Zombies and vampires and ghouls. Oh, my. These supernatural creatures have long been counted among the ranks of the undead. But what about robots, immigrants … and ballet dancers?
All of these topics will be the object of inquiry in the next edition of Nomad, the annual journal for the Comparative Literature Program (affectionately known as COLT). Nomad is completely written by COLT undergraduates and edited by COLT graduate students. The theme of Nomad’s fall 2009 issue will be “The Undead.”
Nomad’s mission is to publish critiques on culturally relevant themes, and the undead are a hot topic right now. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a reworking of the classic Jane Austen novel, became a Top Ten pick on Amazon’s best-seller list last spring. And teen girls have gone crazy for the Twilight series — a set of novels about a high school girl and a vampire who fall in love, and which also became a box-office smash when adapted into a feature film.
Nomad provides a unique opportunity for undergraduates to work closely with graduate student counterparts through mentoring and workshops. Together, they produce and publish high-quality critical essays — a milestone for budding scholars early in their college careers.
The Nomad editorial process begins each fall, when graduate students and instructors invite selected undergraduates to apply to be assigned to a mentor, while other undergraduates proactively apply. Those selected for the program will spend the next six or seven months developing their ideas into a research topic and then a paper. If the paper meets editorial standards, it will be published in Nomad.
For the graduate student mentors, one of the bonuses is the chance to work with “dream students” who are motivated and have a high work ethic, said Max Rayneard, who has been the editor of Nomad for two-and-a-half years.
Graduate student mentorship coordinators pair each undergraduate writer with a COLT graduate student to work in a one-on-one relationship throughout the school year to develop, organize and write a paper.
After months of development, the fine-tuning begins. Graduate students host writing workshops, which facilitate small-group discussions among the undergraduates: They read each other’s paper, and offer comments and suggestions about content, structure and clarity.
After further revision under the guidance of their graduate mentors, students submit final drafts to the Nomad editorial board in mid-May, and the board decides which papers will be included.
The entire process for developing Nomad has evolved over the years. Prior to 2008, COLT instructors submitted the best papers from their classes for inclusion each year, but that procedure often yielded papers with similar topics and made adherence to deadlines difficult. This process began to undergo a transformation, however, when graduate students Jen Hammond and Michael McCann began a vigorous new outreach program to undergraduates in 2007-08, centered around a lecture and viewing series on a provocative, tongue-in-cheek topic. The first topic: the Keanu Reeves Film Series.
This inspired Rayneard and fellow graduate student Erin Senning to align the new lecture/viewing series with Nomad. Together with program director Lisa Freinkel, they decided to build the journal around a theme each year that would match the topic of the department’s yearlong speaker series, and to generate content through the graduate-undergraduate mentoring relationships. They also changed the journal’s shape from a boxy square to a sleeker rectangular format, which is a more standard layout for a journal. The revamping also made deadlines much easier to set and manage.
The first year’s theme — the TV edition, which examined television as a global phenomenon — was “a raging success,” as Senning put it, so COLT decided to organize its next edition around a theme as well. And now we have The Undead, which complements the department’s yearlong speaker series on the same topic.
So, how do those robots, immigrants and ballet dancers fit into this theme? You’ll have to pick up your copy of Nomad this fall to find out.
The release party for the Undead Edition is October 14, 7 p.m., upstairs at the UO Bookstore. At that party we'll also be announcing the provocative theme for this year’s mentorship program.
Read more about the work of COLT graduate students.
Nomad’s mission is to publish critiques on culturally relevant themes, and the undead are a hot topic right now. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a reworking of the classic Jane Austen novel, became a Top Ten pick on Amazon’s best-seller list last spring. And teen girls have gone crazy for the Twilight series — a set of novels about a high school girl and a vampire who fall in love, and which also became a box-office smash when adapted into a feature film.
Nomad provides a unique opportunity for undergraduates to work closely with graduate student counterparts through mentoring and workshops. Together, they produce and publish high-quality critical essays — a milestone for budding scholars early in their college careers.
The Nomad editorial process begins each fall, when graduate students and instructors invite selected undergraduates to apply to be assigned to a mentor, while other undergraduates proactively apply. Those selected for the program will spend the next six or seven months developing their ideas into a research topic and then a paper. If the paper meets editorial standards, it will be published in Nomad.
For the graduate student mentors, one of the bonuses is the chance to work with “dream students” who are motivated and have a high work ethic, said Max Rayneard, who has been the editor of Nomad for two-and-a-half years.
Graduate student mentorship coordinators pair each undergraduate writer with a COLT graduate student to work in a one-on-one relationship throughout the school year to develop, organize and write a paper.
After months of development, the fine-tuning begins. Graduate students host writing workshops, which facilitate small-group discussions among the undergraduates: They read each other’s paper, and offer comments and suggestions about content, structure and clarity.
After further revision under the guidance of their graduate mentors, students submit final drafts to the Nomad editorial board in mid-May, and the board decides which papers will be included.
The entire process for developing Nomad has evolved over the years. Prior to 2008, COLT instructors submitted the best papers from their classes for inclusion each year, but that procedure often yielded papers with similar topics and made adherence to deadlines difficult. This process began to undergo a transformation, however, when graduate students Jen Hammond and Michael McCann began a vigorous new outreach program to undergraduates in 2007-08, centered around a lecture and viewing series on a provocative, tongue-in-cheek topic. The first topic: the Keanu Reeves Film Series.
This inspired Rayneard and fellow graduate student Erin Senning to align the new lecture/viewing series with Nomad. Together with program director Lisa Freinkel, they decided to build the journal around a theme each year that would match the topic of the department’s yearlong speaker series, and to generate content through the graduate-undergraduate mentoring relationships. They also changed the journal’s shape from a boxy square to a sleeker rectangular format, which is a more standard layout for a journal. The revamping also made deadlines much easier to set and manage.
The first year’s theme — the TV edition, which examined television as a global phenomenon — was “a raging success,” as Senning put it, so COLT decided to organize its next edition around a theme as well. And now we have The Undead, which complements the department’s yearlong speaker series on the same topic.
So, how do those robots, immigrants and ballet dancers fit into this theme? You’ll have to pick up your copy of Nomad this fall to find out.
The release party for the Undead Edition is October 14, 7 p.m., upstairs at the UO Bookstore. At that party we'll also be announcing the provocative theme for this year’s mentorship program.
Read more about the work of COLT graduate students.