Laini Kavaloski
Department of English
State University of New York at Canton
kavaloskia@canton.edu
ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT_______________________________________
2019- present Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Canton
2015-2019 – Assistant Professor of English, State University of New York at Canton
EDUCATION___________________________________________________
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, English
M.A. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, Literary Studies
B.A. Edgewood College, Madison, Wisconsin, English
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS_________________________
Writing Pedagogy, digital media poetics, twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, transnational Jewish literature/media, critical security studies, game studies, diaspora and migration, graphic narratives
PUBLICATIONS________________________________________________
“Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels.” MELUS, 44.3 (2019), 209-211.
“Digital Jews.” MLA Approaches to Teaching Jewish-American Literature. Edited by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubenstein. New York: Modern Language Association Press, 2020.
“Security Games: The Coded Logics of the Playable War on ISIS.” Critical Studies on Security 6.1 (2018), 100- 117.
“Adventures in Augmented Reality: Place-based Game Design in University Courses.” Teacher Pioneers: Visions from the Edge of the Map, edited by Caro Williams, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2016.
“Contested Spaces in Graphic Narrative: Refiguring Intersecting Homelands through Miriam Libicki’s jobnik!: an american girl’s adventures in the israeli army.” Studies in Comics 6.2 (2015), 231-51.
“Territorializing the Good Life: Fetishism of Commodity and Homeland in Nicole Krauss’s Great House.” The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context. Eds.Laura E. Savu. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.
“Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist.” Comparative Drama 48.3 (2014), 315-18.
FORTHCOMING BOOK (2025)________________________________
Graphic War: Jewish Women Drawing Contested Spaces (Rutgers University Press)
Graphic War argues that the rhetorical infrastructures within graphic narratives illuminate colonial mapping practices through the representations of geopolitical borders and hybrid identities in visual form. Twentieth-century Jewish identities have been overwhelmingly influenced and defined by experiences of conflicts, genocide, and war, including the Holocaust, the Soviet occupation, the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and subsequent and persistent Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Through an archive of contemporary works that grapple with the ways violence shape Jewish identities (1981-2019), Drawing Graphic War illustrates women’s complex relations to nationhood, security, and gender through a materialist feminist lens, arguing that the creative organization of space, borders, and representation of bodies on the page move beyond the constraints of identity politics and boundaried nationalisms and towards new constellations of Jewish identity.
ACADEMIC AWARDS and HONORS_______________________________
2021-2025 Chairperson, English Department, SUNY Canton
2021-2025 Member of MLA Delegate Assembly
2023-2024 Chair of MLA Executive Committee Global Jewish Forum
2020-2025 Member of MLA Executive Committee (Global Jewish)
2020-2023 SUNY University Faculty Senator, SUNY Canton Representative for SUNY System Faculty Senate
2019 Institute for Research in the Humanities Fellowship, Univ of Wisconsin-Madison. Honorary Fellow. Declined.
2017 Principal Investigator, SUNY IITG Grant for collaborative Digital Studio and research. $60,000 awarded.
2015 Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison (declined)
2015 Innovation in Teaching Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison Campus-Wide Teaching Award (4 given, out of 2,000 TAs on campus)
2014 HASTAC Scholar: Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, Duke University
2013 English Department Summer Dissertator Fellowship Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2013 Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Scholarship Award, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2013 Hermes World Literature Consortium Fellowship Award, Hermes Symposium, Madison, Wisconsin
2013 Natelson Award for the Best Jewish Studies Student 2012-2013, Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2012 Lipton Essay Award for Best Graduate Essay in Jewish Studies, Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2011 Chair’s Essay Prize for Best Essay by a PhD student in English, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2011 Bernice D. Kuney Scholarship Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2002 Lafer Scholarship Prize for Outstanding Thesis Research, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
SELECT CONFERENCE and PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS _________________________________________
“Postcolonial Traditions in Global Jewish Literature and Culture.” Modern Language Association Convention. Philadelphia, PA. January 2024.
“Expanding Global Jewish Literature.” Modern Language Association Convention. Philadelphia, PA. January 2024.
“‘An Enabling Optimism’: Affect in Contemporary Jewish Narratives.” Modern Language Association Convention. Seattle, WA, January 2020.
“Anti-Colonial Cartographies in the Graphic Narrative.” Comics and Graphic Narrative Circle Panel. American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, June 2019.
“Beyond the Screen: Engaging Learners and Transforming Communities Through Location-based Technologies.” MIT Connected Learning Summit, Cambridge, MA, August 2018.
“Transversal, Maker-based Pedagogies: From the Classroom to the Public Sphere.” The Teaching of Literature and the Public Humanities Panel. Modern Language Association Convention. New York, NY, January 2018.
“Geopolitical Bodies: Reading Insecurity through Jewish Graphic Narratives.” Mapping Jewish Geographies Panel. Modern Language Association Convention. New York, NY. January 2018.
“Interactive Homelands: Processes of Play and Resistance in Digital Games.” Colonialism and Digital Games Panel. National Women’s Studies Association Conference. Montreal, Canada, November 2016.
“Diffractive Games: The Structures and Logics of the Playable War on ISIS.” War Seminar Symposium. Colgate University, September 2016.
“Teaching Augmented Reality Games as Historiography.” Games in Education Conference. Troy, NY August 2016.
“Bridging Homeland: Rhizomes and Rhetoric in Zochrot.Org.” American Comparative Literature Association. Harvard University, March 2016.
“Fragmentary Returns: Object Fetishism in Post-Holocaust Literature.” Modern Language Association Convention. Austin, Texas, January 2016.
“Intimate Activist Technologies: Universities, Surveillance and Participatory Mapping.” Performance Philosophy Conference. University of Chicago, April 10-13, 2015.
“Digital Homelands: Refiguring Landscapes and Belonging in Zochrot.org.” Modern Language Association Convention. MLA Presidential Theme Session, Vancouver, Canada, January 2015.
RESEARCH AND GRANT WRITING_______________________________
2017 Principal Investigator for IITG (Innovative Instruction Technology Grant). SUNY-wide Grant to start digital writing lab at SUNY Canton. Includes space renovation, games consuls and software, independent server, moveable and configurable furniture, and writeable walls. $60,000 granted.
2014-2015 Project Assistant, Digital Humanities Initiative, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Assisted with the development of digital studies infrastructure in the university and the English Department including Grant applications (Proctor and Gamble; Adobe; Mellon); built support across sciences and humanities at UW-Madison for an interdisciplinary Design Center that addresses real-world problems through design thinking and interdisciplinary design solutions; and developed English Department collaboration with local communities to develop transmedia storytelling projects.
2014-2015 Project Assistant on Global Midwest Mellon Grant, an interdisciplinary collaboration between UW-Madison, U of Iowa, and U of Minnesota to create community storytelling infrastructures in juvenile justice programs and VA hospitals and other groups.
2013-2018 ARIS (Augmented Reality Interactive Storytelling) International Instructional Development Group. Compiling and creating materials for the accessible learning and teaching of ARIS games for communities, museums, and schools.
2011- 2013 Research Assistant to Professor Susan Friedman, University of Wisconsin- Madison. Assisted with editing, research, and administration for Comparison: Theories Approaches Uses (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014); Provocations: A Planetary Modernist Studies for the Twenty-First Century (Columbia UP, 2015); and Sisters of Scheherazade: Muslim Feminisms and Diasporic Women’s Writing (forthcoming).
2011-2012 Editorial Assistant to Susan Stanford Friedman, editor, Contemporary Women’s Writing Journal, Oxford University Press.
TEACHING ___________________________________________________
2015-Present Associate Professor of English, SUNY Canton
- English 101 Composition and the Spoken Word (in person and online_
- English 102 Research Writing
- English 211 Modern American Novel
- English 214 Contemporary American Fiction
- English 270 Writing, Games, and New Media
- English 290 Mobile Media Stories and Games
- English 314 Digital Graphic Storytelling
- English 321 Ghosts and the Undead: Racial Hauntings in American Literature
- English 350 Electronic Literature: From Cybertext to Video Games
2012-2013 Teaching Assistant and Consultant at UW- DesignLab, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Consulted with students and faculty at DesignLab, a writing center for media projects that supports design arguments and experience design in multimedia platforms using image, text, sound, and data. Led several media design and media assignment workshops for faculty
2010-2014 Teaching Assistant, English Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Eng 571 Remix, Mash up, and Digital Design in Literature
- Eng 550 Studies in Criticism: Smart Media and Critical Information Design
- Eng 177 Stories, Maps, Media: Designing the Wisconsin Experience
- Eng 177 The Graphic Novel
- Eng 169 Violence in Modern American Literature
2004-2010 Lecturer, English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Edgewood College, Madison, Wisconsin
- Eng 101 College Composition
- Eng 102 Research Writing
- Eng 259 Comics and Politics
- Eng 259 Faulkner and Morrison
- Eng 250 Contemporary Caribbean Writers
- Eng 210 Introduction to Literature
- WGS/Eng 159 Literature and Gender Studies
- INS 150 The Fairy Tale in our Cultural Consciousness
- WGS/Eng 150 Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE______________________________________________
2021-2025 Chair of English Department, SUNY Canton
2020-2023 SUNY University Faculty Senator
2018-2019 SUNY Faculty Senate member, Ethics Committee
2017-2018 Teaching, Learning, and Technology Governance Committee
2017-2019 Principal Investigator for IITG (Innovative Instruction Technology Grant). Ongoing pedagogical research project based on StudioLab Manifesto (book project) facilitated by SUNY-wide Grant to start collaborative digital writing lab at SUNY Canton. Includes space renovation, games consuls and software, independent server, VR technology, moveable and configurable furniture, writeable walls, and pedagogical assessment plan. $60,000. Granted.
2017-present Co-editor of Grasse Roots, the SUNY Canton journal of writing
2017-2019 Development Committee and Principal Grant Writer for cross-disciplinary Digital Studio for game design and digital writing
2017-2018 Search Committee for Dean of School of Liberal Arts
2015-present Co-developer of New Media Writing program and major, (includes developing new courses, justification for major, lab development and so forth), SUNY Canton
2015-2016 Co-organizer of THAT Camp North Country (The Humanities and Technology Camp for faculty of St. Lawrence University and SUNY Canton)
2015-present Professional Development Committee, SUNY Canton
2015 Organizer and director of first annual Global Game Jam, SUNY Canton
2015-present School of Liberal Arts Committee, SUNY Canton
2013-2015 Co-director of Contemporary Literature Colloquium, UW-Madison
2011-2014 Graduate Student Committee, Department of English, UW-Madison
2011-2012 Vilas Research Grants Committee, UW-Madison
2010-2013 Chair of the Jewish Caucus, National Women’s Studies Association
LANGUAGES___________________________________________________
Hebrew (fluent speaking and reading)
French (proficient reading)
DIGITAL MEDIA PRODUCTION____________________________________
“UW-Madison’s Graphic Novels.” Collaboratively created website with 60 students in English 169, “The Graphic Novel”. Digital assignments included leading students to create a UW-Madison graphic novel website with interactive timelines, splash page, book reviews, film clips, and live links
“Remembering a Future: A Digital Performance of Memorial Narratives in Israel,” Smart media project for public presentation using Keynote, Garage Band, and iMovie. Presented at the National Women’s Studies Association, Atlanta, November, 2011.
“All Aboard: Wisconsin Death Trip,” collaborative, interactive Prezi museum project using Information Architecture, Information Design, and Experience Design concepts. Based on Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy, 2011.
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS___________________________________
2014-2018 Games Learning Society
2014-2018 HASTAC
2012-Present American Studies Association
2012-2018 Association of Jewish Studies
2008-Present Modern Language Association
2008-Present National Women’s Studies Association
REFERENCES__________________________________________________
Michael Bernard-Donals
Vice Provost
Nancy Hoefs Professor of English
117 Bascom Hall
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706
mfbernarddon@wisc.edu
608-262-5246
Russ Castronovo
Dorothy Draheim Professor of English
7195 Helen C. White Hall, 600 Park Street
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706
rcastronovo@wisc.edu
Laini Kavaloski 