Good News! Updates & Announcements from Draper Community Members

Hilarie Ashton (January 2011) will be publishing her essay, "Urban (as) Flâneur: Narrator and City in Edgardo Vega Yunque's The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into The Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle," in LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES: Critiques of Contemporary Cinema, Literatures, Politics and Revolution (Academica Press) later this year or early in 2012.

Hilarie will also present her paper "The Doppelganger Artist: Reuse and/or Originality in Postmodernity and Popular Music" at the Canadian Association for American Studies Conference this November.

Mario Cancel-Bigay is a musician and songwriter. He will be performing his original compositions "I Got my NYU Card," "I Don't Have to Wear a Tie," "Please Forgive Me, I'm Unemployed," "Matriarchal Revolution," "In the Subway," and other witty and poetically critical songs at Shrine (2271 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. in Harlem) on Thursday November 10^th. Have a listen to Mario’s music and find out about his upcoming performances at http://www.myspace.com/mario-cancel/

Heather Dodge (December 2010) recently presented her paper, "The New Animal Taxonomy: 'rendering' animals visible in Sue Coe's slaughterhouse sketches," at the 2nd Annual European Conference for Critical Animal Studies in Prague. In March, she will present another paper entitled, "Going to the Dogs: human and dog relationships in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf" at the Northeast Modern Language Association's 2012 Convention.

She is also delighted that a co-authored paper, "The New Virtual Librarian: Learning to teach and teaching to learn digital literacy, " will be published in a special issue of Learning, Media and Technology sometime in 2012.

Russell MacKenzie Fehr (January 2009) presented at the Graduate Student History Conference and at the California Conference for the Promotion of History in October. He expects to be ABD by June of 2012.

April Fisher (May 2009) published her short story "Ecology" in the October edition of Burnt Bridge (http://burntbridge.net/). She gave her first reading in Brooklyn on Oct 12, 2011, at Linger Cafe's short story writer series. More of her stories can be found at http://aprilbacon.com.

Yvonne C. Garrett (Draper 2010) and her fellow-poet Mary Ellen Sanger have put out their first book of poetry, Waiting for the end of the world: Thoughts of bullfrogs and guerrillas, through their own small press. The collection is available through Amazon, here.

Andrea Hines (May 2010) began a new position in August as the Executive Assistant to the Institute Director at NYU’s Neuroscience Institute.

Jess Kelly was invited to present her paper "Post-Colonial City Planning and Police Homicide in Derry, Northern Ireland and Los Angeles” at UPenn for the International Herbert Marcuse Society's "Critical Refusals" conference in October.

Jess’ paper, which discusses the similarities between the racialized violence and riots that occurred after the Rodney King incident and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, is the jumping-off point for her thesis research on the reactionary punk subculture of 1970s Northern Ireland - an exploration of the anti-capitalist, anti-establishment subculture (ethnicity?) and its rejection of the religious sectarianism and subsequent violence.

Additionally, Jess’ thesis abstract was accepted as one of 14 finalists for a special punk issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice which will publish 12 of the 14 finalist papers in 2013.

Ji Hyuck Moon (May 2011) published his first collection of short stories, Two Nights With a Lion, in Korea this September. Ji Hyuck plans to translate this work into English in the near future and is currently looking for a literary agent.

Ji Hyuck was also recently hired as an adjunct instructor in NYU’s East Asian Studies Department. He is teaching one Elementary Korean Class this fall and says that teaching students the Korean language inspires him as a writer.

Devin D. Moss, M.S. Ed has been hired as LGBT Program Coordinator at the University of South Carolina November 1^st. This is a newly created position at the institution, and he is thrilled to lead initiatives that will create safe and inclusive environments for LGBT students.

Kathleen Reeves (May 2011) published her article "Bodied Time and Ghosted Narrative in The Body Artist" in Concordia University's Journal of Religion and Culture in September. Kathleen presented the article as a paper at Concordia's 16th annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference "Crossroads and Borders," in February. She attended the conference with additional assistance from one of Draper's Travel Grants, which she was the recipient of in November/December 2010.

Kathleen's article can be downloaded in .pdf format from the journal website, here. (Her article is second to last in the issue.)

Cara Ryan began an internship at the Interfaith Center Of New York, working on the Catholic-Muslim Social Services Project on September 1st. The project, which involves Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, various churches, mosques and social services in the Bronx, Staten Island and Manhattan, complements Cara’s thesis, a study of the relationship between American Catholic and Muslim communities.

Corinne Woods was recently hired as the Production Manager for the inaugural year of the All for One Theater Festival, a ten day festival celebrating solo performance which begins 11.11.11 at Theatre 80 St. Marks.

And lastly...

Congratulations to former Draper Global Histories Fellow/current adjunct Maia Ramnath on her first major publication: Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire.

You can read the first chapter and/or purchase the book at the publisher website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520269552