The Office of Alumni Relations would like to invite current students to an upcoming networking opportunity, Dinner on DePaul. Dinner on DePaul is a free dinner event in which DePaul invites 3 alumni in a specific professional field to have a roundtable Q&A with 15-20 students who are interested in that industry. The upcoming Dinner on DePaul will be Thursday, January 24 at 6 p.m. in the Alumni Center and will feature alumni currently working in Writing & Publishing. The alumni attending include:

• Jennifer Eckert (LAS MA ’06)
  Supervising Editor, National Geographic Learning
• Dean Monti (SNL ’96)
  Author, The Sweep of the Second Hand
• Lisa Reardon (LAS MA ’02)
  Senior Editor, Chicago Review Press

This event would be relevant for any student interested in a career in Writing & Publishing. The event is free but registration is required by at futurealumni@depaul.edu or via phone at 773-325-8941 by Tuesday, January 22 – space is limited. 

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DePaul’s Gamma Psi Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, The National English Honor Society, will elect new members in Spring Quarter 2013. The deadline to apply for membership is February 18th.

English Majors and Minors, graduate and undergraduate, are eligible to apply providing they have completed one course beyond English 120 (or equivalent) and have a G.P.A. of 3.4 or better. There is a one time fee of $40 for membership. Sigma Tau Delta is nationally provides an opportunity for students to meet and organize activities around their common interest in English.

All current DePaul English students have been emailed the application form along with detailed instructions on how to apply. If you do not have a copy of this email, or have any additional questions, please contact Prof. James Murphy at jmurphy5@depaul.edu.

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Call for Papers: Beyond the Margins, a graduate student conference hosted by the Media and Cinema Studies program in the College of Communication at DePaul University, invites current graduate students in any discipline to submit proposals focused on the dialectic between the mainstream and the marginal as it occurs within various media.The conference will be held on DePaul’s campus, May 17-18th, 2013.

This conference will serve as a forum to bring together graduate students with similar interests to share and discuss their work, with the general public welcome in the audience. Panelists are invited to approach the concept of marginality and the media from such critical perspectives as culture and representation, technology and distribution, history and canonization, audiences and journalism, creators and transgression, among other approaches. Each panelist will be given up to 20 minutes to present their paper. Potential topics for papers and panels include, but are not limited to:

• The role of the academy in ‘reclaiming’ neglected media texts
• Case studies of marginalized films, programs, texts, etc.
• The ‘mainstreaming’ of sub-culture
• The phenomenon of ‘cultural currency’ and media products
• Cult audiences
• ‘Trash’ media texts
• The ‘cross-over’ phenomenon and media audiences
• Social media and fandom
• The political economy of marginal media texts
• Advertising and niche audiences
• Marginalization and race, gender and/or sexuality in the media
• Journalism and the formation of ‘the popular’
• Public relations as advocate for marginalized audiences, publics, and or stakeholders
• Public relations as a media advocacy tool
• Marginal media texts and personal identity

Proposals should be between 250-300 words, and should also provide a list of three to five keywords related to your subject along with a brief biography. Full panel proposals on a single theme are also welcome, and should include a 250-300 word description of the panel’s larger significance/objectives in addition to each panelist’s individual proposal. Panels must consist of exactly four panelists.

Please email your abstract, keywords and biography to Prof. Blair Davis, bdavis47@depaul.edu. The deadline for proposals is January 15th. Notification of acceptance will be given by February 1st. The subject line should contain the writer’s last name followed by “Beyond the Margins Abstract.”

Please contact Prof. Davis directly if you have any questions or concerns.