Carrie Harvey, associate professor in Belmont’s School of Nursing, presented at the national clinical conference of the American College of Nurse Practitioners in Denver, Colo.

Over 200 health professionals attended her session entitled, “A Systematic Approach to 12 Lead ECG Interpretation.” The session provided the nurse practitioners with a systematic approach to interpreting the 12 lead ECG. Participants were briefed on major physiologic underpinnings using actual case studies and electrocardiograms. Normal and abnormal 12 lead ECGs were reviewed and a stepwise interpretation approach was introduced.

Teresa Plummer, faculty member in the School of Occupational Therapy, was invited as a plenary speaker for the European Seating Symposium held in Dublin, Ireland Nov.  7-11.

Along with Mary Shea, MSOT from Kessler Rehabilitation in New Jersey, Dr. Plummer presented the RESNA Practice Guide for the Wheelchair Assessment and Procurement Practice.

The practice guide was the outcome of a two year Ad Hoc committee group of 13 stakeholders from the US and is an effort to provide structure for the provision of wheeled mobility. Plummer attended several meetings discussing the education of occupational therapy students in the practice of wheelchair assessments.

English faculty members, Andrea Stover,  Annette Sisson and Kacie Hittel, recently attended the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s 83rd Annual Convention in Atlanta, Ga. The theme of the conference was “The Power of Poetry in the Modern World.” Stover, Sisson and Hittel all presented papers at the conference and served on the same panel, The Rhetorical Power of Women’s Poetry. tover served as chair of the session, and Sisson served as secretary.

Stover’s paper, “Ekphrasis in Modern Women’s Poetry: Uniting Poetry and the Visual Arts to Re-imagine History” offered a close reading of three poems: “Brazil, January 1, 1502” by Elizabeth Bishop; “Degas’s Laundresses” by Evan Boland; and “Mourning Picture” by Adrienne Rich. Each poem is an ekphrasis, or a poem written in response to a visual work of art, that serves the rhetorical purpose of giving an alternative interpretation of the one offered in the paintings, thus helping us to revise old versions of history that have been framed in art and frozen in the cultural imagination.

Sisson’s paper, “Mary Oliver and the Rhetorical “Nature” of Oracular Poetry” argues that in Mary Oliver’s poetry nature is both rhetorical and epistemic, providing an invitation to another way of “knowing” that transcends our human capacity for knowing. At the same time, the speaker plays the role of the oracle, pointing us to the divine mystery that nature embodies in its infinite incarnations. Nature thus provides rhetorical moments that offer a wordless discourse which we are urged to observe, experience, and celebrate—and to which we have the opportunity, if only temporarily, to surrender our human need for answers.

Hittel’s paper, The “Art of Rhetoric” in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, centered on “Beautiful Speech” by Irish poet Eavan Boland. It examined a common conception of ‘the art of rhetoric’ as ‘the art of deception’ through the nationalist, patriarchal literary traditions in Ireland. Boland attempts to subvert the dominant rhetoric to assert her place, managing to both critique and elevate ideas of language and belonging.