The Provost's Awards Lecture Series is intended to honor and showcase the recipients of the Provost's Awards and provide them an opportunity to present, share and discuss their work with the campus. Another goal of this series is to raise the level of academic and intellectual discourse among our colleagues and to further enrich connections with others across the campus.

Date: Thursday, March 17
Time: 3 - 4 p.m.
Location: All seminars will be on Zoom.
Meeting ID: 890 1107 6550
Passcode: 580527

Tanya Nichols, Department of English
2020-21 Outstanding Lecturer

“Young Writers' Conference: Four Decades of Growing Creativity”

For more than 40 years, the Fresno State English Department has produced the Young Writers' Conference, attracting 400-plus high school students and their teachers to campus from all over Central California. It has been my privilege to serve as conference coordinator for 16 years. This annual event — which includes a keynote from a published author, small-group writing workshops led by Master of Fine Arts graduate students, and publication of award-winning youth writers in a student-produced literary journal — inspires the next generation of Fresno writers to share their voices and their stories to the larger world. This event also gives young writers the opportunity to see themselves on a college campus for the first time.

AND

Dr. J. Ashley Foster, Department of English
2020-21 Promising New Faculty

“Extending (Xtending) the Discourse: The Transformative Power of an Intersectional, Feminist Digital Humanities”

This presentation features collaborative Digital Humanities (DH) projects created at Fresno State to illustrate the ways in which intersectional, feminist DH can both facilitate the transformation from student into scholar and make a social justice intervention in academic discourses. Through examining student-engaged projects, based on intersectional and feminist DH design principles (informed by Roopika Risam, Pamela Caughie, and Suzanne Churchill et all, in addition to many others), Foster shows that DH can create necessary revolutions in teaching, student experience, and the way in which scholarship is conducted and addressed. Focusing specifically on the Special Collections and DH exhibition Surveying Utopias: A Critical Exploration and the extended and virtual reality (XR/VR) exhibition Modernisms — Xtended, this talk demonstrates how students used DH to engage in powerful historical recouperations that recover multiple visions from the past to formulate a variety of ways to create a better world in the future.