Sonstroem

I am Eric Sonstroem, Chair of the English Department at Univeristy of the Pacific in Stockton California.

Feel free to browse this page, or use the links at the top of the page to find what you are looking for. The search button in the upper right might help you too.

Image courtesy of Schulman + Thorogood Group

I am currently putting together a self-designed major in Content Engineering for students at the University of the Pacific under the expert guidance of Rand Schulman, an outstanding Pacific alum and the College of the Pacific's first Executive in Residence. The "hub" of this major will be a pioneering course that I tested last fall, called Content Engineering, and which will be on the books for the Fall 2012 semester.

The major will combine classes from the English and Communication departments, from the Business School, and from the Engineering school. If you are a Pacific student and interested in exploring this as a self-designed major or minor, please contact me.

For my new Content Engineering class, I've required my students to create content-rich blogs about topics they enjoy, with the aim of producing commercially successful websites that target a specific market and generate real traffic. I knew this would be a lot of work for the students, so I committed myself do doing the same assignment along with them. The result is The Gweilo's Guide to Hong Kong Movies, a film review site for a non-Chinese perspective on Chinese films.

These are my current two classes for the Spring. Feel free to access the syllabi below. Warning: These syllabi are still very much works in progress. Each class is a community of people, exlporing and learning about a subject together. Therefore, be aware that some elements on the schedules of readings may change as the classes develop their own unique interests in the material this semester.

• Science and Literature
• British Literature: 1800 to present

Yes, it's the text of Frankenstein converted into an online, virtual MOO-space. Click here to begin your adventure:  The Frankenstein MOO

This is an ongoing project I began at Georgia Tech with Ron Broglio in 2001.

In the Summer of 2010 I was in south western Turkey, teaching film making to Turkish and international teenagers at Afaçan Youth Camp. It was a project organized by Gençtur, in coordination with Volunteers for Peace.

Click here for more information.

Congratulations to all of our oustanding presenters who made this a very successful conference!

I am one of the people who coordinated this undergraduate conference on the campus of the University of the Pacific. It was a one-day conference, and it took place on September 25, 2010. The official website is here.