Thursday, March 31, 2016

Visiting Artist Series: Gabriela Jauregui

Visiting Artist Lecture Series, The Dorothy Florence Zaninovich Fund, Todd Madigan Gallery & CSUB Department of Art present Gabriela Jauregui, April 5 Visual Arts Building, Room 103 at 4 p.m.



Gabriela Jauregui is the author of Leash Seeks Lost Bitch (The Song Cave/Sexto Piso, 2015), Controlled Decay (Akashic Books/Black Goat Press, 2008), a short story collection, La memoria de las cosas (Sexto Piso, 2015), and co-author of Taller de taquimecanografía (Tumbona ediciones, 2012). She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Riverside, and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside. Her creative and critical works as well as her translations have been published in journals, magazines and anthologies in the UK the US and Australia, as well as Mexico. She works as a correspondent for various cultural publications including the BBC World Service's Cultural Frontline, Witte de With's Review, Art Forum, Art Review and others. She is a founding member and editor of the sur+ publishing collective.

This event is free and open to the public.
For more information contact: jcaesar@csub.edu or tmgcsub@gmail.com
CSU Bakersfield 9001 Stockdale Highway, Bakersfield, CA 93311

Friday, March 25, 2016

The Passing of Dr. Solomon Iyasere




Dr. Solomon Iyasere spent a distinguished 44-year career at CSUB. He joined the CSUB faculty in the fall of 1972, having just earned a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. He earned an MS in Education from SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, New York in 1968 just one year after earning a BA with honors in English from SUNY. Solomon was hired as an assistant professor to teach Shakespeare and literary criticism at a fledgling, two-year-old “CSB” campus. Two years later in 1974, he received early tenure and promotion to associate professor and became a full professor in 1978. He received the Millie Ablin Excellence Award in Teaching in 1985-86; the Exceptional Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching in numerous years; was a Wang Award nominee; a Professor of the Year award nominee; and was one of 50 professors selected nationwide by the American Association for Higher Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for extraordinary leadership in teaching, scholarship, and service.

Solomon developed and taught more than 35 different courses here at CSUB. In addition to Shakespeare and literary criticism, his areas of specialization included creative writing, world literature, non-western literature, African literature, and African-American literature. He wrote extensively on the oral tradition in African and African American literature, which encompasses the use of proverbs, folk tales, myths, fables, and repetition. He was widely known as a scholar of African literature, a rhetorical critic, and essayist who distinguished Eurocentric and Afrocentric forms of literary criticism and the importance of employing both, “cultural formalism,” an analytical approach he pioneered, to validly analyze African and African-American literature. Of this need for cultural sensitivity he wrote, “To assess a work by foreign standards leads to a mutilation of the message and robs the communication of its vitality.”

His scholarship included literary critical analyses of Othello and Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula (with his wife, Dr. Marla Iyasere, CSUB’s Founding Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor of English Emerita). His essay, “Narrative Techniques in Things Fall Apart,” has been reprinted four times and is considered a definitive analysis of the most widely read and studied English language African novel. He was a frequent contributor to the journal Shakespeare in Africa. His conference presentations included “Racial Issues in Shakespeare’s Othello”; “Race Matters: Approaches to Shakespeare’s Othello”; “Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello to a Group of Multi-Racial Students”; and “Pardon Me, Professor, Why Do I have to Read Othello?”

In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Solomon’s record of service to the University is extensive. As the founding Director of Diversity Services (1988-92), he laid the groundwork for inclusive excellence, one of the core values that guides us and a pillar of our vision statement. He collaborated to establish effective diversity policies and strategic guidelines resulting in the hiring of diverse faculty and staff. He helped revise the GE curriculum to include multicultural and international dimensions, and designed the English Single Subject Teacher Preparation program to incorporate multiculturalism. He developed the MA in Teaching of English, which is now the cornerstone for educating community college writing teachers in the CSUB service region. He served as Chair of the Department of English and Communications (1992-97), co-founded the Career Beginnings Program and the Ernest Williams, Jr. Scholarship Fund, and served on numerous departmental and university-wide committees.

Solomon’s legacy includes his founding of Orpheus, the annual student literary journal. Since its establishment in 1973, the journal has published the work of more than 2,500 students, several of whom have become national award-winning writers and playwrights. The journal invites the submission of short stories, poems, paintings, and other creative works for publication in the 2015/2016 edition.

(from President Horace Mitchell's Memorandum to the Campus Community)

Thursday, March 10, 2016

CSUB's Dr. Strangelove

The B-Side, CSUB Communications Department's blog, has a profile of our English Department's own Charles MacQuarrie, also known as--apparently-- Dr. Strangelove.