Graduation Paperwork for Plan C MA/MS Students

Are you planning to Graduate in the Spring?

If you are completing your Plan C MA or MS in the Spring in one of our on-campus programs (LW, AS, or AS/F), please see to following four steps in filing your paperwork. Especially note that step #4 has a Feb 15 deadline!  --Dr. Funda, DGS

1. If you haven’t already, you need to have your Supervisory Committees formed and paperwork filed. If you do not have that paperwork filed, or if changes have been made since you first filed paperwork, follow the instructions here: http://usuenglishgrad.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-is-my-supervisory-committee-and.html. After you have gotten the signatures from you committee members (not Department Head), return the form to my mailbox or mailing address. I will get the Department Head signature and file the form with the Office of Research and Graduate Studies.  

2. If you haven’t already, you need to fill out and file your Program of Study form.  See the detailed instructions at the first link below and on the form itself on the second link.  http://usuenglishgrad.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-is-program-of-study-form-and-why.html  http://rgs.usu.edu/graduateschool/files/uploads/POS_MS.pdf. After you have filled out the form and signed it on page 4, get the signatures of your committee members (not Department Head) and get the form to me again.  I will check the form against the requirements and your transcript, get the Department Head’s signature, and file the form with the Office of Research and Graduate Studies.  

3. If you plan to get an MA rather than an MS and you haven’t already filled out the proper form and provided the documentation, see the instructions here: http://usuenglishgrad.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-are-language-requirements.html.  The form and proper documentation again comes to me (mailbox or mailing address).  I will file it with the Office of Research and Graduate Studies.  

4. Fill out the “Plan C” Completion Form, available at http://rgs.usu.edu/graduateschool/files/uploads/Comp_Req_PlanC.pdf.  Deadline for this to go to the ORGS is Feb 15, so they need to come to me by Feb 7. I will double check that you are on track for completion, sign the form as your Graduate Advisor, and get the paperwork to Office of Research and Graduate Studies by the deadline.  This form simply alerts the Grad School that you are planning to graduate, and once they get it, they will send you materials regarding finishing and the graduation ceremony.  Make sure that you list your name on this form as you want it to appear on your diploma.  

Tuition Awards & Online Classes & Student Fees:

If graduate students have been granted and have accepted graduate tuition awards, they need to be aware that online courses are charged on a different, higher tuition level. Tuition Awards do not cover those additional costs. Students, therefore, are required to pay the difference in tuition between enrollment in online courses versus face-to-face courses. Also, not covered by tuition awards are student fees, late fees, and the student's portion of graduate insurance. Tuition Awards are only given to graduate students who are employed by the department at a half-time instructor rate (.5 FTE) or equivalent.  Tuition Awards cannot be given to students not employed by the department. 

Scholarships and Tuition Awards for PhD Students

For PhD Students:

In addition to student loans, PhD students may have access to three kinds of financial support: scholarships and fellowships, Graduate Instructorships, and tuition waivers.

Scholarships and fellowships: The English Department has access to a limited amount of scholarship money, for which PhD students will be considered. In the future we expect to develop some research fellowships that will be available to PhD students.

Graduate Instructorships: All students are encouraged to apply for a paid Graduate Instructorship. The assignment will be 50 percent time, or approximately 20 hours of work per week. The normal teaching load is two sections of writing classes (e.g., composition). Guarantee of continued support is contingent upon three factors: 1) acceptable teaching performance; 2) acceptable academic performance and progress towards the degree; and 3) sufficient funding from the university allowing the department to continue hiring GIs. Although we anticipate that students will complete the degree in four years, support may be available for a fifth year if necessary.

Graduate Instructorship duties begin in August with a week-long, in-service training workshop prior to the semester, conducted by the Director of Writing. GIs are also expected to attend departmental meetings as they are scheduled before classes begin and to enroll in Engl 6820: Practicum in Teaching English during fall semester if they have not done so already.

If PhD students have passed Engl 7860: Teaching Technical Writing or demonstrated equivalent formal preparation, they may be given the opportunity to teach certain upper-division technical communication courses, notably Engl 3080: Introduction to Technical Communication, Engl 3400: Professional Writing, and Engl 3410: Professional Writing Technology.

Tuition waivers: PhD students are eligible for remission of the resident (instate) portion of their tuition costs, but if they are not Utah residents they would normally have to pay the nonresident (out-of-state) portion of their tuition. However, if nonresident students are employed as Graduate Instructors they are eligible for a waiver of out-of-state tuition for any courses that will count towards their degree (i.e. lower-division undergraduate classes or recreational classes would not be eligible for tuition remission).

 

Scholarships and Tuition Awards for Master's Students

For Master’s Students:

 

Fellowships:

Incoming students are eligible to apply for fellowships in the offices of the journal Western American Literature or for the Russell fellowship. Students are considered for these fellowships when their applications are first reviewed, and these awards are made in the Spring semester. These awards are not available after the January 15 deadline for graduate applications. Some of these fellowships come with tuition waivers.

Scholarships and Tuition Awards:

Each Spring semester, currently enrolled students are considered for a limited number of private donor-funded scholarships or tuition waiver awards that come from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. These scholarships and tuition waivers are awarded for the following fall and/or spring semesters. A call for applications will come out early in the semester from the DGS (will also be posted on the blog). Our policy is to reward students who have proven themselves since matriculation into one of our programs, so students in the English Department’s programs are eligible if they will have completed at least 12 credits of graduate work towards their current degrees by the end of Spring semester and if they are continuing their studies at USU in the next Fall and/or Spring semester. Students applying for scholarships and tuition waivers will be asked to submit a letter of application, a CV (curriculum vitae), and supporting materials. (For help with creating a CV, please click here)

CFP: Encounters With(in) Texts

20th Annual (dis)junctions Hunamities and Social Sciences Graduate Conference University of California, Riverside April 5-6, 2013 ABSTRACT DEADLINE Feb 11th 

Encounter: transitive verb

1) a: to meet as an adversary  b: to engage in conflict with

2) to come upon face-to-face

3) to come upon or experience especially unexpectedly 

In our contemporary situation within media-saturated, cosmopolitan modernities, we “come upon” texts and Others so frequently that “encountering” with its unanticipated and oppositional valences has become the norm.  This year’s (dis)junctions conference invites papers that contribute to conversations around notions of “encountering,” with particular focus given to the operation of texts, understood as representational media objects, within “scenes of encounter.” 

 

 To articulate both the continued utility and the potential limitations of our critical literacies in a world of encounters, this conference examines the impact of situatedness, unexpectedness, and/or unpreparedness on “face to text” encounters with media objects, embodied encounters negotiated through or overdetermined by texts, and representations of “encountering” within texts. 

Please visit www.disjunctions2013.org for specific panel CFPS, as well as a fuller theorization of the conference theme of “encountering.”   

SUBMISSIONS:  As always (dis)junctions welcomes panels and papers from all areas of the humanities, social sciences, and creative disciplines, as well as panel proposals from our colleagues in the physical sciences.  Abstracts and panel proposals should be submitted through www.disjunctions2013.orgor emailed to disjunctions2013@gmail.comno later than February 11th. 

KEYNOTE:  We are proud to announce this years keynote is Dr. Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of visual studies in New York University's Media, Culture and Communication department.  The editor of both editions of Routledge’s Introduction to Visual Culture (2000, 2009), as well as the Routledge Visual Culture Reader (2002), his current work in visual studies focuses around three major areas: developing a genealogy of “visuality”; developing visual culture as a fie3ld of study and a methodology; and working in conjunction with creative visual artists and media practitioners.  His most recent book is The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke, 2011).   In addition to being a premier voice in visual culture scholarship, he is a contributing editor for the Media Commons online project, and is a co-PI in the development of the multi-media, digital-born authoring software, “Scalar.”  Currently, he is working in conjunction with Islands First on a project that explores the visual culture of climate change.   

Funds Available for Humanities Projects

The Utah Humanities Council (UHC) is currently accepting grant proposals for competitive grants (up to $5,000). UHC offers funding to empower individuals and groups in Utah to improve their communities through active engagement in the humanities.

The application deadlines are February 1 (draft) and March 1 (final).  Projects in this round may not begin before May 1, 2013.

Grant guidelines and forms are available here  or by contacting Jodi Graham at graham@utahhumanities.orgor 801.359.9670 ext. 105.

Funds Available for Humanities Research

The Utah Humanities Council (UHC) offers funding to empower individuals and groups in Utah to improve their communities through active engagement in the humanities.  UHC is currently accepting applications for humanities research fellowships (up to $3,500).  The Albert J. Colton Research Fellowship for projects of national or international scope, and the Delmont R. Oswald Research Fellowship for projects focusing on Utah Studies.   Student fellowships for graduate and undergraduate students are also available (up to $2,000).

The application deadlines are February 1 (draft) and March 1 (final). Projects in this round may not begin before May 1, 2013.

Grant guidelines and forms are available here or by contacting Jodi Graham at graham@utahhumanities.orgor 801.359.9670 ext. 105.

The Utah Humanities Council
The Utah Humanities Council empowers individuals and groups to improve
their communities through the humanities.

 202 West 300 North
Salt Lake City, UT 84103
801.359.9670
www.utahhumanities.org

New Directions in Critical Theory Graduate Conference 2013

“Uncovering the Sublime: The Infinite, the Material, and the Beyond”

Friday, April 5--Saturday, April 6
University of Arizona

The Sublime—the “beyond,” the moment when the ability to know, to express a thought or sensation is defeated—has been labeled as “indescribable,” yet, as Philip Shaw points out, the Sublime has been “debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists,” and it remains a “complex yet crucial concept” that stretches across many disciplines.  From the awe-inspiring landscapes of the southwest as articulated by writers like Terry Tempest Williams and Edward Abbey, to the infinitely reproduced image of prophecies represented in the Ministry of Magic scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the endless hall of drawers that Sam Bell discovers in the film Moon, to the untapped potential of HAL 9000, the supercomputer capable of billions of computations per second, the Sublime leaves us with a sense of unease in confronting boundless possibilities. The Sublime can be “a building or a mountain,” or “a thought, a heroic deed, or a mode of expression . . . a state of mind.” It is the moment when fear and beauty become indistinguishable. At the same time that the Sublime teases us to negate our notions of physical reality, it draws us ever closer to “our actual material limits.” Yet a definition falls short of words. The Sublime escapes us, frustrating the distinction between cause and effect.

Broadly reaching across disciplinary boundaries, this conference accepts submissions from both national and international scholars at all levels with contributions from fields such as rhetoric & composition, history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, science studies, theories of technology, theories of place, environmental and sustainability studies, feminist, gender and queer theory, critical theory, as well as comparative global studies, pop-culture and media studies, cultural geography, and more.

A list of possible concerns that may engage the Sublime in direct or indirect ways include, but are not limited to:

• In the constantly changing face of academia, what is considered sublime in specific academic disciplines?  How are current inter-, cross-, trans-disciplinary work sublime?
• What is the sublime in thinking about social and global problems?  In transcendentalist notions of nature and ecology?  In resistance to hegemonic notions of being and place?  In gender identifications and representations?  And what can we do to overcome the sublime as such?
• What are some manifestations in popular culture and media such as advertising, digital and online spaces, or (post)apocalyptic, fantasy, and superhero narratives?
• What are notions of the sublime as related to technology, computation, virtual reality, game studies, and formations of the post-human?

We welcome submissions in any of the following formats:

• academic papers to be presented individually or as a panel;
• research descriptions or findings;
• creative works to be displayed or performed;
• other non-conventional and experimental presentation formats that engage the audience in new ways of meaning-making.

Please send 200-word abstracts of an individual work or 500-word group/panel descriptions as a .doc, .docx, .pdf, or .rtf file to newdirectionsconference@gmail.com by Friday, Febuary 11, 2013.

Annual International Conference on Language, Literature and Linguistics

The Organizing Committee of the 2^ndAnnual International Conference on Language, Literature and Linguistics (L3 2013)invites you/your research students to submit a paper to the conference which will be held on 17th - 18th June 2013.

• Opening Address will be delivered by Prof. the Hon. Dr. Stephen Martin, Member, Board of Governors, Global Science & Technology Forum (GSTF), Former Speaker Parliament of Australia
  Former Deputy Vice Chancellor (Strategy and Planning), Curtin University of Technology, Former Pro Vice Chancellor International, Victoria University
• Keynote Address "'Translating' The Other: The Making of the Modern Arabic Translation Movement"will be delivered by Prof. Daniel Newman, Head, Arabic Department, Course Director, M.A. Arabic-English Translation and Interpreting, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Durham, England
• The Conference Proceedings (Print ISSN: 2251-3566, E-Periodical ISSN: 2251-3574) will be indexed by Ulrichsweb,EBSCO, CrossRef, Proquest,and will be submitted to ScienceDirect and Cabell's Directories amongst others, where applicable.
• Journal: Depending on their importance, originality, quality, relevance and other editorial considerations, eligible research articles will be invited for publication in the GSTF Journal of Law and Social Sciences (JLSS) (Print ISSN: 2251-2853, E-periodical: 2251-2861) which is indexed by EBSCO, CrossRef, ProQuest, Ulrichsweb and Cabell's Directories. 
• Best Paper Awards and Best Student Paper Awards will be conferred at the conference (in order to qualify for the award, the paper must be presented at the conference).
• L3 2013 will also constitute a Special Panel Session.

IMPORTANT DATE

Paper Submission Extended Deadline: 15th February 2013

For more information, please visit the L3 2013 website. Should you require any assistance or clarification, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Warm Regards,

Elizar Sto Domingo

Global Science and Technology Forum

10 Anson Road, International Plaza,
#14-04, Singapore- 079903

Phone: +65 6327 0166| Fax: +65 6327 0162 | www.l3-conference.org

Co. Reg. No. 200923362W