Please join us for the March event in our United We Read: Graduate Student-Faculty Reading Series, hosted by Art Bar! This month’s readers are Rebecca Baumann, Daphne Daugherty, Danielle Harms, and Professor Valerie Laken.

Please join us for the Gerald J. Alred Professional Writing Awards Challenge Ceremony to honor our Spring 2022 and Fall 2022 student winners!

Honorees

Spring 2022

First Place: Thunder Milroy, Second Place: Lauren Anding, Third Place: Chloe Uphoff, Honorable Mention: Zak Klug, Sebastian Laverde

Fall 2022

First Place: Erick Nicia, Second Place (tie): Rebecca Rodefer, Second Place (tie): Michaela Englund, Third Place (tie): Emily Schnaare, Third Place (tie): Isabella Buettner

This event is sponsored by the UWM Professional Writing Program Instructors, the UWM Department of English, the UWM College of Letters & Science, Macmillan Learning, and the Milwaukee Business Journal.

Attend virtually on Friday, February 24 at 10:30am for the Ceremony here.

Join us for a two-part event with visiting scholars & Panther alumni Dr. Bridget Kies (PhD 2018) & Dr. Megan Connor (MA 2015)! Both events will be held in Curtin Hall, Room 368.

10:30 – 11:30 AM: Career Panel (Curtin 368)

Participate in a panel discussion of our guests’ experiences with the academic and alt-academic job market and brainstorm ideas for post-graduate school careers. Coffee & Morning Snacks to be served.

2:30 – 4:00 PM: Book Talk / Q&A – Fandom, The Next Generation

Imagine a Millennial parent taking their child to see The Last Jedi after their Baby Boomer parents took them to see Return of the Jedi. Picture longtime friends attending a Backstreet Boys reunion concert as adults. For better or worse, reboots, remakes, and revivals are now a standard media industry practice. New modes of distribution and exhibition have further changed fans’ abilities to encounter or re-encounter media texts. Bridget Kies (UWM Phd 2018) and Megan Connor (UWM MA 2015) offer one of the first close studies of fan generations, looking at how these generations are influenced by and, in turn, influence technologies, industry practices, and social and political changes.

Bridget Kies is assistant professor of Film Studies and Production at Oakland University, where she also serves on the executive committee for the Women and Gender Studies program. Her research on sexualities and media fandoms has been published in the journals Feminist Media Histories, Science Fiction Film and Television, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Intensities, as well as several edited collections. With Megan Connor, she is co-editor of Fandom, the Next Generation (2022). She has also co-edited issues of Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture and Participations. She is currently writing a book about the enduring popularity of Murder, She Wrote.

Megan Connor received her PhD from Indiana University’s Media School, where she now serves as research coordinator at the Institute for Communication Research. Her research examines girls’ media, celebrity, and fandom. Her dissertation used an archive of teen magazines such as Seventeen and Teen Vogue to explore the construction and promotion of celebrity girlhood in the 2000s as an idealized form of youthful femininity. With Bridget Kies, Megan is co-editor of Fandom, the Next Generation (2022). Her work has been published in The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (2019) and the journal Black Camera, where she also served as managing editor for several years.

Please join us for the first event in our United We Read: Graduate Student-Faculty Reading Series for Spring 2023, hosted by Sugar Maple! This month’s readers are Sean Enfield, Kathryne David Gargano, Brandon Henry, and Professor Brenda Cárdenas.