Footnotes: The Department Newsletter

Volume 52 | January 28, 2008| Number 17

FROM THE GRADUATE STUDIES OFFICE 

Conference Travel Grants
Applications for Spring 2008 Conference Travel Grants have been placed in mailboxes. If you did not receive an application please stop by the Grad Studies Office. Applications are due in 210 EB on February 18.

Dissertation Travel Grants
Information regarding Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grants has been distributed to mailboxes. If you did not receive the information but feel that you should have, please see Stephanie in 210 EB. Applications are due February 26.

Student Fellowships for 2008-09
Instructions for applying for 2008-09 fellowships were emailed on Friday, January 18.  If you would like a paper copy of these instructions please see Stephanie Shockey.  Applications are due in 210 EB on March 7, 2008.

Fellowship Payment
Graduate students on fellowship for the Spring semester (1/16/08-5/15/08), will receive their first fellowship payment on 2/16/08 and their last payment on 5/16/08.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

Spring 2008 – Dates to Remember
January 28: Last day to add/drop a semester course on Web Self-Service
January 28: Last day to add a first-half session course
February 22: Last day to add a semester course at OAR without department approval
February 22: Last day to elect or change credit/no-credit option for a first half-session course
February 22: Last day to drop a first half-session course
March 10: Second half-session courses begin
March 15-23: Spring Break
March 14: Instruction resumes
April 4: Last day to add a second half-session course
April 4: Last day to add name to May degree list
April 11: Last day to withdraw from a current term without a grade of W
April 11: Last day to elect/change credit/no-credit option for a semester course
April 11: Last day for student to drop a semester course without a grade of W (without
approval)
April 11: Last day to take final exam for May doctoral degree
April 25: Last day to elect/change credit/no-credit option for a second half-session course
April 25: Last day to drop a second half-session course
April 25: Last day to deposit May master’s theses
April 30: Last day of instruction
May 1: Reading Day
May 1: Last day to add or drop a semester course with approval (a W is recorded)
May 1: Last day to remove an I grade from fall 2007 to prevent F by rule
May 2-9: Final examination period
May 2 : Last day to deposit May doctoral dissertations
May 11: May degree conferral (Commencement)

 

REMINDER TO FACULTY AND GRADUATE STUDENTS

Second Reminder
It is the policy of our department to keep a copy of all syllabi on file for each semester. If you have not turned in a syllabus for each course you are teaching this semester, please make sure Maureen in room 200 EB gets a copy as soon as possible.

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value
April 11-13, 2008
University of Minnesota
Deadline for Submissions: February 15, 2008

The university is in crisis. This crisis, evident in the everyday transformations of higher education, is made most visible during moments of labor struggle. Like universities across the world, the University of Minnesota has recently experienced an explosion of labor struggles, themselves symptomatic of the tendencies existing in this increasingly neo-liberal institution. Unfortunately, our struggles have been hampered by an intellectual and organizational lag, which has made it difficult for us to adequately respond to these crises. As a result, at key moments we have been unable to rethink fundamental assumptions about the university and, as a result, have fallen back on idealist notions of a university somehow removed from the world, have reproduced the language of an already existing "public university," and have sought comfort in legislative and institutional remedies.  

It is because of the need to radically rethink our political strategy that we invite you to join us in the project of rethinking the University of Minnesota as well as the concept of "the university" itself. It is our belief that a militant struggle over higher education requires a militant rethinking of the languages, organizations, and foundational assumptions upon which the battle over higher education takes place. To this end, we want to collectively think about questions such as: What is the role of the university in the production of value within contemporary capitalism? What is the relationship between academic labor and various other forms of labor at the university? How can we reconsider the status of academic knowledge, research, and pedagogy in this context? How can we remake universities as agents for changing this context? What forms of university governance, collectives, and subjectivities would best facilitate projects for constituting the common world that we desire?

The purpose of this inquiry is not only to produce critique, but also to generate sites of resistance and viable alternatives to the corporate university. As such, we invite diverse responses to these questions including collaborative works, workshop presentations, and art (e.g. photo-essays, performance art, and film/video pieces), as well as traditional essay presentations. In addition to presentations that engage the problem of the university in late capitalism more generally, we also invite presentations that treat the specific case of University of Minnesota. We hope to put into conversation workers of all types: university staff, artists, lecturers, union organizers, students, professors, and community activists, all of whom have a stake in shaping the future of the university.

Potential topics might include (but are not limited to):
radical pedagogy
corporate funding, branding
labor organizing in the university
students as consumers
intellectual property
immaterial labor  
student  and faculty activism

 

FELLOWSHIPS

Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship deadline is Feb. 15
FLAS Fellowships support graduate study of foreign languages in combination with area studies or international studies. Academic year FLAS recipients receive full tuition, mandatory fees and a stipend ($15,000). Summer awards cover full tuition for a summer language program as well as required Illinois fees and a $2,500 stipend.

URL: http://www.ilint.uiuc.edu/flas/
Steven W Witt - swwitt@uiuc.edu
International Programs and Studies
 
For more information see file in 213 EB (Journals Room).

 

WORKSHOP

Announcing the "Introduction to TEI" Workshop
Are you interested in learning about electronic publishing in XML? "Introduction to TEI", a two and a half day hands-on workshop, will be offered on Friday, February 22nd, Saturday, February 23rd, and Sunday, February 24th, in the LIS Building. Experts from Brown University will teach the course, during which participants will learn how to create their own XML documents. Participants without prior experience working with markup are asked to introduce themselves to TEI and XML by reading through a suggested reading list, which will be provided after registration.

What is TEI?
According to the TEI website http://www.tei-c.org/, "the TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent." A seminal effort in the humanities computing community, its role in libraries is growing. GSLIS faculty members Allen Renear and John Unsworth have long been involved with the TEI community.

Participants will meet in room 52 of the LIS Building from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Friday and from approximately 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday. The cost is only $50 per person for UIUC faculty, staff, and alumni ($20 for current UIUC students), and you must sign up and pay in advance.

The instructors, Julia Flanders (Vice Chair of the TEI Consortium) and Syd Bauman (North American Editor of the TEI Guidelines), work at the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group http://www.stg.brown.edu/ on its major text encoding effort, the Women Writers Project http://www.wwp.brown.edu/. They are both involved in the activities of the TEI and the Association for Computers and the Humanities http://www.ach.org/.

Participation is currently limited to 31 people without their own laptops, plus 12 people who can bring their own laptop. (Those participants bringing laptops will need to install a free trial version of the <oXygen/> text editor on their computer prior to attending the workshop http://www.oxygenxml.com/. A registration waitlist will be kept if capacity is exceeded.

Email Sara Schmidt (saschmid@uiuc.edu) to reserve your spot, and please indicate whether you will be bringing your own laptop and which operating system it has. More information will follow to those who reserve spots. Please drop off your attendance fee with Sally Eakin in the GSLIS main office or mail a check or money order (made out to GSLIS) to:

Sally Eakin
TEI Workshop Fee
112 LIS Bldg.
501 E. Daniel St .
Champaign , IL 61820

If you have any questions, contact Sara Schmidt (saschmid@uiuc.edu).

Sponsored by: GSLIS, I-CHASS -- Illinois Center for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science, the University Library, the Illinois Informatics Institute, and EPRG.

Co-organized by: Christine Allen