Saturday, March 13, 2010

5:00pm - 6:00pm

Fringe Festival of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature

Festival City Mall (inside stage)

Join us at the EAFL's Fringe Festival in Festival City Mall on Saturday evening, March 13th to hear AUS Creative Writing students read their original works.

This event is unofficially organized by the seminar coordinator of the AUS Dept. of English Seminar Series and likewise is not an official AUS event. Poetry is a nation unto itself:

Khalisah Stevens

Mohammed al-Sabah

Nicholas Karavatos

Nour Merza

Patricia Fermazi

Sadaf Ahmad

Sara Hassanien

Sara Kassas

Sarah al-Shammari

Sidra Tariq

Vlad Sergio Fermazi

Poets will be reading on the interior stage at the waterfront side of the Festival City Mall (bringing poetry to the people?) and will be followed by a chamber music recital by someone who won a prize.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

2:00pm

Hall B (Main G42)

Of her presentation, Dr. Gunn writes: “Many Teacher Training programs, including MATESOL programs, encourage their trainees to be reflective practitioners. The MATESOL program at The American University of Sharjah (AUS) is no exception and offers the students many opportunities for reflection. This paper discusses my experience with one cohort’s reaction to being asked to reflect on their own teaching and learning in the final course of the program, Practicum in TESOL. Unlike other cohorts, several students in the class were showing what seemed on the surface to me as resistance to keeping a reflective journal and to examining their beliefs about teaching in learning in their lesson plans. Rather than deduct grades and otherwise force students into reflecting as per the course objective and assignments, I decided to conduct an Exploratory Practice investigation of this situation and search for a greater understanding of the students’ reactions and apparent resistance to the reflective assignments I gave them.”

Thursday , March 11, 2010

10:00am

Hall B (Main G42)

D.J. Taylor is the author of seven novels, including English Settlement (1996), winner of a Grinzane Cavour prize, Kept (2006) and, most recently, Ask Alice (2009). His new novel, At the Chime of a City Clock appears in spring 2010.

His non-fiction includes Orwell: The Life (2003), winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography, and Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940.

has just been accepted for  publication in Atenea Revista, a bi-lingual literary journal published by the English departemnt of the University of Puerto Rico.  

The book argues that human civilization will never achieve utopia unless humans reach a state of pure consciousness in which they will use their full mental potential and avoid making blunders in life that would undermine the possibility of a utopia.This book develops a non-teleological, comparative poetics between Western and Sanskrit literary traditions by analyzing their opposing theories of language, consciousness and meaning. 

Nearly all students at AUS take ENG 204 Advanced Academic Writing as part of their General Education requirements. As the culmination of the course they are required to write a research paper. Vidya Diwakar, a sophomore majoring in International Studies, entered her grade A paper in the Sharjah Islamic Bank (SIB) Student Research Awards for ENG 204 research paper and has won fourth prize. The award will be presented at a ceremony on February 10, 2010 at 7:00pm, in Lecture Hall A.
Research projects are evaluated according to 1) completeness of application; 2) depth of research/investigation; 3) communication and presentation; and 4) creativity
and innovation.

Vidya’s research paper is entitled ‘Social Psychology: A Study of the Situational Causes of Certain Kinds of Institutionalized Violence’. Her faculty sponsor is her ENG 204 instructor, Dr Peter Crompton.

Dr Crompton comments:
“I am delighted that the judges found a library-based research paper worthy of this award. Institutionalized violence is an important topic, seldom tackled in its own right. Vidya’s paper was creative in synthesizing perspectives on her topic from social psychology, literature, and recent history.”

Professor Judith Caesar grants her agreement to reprint her article entitled “, "Beyond Cultural Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”, in the upcoming publication of Contemporary Literary Criticism, v. 282, to be published by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning,  
on 2-5-2010

Dr. Ahmad Al-Issa ,Interim Head of the Department of English receives a grant along with Dr. Anissa Daoudi, a Research Fellow at the University of Durham in the UK, from the British Academy –International  Partnership Competition 2009. The research focuses on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) in the Arab world.

December 17-19, 2009
To be held at the American University of Sharjah, UAE

The American University of Sharjah and Zayed University, two of the leading institutions in the Gulf region, are happy to announce a joint conference on Bilingualism and Bilingual education in the Middle East. The theme of the conference is: Fostering Multiliteracies Through Education: Middle Eastern Perspectives
For more information please visit the website

Presenter: Dr. Dr. Anderson Araujo
Department of English
College of Arts and Sciences

Tuesday 17th November
Hall B in the Main Building at 12:30pm

From its etymological root in the Greek arkh ē—“beginning” or “government”—to its suffixal form, arkheion—“ruler’s house” or “public office”—the term “archive” has long connoted power. In her pacifist-feminist treatise, Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf “re-discovers” photography as the visual archive of phallocentric civilization. She illustrates her historiography of power, violence, and war with various newspaper photographs of university professors, heralds, a general, a judge, and an archbishop, all of whom appear in full regalia. Needless to say, all the subjects are male. For Woolf, the photographs expose patriarchy’s transhistorical narcissism and will to power: “Pictures and voices are the same to-day as they were 2,000 years ago.” As such, the attendant refrain of war also grinds out “like a gramophone whose needle has stuck.” The acoustic image recurs in the book as a token of human nature’s deep-rooted belligerence and chauvinism. Yet, I argue, it is the often-
cited but absent photographs of “dead bodies and ruined houses” from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) that she enlists to break this pattern of ruinous iteration. By textualizing (rather than visualizing) the Madrid massacres of 1936, she hopes that her readers will imaginatively recreate the horror of war and interrogate its cultural, political, and psychosexual sources. The absent photographs represent a conscious way to avoid aestheticizing and sensationalizing the massacres. I thus situate the text as an iconoclastic protest against the society of spectacle, a withholding of the prurient pleasure of gazing at the carnage from afar. Woolf, I suggest, deploys her anti-Fascist, feminist polemic as a kind of “anti-archive”—a site of resistance, rather than a passive repository.