2017-2018
The Department of English Research Workshop Series is a platform for discussing research that is at any stage of planning or implementation. Presenters will describe some research that they have been working on for some time, have just started working on, or are thinking about working on in the future. Attendees will ask questions and try to brainstorm ideas in an attempt to help the presenter fine tune his/her methodology, research questions, or anything else that attendees may think of.
The two aims of this research workshop series are: 1) for presenters to share their research processes, approaches, and methods so that attendees can all get ideas and learn from others’ research experiences; 2) for presenters to get ideas from attendees’ questions and suggestions, so that they can refine and improve their research methods. It is hoped that attendees, both students and colleagues, will learn some new things about the research process, and that they will then adopt whatever they like, e.g., a particular presenter’s approach to coming up with new ideas, a way of formulating research questions, a reason for choosing a particular methodology, etc.
All students and faculty are welcome and encouraged to attend. No registration is required. Do not worry about asking questions or offering advice. It is perfectly acceptable to just show up, observe, and learn. But you may surprise yourself—you might actually think of some good advice for the presenter! And it would be a shame for presenters to miss that opportunity, so please do come.
/// Speaker: John C. Wakefield ///
Date: Monday 25 September 2017 {fb}
Topic: English Loanwords in Cantonese: How Their Meanings Have Changed
In this seminar John C. Wakefield will describe some research that he has begun, and which he plans to expand on. He will then solicit suggestions for how to improve his methodology. This research relates to a recently written paper that describes the semantic change of six English loanwords in Cantonese: sot1 “short”; ku1 “cool”; hep1pi2 “happy”; ang1kou4 “uncle”; haai1 “high”; on1si2 “ounce”. {Click here to read more information about this workshop.}
/// Speaker: Jason S. Polley ///
Date: Monday 16 October 2017 {fb}
Topic: The Burmese Way and the High Way; Or, A Beer a Beer my Freedom for a Beer—A memoir of an aborted deportation
In the spirit of creative criticism and the blending or dissolution of classical genre paradigms—see, for instance, Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933), Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1953), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Hunter S Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Hayden White’s “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (1974), Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2001), and Affleck’s I’m Still Here (2010)—this seminar aims to investigate the means by which I should produce and disseminate the tentatively titled text-in-process named just before the beginning of this sentence. That first sentence exposed my strategies to all culture freaks and criticism geeks. It, that first sentence, encoded and/or included the following key words, some or all of which I hope to address in this interactive—Socratic rather than pontific—seminar. {Click here to read more information about this workshop}
/// Speaker: Robert Fuchs ///
Date: Monday 6 November 2017 {fb}
/// Speaker: Magdalen Ki Wing Chi ///
Date: Monday 27 November 2017 {fb}
/// Speaker: Winnie Chor Oi Wan ///
Date: Monday 22 January 2018 {fb}
/// Speaker: Jason Eng Hun Lee ///
Date: Monday 12 February 2018 {fb}
/// Speaker: Lian-Hee Wee ///
Date: Monday 5 March 2018 {fb}
/// Speaker: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho ///
Monday 26 March 2018 {fb}
Topic: Cantonese in Anglophone Literature
/// Speaker: Stuart C. F. Christie ///
Date: Monday 16 April 2018 {fb}
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