May 21 – 24, the English Department hosted the 17th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). For four days, over 250 participants from all over the U.S. Canada and Europe gathered at the Washington Duke Inn. The theme of this year’s conference was Romanticism and Modernity, and many scholars presented work engaged in furthering our understanding of the connections and discontinuities between this relatively short period and the larger cultural formations of European Modernity.

Prof. Thomas Pfau and Prof. Robert Mitchell confronted the mathematically sublime task of organizing such a large conference with inexhaustible energy. By all accounts, the conference was a great success. The organizers had the help of a few resourceful graduate students who found the time to put in many hours of work. Among the most essential were Lindsey Andrews and Nathan Hensley from the English Department and Lisa Klarr and Abraham Geil from the Department of Literature.

- Kevin Modestino

Read the article from This Month at Duke.

conference website

NASSR

At its conception in the 1960s, the internet’s great aspiration was innocent enough: it sought to facilitate nerd-to-nerd connection, information sharing at its most erudite and least user-friendly.
But today’s internet occupies a whole new frontier.
It could be said that on its pages plays out a duel of divergent imperatives: the noble educational intentions of yore must duke it out daily with siren-song sites like Juicy Campus and Facebook—just ask any professor who has allowed laptops in his classroom only to have his teachings eclipsed by the Twittering of his students.
Enter: “HASTAC,” the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, a band of renegade intellectuals who are exploring uncharted territory, searching for new and creative ways to harness the potential power of the wild wild web.
According to HASTAC’s co-founder Cathy Davidson, a Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English at Duke, the initiative has “three intertwined goals: creative, innovative design and development of technology; critical thinking about the social and ethical implications and applications of technology; and participatory learning (using digital technologies to share ideas and research, collaborate, create art, or design and implement goals together).”
In short, HASTAC hopes to bring computers into the classroom in more than the physical sense.
“HASTAC wants to spur interaction between internet and learning,” said Duke English graduate student Patrick Jagoda.
“The internet changes who we are, how we think, and how our brains work,” said Jagoda, who is one of fifty HASTAC Scholars chosen this year in recognition of their commitment to innovative technological work. Through his association with HASTAC, Jagoda will spend the year as part of a virtual community of good guys. According to the Scholars’ website, the group’s prerogatives include, “creating, reporting on, blogging, vlogging, and podcasting events related to digital media and learning for an international audience.”
Both the internet and the concept of the internet are integral to Jagoda’s personal research, which concerns the relationship between networks, connectivity and terrorism as depicted in literature and film (to put it oversimply.) Being online for him is both a tool and an object of analysis.
“With Google and Wikipedia at my disposal, I am constantly and frantically connected at super speed.”
It is this super-connection that HASTAC and its allies are trying to funnel into the classroom, championing the concept of “participatory learning” that has already been embraced by user-generated content sites like YouTube and Wikipedia.
In 2006, one of these allies, The MacArthur Foundation, launched a five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative with aims of, as put on its website, “changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.”
Together with HASTAC, the foundation hosts a yearly Digital Learning and Media Contest in hopes of rooting out the technology of tomorrow.
Its latest winner, the Virtual Peace project, was created Duke’s own Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society, Tim Lenoir, and has the potential to turn the digital gamefront on its head.
Let’s just say the good guys have put up their dukes.
Virtual Peace is a video game, but not just any video game. It is HASTAC’s answer to the popular mass-destruction post-doom video game model. The game’s format will look familiar to fans of other virtual simulation games like World of Warcraft, but make no mistake: there is a plot twist in store. Instead of blowing up innocent bystanders or stealing their cars, users are assigned to the task of disaster relief and challenged to virtually manage the after effects of natural disaster.
“This is an example of gaming being used for more complex purposes,” Jagoda said. “How great would it be if we could refocus the interest in games like Counterstrike and apply them to productive peace generation?”
Although the effects of Virtual Peace are yet to be seen–the program is still in its initial testing phases—Jagoda seems confident that this and all of HASTAC’s efforts will ultimately greet the dawn of a new internet era.
“Today the internet is phenomenal—I can instantly satisfy any passing curiosity or intellectual itch with one click on Wikipedia,” he said. “Something about that model is really promising.”

– Anne Rhett, ‘09

English graduate student Patrick Alexander was awarded a 2008 Samuel Dubois Cook Award for his work creating “Stepping Stones,” an educational program that acquaints (or reacquaints) men who are incarcerated at Orange Correctional Center in Hillsborough with the unique experience of the college classroom. He taught a seminar in African American literature and creative writing there and will be teaching further courses in literature and writing seminars at OCC in the summers to come.

You can read more about the class and hear recordings of the students reading their essays and poems here.

The Samuel Dubois Cook Award is an honor granted to members of Duke’s community who demonstrate the goals of the Cook Society: “to translate the promise and potential of African Americans into fulfillment and actuality, and to seek to improve relations among persons of all backgrounds.”

Patrick was accompanied at the award ceremony by Dean Jo Rae Wright, Associate Dean Jacqueline Looney, Dr. Tomalei Vess, and by “my advisor, Dr. Maurice Wallace; my pastor, Rev. Kenneth Ray Hammond of Union Baptist Church (who has financially and verbally supported my work), and Kathy Alberter and Mary DesHarnais, a dedicated administrator and my teaching assistant, respectively, from the Orange County Literacy Council (they are my liasions to OCC and huge supporters of my work). I also had the privilege of meeting the distinguished Dr. Samuel Dubois Cook personally that evening.”

Emeritus professor Ron Butters and graduate student Phillip Carter presented a paper which they co-authored with Tyler Kendall at the Law and Society Association in Berlin in July 2007: “Perverted Justice: The Instant Messages of Some Convicted ‘Sexual Predators’.”

Prof. Butters also was an invited speaker at a one-day conference, “Trademark Dilution: Theoretical and Empirical Inquiries.” at the High Tech Law Institute of the Santa Clara Law School, Santa Clara, California, October 5, 2007. His paper was entitled, “A Linguistic Look at Trademark Dilution.” He was elected to a two-year term as vice president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists at the society’s meeting in Seattle in July. He will move on into the presidency of the Association for 2009-11. He was appointed co-editor of the International Journal of Speech, Language, and the Law (the journal of the International Association of Forensic Linguists).