Hi folks,

We are officially only TWO WEEKS away from NYCEA 2017.  A couple of quick reminders:

-Every presenter must also be a NYCEA member.  We have had several folks register for the conference but not sign up as a member.  Those two items pay for different things (the registration fee paying for the luncheon, the keynote speaker, assorted costs, coffee, etc, and the membership fee paying for the graduate paper prize and the hosting fees for our website).  Please sign up for membership as well if you did not do so initially!

-Several folks have still not registered!  PLEASE do so as soon as possible so we can have an accurate head count for catering (and finalize the program so that we can get the latter out to you sooner rather than later).

Now, on to some news you can use.  Scott, one of our conference organizers, hit the campus at the University of Rochester today and recorded some videos to help you find the locations we will be using for NYCEA.  Below, you will first find a ~9 minute video with narration, talking you through how to find the various rooms.  After that are a series of un-narrated videos showing individual locations.  The conference program will have a QR code link to this blog post, so that you can pull it up on your phone or tablet to help you navigate during the conference.

​We are looking forward to seeing everyone!  Just two weeks away!

A full, narrated tour of the locations that will be utilized for NYCEA 2017.

This is the lot you should park in on Saturday (all of Friday's events are at the Staybridge Hotel).  Parking is free on Saturday, and you can park in any lot, but this one is the closest to the conference venues.

This video shows you how to get from the parking lot to the registration area.  The registration area is also where the coffee station will be AND where two of our panel spaces will be.

A video showing how to get from the registration area to G-108A, which will be the location for some of our panels.

These two videos show you how to get from Instructional Suite B to the Rettner Atrium, where we will be having our conference luncheon.  The first video travels from the Instructional Suite to the main quad, and the second video takes you from the quad to the Atrium.  In the narrated version, I incorrectly identified a portrait as one of REGINALD Rettner.  In fact, his name is RONALD Rettner.  Apologies.  :)

Finally, this video shows you how to get from the main quad to the Robbins Library.  Robbins will not only be hosting panel sessions, but will also be the site for our keynote speaker.

Hi all,

Some quick reminders for our 2017 conference at the University of Rochester:

1- The block reservations at our two hotels expire in the next day or two (depending on the hotel).  If you have not yet made your reservation, please do so ASAP.  Both hotels want to work with us, but can't guarantee availability or pricing after the blocks are released.

2- For our graduate student presenters, if you would like your paper to be considered for our annual grad student prize ($$$), you will need to send us your paper by 5pm EST on October 13th.  Please ONLY send presentation-ready papers (ie: no seminar papers that you still intend to cut down). The winning paper will be announced at the conference luncheon on Saturday the 21st. Papers for prize consideration should be sent to newyorkcea@gmail.com

3- For those who have not yet registered, please do so ASAP.  We need an accurate headcount to give to the caterers for the luncheon.

4- A few folks have e-mailed to ask about paper length.  Papers at NYCEA should be about 15 minutes (7 to 8 pages) in length.  This is to ensure time for lively discussion at the end of each panel.

Hi Folks!

Some useful info for you as you begin to plan your NYCEA conference travel.  As mentioned earlier, we have two conference hotels with discounted room blocks.  The deadlines to get those rooms are rapidly approaching, so don't delay! 

One of those hotels, the Staybridge, is actually hosting our conference dinner on Friday, October 20th.  We have finalized the menu, and we are both excited and DROOLING!  We will have:

-A fully-stocked salad bar
-Root beer basted beef brisket
-Greek chicken with kalamata olives
-Red roasted potatoes with garlic
-Vegetarian Lasagna
-An array of tasty desserts
and a two hour cash bar.

All of this will be in a room at the Staybridge overlooking the Genesee River (see photos below), and after we eat, we will be screening a film by Ida Lupino (the topic of our keynote speaker) as our Friday night entertainment..

We hope to see many of you at the dinner!  

As for other updates, the program is coming along--we just need to hear back from a few more folks re: registration, so we can make sure that those who NEED A/V are in rooms that HAVE A/V capability.

Keep an eye on your inbox for more information about the program, deadlines for the graduate paper prize, and other important info.  We're only about a month away!

​Scott

For the next installment of our ongoing feature about the most memorable and rewarding features of the annual NYCEA conference, board member Scott O'Neil shares a few thoughts about one of newest and most distinctive events: the graduate student round-table events. In Scott's words:
​
NYCEA has always had a wide range in panels, covering both literature and pedagogy, and stretching across the entire canon chronologically, with papers ranging from Anglo-Saxon to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  There is one recurring panel that, as a graduate student, stands out to me.  For the last three years, NYCEA has featured a grad student professionalization panel.  This concept really began at the 2012 conference, when NYCEA ran a panel on “Teaching at a small college.”  I think even then that they were surprised at the turnout.  The panel was VERY early in the morning, and the panelists had a full house of graduate students eager to ask questions.  The panels returned as a regular feature three years ago, and since then, NYCEA has had grad student roundtables on structuring the C.V. for teaching-centered schools (2014), understanding university service (2015), and preparing for the job talk/teaching demo (2016).  These panels started out as a one-off concept to address a perceived need (giving grad students a better sense of the needs and realities of the teaching centered job market), and they have now become a regular feature designed to help grad student members of the organization professionalize.  This attitude reflects NYCEA’s approach to viewing graduate student members as equal members—and as a grad student board member, I can personally attest to how welcoming that has been.  The grad student round table at NYCEA 2017 is going to focus on preparing the C.V. for Alt Ac job prospects.
 

Happy Monday! To continue our "NYCEA Memories" series of posts, NYCEA board member Scott O'Neil offers a few remarks about the Friday night entertainments that have long been one of the conference's most popular features. In Scott's words:

One of the things I most look forward to at NYCEA every October is the Friday night entertainment.  After the conference dinner, the host puts on some sort of entertainment.  What makes this so great is the fact that you literally never know what you might see.  My first NYCEA (2010 at St. John Fisher), the entertainment was an interactive performance workshop on medical humanities run by Stephanie Brown-Clark.  We’ve also had readings from authors like Eric Gansworth, and our most recent conference featured a brilliant performance-based “Blues musical” that engaged in the history of music and race in America.  While there have been a wide array of entertainments, I think my favorite was the one in 2014.  That year, everyone who indicated that they would be attending the conference dinner was asked to bring along a poem.  After dinner, in a fun, whimsical move, we became the entertainment, putting on an impromptu poetry reading featuring works that touched on school and education in some way.  There were amusing pieces, serious pieces, historical/archival poems, and the occasional original work.  That’s one of the thing I most love about NYCEA.  It’s not “stodgy” or stereotypical.  It’s more like a group of friends getting together every year.

Throughout the year, NYCEA board members and participants will write short blog posts describing memorable NYCEA moments. To kick-start this series, our current president, Deborah VanderBilt, offers some reflections and memories about the 2014 keynote address, delivered by the Folger Shakespeare Institute's Peggy O'Brien. In Deb's words:

A highlight of my NYCEA experience was the plenary given by Dr. Peggy O’Brien, then the Education Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2014. She talked about the use of Shakespeare at all levels of education from primary to graduate studies, but then took us all through an acting exercise from Julius Caesar. It wasn’t focused on reading the play; she told us to let that go. And she didn’t direct us, but let each person do what each of us thought would make sense given the “script” of the play. Instead of the lines she asked us to listen to the tones in our voices … the location of our bodies in relation to each other … the clusters that seemed to organically form in the group.
 
It was a fascinating exercise, especially when she compared what had happened with our group to a group of fifth-graders she had worked with earlier that year! But what made it great was the group. We’d spent about 24 hours together by that point, a relatively small group of conferences, in and out of rooms in shifting clusters. Most of us took part in that exercise. Peggy was more than our speaker; by the end of the exercise, she was our colleague.  The small size of the NYCEA conference and the shared interests and love of teaching of the group leads to experiences like this every single year for me.

Image of Peggy O'Brien running a similar workshop at Arizona State University; this photo can be found at Arizona State University's website.

The New York College English Association is thrilled to announce that we are very close to finalizing our keynote speaker for the 2017 conference, which will take place at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York this coming October. Please keep your eyes glued to this space, as a more official announcement with more specific information about the keynote's identity and the subject of the keynote address will be posted to this space on Monday afternoon!

Cheryl Emerson
SUNY Buffalo
 
CEA 2016, March 31st—April 2nd, 2016, was held at one the most beautiful of all possible conference venues, at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Denver, Colorado. Presenting before a panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains from the 38th floor of the hotel lent a certain grandeur even to a paper about ePortfolios! The slow time of the mountains seemed to offer a silent commentary upon trending practices in college English education and fresh perspectives on literature old and new.

                                    This year’s theme, “Creation,” lent itself nicely to topics ranging from racial, gender, and cultural constructions; narrative theory; genre-making; literacies; classroom innovations; linguistic and discourse theory; and of course a return to myth and Creation stories proper. Apart from my own panel, “Creative Approaches to Assessment of Student Learning,” I followed a literature track through the conference. The panel I found most thought-provoking was “Tribes, Cultures, and Lost Identities,” because of its immediate relevance to the contemporary political challenges of shifting borders and massive migrations of refugee populations. Kittiphong Praphan (Mahasarakham University) addressed the effects of neo-colonial capitalism upon India’s tribals (“Recreation of Tribals: Debt, Bonded Slavery, and Bonded Prostitution in Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps”). His paper elucidated not only the dehumanizing force of a “globalized ruling class” that manipulates local economies from afar, but also the way that subjugation by money rather than direct colonial occupation “uncouples” the economic ruling class from the responsibility to offer protection for the tribal laborers. Instead, India’s tribals are instrumentalized in the building of dams that flood their tribal lands, their sufferings subsumed under Western “development” ideology that propagates the myth of a poor country in need of industrial advancement. The stories in Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps reveal the exploitative cycle of bonded laborers facing a life of insurmountable debt to money lenders, resulting in a form of “bonded slavery” whose debts carry on to the next generation. For the first time, thanks to Kittiphong’s paper, I realized the difference between “post-colonial” and “neo-colonial,” and ways that the former implies a liberation from foreign rule that is misleading. As long as global corporate giants are “uncoupled” from responsibility to protect tribal workers from economic exploitation, the global map is still divided by colonial rule of a different kind—one that is less accountable for its actions than ever before.
                  In the same panel, Carolyn Marcille (Buffalo State College) presented as “Dr. Marcille” for the first time, having recently defended her dissertation. (I have to admit that had she not been on the panel, I might have attended the Shakespeare papers instead. But Buff State and UB are neighbors. Naturally I had to cheer on a fellow Buffalonian!) Her paper, “Postcolonialism, Transcorporeality and the Bordered Body,” did a fantastic job illustrating the ways that the human body is not safely bordered from the environment, but rather is increasingly “unbordered.” In the follow-up Q&A, we remarked how the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, perfectly illustrates her thesis. Similar to Kittiphong’s presentation, Carolyn’s also argued that certain bodies are more “bordered” than others, and that the bodies given least protection from environmental disaster are marked along racial and economic divides.
                                    It was my pleasure to highlight what I thought were two outstanding presentations at CEA 2016, but I could easily go on. I attended panels on American 20th Century Novelists; American Gender and Narrative; Creating the Modern; Reaching the 21st Century; Prisons & Police; and Language & Gender Roles. Since this was my first visit to the CEA, I didn’t notice that all events beyond the panel sessions required pre-registration. Unfortunately, I’m unable to report on the luncheon speakers, but thanks to Scott’s coaching before the conference, knew to prepare myself for the annual book grab on Saturday! Like the CEA veterans, I scouted the book exhibit in advance. As luck would have it, my name was the 3rd drawn and I snagged my first choice, a new English translation of Mo Yan’s Frog, which chronicles the story of a Chinese midwife whose standing in the village falls when the woman who once delivered infants becomes the local enforcer of the new One Child law.

                  I crossed paths with many presenters from New York, but as a newcomer to the NYCEA, none that I recognized from our October conference at Hilliard College. For future national conferences, perhaps we could find each other in advance or even collaborate on moderating a panel. Looking forward to next year!