Creative and Scholarly Activities
Campus Currents
Leigh Wilson Named SUNY Distinguished Service Professor The State University of New York recognized Leigh Wilson as a Distinguished Service Professor, one of the SUNY system’s highest honors. In addition to being an award-winning fiction writer, highly regarded teacher and chair of Oswego’s English and creative writing department, Wilson also directs the college’s creative writing program, campus-wide Grand Challenge’s Fresh Water for All initiative, the Digital Oz storytelling project and, until recently, the Interdisciplinary Programs and Activities Center. Wilson began teaching at SUNY Oswego in 1984, and her service bridges her scholarship and teaching, establishing and building connections across disciplines, among students and with the broader community.
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Member Earns Prestigious NEH Fellowship
Gonzalo Aguiar Malosetti of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures earned a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar Fellowship for his book project, Tropes of Violent Inequality: Brazilian Crime Fiction in a Post-Neoliberal Age. The award comes with an invitation to a future seminar, “The Making of Modern Brazil,” which will connect top teachers and scholars in this field in an environment to “exchange ideas, readings and research at various stages of completion,” Aguiar Malosetti said. The seminar includes a variety of readings that connect participants with such avenues as anthropology, cinema studies, cultural studies, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary studies, performing arts, sociology and urban studies.
Leigh Wilson (standing), professor and chair of the English and creative writing department, recently earned one of the top honors in the State University of New York system, the title of Distinguished Service Professor. She is shown in this file photo leading the Digital Oz project, one of many interdisciplinary collaborations she has created and spearheaded.
‘In the Cotton’ Production Uses Innovative Techniques to Tackle Serious Topic
Published Books by Faculty •D arkened Enlightenment: The Deterioration of Democracy, Human Rights and Rational Thought in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2020), the latest book by sociology professor Tim Delaney, describes society at a crossroads, with a choice between rational thought and antiintellectualism.
Clockwise top left are director Steven J. York; Angel Tyler ’21, who plays Meridian; and assistant director Bayana Burnell ’21.
•P olitical science faculty member Helen Knowles published two books— Cascadian Hotel and Free Speech Theory: Understanding the Controversies. The first covers a historic treasure of a building in the Pacific Northwest and the second addresses hot topics like removing Confederate statues.
Directed by theatre professor Steven J. York, In the Cotton is driven by a racially motivated hate crime on a college campus, and the fallout as students and administrators take sides. The result in the award-winning play written by Morgan McGuire is conversations and explorations on racism, hate, protest and related threads.
•M idwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press, 2020), a new award-winning book from English and creative writing faculty member Laura Donnelly, brings together a collection of poems on the themes of family, memory, history and a sense of place.
York said the cast and crew developed some cutting-edge techniques for the production where its participants were never able to gather in one place due to the pandemic. Auditions, rehearsals and performances were held online.
•C ommunication studies faculty member Jason Zenor’s new book, Emerging Media: Legal Principles, Virtual Issues (Cognella Publishing, 2020) takes a different approach to media law—focusing forward instead of back. The book covers issues in the news like regulating tech companies, bots spreading fake news, apps that can track health information, facial recognition technology and hacking of data stored in the cloud.
The resulting “virtual theatre” is similar to traditional theatre in being produced in a single take, “but also very close to the process of creating live television in that there’s no audience present and that live performance is being captured on camera relying heavily on camera and sound feeds,” York said.
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