College of Arts & Letters News and Events
APSU Communication graduate student lands highly competitive Twitter editorial internship
Since 2009, Celeste Malone has been an active Twitter user. From watching live broadcasts to simply tweeting, there is always something for her to explore. This summer, the APSU communication graduate student will be using her Twitter and news reporting skills for Periscope — a Twitter subsidiary — as an editorial intern in San Francisco, California. She was selected out of 65,000 applications for the position.
“Twitter has definitely played a major role within my jobs on campus,” Malone said. “I have used it to follow interesting stories for The All State, and as a way to find interesting topics to discuss in the WNDAACC.”
Malone currently serves as editor-in-chief of The All State, student newspaper, as well as graduate assistant for the Wilbur N. Daniel African American Cultural Center. She has been editor-in-chief since fall 2016, and The All State and student staff have earned almost 40 awards at state, regional and national competitions during her time.
“As editor-in-chief, I have learned to seek out and find interesting stories, while also evaluating the news value of things,” she said. “Additionally, I have learned how to work with a very diverse team and the importance of people having a voice.”
“Celeste has unparalleled drive and passion in everything she does,” Patrick Armstrong, coordinator of Student Publications and adviser to The All State, said. “The student staff look up to her and follow her lead. This will be a big motivation to continue the drive and push she has set for social media content.”
Marcelius Braxton, director of the Wilbur N. Daniel African American Cultural Center, was delighted to hear the news of Malone’s internship. “I’ve watched her cultivate her leadership, management and communication skills while serving as my graduate assistant at the Wilbur N. Daniel African American Cultural Center,” Braxton said. “I’ve entrusted her to work independently and develop new and innovative and inclusive programming, and she has taken on that challenge and exceeded all expectations.”
Malone is currently working toward her Master of Arts degree of Marketing Communication from the communication department.
“I’ve advised her since her first year at Austin Peay, and have always known, since our first meeting, that Celeste would go on to do great things,” Robert Baron, assistant professor and graduate coordinator for the communication department, said. “In my social media classes I teach students that they need to think about social media seriously. Celeste serves as a great example of what happens when someone does just that. I’m already trying to book her as a guest lecturer for my fall 2018 social media classes.”
Malone was also recently selected by the APSU Board of Trustees to serve as the 2018-19 student representative.
“APSU has continuously challenged and pushed me to become the person I am today,” she said. “I am truly humbled and honored to represent this campus, The All State, The Wilbur N. Daniel African American Cultural Center and the APSU Communication Department to the best of my ability.”
APSU dance faculty member concludes a year-long collaboration with the Frist Center for the Arts in Nashville
Marcus Hayes, Austin Peay State University associate professor of dance, has been engaged in a year-long collaboration with the visual artist Nick Cave and the exhibition of his work at the Frist Center of the Visual Arts in Nashville.
Cave is a Chicago-based artist who produces work in a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, video and performance. While his creations are optical delights, a deeper look reveals that they speak to issues surrounding identity and social justice, specifically race, gun violence and civic responsibility. His trademark human-shaped sculptures—called soundsuits because of the noise made when they move—began as a response to the beating of Rodney King by policemen in Los Angeles more than 25 years ago. As an African-American man, Cave felt particularly vulnerable after the incident, so he formed a type of armor that protected him from profiling by concealing race, gender, and class.
The first part of Hayes’ collaboration was the contribution of a quote to the tapestry of photos of Cave’s art work and quotes by notable artists from Middle Tennessee, as well as nationally known artists from various art forms produced by the Frist Center. The tapestry is titled “Spreadsheet” and is available for purchase in the gift shop of the Frist Center.
The second collaboration involved contributing to the audio tour for the exhibition, “Feat.” Hayes was able to do a walk-through of the exhibition with Cave, gather notes, and have the reactions professionally recorded.
“This part of the experience was fantastic,” Hayes said. “I truly enjoyed my time with Nick Cave and learned so much about live audio recording and was honored to have my reactions shared with the public.”
The audio tour is available on the Frist Center for the Arts app.
The collaboration will culminate with two live performances on Friday, April 6, at the Schemerhorn Symphony Center. The sold-out, live performance includes elements of dance and performance art and will feature Hayes, along with eight current APSU students, in the piece, “Up Right,” which is a staged rite of passage ceremony.
The APSU students include Maurice Anglin, Corey Finley, Cordarius Talley, Sammie Hall, Nicholas Gunter, Samuel Spewer, Jared Little and Raymond Ivory Roberts. For more information about the performance or to watch the livestream, go to fristcenter.org.
Award-winning textile artist Sonya Clark is the 2017-2018 Acuff Chair of Excellence
Award-winning textile artist Sonya Clark will return to the campus of Austin Peay State University as the 2017-2018 Acuff Chair of Excellence. Clark was selected as this year’s Acuff Chair by the faculty of the APSU Department of Art + Design after an overwhelmingly positive response to her first APSU visit in March 2017 as part of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts (CECA) Visiting Artist Lecture series.
This spring, Clark will facilitate a course for APSU art students, titled “Measuring Histories,” which will be an in-depth extension of her featured PBS Art Assignment episode of the same name. The course will be co-taught by Clark, APSU professor Billy Renkl and Michael Dickins, APSU director of galleries. A culminating exhibition of the work created during the course will take place at the end of the semester and will be announced once more details are available.
Clark is known for using a variety of materials, including human hair, flags, currency and combs, to address race, culture, class and history in her work. She is a distinguished research fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. From 2006–2017, she served as chair for the Department of Craft/Material Studies. She was previously named to the Emily Mead Baldwin Bell-Bascom Professorship in the Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Clark is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited her work in more than 300 museums and galleries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas. Her work has been favorably reviewed in several publications, including the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Italian Vogue, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic and Huffington Post.
Clark holds a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and in 2011 she was awarded their first mid-career Distinguished Alumni Award. She also holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Art from Amherst College. In 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate.
In 1985, country music legend Roy Acuff generously established an endowment to enrich the arts community at APSU and in Clarksville-Montgomery County. The result was the Roy Acuff Chair of Excellence, which brings regionally and nationally acclaimed artists to APSU to share their artistic innovation with students and the community in a dynamic atmosphere of unrestricted experimentation. The Acuff Chair of Excellence is administered by the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at APSU. The prestigious endowment rotates through the four arts departments on a four-year cycle.
For more information on Clark, visit www.sonyaclark.com. For more information on the Acuff Chair of Excellence, visit www.apsu.edu/ceca/chair.
APSU Arts and Letters students collaborate on new Shakespeare podcast
At first, it sounds like the set-up to a joke—a voice actor, a Restoration-era drama scholar and a sound engineer walk into a bar (or coffee shop, in this case). But instead of hijinks, these three Austin Peay State University professors discuss a bold collaborative project to connect students from different disciplines and provide an entertaining resource for the community.
Earlier this semester, Talon Beeson, assistant professor of theatre; Dr. Jane Wessel, assistant professor of languages and literature; and David Ellison, assistant professor of communication, began teaching three separate classes in their fields. The courses, however, require the students to collaboratively produce a four-episode podcast on Restoration and 18th-century adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays.
“This is the moment when Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare,” Wessel said. "The class asks how people played with his material to make it their own, to make audiences interested again a century after his death. He’s old news, but because of all these adaptations, people are paying attention to Shakespeare again.”
While Wessel discusses this subject with her literature students, Beeson is leading a special topics class on radio dramas and Ellison is teaching a radio theater workshop. The three classes meet separately at the same time, but on certain afternoons, they come together to work on the project.
For the podcast, Wessel’s students have selected a scene from an original Shakespeare
play and a scene from an 18th century adaptation. They then give those scenes, along with narration they’ve written
and some historical context, to Beeson’s radio drama class.
“For the first several weeks, my students have been learning Shakespeare, going in and pulling research, and then I’ve been teaching them how to work a microphone,” Beeson said. “It’s starting to come together. We’ll have auditions, a table read, work the scenes and then go into the booth and record them.”
That’s where Ellison’s class comes in. His communication students have read the plays, and they’ve made notes on how they should record the final podcasts.
“We’ve been paying attention to the surroundings in these plays,” he said. “What is the background noise going on in Venice? They know the actors are going to know their lines. How are we going to create this ambiance and this feel for every scene?”
At the end of the semester, the public will be able to download three podcasts pairing scenes from “The Merchant of Venice,” “Macbeth,” and “The Tempest,” with their Restoration-era adaptations.
“We’re talking about the public humanities these days and making what we do go beyond the university and connecting to broader communities,” Wessel said. “I think this is a great way to do that because our students are producing a product that will go up on the web and is aimed to be accessible for non-academics.”
The students will also receive professional experience they can take with them when applying for jobs in their fields.
“Radio drama is having a huge resurgence with podcasting in the last 10 years, but it’s a style most of my actors aren’t familiar with,” Beeson said. “At the end, we will have a show we produced that will go out into the public. That will serve as a credit for my actors on IMDB, a credit for writers, a credit for producers.”
The podcast is also helping students move beyond their comfort zones. All three professors work within APSU’s College of Arts and Letters, but they don’t often interact on projects.
“My communication students are not versed in the 18th century in any way,” Ellison said. “Many of them are sports journalism students, and they wouldn’t normally read ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ It’s been pushing them well beyond their norms. I love it, and they’re loving it.”
“I love that your sports journalism students are reading ‘The Merchant of Venice,’” Wessel said.
The three episodes, along with a fourth “making of” podcast, will be available later this spring on iTunes.
APSU and school system team up for Kennedy Center's Partners in Education program
The Clarksville-Montgomery County School System and APSU's Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts (CECA) were selected to join the Kennedy Center's Partners in Education program.
APSU French professor Sorenson is Tennessee's Foreign Language Teacher of the Year
Austin Peay State University Professor of French literature Dr. Karen D. Sorenson has been named this year's Jacqueline Elliott Award for Service in Higher Education recipient by the Tennessee Foreign Language Teaching Association (TFLTA).
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