Humanities and Communication
Spring 2016
Deb Busman to deliver Keynote Address & serve on Panel Discussion
Debra Busman will deliver a keynote address at The Gathering for Women: A Refuge for Unsheltered Women in Monterey County on March 5. Busman will also be part of a panel discussion, “Rebel Girls: Pushing Boundaries Across Landscapes, Cultures and Confines” at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Los Angeles in April. Her essay "You Gotta Be Ready for Some Serious Truth to be Spoken," is being published in February in Talking Back and Looking Forward: An Educational Revolution in Poetry and Prose, eds. Paul C. Gorski, Rosanna M. Salcedo, Julie Landsman. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Estella Porras produces Podcast in Spanish
Estella Porras has produced a podcast, "EL Reino de la Nutria" in Spanish, featuring interviews with Latinos/ Latinas and their contributions to the Central Coast region regarding arts, education, culture, science, and economy. You can find the podcast on Soundcloud.
Umi Vaughan contributes to the Routledge History of Latin America
Umi Vaughan's chapter, "The Genesis of Afro-Latin Music," will appear this spring in the The Routledge History of Latin America. He will also do an invited lecture/performance presentation at Stanford University as part of a Dance Studies Colloquium in May.
Spring 2016
David Reichard Publishes in the Oral History Review
David A. Reichard's article, "Behind the Scenes at the Gayzette: The Gay Student Union and Queer World Making at UCLA in the 1970s" has just been published by Oral History Review, part of a special issue on LGBT oral history.
Debian Marty publishes & attends Book Launch
Debian Marty's article, "A Tribute to an Anti-Slavery Martyr: Rees Perkins Brown (1825-1856)https://leavenworthhistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/" was published in January by the Leavenworth County (KS) Historical Society. In addition, her chapter, “One More River to Cross: The Crosswhites’ Escape from Slavery," has been published in V. Tucker and K. S. Frost (Eds.), A Fluid Frontier: Freedom, Slavery and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). She will be attending the book launch in Detroit timed to coincide with Black History Month.
Josina Makau to facilitate and present at Conferences in D.C. & San Diego
Emerita faculty Josina M. Makau is the co-facilitator and a panelist on the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Conference Program titled "'Human Nature and its Implications for Ethics and Education." The conference is scheduled February 18-21 in Washington D. C.
Josina M. Makauis also serving as facilitator and presenter on the Organization for Research on Women and Communication Gender Conference Program titled "New Questions" to be held in San Diego on February 27th.
Meghan O'Donnell to give a Lecture at the First Mayors House
Meghan O'Donnell will be giving a lecture on "Manifest Destiny, Westward Expansion, and Race in America" at a Learning Through Local History event at the First Mayors House in Salinas, on Feb. 11th, 2016. She will also facilitate a workshop for local 5th grade teachers on incorporating local history in their lessons.
Professor Cecilia O'Leary to present at Public Symposium
Recently retired, but still teaching for HCOM part-time, Professor Cecilia O'Leary has been invited to give a talk and participate in a Public Symposium Exploring Slavery, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. “Memories of a Massacre: Memphis, 1866” is a partnership between the University of Memphis in partnership and the National Parks Service and is the centerpiece of a semester-long series of events designed to bring public attention to one of the largest acts of racial violence to rattle the nation in the wake of emancipation.
Patrick Belanger publishes Article in Canadian Journal
Patrick Belanger's article, "Rhetoric and Collective Necessity: The Declaration of Independence" has been published in Rhetor: Journal of the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric.
Cecilia O'Leary to be Guest Speaker on the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Professor O'Leary has also been invited to be a guest speaker on the National Museum of African American History and Culture at a two-week NEH Summer Institute for college and university teachers organized by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The focus will be on "Visual Culture of the American Civil War and its Aftermath." Professor O'Leary is a Senior Advisor to the Director of the new museum which is scheduled to open on September 24, 2016.
Rina Benmayor contributes Field Collection of Sephardic Ballads to Digital Library
HCOM faculty emerita Rina Benmayor has been busy in retirement! Her field collection of Sephardic (Judeo-Spanish) ballads (romances) gathered in Los Angeles and Seattle in 1972-73, will soon be available online through the Sephardic Studies Digital Library and Museum at the University of Washington. These medieval Spanish ballads, passed down in oral tradition for over 500 years in exile from Spain, were sung in the home and in community gatherings. They were brought to the United States by immigrants from Greece and Turkey throughout the first half of the XXth century and sung from memory. This folk tradition is now virtually extinct as a cultural practice among Sephardic Jews. Benmayor's singers reflect the last generation of singers to have grown up hearing these ballads.
Rina Benmayor et al. publish Memories, Subjectivities, and Representation
Rina Benmayor, María Eugenia Cardenal de la Nuez, and Pilar Domínguez, have just published (2016) the first volume in the Palgrave Studies in Oral History series devoted to oral history research in translation. Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain, consists of 11 original essays written in or translated into English, aimed at bringing oral history research in Spanish and Portuguese to Anglophone audiences. The essays explore a variety of themes: Portuguese veterans of the African colonial war, trade union activists in Spain during the Franco regime, women militants in the anti-dictatorship struggles in the Southern Cone, gender identity and nationalism in the Basque Country, women migrants and labor, career
struggles during the recession in Spain, tattoos as auto-bio-graphical inscriptions, anti-racist pedagogies in Brazil, memories of the 1968 student massacre of Tlatelolco, Mexico, and memory and performance vis the 1975 "Carnation Revolution" in Portugal. The CSUMB Library has copies available.
Rina Benmayor and Kristen LaFollette organize latest Oral History Project
The CSUMB Founding Faculty Oral History Project is proceeding, with 10 interviews completed to date. The interviews are being conducted by a group of founding faculty themselves, and will focus on faculty who were present in the first three years of the university's establishment. Rina Benmayor and Kristen LaFollette are the organizers.
Kent Leatham publishes Poetry
One of Kent Leatham's poems was just published in Poetry Quarterly in January, he has one forthcoming in Ploughshares, and three Scots-language poetry translations of Robert Henryson (1425-1500) forthcoming in InTranslation in March.
Kyle Livie
Kylie Livie will give two conference presentations this spring. He will present his paper, "America 'at the Junction': Place, Modernity, and Memory in Paul Henning's "Ruralcoms," 1962-1971" at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Meeting in Seattle in March. He will also present his paper "Cultivating Community: Parades, Pageants, and Power in Rural California Towns, 1917-1937" and the Western Social Science Association in Reno, NV in April.
HCOM Emerita Professor Frances Payne Adler's exhibition, "Dare I Call You Cousin," opens March 3, 2016. Including photos, poems, and videos, it explore the struggle of Israelis and Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line and is a collaboration with two Israeli artists, photographer Michal Fattal and videographer Yossi Yacov. The opening is being funded, in part, by Portland's Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) and is hosted by Havurah Shalom and co-sponsored by J Street Education Fund. Professor Adler will do a reading of her poetry on March 8, 2016.
Stephanie Spoto & Sriya Shrestha to host Series at Old Capitol Books
HCOM Lecturer Stephanie Spoto has organized a series of seminars on critical theory this Spring at Old Capitol Books in Monterey--all starting at 7:00 PM. Sriya Shrestha, also teaching in HCOM, will be facilitating two of these. The series includes Black Feminism on March 4th with Sriya Shrestha; Situationalism on March 11th with CSUMB alum Ben Wilson; Post-Colonial Theory on March 18th with Sriya Shrestha and Social Perceptions of Disability on March 35th with Ali Elfaki a student at Monterey Peninsula College. More on the series here.
Deb Busman reads novel, Like a Woman in Seattle
Debra Busman had a busy fall 2015 sabbatical. She kicked it off in summer with a reading at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, with other recent authors from Dzanc Books, the publisher of her novel, like a woman. In the fall, she was a Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, where Creative Writing Director Elmaz Abinader redesigned her MFA Fiction course around "Rebel Girl Narrators." Students studied Busman's novel along with works by June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Daisy Hernandez, Mari Naomi, and more. She also found time to do a reading and visit with Professor Maria Villasenor's First Year Seminar class. Other readings during the semester included a keynote address for Central Coast Writers Group, a reading at Lit Crawl 2015 in Portland, including a Literary Salon Dinner hosted by Emerita Professor and Founder of the Creative Writing and Social Action Program in HCOM, Frances Payne Adler. Her novel is continuing to garner strong reviews including in The Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Lambda Literary Review.