Raymond-Jean Frontain, professor of English at UCA, delivered a belated Milton Quartercentenary Lecture title “Milton, Theology and Syntax” at four universities in West Bengal, India: Kalyani University, the University of Burdwan, Vidyasagar University in Midnapore, and Viswa Bharati, the experimental “open world” university founded in 1921 by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The lecture will be published in Literature and Criticism, the journal of the Literary Society of India. While in India, Frontain completed work on A Talent for the Particular: Critical Essays on R. K. Narayan, which he has coedited with Professor Basudeb Chakraborti of Kalyani University, and which is forthcoming from World View Press in Kolkata. Frontain also recently coordinated an interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies conference that was held in Hot Springs and was attended by 111 scholars in literature, history, and art history.
Most recently, Frontain has published “Envy, Simple Lines, and the Festive Mode of Skelton’s Elynour Rummnyg,” Cahiers Elisabethains 68 (Oct. 2008); “Terrence McNally and the Dance of Death,” CEA Critic 72, 2 (Winter 2009); “Kipling’s Follow Me ‘Ome and 2 Samuel 1,” ANQ: American Notes and Queries 22, 2 (Spring 2009); and “Sexual Privacy and Gay Literary Biography,” Gay and Lesbian Review 16, 3 (May-June 2009), in press. The latter is the extended version of a paper title “Whose Life Is It Anyway?: AIDS, Privacy, and the Writing of Gay Literary Biography” that he presented in December at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America in San Francisco.
Michael Gunter, a lecturer in Digital Filmmaking in UCA’s Department of Mass Communication and Theatre, and Levi Agee, a graduate student in the MFA program in Digital Filmmaking, recently screened their short narrative films at the Ozark Foothills Film Festival in Batesville, Ark. Gunter’s film, Memories of Viola, is a story of love, loss, and the redemptive power of friendship told along the banks of the Ouachita River. Agee’s film, What Happened to My Brother, is the story of a young boy whose perception of reality is shattered when he learns the news that his idol, his older brother, has attempted suicide and is now mentally impaired.Tim Thornes, Assistant Professor of Linguistics in UCA’s Department of Writing, has been invited to contribute a chapter to a forthcoming volume entitled “Multi-verb Constructions: A View from the Americas.” The volume will be published by Brill of Leiden, the Netherlands, later this year as part of a new Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas series. Thornes is also co-organizer of the second annual Oklahoma Workshop on Native American Languages, to be held April 18 and 19 in Talequah, Oklahoma, the capitol of the Oklahoma Cherokee Nation. The workshop will wind up the week-long 39th Annual Symposium of the American Indian.
William H. Friedman, Associate Professor of Management Information Systems at UCA, recently presented his paper, “The (Mission) Statement of an Organization,” to the Global Business Development Institute 11th International Conference in Las Vegas. This paper tries to harmonize traditional views of an organizational mission — usually viewed as amassing money — with wider concerns, such as ethical guidelines, long-term vision, and environmental goals. Moreover, after examining many existing statements, it suggests a formal structure for constructing organizational (mission) statements. The “statement,” it is urged, should contain much more than a platitudinous “mission.”
