Reineke to join faculty at MTSU

I am excited to announce that after receiving two attractive job offers, Jason Reineke has accepted an Assistant Professorship at Middle Tennessee State University's College of Mass Communication, School of Journalism. In addition to his regular faculty duties, Jason will be the new Associate Director of the MTSU poll, a survey of Tennessee residents administered by the Office of Communication Research that has been conducted twice yearly since 1998. The poll regularly surveys the public on topics including free expression, faith in major institutions, and a wide range of other public issues. Among the courses Jason will regularly teach include a course entitled "Free Expression, Mass Media, and the American Public", an examination of freedom of expression from legal, social scientific, and ethical perspectives. I know I speak for all COPS members when I say how proud we are of Jason for his hard work and dedication during his years at OSU, and we will miss seeing him around the halls of Derby.

COPS in New Orleans for AAPOR

And, to build on the ICA information, I do know that COPS will have a presence at the American Association for Public Opinion Research conference in New Orleans a week or so before ICA. Although there are likely more COPS papers, I know that Laurel Gleason will be presenting her paper "Revisiting 'The Voice of the People': An Evaluation of the Claims and Consequences of Deliberative Polling" and Jerry Kosicki will present "Public Opinion and the War on Terrorism 2001-2007." And, I have to admit, I suspect that New Orleans will be more appealing in May than Canada... ;-)

COPS in Montreal for ICA

Decisions have been rendered on submissions to the annual conference of the International Communication Association held in Montreal this May. As always, research in political communication and public opinion by COPS will be well represented on the international research stage. Here is a partial list of papers COPS members will be presenting.

Beam, M. A.
The portal effect: The impact of customized content on news exposure.

Hayes, A. F., Glynn, C. J., & Huge, M. A.
Cautions in the interpretation of coefficients and hypothesis tests in linear models with interactions.

Hayes, A. F., & Myers, T. M.
Testing the "proximate casualties hypothesis": Local troop loss, attention to news and support for military intervention.

Hively, M. H. & Landreville, K. D.
The interaction between efficacy and emotion in predicting civic engagement.

Holbert, R. L., & Benoit, W. L.
A Theory of political campaign media connectedness.

Holbert, R. L., & Hansen, G. J.
Stepping beyond message specificity in the study of affect as mediator and inter-affective associations: Fahrenheit 9/11, candidate aversion, and perceptions of debate superiority.

Lamarre, H., & Knobloch-Westerwick, S.
Dark black rap and bright white rock: Effects of radical music on support of ethnic groups.

Landreville, K., & LaMarre, H.
Documentary and historical reenactment film: A comparison of transportation, emotion, interest, and learning.

Kim, Y.M., & Geidner, N. W.
Politics as friendship: The impact of online social networks on young voters' political behavior.

Min, S. J., & Feaster, J.
Missing children in news: Racial and gender representation of missing children cases in television news.

Shen, F., Lu, Y., Guo, Z. & Zhou, B.
News media use, perception, and efficacy: A multi-level analysis of media participation in China.

COPS Faculty in Public Opinion Research Handbook

The SAGE Handbook of Public Opinion Research has now hit the market, and might be of some interest to students in the COPS group. The handbook includes chapters from three different OSU faculty -- Theories on the Perception of Social Reality by COPS members Eveland and Glynn and The Methodological Strengths and Weaknesses of Survey Research by political science professor Herb Weisberg.

Caster: Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film

Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film

Peter Caster

In Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W. E. B. DuBois famously termed “the problem of the color line.”

A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: “we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary.” Such rampant racism contributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America’s national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Burroughs: Everything Lost

Everything Lost

The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs
Edited by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Oliver Harris

“From the opening page we immediately get an extraordinarily vivid picture of Burroughs himself, sitting alone in some dingy bar in the Peruvian coastal town of Talara, pencil in hand—his “rum” in the other—pressing his thoughts and observations onto the paper in his own, instantly recognizable style.” —from the Introduction by Oliver Harris

In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven-month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America. His first novel, Junkie, had just been published and he would soon be back in New York to meet Allen Ginsberg and together complete the manuscripts of what became The Yage Letters and Queer. Yet this notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs not as a writer on the verge of success, but as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster.

Losses that will not let go of him haunt Burroughs throughout the notebook: “Bits of it keep floating back to me like memories of a daytime nightmare.” However, out of these dark reflections we see emerge vivid fragments of Burroughs’ fiction and, even more tellingly, unique, primary evidence for the remarkable ways in which his early manuscripts evolved. Assembled in facsimile and transcribed by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, the notebook forces us to change the way we see both Burroughs and his writing at a turning point in his literary biography.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Meet our 2008 Juror, Anderson Turner

Anderson Turner Bio


Anderson Turner is currently the Director of Galleries Adjunct Professor and Adviser to the Kent State University Art School. He earned a BFA from the University of Arizona, and MFA in Ceramics from Kent State University. He has exhibited regionally and nationally. Mr. Turner has been recognized with various awards and scholarships by the Akron Area Art Alliance, Ohio Art League, Vermont Studio Center, and others.

Anderson, a published author has written several books and journals, with a ceramic focus, as well as written for such publications as, Ceramics Monthly, Pottery Making Illustrated, and Metalsmith Magazine. Anderson currently resides in Garrettsville, Ohio

Meet our 2008 Juror, Tim Portlock

Tim Portlock Bio

Tim Portlock is a visual artist who creates work in a variety of mediums ranging from painting to computer technology. His digital work varies from virtual realty interactive narratives to 3D simulations of historic spaces. Portlock’s subject matter primarily focuses on navigating space and how this process creates a dialogue that constructs identity.

He has exhibited at Arts Electronica (Austria), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and ISEA (Japan), 404 (Argentina) as well as other venues in Europe, North America and South America. Tim Portlock currently resides in Philadelphia and teaches at Hunter College New York, NY in the department of Film and Media Studies.

Meet our 2008 jurors, Michael Ferris Jr.

Michael Ferris Jr. Bio


Michael Ferris Jr. was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1969. He received a B.F.A from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1991, and a M.F.A from Indiana University in 1996. His work has been shown at the ATM Gallery, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Queens Museum in New York, the de Young Museum and the Bucheon Gallery in San Francisco. Awards include the George Sugarman Foundation Grant and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Grant. In 2008 Michael will showcase his latest work in his one-person exhibition at the George Adams Gallery in New York City. Michael currently resides and works in New York.