COOK FAMILY WRITING PROGRAM

• First-Year Seminar Writing Awards
  • “Hybrid Squalor” - Carter Makice
  • “An Abdication of Moral Leadership: America's Response to the Holocaust” - John Magloire
  • “Emissions Trading in China” - Joshua Tabuena
• Honorable mention in the First-Year Seminar Writing Award
  • “An Abuse of Power?: Explaining the Recent Spate of Executive Actions” - Shreyas Iyer

John Anderson, one of our affiliated faculty, has just been named co-director of the Segal Design Certificate Program, along with Stacy Benjamin. The Design Certificate is available to any Northwestern undergraduate who wants to work on design in a team-based, cross-disciplinary setting. Information on the program can be found at http://segal.northwestern.edu/programs/undergraduate/segal-design-certificate/.

Writing Program faculty remember with joy and sadness our former colleague and friend, Edith Skom, who taught in the Program for over 30 years. Edie was a dedicated teacher and mystery writer who brought wit, compassion, and intelligence to us and to her many students. For more on Edie’s life and accomplishments, see Northwestern News and The Daily Northwestern.

Kathleen Carmichael was selected as a member of the Writing Program for the Associated Student Government (ASG) Faculty and Administrator Honor Roll for 2016-17. Robert Gundlach was also selected as a member of the Linguistics Department.

Charles Yarnoff has been appointed to serve on the search committee for the next Director of the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching at Northwestern.  The Searle Center occupies a key role at Northwestern, offering to students and faculty a wide array of services and programs that promote outstanding teaching and in-depth learning. 

Phyllis Lassner just completed the first of her three year visits to Southampton University, UK, for her International Diamond Jubilee Fellowship. She gave a keynote address to a symposium based on her research, Espionage and Exile, led an MA workshop on “Women and War Writing,” and co-taught a Graduate Seminar in Holocaust Studies on the subject of “Liberation and After.”

The Writing Program of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences was renamed the Bobbie and Stanton Cook Family Writing Program on May 13, 2015, after the Cook family made a significant gift to the program that touches every part of Northwestern University. Read more

Provost Dan Linzer and the Faculty Distance Learning Workgroup have funded Leslie Fischer’s digital technology proposal. The grant supports the development of individual instructional modules that target where students need extra support in communication skills in the first year, two-term engineering and writing course, Design Thinking and Communication (DTC). Fischer will research, write, produce and record approximately twenty brief instructional modules centering on written, oral, visual and team communication. Student engagement and learning will be assessed with interactive software. The modules will live as a library of communication resources on DTC’s Canvas site and the Writing Program’s NuWrite website.

Charles Yarnoff was selected as a member of the Writing Program for the Associated Student Government (ASG) Faculty and Administrator Honor Roll for 2015-16.  Robert Gundlach was also selected as a member of the Linguistics Department.

• Intermediate Composition - The Jean Reeder Smith Essay Award: 
  • "My Model Minority" - Ryan Yang
• Intermediate Composition Honorable Mention: 
  • "The Morality of Espionage: Operating in the Cold Shadows" - Ryan P. Kearney
• Writing In Special Contexts (Design Thinking and Communication) Essay Award
  • "A Backpack that Saves Lives" - Marc T.L. Gyongyosi
  • "The Creation of Giants: Analyzing Ethics in Scientific Research" - Watson Fu