Category: Student Voices

March 22, 2023 English Corner Student Voices, Student Voices

A student-to-scholar transformation

Pictured L-R: Dr. Christian Smith, Dr. Emma Howes, Kelsie Crough, Jennifer Terry, and Peyton Barrett

For many student writers, attending a nationwide conference and presenting original work is one of the first steps to establishing their professional identities. On March 29-April 1, 2023, three students from the English department will, for the first time, attend a Sigma Tau Delta (STD) conference in Denver, Co. to showcase their work.

Sigma Tau Delta is an international English Honors Society that provides spaces for networking and honors graduate and undergraduate research in English studies. The conference invites its chapters and respective advisors from various universities across the globe to share experiences and ideas, be recognized for their achievements, and meet numerous respected authors. Aside from present their own work, students at this conference will celebrate Toni Morrison’s contributions to the English field; attend a lecture with Nicky Beer, writer and poetry professor at the University of Colorado Denver; and explore Brenda Peynado’s short story collection The Rock Eaters. We had a chance to chat with the three students attending, all of whom are also officers in the CCU chapter of Sigma Tau Delta: Jennifer Terry (president), Kelsie Crough (co-vice president), and Peyton Barrett (treasurer). The students discussed both their conference presentations and their expectations.

Terry will present three original poems: “Drifting Too Far,” “Pawn Shop Electric Bills,” and “Adoration of the Ages,” the latter of which has recently been published by LoftBooks. All three poems focus on the different manifestations of love. “Since poetry is part of who I am,” said Terry, “it made sense for me to submit [poems] to the conference.” Terry noted that since Coastal Carolina University’s chapter of STD has not been to the national conference in many years, she has high expectations for the event.

Since poetry is who I am, it made sense for me to submit [poems] to the conference.

Jennifer terry

“I am most looking forward to exploring a new place with Kelsie, Peyton, and the advisers while we interact with other chapters of the Sigma Tau Delta organization and listen to some great readings of all sorts of writing and research,” said Terry.

  Crough will present “Fire in the Glass House,” an original short story she wrote in a Fiction II class with Jason Ockert, professor of creative writing. The second-person narrative employs magical realism in its exploration of Crough’s anxieties about losing a loved one. “I chose this piece for a few reasons,” said Crough. “First, I believed that it highlighted my skill as a writer and showed an emotional depth to my writing. Second, it was an unpublished piece that felt…ready for the world to see.” Like Terry, Crough is excited to meet and network with other writers, yet she is also eager to present her work to a large, professional audience for the first time. The conference presentation is “such a unique experience that not a lot of young writers get to do,” said Crough, “and I am looking forward to getting that experience and making memories that I can reflect on as I grow as a writer.”

Crough presented her poem at a recent Brown Bag Lunch event, sponsored by the English department’s Student Success Committee

 Barrett will present an academic paper on discourse surrounding sexual violence, specifically regarding agency and how we can relocate that agency to benefit victims of sexual violence. Barrett’s interest in the topic stemmed from her composition and rhetoric course with Dr. Howes, a CCU associate professor in Composition and Rhetoric and one of the advisors for Coastal’s STD chapter. Through her research, Barrett found a significant lack of education surrounding sexual violence discourse—a fact she wanted to change. “I felt that this research was…something most people have never heard of or didn’t know much about,” said Barrett, “so it felt right to submit this paper for the Sigma Tau Delta conference.” Barrett is also excited to learn from the other writers presenting at the conference and to see what new conversations and pieces are entering English studies. “I know there will be a lot to learn and experience at this conference, and that’s probably the best part of this trip,” said Barrett.

Barrett presented her academic work at the Brown Bag Lunch event as a preview to the conference.

All three students said that support from their professors and friends, specifically Dr. Howes and Dr. Smith, another STD advisor and associate professor in Composition and Rhetoric, motivated them to attend this conference. “[Dr. Smith] was very encouraging to Kelsie, Peyton, and I about what we wanted to submit and was there for guidance if we needed it,” said Terry.

Smith urges current and prospective students in Sigma Tau Delta to submit their work to the next conference. “This is a fantastic opportunity,” said Smith, “and our students attend a school that sees that [and] is willing to help them get there.”

These students delivered a preview of their presentations at the recent departmental Brown Bag Lunch event, sponsored by the Student Success Committee.

February 7, 2023 English Corner Professor Profiles, Student Voices

Anna Mukamal, NEW (Fall 2022) assistant professor, Digital Culture and Design

  1. What is your area of specialty? 

I specialize in 20th and 21st century literature and the history (and futures!) of psychotherapy; intersectional feminist theories and pedagogies in the field of digital humanities (DH); and synthesizing computational text analysis (or distant reading) with formal analysis (close reading). In Digital Culture and Design, I am privileged to teach methods of ethical data collection and visualization as social justice tools; critical making interdisciplinary digital projects about pressing social issues like climate change and mental health; and digital resources, from archives to artificial intelligence, as tools for big, real-world humanities questions.

  1. What was the title of your master’s thesis or dissertation? 

My dissertation, The Therapeutic Encounter, is about the different shapes taken by the relationship between patient and therapist over the course of the 20st century and into the 21st: from the formal, embodied structures of Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1930s to the pervasiveness of virtual and automated modalities in the 2020s. I write in particular about how women and other marginalized patients, some well-known literary authors and other lesser-known individuals, use writing while in therapy as a tool to work through their relationships to gender, sexuality, race, and other aspects of minoritization. I see writing—often prescribed by the therapist—as a process of self-definition and self-transcendence that authorizes each individual to become the self she is, not the self others expect her to be. But I also look at the other side of writing, reading, to show how reading literature can feel like being in therapy because it helps us appreciate the conflicts and opportunities for growth that arise when we discover we do not know ourselves as well as we tend to think we do.

3. What is your current scholarly project?

I’m working on my next book project, The Us Generation: Mental Health and Social Justice. I’m interested in how mental health is “marketed” to Generation Z in narrative forms that might be more accessible than therapy itself: young adult (YA) novels, podcasts, television, and social media posts. I’m reading narratives across media forms, from Adib Khorram’s 2018 YA novel Darius the Great Is Not Okay to the recently revivified HBO series In Treatment (2021) in which a Black female therapist treats a diverse set of patients navigating racial reckoning and cancel culture, inequity and disability, all amidst the ongoing global pandemic. I’m also distant reading a large corpus of Gen Z discourse on the Internet, using computational tools such as word embedding models to show how this generation thinks through the tension between caring for the self and caring for the collective. I’m finding that, while this may have seemed paradoxical to previous generations, Gen Z uses therapeutic vocabulary and concepts to advocate for social justice movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and Fridays for Future.

  1. What and where was your previous position? 

I earned my PhD in English and Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from Stanford University in California in 2022. I was a Project Manager for the feminist DH project The Modernist Archives Publishing Project and a Core Research Member of the Stanford Literary Lab, a research collective that uses computational tools to study literature and culture. Before that, I was an undergraduate double-major in English and Spanish (and also learned French!) at Duke University in North Carolina.

  1. What is your favorite assignment to assign?

This is a tough one! I’m currently jazzed about the hybrid collaborative/individual project my students and I are working on in my DCD 300: Special Topics in Digital Studies course on Banned Books from a Digital Perspective. We’re collectively writing and creating data visualizations about who book banning disproportionately affects on a national level. Each of us is also writing and researching an individual “case study” of any banned book we choose, from children’s to young adult to adult to poetry. I want to empower us to use data-driven storytelling—from individual accounts of how reading helps us understand the complexities of identity to geographic regions most affected by book banning and related legislation—to speak out against the silencing of marginalized stories.

  1. What was the last book you read? 

I’m the kind of person who reads several books at once! I am relishing Amy E. Elkins’s magnificent book Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Stephanie Springgay’s Feltness: Research-Creation, Socially Engaged Art, and Affective Pedagogies (Duke University Press, 2022), both brilliant scholarly works that inspire me in their beauty of expression as I finesse my first book manuscript, The Therapeutic Encounter. I’m bolstered in my commitment to lived feminisms by Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! (Duke University Press, 2021), which is about complaint, particularly against gender-based violence, as feminist pedagogy. And I’m reading Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer for the Banned Books Club organized by my colleagues, Dr. Ellen Arnold and Dr. Tabitha Lowery in English.

  1. What do you enjoy most about CCU so far? 

I love working with my office door open in the Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts building because it’s such a vibrant space! From the Black Box Theater to the John Cage, the painting and ceramics studios to the FabLab, the Digital Production Studio to the Athenaeum Press, there is so much artistic vitality in our College. I feel energized by the collaborative spirit across Departments and the talent I’m lucky to be surrounded by every day.

April 20, 2021 English Corner Student Voices, Student Voices Post a Comment

A Prize-Winning Poetic Performance

We don’t always think of poetry as a performance art. Though it’s fundamentally designed to be spoken, poetry is frequently considered to be a solitary pursuit, with the creator focused inward. CCU senior Aliza Saper, physical theater major and winner of the Spring 2021 Paul Rice Poetry Broadside Contest with her work “To Eat and Be Eaten,” brings the dynamic nature of poetry back to its rightful place: front and center stage.

Aliza Saper reading her piece, To Eat and Be Eaten

Saper’s winning work is a reflection on the nature of space, the passage of time, and a permeating anxiety that she believes afflicts everyone in a Covid-19 world.

“This is my Covid life,” Saper said of her winning work, which was judged by poet Abraham Smith. “I think we all have a version of this right now. The problems that we’re facing, the struggles that we’re having, are all compounded together.”

Saper edited and submitted the poem from her childhood bedroom, the same place she inhabited the entire pandemic. The focus on space in the poem blends with a chronic worry that Saper fears is an unavoidable symptom of the pandemic.

“It really has been a time of, ‘If it’s not this thing that’s eating at me, then it’s this thing,’” said Saper. “And then it almost feels abnormal to be at peace and not be worrying — we have become so used to that little eating-away-at-you feeling that something’s wrong, something bad is going to happen.”

Saper has certainly gained notoriety for her verse in her final semester at CCU; in addition to her Paul Rice Poetry Broadside Contest honor, Saper also won the inaugural commencement poetry contest, open to all pending graduates of the E. Craig Wall Sr. College of Business Administration and the Thomas W. Edwards and Robin Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts, established for the combined ceremony for students of the two colleges. Saper’s winning work, “Inches,” will be presented at commencement.

Joe Oestreich, chair and professor of the Department of English, said Saper’s approach transcends mere reflection on a given subject.

“What I love about her work, and this commencement poem specifically, is how she gets beyond the sentimentalized, conventional wisdom of her topic to the truth with a capital ‘T,'”said Oestreich.

Theater has always been the center of Saper’s artistic life, with poetry serving as a side hobby. Her discovery of poetry as performance occurred during a gap year she took after attending Illinois Wesleyan University for one year. At home in Denver and feeling a bit pigeonholed, Saper dared herself to attend the weekly poetry slam at the Mercury Café.

People liked my words, and I was shocked.

“I went, and it was one of those magical moments in life when I was in the right place at the right time,” said Saper. “I had written poetry before — that wasn’t new — but performing it was. People liked my words, and I was shocked.”

Saper enrolled in CCU’s physical theater program the following year, and during that time she founded Tongues in Common, a monthly poetry open mic night at Yoga in Common in Myrtle Beach. Established in February 2019, the student-run program continues today as an outlet for artistic performance, growth, and connection.

This year’s Paul Rice Poetry Broadside Contest was Saper’s first experience submitting her work, and she encourages other students to do the same, emphasizing the concept of pulling out work that’s already been produced and polishing it up.

“Giving life to old work is sometimes more accessible and more fulfilling that even producing something new,” said Saper. “That idea is really well taught to the physical theater majors: work never dies. I think we’re so used to having our work die. We get an assignment to make this project, and we organize it, and we show it in class, and we get a grade on it, and it evaporates after that. But that’s always raw material. Once you make something, it’s raw material.”

Saper credits Jessica Richardson, associate professor of creative writing in the Department of English, with guiding her, an artist who typically wrote poetry for the ear, toward learning how to edit for the eye.

“I write poetry for performance, so I never thought about the importance of details such as punctuation and line placement,” said Saper. “It was a fascinating experience.”

August 7, 2020 Student Voices 6 Comments

Sandy Island School Nomination Headed for National Review

CCU-led Nomination of Building on Final Review of 
National Register of Historic Places

The Sandy Island School is only one step away from being added to the National Register of Historic Places. The South Carolina State Board of Review approved the nomination for the school to be added to the register as a significant cultural, historic, and architectural space.

The Sandy Island School, located in Georgetown County, served one of the last island communities only accessible by boat. Its construction in 1932 was financed by Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington, the philanthropists who founded Brookgreen Gardens. From 1932 through 1966, the school taught children in first through eighth grades. It was converted into a senior and community center and later a library for island residents, which is still in use today.

The nomination is also significant for its connection to Prince Washington, a leader on Sandy Island, who sold the land to Archer Huntington for the school, ferried the school boat across the Waccamaw, and helped organize adult education courses at the school. Washington led efforts to bring electricity and telephone to the island in 1963 and 1965.

Eric Crawford, director of Coastal Carolina University’s Charles Joyner Institute for Gullah and African Diaspora Studies, and Alli Crandell, director of CCU’s Athenaeum Press, spearheaded the research and writing of the nomination, collaborating throughout the process with Brookgreen Gardens, Sandy Island community members, and CCU students.

Several Sandy Island community members, many of whom are alumni of the school, spoke on the significance of the nomination at the state board review meeting. Some residents spoke from the school building itself.

Charles Pyatt, who has been a leader in preserving the school, talked about the broad scope of the school’s impact.

“The nomination honors the foundation on which the school was built. You think about all the people who were educated here, who have gone on to become doctors, lawyers, military officers, and my brother [Isaac Pyatt], who became the Magistrate Judge of Georgetown County,” said Pyatt. “It’s really profound. It’s hard for me to put into words what it means.”

Yvonne Tucker-Harris linked the school’s history to the island itself.

“My daughter asks about this big building every time she visits Sandy Island,” said Tucker-Harris. “The story of this school is the story of this community.”

The nomination is part of the larger Sandy Island Cultural Initiative, a collaborative effort among Coastal Carolina University, the Sandy Island Community, Brookgreen Gardens, and Georgetown County. This initiative is funded by an African American Civil Rights grant from the National Park Service, which also supports the planning and rehabilitation of the school into a multi-use interpretation and gathering space for the community and visitors.

The research team first drafted the nomination to focus on the community support of the school that created a high-quality education for Sandy Island children, but through further conversations discovered that the school was an important part of voting rights.

During the 1950s and 1960s, black voters were subject to intimidating citizenship and literacy tests that were designed to impede them from voting. Prince Washington and community leaders, inspired by the Citizenship School movement near Charleston, set up adult courses in the Sandy Island School to help its pupils pass these restrictive tests. Of the 94 reported schools around South Carolina, researchers have previously identified the locations of only four near the Charleston area. The team hopes that finding two of these locations (Plantersville and Sandy Island) will inspire the identification of other adult education sites.

The final step for the school’s addition to the National Register of Historic Places is receiving approval from the Department of the Interior. That is expected to happen in August 2020.

More information about the grant project can be found on the Athenaeum Press’ website: http://projects.ccu.press/lowtide/nps-civil-rights-grant/

April 20, 2020 Student Voices Post a Comment

Student radio station WCCU and Provost Dan Ennis

students in WCCU

WCCU, Coastal Carolina University’s student-run radio station, conducted an interview with Provost Dan Ennis last week. Students asked a series of questions for Provost Ennis about decisions around graduation and COVID-19 safety.

Listen to WCCU live for more interviews and original programming.

Part I:

WCCU’s interview with Provost Dan Ennis of Coastal Carolina University.

Part II:

Part 2 of WCCU’s Interview with Provost Dan Ennis.
April 7, 2020 Student Voices Post a Comment

Resilience in the age of unpredictability

I think it is safe to say that I have had an abnormal graduate experience. My first semester, Fall 2018, was disarranged due to Hurricane Florence and the subsequent flooding of Conway. Fall 2019 saw the damage that Hurricane Dorian brought to South Carolina, and the latest Coronavirus outbreak has taken my final semester completely online. However, things this time around have not been as bad for me personally.

My only class this semester is my capstone course, MALS 799, where I am writing my thesis paper. Thankfully, most of my research can be completed online and I can hold virtual meetings with my advisor. Technology has been a godsend this semester.

I work for the Athenaeum Press on campus, where we publish student work into books or online experiences. While it is much easier to conduct meetings in person with the undergrad students and professors, we have been able to work with Slack and Zoom to keep our workflow running as smoothly as possible. I am grateful for the technology integration that CCU has implemented to keep our academic life continuing. While the three-week break from Hurricane Florence was nice in some respects, cramming the rest of that semester in was extraordinarily difficult when I had two major papers to write in a couple months.

One of the hardest things I have found during the last couple weeks is to force myself to get up and start working, whether that be on my paper, or work itself. My office environment on campus allows me to focus on what needs to be done, but working from home is an entirely different beast. There are simply so many distractions, from YouTube being just a click away to my dog wandering into my room at any given time. What works for me is to create something of a routine. Wake up, work, then relax. It reminds me of my normal work day, so it seems to feel normal.

My heart goes out to all members of the Coastal family. Some of you have been personally affected by the Coronavirus, and I cannot begin to imagine to pain and difficulty that must bring. Hopefully we can all continue to do our part and put this thing behind us.

April 1, 2020 Student Voices Post a Comment

Stageless but still standing

My name is Tessa Belongia and I am a BFA Musical Theatre Senior who will be spending the rest of her time at CCU doing virtual learning. You can imagine the struggle doing a performance-based degree online. I will admit that I was incredibly nervous and feeling a bit overwhelmed when CCU announced that we would be switching to online classes because I have been known not to be great with technology.

We are just beginning virtual learning, and right off the bat, my professors have made this transition as easy as possible. They are working with us individually to make sure we have access to all of the required materials and technology. After just a few days of communicating with my professors and testing out Zoom and Slack and every other source, I feel confident about proceeding with this semester online. I am so thankful for CCU and its professors and everything they have done for me over the past four years.

I have been filling my time at home with crocheting, cooking, watching movies, cleaning and making music with my friends. I have made over a dozen scrunchies and even deep-cleaned my bathroom. I decided to stay in Conway with my roommates and spend as much time with them as I can before school is over and we all go our separate ways. We make family dinners and spend a lot of wonderful quality time together. The other day we went to the beach to soak up a few hours of sunlight and get out of the house. We are doing little things to make sure we are taking care of our mental health.

This has been a very emotional time for all of the students, especially the seniors who didn’t expect their last semester in school to end the way it did, but we are staying connected as a community and lifting each other up. I hope to spend the next few weeks working hard in my classes and growing as an artist. Chants up!

March 30, 2020 Student Voices Post a Comment

Learning, but not loving, the new normal

Students may wonder, “How did I get here?”

Bad news keeps on coming, doesn’t it? What was supposed to be a midpoint reprieve quickly turned into Spring Break: Doomsday Edition for all of us. Social distancing. Hourly social media check-ins. Stocking pantries with money we don’t have. The list goes on.

So much change in one week’s time. It feels like days have been stretched into weeks and weeks stretched to months. Who’s to say what our campus will look like come this Friday? No doubt we’re all anxious for this quarantine to be over.

But life keeps going. No one is alone. We will all get through this one step at a time.

I’m in a fortunate situation where my academic world hasn’t entirely been rocked. As a graduate student in my last semester (!!), my capstone class only meets once per month, my independent thesis once per week. My classes have practically been remote since the start, but that doesn’t mean I’m any less stressed. The momentum to keep going has slowed to a halt, as I’m sure it has for you, too.

Working remote is a different beast, one intent on distraction. Just when you thought you’ve knocked it down, it stands right back up. And I’m guilty of not always being the most responsible when working remote, but I’m getting better!

I’ve found that the hardest part to working at home is tricking my brain into differentiating work time and leisure time. Remote work requires different skills and discipline for sure, but with practice and consistency, every student can get through the next few weeks successfully. These are just a handful of things I’ve found that work for me:

  • Get out of your PJs.
  • Set weekly deadlines.
  • Create daily task lists.
  • Review your accomplishments before bed. Plan for the next day.
  • But don’t overload your daily schedule; adhere to a cutoff point.
  • Repeat to yourself: what can I conceivably accomplish today? And then execute.
  • Remind yourself of the schedule you adhered to in the classroom and apply it to your new workspace.

Of course, taking advice is much easier than acting. This is your time to find the process that works best for you. With discipline and determination, I know you can do it.

To contradict myself, however, it’s equally important to learn when to put away the work. No doubt stress and anxiety are at an all-time high. If you’re anything like me, you might be caught in an endless loop of scrolling through social media feeds. While it is important and responsible to stay connected, remember the hobbies that fulfill you and lean into them. Turn on Netflix; I hear their “Party” feature allows movie nights while social distancing. Blast some music. Lose yourself in a book. As for me, I’ve been leaning heavily into gaming. I’m staying connected with my friends online, despite the lonely isolation.

When you’re stuck at home with looming responsibilities, the it’s natural to look toward your distractions. Through our second week of Spring Break I’m doing the best I can to strike that necessary balance between work and leisure. With consistency, I’m confident I’ll make it through the other side, and I know you will, too.

March 30, 2020 Student Voices Post a Comment

Idle Hands and All That

Distractions, anyone?

Confession time: I’ve always been a bit of a homebody. While some of my friends would go out and party or go to a sporting event, I’ve always just been more comfortable with a book or a movie. Ultimately, staying inside has never really been a problem for me, but this whole situation has really messed with me in another way. As anyone who knows me could probably tell you, I’ve always been bad at managing time. Whether it was spending a whole weekend playing video games or getting particularly engrossed in a good book and losing a day somewhere between those pages, I could, for better or worse, always depend on work or classes to ground myself during the week. There was a time for class, a time for work, and a time for the rest of the things that I’m sure should be done (but eventually just devolved into YouTube or video games). I’ve been dependent on this work/life balance for a while now and this whole situation has been kind of upsetting on that front.

Since campus closed, I’ve been finding myself working late into the night on assignments that I would normally break up into multiple days, getting sidetracked on tangents that eventually devolve into digging through the depths of Wikipedia in search of obscure information, and ignoring alarms that I used to revolve my life around. There’s a lot of anxiety going on right now in the world, a lot of fear, and I think that I’ve just kind of been keeping busy as a kind of defense mechanism.

But I’ve also found time for some of the things that had kind of fallen to the wayside. I’ve reconnected with some friends from high school over Facebook, picked up old hobbies that I’d set aside when I didn’t have time for them anymore, and I’ve finally gotten around to putting together some of the exercise equipment that has been sitting in the garage for a while.. now to see if I actually end up using it. But heck, it’s not like I don’t have the time. But what I’m saying is that just because we’re stuck at home, it doesn’t mean that we have to be bored, you know? As long as you’re doing something, anything really, and you’re staying away from other people, you’re fighting the good fight.

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