Thursday Keynote Speaker: Mr. Allen Nance of Tech Square Labs
Allen is an entrepreneur, investor, and director. From a rented house in 2000 he founded a company that became one of the world’s largest email marketing firms leading it to three Inc. 500 awards representing the fastest growing private companies in the United States before its acquisition. Today, he is an active technology investor and advisor to a set of companies that generate over $500 million a year in revenue and employ 3,000 talented individuals. He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and a member of Young President’s Organization (YPO).
Allen on Allen:
You should know a few things before reading further. I am an entrepreneur first, and an investor second. I surf, I box, I blog, I am a technology fanatic. I don’t have a filter on my mouth, and I am not working on it. I have had opportunities that don’t matter, such as being mentioned the prerequisite amount of times in the paper, or listed in the most this, or the youngest that. I have also had opportunities that do matter, like having amazing mentors and working with crazy smart team members. I am the first person in my family to attend college, so I am especially proud of my education.
My business cards have read: Founder, CEO, Chairman, Investor, Advisor, Board Member, and Partner.
David Morgen:
David is the Project Manager of Domain of One’s Own at Emory University and Coordinator of the Emory Writing Program. At Emory, he has taught courses in first year composition and the sophomore poetry class and used to help run the Writing Center. Before coming to Emory, he was a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech and also taught at University of West Georgia and at Longwood University in Virginia. He did his graduate work in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, but left before finishing his dissertation (which was on child raising and the frontier in turn-of-the-century America and ecocriticism).
David is the father to two wonderful daughters who, though he can’t quite bring himself to believe it, are becoming teenagers. He’s also a semi-professional photographer and an untalented but passionate painter. He’s played rhythm and lead guitar in a few bands in recent years, though these days he mostly just regrets not being able to play more often. And he’s the president and webmaster for his Unitarian Universalist congregation in Atlanta. He’s been an actor in a community Shakespearean theater company (best roles: Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and Speed in Two Gentlemen of Verona).
He spent a number of years as a semi-pseudonymous blogger writing about parenting, the academy, and politics, though not necessarily in that order, and was at one time inordinately proud of being the number one return for Google searches as disparate as “fucking dissertation” and “how to make an upholstered headboard.”
In 2007, David took a photo and posted it on Flickr every day. In 2008, he tried to take a self-portrait every day but he only made it 228/366ths of the way through before throwing in the towel.
Pete Rorabaugh:
Hi! I’m Pete Rorabaugh, a husband, father, teacher, writer, and lover of hammocks and ultimate frisbee. I live in Atlanta, GA, and soak up as much of the film and music scene there as I can. I’m fascinated by the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, the films of the Coen Brothers, and the life Malcolm X.
I am an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. I earned an M.A. in English Education and a Ph.D. in American Literature and Rhetoric, both from Georgia State University in Atlanta. My research interests include contemporary American fiction, religious rhetoric, networked culture, and the intersection of digital and critical pedagogy.
With my students, I explore new media and their impact on reading, thinking, and collaboration. My teaching is informed by critical pedagogy (specifically, the work of Paulo Freire) and my research fuses these interests and includes the study of games, digital literacies, and alternatives to traditional models of schooling and scholarship.
Julian Allen:
