Making a Difference: Research and Scholarship
What difference does the research of English Department faculty make? Here are a few examples.
Carlos Evia, Hispanic Construction Workers: Training and Safety
Hispanic construction workers in the United States have higher injury and fatality rates than construction workers as a whole. Worksite hazards are compounded by issues of language and culture. Hispanic construction workers may not know what type of work they are expected to do until they arrive at a jobsite, and they may have difficulty understanding supervisors? instructions in English. Analysis of these problems has been written from a United States-based managerial or training perspective that does not emphasize the rhetorical, cross-cultural, and political dimensions of the situation. Assistant Professor Carlos Evia, a specialist in professional writing and a native of Mexico, is particularly well suited to expand the understanding and then to provide recommendations and materials for solving the problem.
His research includes enthnography: collecting narrative profiles of Hispanic construction workers in the United States and Mexico to document their struggles, needs, job satisfaction, and professional experience. By comparing rhetorical, cultural, and professional differences, he will be able to propose methods for improving the safety and working conditions.
As his research progresses, Professor Evia will also develop and test training materials that will incorporate knowledge of cultural backgrounds in order to draw on the workers? prior knowledge. A result of customized training materials should be greater safety at construction sites and new knowledge about how to train workers in the US from other cultures.
Kelly Belanger, Rhetorics of Reform and College Athletics
Language influences social change. The way we talk and write about problems and goals influences the way we act and the policies we implement. But we know these statements more as principles than as strategies. Kelly Belanger, Associate Professor, is interested in how language influences the ongoing movement for gender equity in higher education. Specifically, she is exploring the dramatic gains made by women in athletics in the past 35 years under Title IX and more recent efforts to address equity issues for women faculty and students in engineering and the sciences.
In her research, Professor Belanger documents and analyzes the coordinated legal and political strategies that were called for to create the circumstances in which college women could actually benefit from changes mandated by Title IX. She examines the interplay of arguments in public and institutional discourses among both advocates and opponents of Title IX. She also interviews people who have been spokespersons and key sports figures who were affected by the changes and who helped to define what those changes would be.
Although Professor Belanger?s specific interest is gender equity in academia, the work has implications beyond this issue. An outcome will be increased understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of social change. As a result, future leaders of social change will have more knowledge of how to use language to pursue their goals. Professor Belanger also hopes to create a documentary suitable for PBS on the efforts to create the opportunities mandated by Title IX.
Steven Salaita, Legitimizing Arab American Studies within the Humanities
One almost invisible area of English Studies is Arab American literature, and, in turn, this literature is not well known in the United States. Steven Salaita, Assistant Professor of English, hopes to change that situation. Doing so could open conversations about culture, ethnicity, racism, politics, and literature.
Professor Salaita published three books in 2006, all on ethnic studies, focusing specifically on Native Americans, Arab Americans, and Palestinians. The books are Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan); Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes From and What it Means for Politics Today (Pluto Press); and The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse University Press).
Professor Salaita composed all three books hoping they would advance relevant conversations around a variety of literary, social, and political issues. He was particularly concerned with the uses of various political discourses in moral, popular, and literary environments. While all three books ended up looking quite different, all of them are trained on representing groups that have been underrepresented in English Studies: Native Americans, Arab Americans, and Palestinians. Thus, from a philosophical standpoint, he hopes the books will compel others to rethink both curricular and political questions and develop a better understanding of emergent literary traditions. From a practical standpoint, he hopes the books will usher others into productive dialogue around difficult but pervasive issues in today's United States. Consequences of the books may be the legitimization of Arab American Studies as a field of study within the humanities and social sciences; the advancement of interethnic methodologies in Native American Studies; the continued examination of Arab American literature; and scholarship that responds to and extends this work.
Paul Sorrentino, Correcting Biographical Information on Writers and Politicians
Professor Paul Sorrentino has an international reputation for his scholarship and literary criticism on the major American author Stephen Crane, most famous for The Red Badge of Courage. Among the more interesting outcomes of his research are two major discoveries. The first was of a massive, long-lost, private collection of unpublished Crane letters, manuscripts, and other valuable documents that no other scholar?except the person who had collected them?had ever seen. Unlike the typical research project, this one involved Paul?s encounter with thieves, his being stranded in Hawaii, and his daily encounter with two 80-pound dogs guarding the collection.
Professor Sorrentino also discovered that the most influential work on Crane in the twentieth century, a biography written by Thomas Beer in 1923, is a literary forgery. Beer altered the chronology of Crane's life; invented characters, scenes, anecdotes; suppressed information about Crane?s love affairs; and composed many of Crane's letters himself. Because of these fabrications and deceptions, such letters, accounts of incidents and persons, and chronology unverifiable from sources outside of Beer's writings must now be ignored in Crane biography and criticism. The implications of this conclusion are enormous, for every biography of Crane?as well as scores of books and articles on him?have relied on Beer's work. Previous interpretations of Crane's personality, his literary career, and the relationship between his life and art will be considerably challenged by these exclusions.
Unfortunately, Beer?s widely influential work has, like a computer virus, infected not only Crane scholarship but also literary histories of the 1890s as well as biographies of such important figures as Theodore Dreiser, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Theodore Roosevelt. Paul?s publications are helping to separate fact from fiction in American literary history. He is currently writing a new Crane biography that will incorporate his discoveries as well as new information he has recently unearthed.