OFSTAD VISITING SCHOLAR PROGRAM

The Clayton B. Ofstad Reading Series

Spring 2024

Thursday, February 15, 2024 | 7 p.m. | Baldwin Little Theater
Nina Furstenau
Reading and Q & A

Nina FurstenauNina Mukerjee Furstenau is an award-winning author and journalist with special interest in food and identity. Her food memoir, Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, won the 2014 M.F.K. Fisher Book Award, and the International Grand Prize/Les Dames d’Escoffier for culinary literature, among other recognitions.

She launched five business magazines and served as publisher of two of them for 15 years prior to coming to the University of Missouri Science and Agricultural Journalism program, 2010-18, where she was director of food systems communication. She was a Fulbright Global Scholar in Kolkata, India, in 2018-19, and long ago, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia.

Her most recent book, Green Chili and Other Impostors (2021), focuses on heritage foods and colonial power. Her textbook, Food & Culture has also recently been released.


Wednesday, March 6, 2024 | 7 p.m. | Student Union Building, Alumni Room
Julie L. Moore
Reading and Q & A

Julie L. MooreA Best of the Net and eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her other books include Particular Scandals (Cascade Books, 2013), Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech Editions, 2010), and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press, 2006).

Moore has won the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate Magazine, the Editor’s Choice Award from Writecorner Press, and the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance. Moore’s poetry has appeared in hundreds of journals such as African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Missouri Review Online, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, SWWIM, and Verse Daily. Likewise, her poetry has appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman, published by the University of Nebraska Gender Programs; Every River On Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, published by Ohio University Press; How Higher Education Feels: Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching, published by Oxford Learning Institute, University of Oxford, UK; Taking Root in the Heart: Thirty-Four Poets from the “Christian Century,” published by Paraclete Press; and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, to be published by Penn State University Press.

She lives in Indiana and works at Eastern University for its LifeFlex program as a Senior Online Advisor and Instructor of First Year Composition. You can learn more about her writing at julielmoore.com.


Thursday, April 11, 2024 | 7 p.m. | OP 2210
Kelly Wright
Lecture: “Linguistic High Crimes”

Kelly Wright

Experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright will consider censorship both from the perspective of an individual language user, navigating their social environment, and from the perspective of local & legal language policies. Wright will present findings which demonstrate users are aware of the direct indexation of the majority of their daily linguistic choices to potent & omnipresent Standard language ideologies. Such awareness makes all language use relevant for success across linguistic markets and often marks non-normative identity performance as unintelligent, crude, or even criminal. Wright will invite consideration of what a general preference for assimilationist linguistic production portends for the future of free speech and for the future of linguistic scholarship.


2023

  • October 19, 2023
    Taylor Jones
    Lecture: The Linguistic Skills of Leaders
  • October 7, 2023
    Alexandra Rowland
    Seminar and Reading: “The Squamish Language Policy and Language Commission”
  • March 2, 2023
    Kyle Eveleth
    Ofstad Scholar Lecture: “The Semiotics of Play, or ‘Teaching History through Cannibalism’”
  • January 26, 2023
    Anand Prahlad
    A Reading with Ofstad Visiting Writer

2022

  • Oct. 20, 2022
    Nzingha Kendall
    Lecture from Visiting Ofstad Scholar Dr. Nzingha Kendall
  • Sept. 16, 2022
    Dr. Caitlin Coons
    “Toward Inclusive Linguistic Typology: What Understudied Sign Languages Contribute”
  • April 1, 2022
    Mark Wisniewski
    A Fiction Reading with Author Mark Wish and Truman Students
  • March 15, 2022
    Dr. Rachel Weissler
    “Approaching Linguistic Discrimination and Social Justice through Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches”
  • Feb. 4, 2022
    Dr. Tabitha Lowery
    “Thank God for Little Children’: Frances Harper’s Children’s Poetry, Social Justice, and the Archives in the Twenty First Century”

2021

  • Oct. 5, 2021
    Angela Shaw-Thornburg
    Lecture, “‘What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black?’ Stories We Tell About Black Childhood”
  • Sept. 16, 2021
    Maria Miranda Maloney
    Reading from Cracked Spaces
  • Sept. 8, 2021
    Megan Figueroa
    “Decolonizing (Psycho) Linguistics Means Dropping the Language ‘Gap’ Rhetoric”

2020

  • October 29, 2020:
    Tricia Levenseller
    “Turning Rejection into Success”
  • October 14, 2020:
    Darcy Browning
    “Hesitation in Asynchronous Media: Twitter Hashtags and Spoken Discourse Markers in Survivor Stories”
  • September 17, 2020:
    Anne Morey
    “‘That’s Marriage’: Gone Girl and the Genealogy of the Paranoid Woman’s Film”
  • April 2, 2020:
    Amanda Nadelberg
    “Life Forms: Poems from Daily Habits”
  • February 19, 2020:
    Nicole Ziegler
    “Technology-Mediated Task-Based Language Teaching and Research”
  • February 11, 2020:
    Amy Levin
    “Dutch Museums as Models for Gender Diversity and Community Engagement”
  • February 4, 2020:
    Neil Hilborn
    A Poetry Reading

2019

  • November 6, 2019:
    Zoe Estelle Hitzel
    A Poetry Reading
  • November 4, 2019:
    Miyabi “Abbie” Yamamoto
    “Reimagining the Ivory Tower”
  • September 18, 2019:
    Sheena Shah
    “SiPhûthî, an Endangered Language of Southern Africa”
  • February 27, 2019:
    Elizabeth  Kissling
    “Accent in the Foreign Language Classroom: Misconceptions, Methodologies, and The Making of a Good Speaker”
  • February 9, 2019:
    Angela Carter
    “Classrooms in Crisis: Disability Pedagogy, Feminism, and The Trigger Warning Debate”
  • February 7, 2019:
    Meg Elison
    A Speculative Fiction Reading

2018

  • October 8, 2018:
    Alexandria Lockett
    “Overflow: The Leaky Politics of Living in The Data Deluge”
  • October 4, 2018:
    Prajwal Parajuly
    Selections from The Gurkha’s Daughter and Land Where I Flee
  • September 19, 2018:
    Marissa Fond
    “Sociolinguistics in the Field(s)”
  • April 4, 2018:
    Dawn Sardella-Ayres
    “Girls’ Literature as Genre and The Importance of Girlhood”
  • March 1, 2018:
    David Elliott
    Reading from Bull, Voices: The Final Hours of Joan of Arc, and other works
  • February 22, 2018:
    Doug Reside
    “Editing Musical Theatre in the Digital Age”
  • February 12, 2018:
    Scott Johnson
    “Egos and Epigraphy: Decoding Maya Hieroglyphs”
  • February 8, 2018:
    Laura McHugh
    Reading from Arrowood and “Endgame”

2017

  • November 9, 2017:
    Arisa White
    A Poetry Reading
  • September 7, 2017:
    Katherine Riestenberg
    “Task-Based Teaching of Endangered Languages: Challenges and Successes of Zapotec Revitalization in Oaxaca, Mexico”
  • February 15, 2017:
    Faith Adiele
    Selections from her Nonfiction Writing

2016

  • September 21, 2016:
    Maggie Messitt
    Reading from The Rainy Season and work-in-progress
  • February 10, 2016:
    Allison Joseph
    A Poetry Reading

2015

  • October 6, 2015:
    Prajwal Parajuly
    Reading from Land Where I Flee
  • March 18, 2015:
    Bennett Sims
    Multimedia Reading of White Dialogues

2014

  • November 19, 2014:
    David Chan
    Reading from City of Ghosts
  • September 30, 2014:
    Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
    A Prose Reading
  • March 18. 2014:
    Cornelius Eady
    A Poetry Performance and Reading
  • April 17, 2014:
    David Chan
    Reading from Utopian Fairytales

2013

  • October 24, 2013:
    Paul Legault
    Reading from The Emily Dickinson Reader and selected poems