The Chronicle of Higher Education has devoted three pieces to the ELO/MITH Open Mic & Mouse event that was held as a kick-off to the Electronic Literature Symposium that was held at the University of Maryland in early May.

Click here for an article covering the event. Below the lead picture, you’ll find a link to the video story. And, on the right-hand side of the screen, under "Related Material," you’ll see a link for an audio interview with N. Katherine Hayles.

Dr. Angel David Nieves, assistant professor in the Historic Preservation Program in the School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation and Director of Graduate Research and Training in the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity was recently named the recipient of the 2007 Lionel Cantu Memorial Colloquium Award from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

On Friday, May 18th, he delivered the 2007 Memorial Lecture in honor of Dr. Cantu’s commitment to studies of transnational migration, cross-border studies and the interrelations between race, gender and sexuality in the nation-state. Replete with the distinction and an honorarium, he was honored at a commemorative banquet with University of California, Santa Cruz faculty, students and administration.

Dr. Nieves presented his digital research project on the Hector Pieterson Museum, a national heritage site in Johannesburg, South Africa. A faculty research fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), he has developed a "living archive" and digital museum entitled "Soweto ‘76" memorializing the 1976 Soweto uprising against apartheid resulting in the massacre of over 575 student protesters. He is the first MITH faculty fellow from the School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation.

"I am honored to give this year’s memorial lecture," said Dr. Nieves. "Lionel made a lasting and significant imprint on the field, his students and colleagues. I hope that my talk furthers his vision of social justice and equity in some important ways."

Lionel Cantu was assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz at the time of his unexpected death. He was 36. Established in 2003, the Cantu Memorial Colloquium honors one graduate student and faculty member pursuing studies related to his research. His co-edited anthology with Eithne Luibheid, Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings was posthumously published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2005.

Nieves is also traveling to Uganda, Rwanda, and South Africa in June as part of an ACC/IAC Faculty Fellowship he was awarded. The program, “Post-Conflict Reconciliation and Reconstruction in Africa,” will provide an opportunity to explore and possibly establish additional collaborations with historic sites in Uganda and Rwanda. He hopes to add two additional sites to his current project under the umbrella of a larger meta site on issues of national reconciliation.

At the 32nd Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association, to be held in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, MITH Fellow Merle Collins (Professor of English and Comparative Literature) will present on “Africa to the Caribbean: Saraka and Nation in Grenada.” The panel will be looking at African influences in the Circum-Caribbean, and its main focus is Yoruba influences on Afro-Brazilian Culture.

Open Mic and Mouse in Art/Soc 2203, May 2, 2007. Some ten different writers of electronic literature, traveling from as far away as Spain and Norway, read from their work amid a space transformed by MITH staff and interns. Photo by Rob Kendall.

See also a Flickr set here.

And another one here.

Look for more blog and Flcikr coverage soon.