The Office Hour, Chapter 4: “Marzoni on Cassavetes”

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In this highly anticipated episode, Toby interviews me about the work of filmmaker John Cassavetes using questions written by his wife, Candice Wilson, Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of North Georgia, Gainesville. The podcast can be played using the embedded player above or downloaded as… Continue reading

Selfish Researchers, Neglectful Educators: Student Misconceptions of What We Do

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By Jennifer Forsthoefel Here is an example of a popular meme depicting how different groups might understand the role of the professor. Friends may believe professors have summers off; parents may liken them to a school teacher; society may assume they show students movies to pass the time. Although I… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 3: “Contrarianism Mixed with Privilege”

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In this episode, Toby and I discuss the Ginkgo Tree in Skiles Courtyard at Georgia Tech (pictured above) before moving on to discuss nostalgia and the work of Marcel Proust, Gérard Genette, Walter Benjamin, and Jörg Zimmer, and once again deferring our conversation about John Cassavetes to a future podcast…. Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 2: “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion”

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In this episode (named after a phrase borrowed from Paul Ricoeur), Toby and I talk to Anna Ioanes, Brittain Fellow and co-editor of TECHStyle, about her article “Shock and Consent in a Feminist Avant-Garde: Kathleen Hanna Reads Kathy Acker,” which appeared in the Autumn 2016 issue of Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in… Continue reading

Talking as Artists: Oral Communication in the Gallery Space

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In July 2015, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled “Final Exams or Epic Finales.” In it, Anthony Crider, an associate professor of Physics at Elon University, describes how and why he ends his courses not with exams, but with “epic finales.” These epic finales can take many… Continue reading

4.33@Tech, Episode 2: “#justanotherday”

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The second episode of 4.33@Tech is “justanotherday.” It features the interview Lauren Neefe and student producer Prachi Sahoo did with Radiolab‘s Jad Abumrad before his talk at Georgia Tech’s Ferst Center for the Arts in October 2015. They talk about telling stories with sound, how Jad imagines his radio audience, a Big Bang moment… Continue reading

Student View 2016

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A signature event for the Writing and Communication Program, Student View once again featured outstanding student work from English 1101 and 1102, as well as various Literature, Media, and Communication courses. For the first time ever, the exhibit was hosted in the Stephen C. Hall Building, home of the Writing and Communication… Continue reading

Brittain Fellow Posters from Celebrating Teaching Day 2016

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  On Tuesday, March 15, a number of Brittain Fellows and Writing and Communication Program Lecturers showcased their work at Georgia Tech’s Celebrating Teaching Day celebration. Brittain Fellows and Lecturers use a wide range of multimodal activities and assignments in their classes, as their posters demonstrate. The posters can be viewed… Continue reading

Mapping Burroughs’s Junky

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While Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) is usually remembered as the quintessential American road novel, the slightly earlier debut novel of Kerouac’s friend and fellow Beat William S. Burroughs, Junky (1953), is equally expansive in its exploration of the North American continent. Kerouac’s roman à clef—first mapped by the… Continue reading

H. Rider Haggard’s Adventure Novel and Multimodal Composition

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One of the challenges of teaching literature in a multimodal communication course is to keep students focused on the task at hand—becoming effective communicators—while also teaching the literary work as an artifact with all its history, cultural significance, and metaphorical complexities.  While I think nearly any cultural artifact from an… Continue reading

Archiving Other Worlds: Science Fiction Magazines as Multimodal Artifacts

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When first designing my English 1102 course, Multimodal Mars, I wanted to integrate the Georgia Tech Science Fiction Collection, which contains a large number of magazines such as Planet Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Astounding Stories (among others). My reason for this was twofold: I felt that students would better… Continue reading

Flash Readings, Episode 3: “A Safe Imaginative Space”

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The third episode of Flash Readings with the Brittain Fellows is “A Safe Imaginative Space,” featuring Ellen Stockstill’s interview with Sarah Higinbotham about the meaningful ways that children of many ages respond to Dr. Seuss’s “The Sneetches” (1961) and her work on Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the… Continue reading

Engineering English: Writing Lessons from English 1101 and 1102

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Introduction Lakshmi Raju took my 1101 and 1102 courses her freshman year at Georgia Tech. Currently, she is finishing up her junior year at Tech as an Electrical Engineering major and she is an Associate Editor for Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering at the Journal of Young Investigators. During and… Continue reading

Applications open for 2016-2017 Brittain Fellowships

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The job ad for Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowships in Composition, Technical Communication, and Digital Pedagogy has been posted at Vitae. To apply, please consult the following job ad: Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship in Composition, Technical Communication, and Digital Pedagogy The Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech seeks… Continue reading

Flash Readings, Episode 2: “Read as Believers”

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The second episode of Flash Readings by the Brittain Fellows is “Read as Believers,” featuring Lauren Neefe’s interview with Caitlin Kelly, who specializes in the literature and culture of the “very long eighteenth century.” As part of a larger project that recasts the rise of the novel from Daniel Defoe to… Continue reading

Attaining the Text?: Teaching Annotated Video Essays in the Multimodal Classroom

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Writing in 1975, the French film theorist Raymond Bellour characterized film analysis as a writing activity “carr[ied] out in fear and trembling, threatened continually with dispossession of the object” (19). Much of this owed to the technological limitations that then made it all but impossible for critics and scholars (save the… Continue reading

“There is No Delight and No Mathematics”: Teaching the Multimodal Avant-garde

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Before coming to Georgia Tech, my approach to teaching writing and communication through fictional work could be summed up like this: students will learn how to analyze novels and short stories and then write arguments explaining their analysis. They will support those arguments by close reading passages and quoting academic… Continue reading

Becoming a Guide to Knowledge: The World of Academic Librarianship

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In a previous article, I described practical but also subjective reasons I switched from the traditional professor route to the library field. I also pointed out facts and figures related to job placement rates for tenure-track positions and alternatives to academic careers. I don’t quite fit the mold of leaving… Continue reading