Margaret Konkol
Justin Remhof
Ruth Osorio
Three scholars from the College of Arts & Letters will present their research as part of the college's annual Junior Faculty Forum on March 4 from 3 to 5:30 p.m. in the Burgess Room, 9024 BAL.
The Junior Faculty Forum has a long history in Arts & Letters and offers a venue where faculty who are relatively new to Â鶹´«Ã½ can showcase their work.
Speaking will be Margaret Konkol, assistant professor of English; Justin Remhof, assistant professor of philosophy & religious studies; and Ruth Osorio, assistant professor of women's studies and English.
The three faculty members summarize their talks below:
Konkol, "Prototyping Mina Loy's Alphabet": "This talk discusses the interpretive and methodological implications of using 3D printing technologies to prototype the archival diagrams of a proposed but never constructed plastic segmental alphabet letter kit - a game designed by Mina Loy for F.A.O. Schwarz. Although it is intended as a toy for young children, "The Alphabet that Builds Itself" is also a work of object typography which articulates a theory of language as kinetic, geometric, recombinant, and open to mutation. Alphabetic segments extend into the x, y, and z coordinates in exponential iterations and conjoin according to polarities established with magnets. Combining elements of contemporaneous typefaces derived from Bauhaus principles of simplicity and the liberatory Futurist typographic fantasy of pure graphemes - free of history - these recombinant three-dimensional letters realize Loy's unpublished modernist poem; an articulation of language as a physical substance which infers its own morphology."
Remhof, "Nietzsche, Evolutionary Debunking, and the Possibility of Metaphysics": "One longstanding interpretive dispute over how to read Nietzsche concerns whether he is a metaphysician. I first present an evolutionary argument which holds that Nietzsche rejects metaphysics. I then develop Nietzsche's Kantian view of what makes metaphysics possible in order to challenge the evolutionary argument and offer a modest defense of why we should read Nietzsche as a metaphysician."
Osorio, "Inviting Human Frailty into the Academic Conference: An Analysis and Oral History of Conference Access Guides": "This talk focuses on the rhetorical labor and impact of the Access Guides within the Conference on College Composition and Community (CCCC), the premier Writing Studies conference. Each year, a group of committed volunteers publishes an Access Guide for CCCC; the guides document the accessibility features, challenges, and resources in the conference city, venues, and hotels. While the CCCC community may see/hear/interpret the Access Guide each year, what is often unseen are the countless hours of labor often done to produce such a rich, detailed document. I interviewed the authors of the first six years of the guides (2011-2016), tracing how the guide evolved from a three-page document with a corresponding online photo gallery to the 70-plus-page multimedia guides that circulate today. The interviews reveal the behind-the-scenes rhetorical work that goes into activating access within professional settings, and furthermore, depict access as an ongoing, rhetorical project, in which a community welcomes, values, and makes space for the presence of human frailty."
The presentations will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience and then a small reception including light refreshments.
The event is organized by the Institute for the Humanities.