Dear MA Students, We hope your semesters have started well and that you are nicely settled into the new year. We write with some announcements and reminders about things going on in the College in the coming month. CONFERENCE: In Other Worlds The English Graduate Conference is scheduled for March 27, 2024, from 10 am to 6 pm. We’re excited that the conference’s culminating event will be a reading and discussion with Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer and MacArthur (“Genius”) Grant recipient NK Jemisin<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._K._Jemisin>, who will be visiting campus as part of the College’s “Off the Page” series. We urge you to submit an abstract to present a short paper at the conference. The conference call for papers is attached to this message. 200-word paper proposals and due by February 28 to MAEnglish@qc.cuny.edu<mailto:MAEnglish@qc.cuny.edu>. Please feel free to contact Hillary or me if you have any questions about the conference. We’re also looking for volunteers to help with some of the conference organizing, including selecting papers for the program, organizing papers into panels, and inviting faculty chairs for the day, among other things. Please fill out the following form<https://forms.gle/vSntyGY7eY4FjM8H6> if you’d like to participate. We’ll have our first planning meeting next week. APPLYING FOR GRADUATION If you plan to graduate this semester, make sure to apply for graduation by March 1 on CUNYFirst. THESIS WRITING WORKSHOPS If you are writing your MA thesis this semester, we will be holding thesis writing workshops on February 20, March 20, and April 16 at 6:30 pm. If you haven’t already RSVPed, email MAEnglish@qc.cuny.edu<mailto:MAEnglish@qc.cuny.edu> to RSVP for the next one. VIRTUAL OPEN HOUSE We’ll be holding a virtual Open House for prospective MA students planning to apply for the 2024-2025 school year. This will happen on March 7 at 6 pm. If you know people who are interested in applying, let us know and we can share the announcements and details with you. SUMMER REGISTRATION Summer registration is open. All of our classes are online or hybrid. If you know that you will be taking a class in the summer, please register as soon as possible so that the class doesn’t get canceled. I have attached the Summer 2024 course descriptions to this message. READING: Ava Chin in Conversation with QC President Frank Wu Ava Chin is a graduate of Queens College’s English department and current professor at the College of Staten Island. She will be on campus reading from her memoir Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming on February 21 from 12:15 to 1:30 in The Godwin-Ternbach Museum on the 4th Floor of Klapper Hall. You can also see her reading and discussion with QC President Frank Wu online that at: http://tinyurl.com/5n78r4v3 the day of the event. GRADUATE STUDENT SURVEY Christen Patalano, graduate student in the Queens College School Psychology program, is conducting a research study exploring the impact of financial stress on graduate student's mental health. He is looking for current graduate students to complete a short survey. It's anonymous and takes between 3-4 minutes. The link for the survey is: https://forms.gle/xz1veAeXSB31YBpu5 CONGRATULATIONS Congratulations to the last semester’s thesis writers (with the titles of their thesis essays): * Amanda Long (“From Slow Death to Revolutionary Awakening: Melancholia as Dialectical Image”) * Gavin Singh (“The Rebis of Mary Shelley: A Gender Studies Analysis of Frankenstein) * Dawn Whiting (“Landscape and the Psychology of Memory in Willa Cather’s My Antonia”) That’s all for this month. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to get in touch with Hillary or me. If you have any news for future monthly messages, please feel free to send that to us as well. Best, Bill