From: Nicole Cunningham n.cunningham (@) utexas.edu
Get involved as a student representative! Positions are available for committees in the following areas: General Faculty, Graduate Assembly, Graduate Studies, and more. Student representatives play a vital role as ambassadors to the university. Their service helps guarantee that students’ interests are represented in may decisions that affect the University community.

Applications will be due on Wednesday, May 15th by 5 pm to the Graduate Student Assembly office (SAC 3.102) or via email to Columbia Mishra at 
columbia.mishra (@) utexas.edu. Applicants may be contacted for an interview once all applications have been reviewed.

Nicole Cunningham

Communications Director
Graduate Student Assembly
University of Texas at Austin

 

Call For Papers: Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature

 

Call For Papers

 The 10th Annual

Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature

at the University of Texas at Austin

 What We Read:

Materiality, Narrative, Text

 Friday, October 11th, and Saturday, October 12th

Keynote Address by Dr. N. Katherine Hayles

We begin with narrative. Reaching backwards, we explore the way that history meets historiography and myth and novel. These stories travel over time and across borders, moving between nations and languages, but also between forms. They become fixed or transfixed as they take shape, embodied in manuscripts and pictorial narratives, photos and films and digital code. This year’s conference is located at the intersection between narrative and material form.

In How We Became Postmodern, N. Katherine Hayles writes of the implications of dematerialization in the digital age. This conference addresses questions of materiality and narrative, the relationship between image and form, between form and content. Starting with the contemporary moment, we invite papers that take these concerns and explore them across literatures and historical contexts, looking at avant gardes past and present, at manuscript and book history, archival studies, non-written textual culture, and contemporary media studies.

Dr. Hayles writes that “now almost every aspect of work in the humanities can be envisioned differently.” In this conference, we encourage participants to embrace the possibilities for formal experimentation in their own work. We also strongly encourage applicants to propose panel topics to accompany their work, or to propose a panel in collaboration with colleagues.

We are particularly, but not exclusively, interested in seeing papers that address the following themes:

  • The state of the field: implications of the digital age for literary scholarship
  • Writing without words
  • Silence and sound
  • Concrete and visual poetry
  • Hypertext and the digital humanities
  • Cartoons, comics, and graphic novels
  • The theatricality of space
  • Translation across media
  • (De)colonial journeys
  • Archive and memory
  • Utopia and dystopia
  • Textual production, textual consumption
  • Queering form, queering bodies
  • Zombies, vampires, cyborgs

The deadline for Individual Abstracts is June 15, 2013. All proposals should be submitted via email attachment to graclsconference2013@gmail.com.  Panel Proposals may include 3 or 4 speakers and must be submitted by June 1, 2013.  The panel leader must email the proposed title, topic, moderator (if available) and presenters for the panel. Each member of the panel must also submit their abstract via email.

 

For additional information about the conference, please contact conference organizers Cory Hahn and Hannah Alpert-Abrams at graclsconference2013@gmail.com or visit UT’s Program in Comparative Literature website: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit/.

 

Survey on Cinema and Social Media

Hi , I am PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. I am doing some research on cinema and social media. Please take a few minutes to complete the following survey. It would be a great help and it would hardly take 10 minutes.

Here’s the link to my survey https://utexas.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4Se011B6Ih79nvL

I would really appreciate your help with this. Please feel free to email me if you have questions.

Thanks

Swapnil Rai swapnilrai (at) gmail.com

Doctoral Student in Media Studies

RTF Department

The University of Texas at Austin

Candidate for Director of CAAS

Greetings,

This is an invitation to meet the candidate for the Director of the Center for Asian American Studies, Dr. Sharmila Rudrappa.

Dr. Rudrappa will give a presentation on “Rethinking Asian American Studies at UT-Austin: Opportunities and Challenges” followed by a Q&A. The time and location details are:

Tuesday, April 16th
6-7:30pm
Biomedical Engineering Building (BME) 3.204

Please forward this to others who are interested in supporting the Center for Asian American Studies.

Thank you,

Rowena Fong, Ed.D.
Chair, CAAS Director Search Committee

Asian-American Cultural Center’s Dragon Boat Festival

Hello,
My name is Ashley and I’m working as the event coordinator for the Asian-American Cultural Center’s Dragon Boat Festival that is to be held on Saturday, April 27th 2013 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Festival Beach Park on Lady Bird Lake. This festival is free admission and everyone is welcome to come and join in our festivity!
Along side our main event, the racing of the dragon boats, we will be having many a variety of acts, such as (likely to change):
  • Taiko Drums
  • Shaolin Wushu
  • and many dances from various Asian cultures, such as:
    • Hawaiian & Polynesian
    • Filipino
    • Korean
    • Chinese
    • Japanese
    • and more!
We will also have an arrangement of entertainment for kids, like:
  • Bouncy Castle
  • Firetruck and/or Police Cars
  • Face-painting
  • Crafts, including:
    • Origami
    • Calligraphy
We are in need of volunteers and if you’re interested, you may e-mail me at ashemarie.bald (at) gmail.com or call/text me at 512-636-2171.
Otherwise, hope to see you there!
-Ashley M. Bald

 

Enchanting Modernity: Religion and the Supernatural in Contemporary Japanese Popular (Pop) Culture

The JASGA June 2013 cultural program will present Religion and the Supernatural in Contemporary Japanese Popular (Pop) Culture by Chis Feldman.

About Presentation:

Popular culture not only reveals the way that many Japanese think about religion and the supernatural, it also performs an important function in preserving those ideas and images. Many stories of the supernatural depict characters who are called upon to heal the split between between the material and the spiritual realms, and between tradition and modernity. The heroes of these stories often embody this split in themselves by being part human and part yokai (demon). Against opponents who demand the abandoning of the past in order to move into a fully modern future, the protagonists call for a solution in which the split between a mythological past and a technological present is healed. By moving forward into the future while retaining the spiritual heart of “Japaneseness,” they struggle to bridge the worlds of tradition and modernity.

The conjunction of religion and popular culture is a powerful one, and raises fascinating questions about today’s Japanese culture. How are supernatural characters depicted in anime and manga, and what messages about the benefits and dangers of religion are being encoded in them? How are these stories used to convey ideas about what it means to be Japanese? What benefits do the consumers of anime and manga gain from including supernatural themes in these stories, and what is the benefit to society as a whole? These are some of the questions addressed in this multimedia presentation.
June 3, 7-8:30 PM
http://www.jasga.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=449

CIEE LIFT scholarship for Chinese and Japanese

Greetings from study abroad,

I want to share information from one of our affiliate partners, CIEE…

The new LIFT scholarship is targeted to students studying Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian.

CIEE is attempting to help students attain their goal of language acquisition through long-term study abroad and they have therefore allocated $100,000 to the new LIFT scholarship fund.  CIEE is offering $5,000 scholarships to students who apply for an academic year CIEE program of language study in one of the aforementioned languages.

You may learn more about the LIFT scholarship using the following link:

http://www.ciee.org/study-abroad/scholarships/lift/

The deadline for 2014 programs is April 15.

Thanks for your attention,

Rhonda

Rhonda Waller

Advising Team Leader | Study Abroad

International Office

The University of Texas at Austin

Phone: (512) 471-6965

Email: rwaller (at) austin.utexas.edu

http://world.utexas.edu/abroad

Campus Mail Code: A7000

Campus Location: 2222 Rio Grande St., Ste. 2.201C

 

The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi

Dr. Erik Braun, of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma, will be giving a presentation on his upcoming book The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi 

Thursday, April 4

2-3 pm, followed by a reception

Meyerson Conference Room (WCH 4.118)

Sponsored by Religious Studies, Asian Studies, and the South Asia Institute

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/rs/events/26522

Invisible Strangers: Muslims in Early Modern France and Britain, 1500-1800

The Center for European Studies invites you to:

Invisible Strangers: Muslims in Early Modern France and Britain, 1500-1800

 

Presented by Dr. Jocelyne Dakhlia

Thursday, April 4

3:00 p.m.

Texas Union, Texas Governors Room (3.116)

The contribution made by Muslims to the development of Western Europe is much greater than previously thought. This talk will examine a recent body of collaborative research that brings this history of Muslims in Europe out of the shadows. It will also consider the reasons why previous historians have passed this history over in silence, looking in particular at Britain and France. A new understanding of Western Europe and the Mediterranean emerges from this work, one with important civic and geopolitical ramifications for the present.

Dr. Jocelyne Dakhlia is a Director of Studies at the Centre de Recherches Historiques at the École des Hautes Études (EHESS) in Paris and this year’s exchange faculty member through an agreement between UT and EHESS.

The talk is free and open to the public. Registration is not required.

Sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Institute for Historical Studies

Sally K. Dickson

Program and Outreach Coordinator

Center for European Studies

(512) 232-4311

Mezes 3.304

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/european_studies/

Position for native Mandarin speaker

Oak Hill Technology, Inc. (OHT), an Austin based company, desires the services of a current student from mainland China with an interest in working for an international firm to assist us in developing an understanding of the culture and issues for Chinese students in the U.S. We prefer an individual  that is both knowledgeable of Shanghai culture and fluent in Mandarin.
OHT will schedule a one-hour lunch session per week with the company business executives.  During the session the student will discuss current events while speaking Mandarin to the group as we improve our conversational Mandarin.  The lunch will be at no cost and the student will be reimbursed $25 per lunch session.
Please note, this not a job solicitation, only a temporary requirement for the spring and summer of 2013.
Those that are interested or have any questions may contact me directly.  We look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
    Sherry Harvey
     Contracts Manager
     Oak Hill Technology, Inc.
     12505-A Trail Driver
     Austin, Texas 78737
     tel (512) 288-0008
     fax (512) 288-5792