DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH HOLDS TWO-DAY WORKSHOP ON E-LITERATURE
Resource persons in a pose with workshop participants and Prof. Helen A. Yitah, Head of English Department (front row, 4th from right)
The Department of English has hosted a two-day workshop on Introduction to E-Literature. The workshop took place from 3rd to 4th May, 2016. It was organised by the Department of English in collaboration with Professor Sandy Baldwin of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang, an alumnus of the Department of English, UG, and a PhD. Candidate of the University of West Virginia. Other resource persons for the Workshop were Philippe Bootz, University of Paris 8, Odile Farge, University of Paris 8, and Laura Shackelford, The Rochester Institute of Technology.
The event took place in Lab 3 on the 3rd Floor of the University of Ghana Computing Systems (UGCS) building.
The workshop combined theory and practice and left participants with concrete techniques for writing and reading e-literature. It also introduced participants to significant traditions, genres, concepts, and future directions of e-lit. Participants left the workshop with concrete skills and plans for scholarly publications and/or for creating works of art. An important aspect of the workshop was that it played a community building role by identifying and engaging with local scholars and artists in a bid to create an African e-literature network.
The project team will continue to communicate with the workshop participants and other interested faculty and students via the electronic media, including Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as through other means, to sustain the discussion and plan further activities after the workshop.
At the end of the workshop the resource persons met with Professor Helen Yitah, Head of the Department of English, and Dr. Jemima Anderson, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, to discuss future plans. Among the activities proposed were faculty visits (involving UG, RIT and Paris 8), co-teaching of courses on digital literature (UG and RIT) and an international e-lit conference to be held at UG in 2017 (to be jointly organised by UG, RIT and Paris 8).