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Electronic Literature Organization moves to WSU Vancouver

The Electronic Literature Organization, which promotes and preserves “born-digital literature,” is moving west to Washington State University Vancouver from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dene Grigar
Grigar

WSU Vancouver, where organization president Dene Grigar is a professor and director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program, will host the 20-year-old organization, which migrates around the U.S. periodically, for the next five years.

Grigar said the premise of born-digital literature is that “the computer can be used as a form of creative expression.” It’s also a genre that must be read electronically; “it’s not like Emily Dickinson on the web,” she said. As examples, she cited poet Thom Swiss’ “Shy Boy,” which features music, scheduling and text animation, and screenwriter Kate Tullinger’s interactive digital novel “Inanimate Alice,” among others.

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The Oregonian

WSU News

May 16: WSU Museum of Art summer exhibit opens

The Museum of Art/WSU will present its summer exhibit “Points of Interest: Reflections on Place,” May 16-June 30.

Art

This exhibit offers a glimpse into the idea of place through the works of four WSU faculty members, including Ruth Boden, associate professor of music; Kevin Haas, professor of art/printmaking; Taiji Miyasaka, associate professor of architecture; and Linda Russo, clinical associate professor of English and poetry.

Each artist provides a unique, multifaceted view of place through their creativity and research. Supplementing and providing context to their inquiries will be selections of place-based works drawn from the museum’s permanent collection of over 3500 objects.

Admission to the exhibit is free.

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WSU News

Ask Dr. Universe: Why do we find some things scary?

While our fears might be different, we all get scared sometimes. Perhaps for you it’s spiders, the dark, or the thought of monsters under your bed.

Michael Delahoyde
Delahoyde

My friend Michael Delahoyde is really curious about what freaks us out. As an English professor at Washington State University, he’s even taught a course about monsters.

Delahoyde explained that our brains like to categorize information to help us make sense of our world. But monsters sort of live between different categories.

“We are comfortable with animals. We are comfortable with humans. We’ve got the distinctions down,” Delahoyde said. “But when you have a monster, like a werewolf who is somewhere in the middle, then it freaks us out.”

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Dr. Universe

Kiggins presents radio-drama production of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’

If the spectacle of a rich and famous man repeatedly forcing himself upon innocent women freaks you out, stay away from the Kiggins Theatre on Thursday night. Portland radio dramatist Sam Mowry and his Willamette Radio Workshop have unleashed Martian invaders at the Kiggins during several recent Halloween seasons. But this year they’ll bring the vampire back to life instead. Or, that is, back to un-death.

“Dracula” is so effective because it invokes a sly and seductive menace that absorbs and transforms what it touches, according to John Barber, who teaches in Washington State University Vancouver’s Creative Media and Digital Culture program, and who first facilitated bringing Mowry and crew to the Kiggins years ago as part of a project called “Reimagined Radio.”

“The novel examines society’s fears of the unnatural during late 19th- and 20th-century Victorian society,” he said. “The focus of its many interpretations has come to be how abnormality can evolve from one source and infect the surrounding society with discord, misfortunes and evil. Dracula, the vampire, infects others with his evil.”

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The Columbian

WSU Writing Program ranks among top in nation

The Writing Program at Washington State University again has been named among the 21 best in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. WSU is the only institution in the Northwest to “typically make the writing process a priority at all levels of instruction and across the curriculum,” according to the rankings criteria.

Victor Villanueva
Victor Villanueva

“It is a great honor to be recognized publicly for the positive affect we have on students and their academic programs,” said Victor Villanueva, Writing Program director and WSU Regents professor of English. “To be on this list of top programs means we are on the radar of university officers and administrators across the U.S.”

Of the seven institutions on the list west of the Mississippi River, those closest to WSU are Stanford and the University of California-Davis. Other top schools across the nation include Brown, Cornell, Duke, Harvard and Princeton.

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WSU News