About
This is the current online residence of William Patrick Wend. I am an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts who specializes in teaching film, grammar, composition, and literature. My writing has appeared in The Chronicle Of Higher Education, College English Forum, The Quarterly Conversation, The Victorian, and many other platforms. I am a former blogger for Blogging Woolf, one of the leading Virginia Woolf centered websites on the World Wide Web. I have spoken at Bergen Community College, Ocean County College, Rowan University, Rutgers University, Seton Hall University, and Stockton University plus a number of THATCamp unconferences and the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. I have also coordinated two graduate symposiums and was the coordinator for THATCamp Community College from 2012-2019.
This website contains my weblog and information about my work and educational experiences, publications, coursework taken and taught, instructional materials I have prepared, and other things that do not fit into a category.
Briefly, A History
I am an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts. I teach our required composition courses, which focus on writing, grammar, and critical thinking skills. I also teach a variety of literature courses including both British Literature surveys, Shakespeare, Woman's Literature, and courses on adaptation, cinema, and graphic narratives. I have been at my college since 2009, first as an adjunct and then as a full time faculty member as of January of 2011. I also worked at another college in New Jersey during the 2010-2011 school year teaching Composition and Developmental English. I was the coordinator for our Honors program from 2017-2020. I was awarded tenure in 2018.
I earned my MA in English in 2009. I organized two symposiums for my department and participated in two others. Two of my presentations later became published journal articles. My MA Thesis "A Threat To The Known: The Unknown Descendants Of The Bounded Text" looked at the role of reader agency and how it is affected by hypertext fiction and the move from print to electronic text. Caitlin Fisher's These Waves Of Girls and The Unknown Collective's The Unknown are used to examine and close read the literary and aesthetic nature of electronic literature. Bram Stoker's Dracula is contrasted as a canonical touchstone to discuss the potential role of hypertext fiction in the literary canon.
In 2006, I received my BA in Literature (with minors in Philosophy/Religious Studies and Writing). I was a student researcher for Dr. Ken Tompkins' Advanced Shakespeare course and an active member of the Gay/Straight Alliance from 2001-2004. I worked in three secondary school districts as a substitute teacher. I worked at Southern Regional from 2002-2009. I worked in the Barnegat school district from 2009 to 2010. In between, I also worked in the Pinelands Regional school district during the 2005-2006 school year.
I am proud to say I am also a former community college student, having completed a Liberal Arts AA in 2000.
Over the years, I have worked on a number of digital projects. I have been a lifelong user of computers going back to my childhood, but as an adult the first digital project I worked on was the digitization of the American Weekly Mercury newspaper, which was Philadelphia's first newspaper during the colonial period in 2003. I worked on both research and coding ends of this project to create annotations for various parts of each issue. I have been a blogger since 2004 (and had a “weblog” as early as 1999 before there really was a vocabulary for it) on Movable Type, Wordpress, and now more recently Squarespace.
Later in 2004, I wrote my first hypertext novel entitled War Prayers. Inspired by the work of The Unknown Collective, Shelley Jackson, and others I began writing constrained, 300 word, entries on and off for the next year.
I self published print fanzines from 1995-2002 covering independent music and culture. These fanzines, plus new and previously unreleased material from a 2003 fanzine project that never got off the ground, have been collected on Signifying Nothing, where I have also done 50 podcasts and created new content on and off since 2005. You can read an interview with me about Signifying Nothing here.
In 2007, I combined my love of independent music and the digital humanities to creates Hardcore Show Flyers. HSF serves as an archive of gig flyers and ephemera with a focus on the years 1980 to more recent times. This archive has greatly aided the research of a number of books about independent music and has been featured on Brooklyn Vegan, Mojo Magazine, Verbicide Magazine and many weblogs and fanzines.
I was also a columnist for Quick Fix Magazine in 2007.
From 2016-2022 I did Giraffe Feels podcast, focusing on retro gaming culture.
Before my time coordinating THATCamp Community College. I helped organized a previous THATCamp in 2011. I also organized two symposiums for my program while in graduate school in 2007 and 2008.
My service work on campus continues to be something I am proud of. Since 2012, I have been a sponsor of students entering the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society. My annual book drive donated over 1,200 books to local schools and organizations from 2012-2014. In the spring of 2015, I founded a yearly scholarship going to an RCBC student transferring to one of my alma maters. Since 2017, I have awarded a scholarship to a student from our international student community.
I was interviewed for Slate Magazine about the future of the college essay in 2016 and about DIY ethics in the classroom for Visible Distance Fanzine in 2020.
In more recent times, I have been a regular guest on the CULTURE podcast discussing the world of professional wrestling.
Contact
You can email me at williampatrickwendATgmailDOTcom