. Read the series introduction here. For me, January 2019 was bookended with conferences. I started the month (and year) with a trip to Chicago for the 2019 Modern Language… Continue reading

The Office Hour, “Fixing the Academic Conference”

Is the academic conference an important place for sharing and developing knowledge or an increasingly boring relic of a bygone era? Given the cost of attending, the increasingly precarious market for academic jobs, and the psychic toll graduate school takes on early scholars, these questions are more important than ever. In… Continue reading

Things To Do in Wivenhoe; Or, So Going Around “The Basketball Diaries”: A New York School Travelogue

“Wake up high up / frame bent & turned on,” begins Ted Berrigan’s iconic “Things to Do in New York (City),” a lyric list poem that shows Berrigan moving through the literary landscape of the city in timeless style. Berrigan was fond of this genre, also writing poems like “Things… Continue reading

Notes from DragonCon: Teaching Multimodal Literacy with Comics

This weekend I participated in a panel on “Teaching Multimodal Literacy with Comics” at DragonCon here in Atlanta. The panel was part of the Comics and Popular Culture Conference which is held concurrently with DragonCon. Other panelists included my Brittain Fellow colleague Noah Mass and Andy Runton, an Eisner Award-winning… Continue reading

Research News from the CommLab

At Georgia Tech, the Communication Center (or CommLab, as it is popularly known) is part of the Writing and Communication Program. The program’s commitment to the principles of WOVEN communication (i.e. Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Non-verbal) has inspired instructors to design courses that develop and refine rhetorical skills in multiple media… Continue reading

Tech Gets Medieval Symposium!

On Tuesday, November 13, the Writing and Communication Program will sponsor a symposium on How Medieval Technology Can Teach the Past. The symposium will foreground the ways in which knowledge of history informs technological development today and allows faculty from different programs and schools across Georgia Tech to collaborate and… Continue reading

Dean-Ruzicka on combating hate through YA literature

Brittian Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, gave an invited talk at a special symposium held at American University – Washington College of Law on September 27th. The symposium was held in honor of the 10th Anniversary of the Journal of Hate Studies and was organized around… Continue reading

Munro Focuses on Photography and Racial Anxiety

Julia Munro presents at the Northeast Modern Language Association 2012 conference in Rochester, New York (March 16-18). Her paper — “‘It Tells a Story to the Eye’: Photography and Visualizations of Racial Anxiety” — is part of the panel, “Sex, Blood, and Hybridity: The Discourse of Racial Anxiety in Antebellum Writing,”… Continue reading

Nothing to See Here, Folks!

Christine Hoffmann’s paper—”Nothing to See Here, Folks: Milton’s Art of Disappearance”—explores the ways in which disappearance gives the impression of vitality in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton broadly realizes the possibilities of fallibility, failure and fallenness through his own illegible posture as the poet vainly presuming to write Eden, and he… Continue reading

Notes from National Women’s Studies Association

Normally, I would sit down to write a blog of this sort saying I’d “just returned” from a particular conference.  However, that language doesn’t really work this year as I was lucky enough to move to Atlanta just before this year’s National Women’s Studies Association annual conference.  This year it… Continue reading

Tondre presents paper at NAVSA conference

Michael Tondre presented a paper entitled “‘A Nat’ral Born Friend’: Friendship, Filiation, and Group Selection in Dombey and Son” at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in Nashville, TN. The paper traces the complex interconnections between Charles Darwin’s theories about non-reproductive sexuality and representations of the bachelor and spinster… Continue reading

Brittain Fellows–Bremm, Curtright, Schiff–to Present at SAMLA

Brittain Fellows Doris Bremm (second-year), Lauren Curtright (second-year), and Sarah Eden Schiff (first-year) will present at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference in Atlanta this weekend, November 4-6. The theme for this year’s conference is “The Power of Poetry in the Modern World.” Former Brittain Fellow and Associate Director… Continue reading

Building Citizen Journalist Communities

On Saturday, October 22, I attended the 2011 Media Law in the Digital Age conference, co-sponsored by Kennesaw State University’s Center for Sustainable Journalism and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. After the morning’s plenary session, I attended a panel on “Online Community Building and Managing: What are the Legal and Editorial Concerns You Need to Know?” Continue reading

First Annual Atlanta Comics Symposium

On Saturday, April 9, Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program, The University of Florida English Department, ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, and Xerographics Print and Copy Center present the First Annual Atlanta Comics Symposium. The symposium will feature Brittain Fellows, faculty from Georgia State University and the University of Florida, Georgia… Continue reading