February/March Missive

Hi all.
This past Thursday, the English Department hosted the first of what I hope will be a regular spoken-word event here at UNC Charlotte. As I mentioned in our recent department meeting, we had a very healthy student turnout for a Thursday-night offering, and I was really happy to see that very few of these students left at intermission. Our own Marquis Hartis not only planned the event but they emceed it and delivered a terrific poem to top it off. Participants were: Frank Expression, A Poet Named Superman, Jay Ward, Asma, Jordan, Lyric, and TuKool Tiff. After the event was over, a number of our students stuck around to talk to the poets. A good time was definitely had by all.
This coming Friday marks the second straight year that the EGSA will be running its symposium after what was a three-year hiatus. The event consists of twenty-nine presenters across five concurrent sessions. During lunch, the EGSA will announce the recipient of this year’s Graduate Faculty of the Year Award. I have no doubt that members of the EGSA and all of the participating students are looking forward to a healthy faculty turnout. I’ll be there. I hope to see all of you there too.  
I will soon be scheduling a second brown-bag lunch gathering so that faculty can continue to discuss their thinking about the opportunities and challenges of teaching in a world of AI. Look in your email boxes for an announcement of day and time in the coming days. As a reminder, WRC Director Katie Garahan will be visiting what will be her new home department on Monday, April 20th. Along with meeting with faculty, staff, and students, she will be delivering a talk on her research and teaching in the Seminar Room (time TBA). That evening, English Department faculty will be taking Katie out for a meal at a local eatery. An advertising campaign for CHILL 2.0 is now underway at the IPH. As you’ll see here, both Helen Davies and Mark Hall will be offering courses as part of this continuing education program this summer. It would be much appreciated if all of you helped us get the word out by talking to friends and family about CHILL over the coming weeks. Last but not least, please make sure to put the department’s annual Student Awards Ceremony on your schedule. It will take place on April 17th at 1:00pm in 

Atkins Library’s Halton Reading Room. 

Kudos!

Lucy Arnold published the article From Inspiration to Liberation: Decolonizing Nature Writing in the Classroom in the latest issue of English Journal. Her co-writer is UNC Charlotte grad student Jessica Hawkins.

Meghan Barnes, Lucy Arnold, and Heather Coffey published the monograph Fostering Critical Pedagogy in the ELA Classroom: Mentoring, Networking, and Supporting English Teachers with Routledge. Meghan also chaired Erica Neal’s dissertation Preservice Teachers’ Knowledge Regarding Text Selection in the English Language Arts Classroom. With Erica, she recently gave the presentation “Fostering Belonging through Young Adult Literature” at the Young Adult Literature Summit.

Balaka Basu delivered an invited talk-back at the IPH after a screening of the new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

MA graduate and poet Alex Beets was awarded a Goodyear Arts Residency.

Helen Davies’s co-written chapter “New Crusaders, New Problems: Engaging with Crusader Content in Digital Space and the College Classroom” was published in the volume Digital Medieval Studies: Crusaders and Computers (ARC Humanities Press); Helen also was awarded, as a co-PI, a grant to support the project Digitally Reconstructing a Desecrated Holocaust Torah Scroll.

Monique Delagey, a 2025 graduate from our BA in English-Creative Writing and Honors programs, was accepted into the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College; she will concentrate in speculative fiction.

Erica Hussey was awarded an Ou-Telier Artist Residency at the Ou Gallery (Vancouver Island, Canada). She’ll be there in June of 2027. 

MA graduate Robin Kello accepted a tenure-line Early Modern British Literature position at West Chester University in Philadelphia.

Juan Meneses recently gave an invited talk for the ASLE Ecomedia Interest Group titled “Eternity Now: Nuclear Waste, Documentary Filmmaking, and the Haunting of the Future.” He was also appointed to the MLA Global South Forum Executive Committee.

Liz Miller co-presented the paper (with our former colleague Chris Bongartz) titled “Belonging on the move: Relational and epistemic dynamics in Moroccan teacher narratives” at a conference hosted by Teachers College, Columbia University; she also presented the paper “Language teachers and administrators co-constructing servant leadership: Accounts from language program administrators” at the annual AAAL conference in Chicago. 

Nathan Nicolau, a graduate of our MA program, was recently featured in a CPCC web-page story on his work as a teacher of writing and work on the literary journal The Hammer. 

Britt Olsen recently signed on to write articles across three segments (Culture, Community, Wellbeing, and Discourse) of  Tusk & Quill. Her first article, “Upholding Sustainability at UNC Charlotte,” was just published in its Community segment.

Alan Rauch was invited to participate as an exhibiting author at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Meetup; he was asked to talk about his recent book Sloth (Animal).

Matt Rowney published the review essay “Time and Terrain in British Romantic Writing by Alan Vardy / Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland by Ann Radcliffe, edited by Penny Bradshaw” in European Romantic Review; he also published a review of Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East by Yin Yuan in the Summer 2025 issue of Wordsworth Circle.

Daniel Shealy was awarded a CHESS Small Grant to support his book on Louisa May Alcott in Europe. 

MA/Fulbright student Julio Lopez Sosa won a Convention Paper Award at the most recent national Sigma Tau Delta conference.

Ralf Thiede and Barbara Thiede (Dept. of Religious Studies) presented a one-hour panel entitled “Enslavement, Judeophobia, and Linguistic Imperialism in Bible Translations” at the 93rd meeting of SECOL (SouthEastern Conference on Linguistics) in late March in Atlanta.

Aaron Toscano was named President of the Southeastern Association of Cultural Studies (SEACS). At its recent annual conference, he delivered the paper “Twenty-First Century Anti-Intellectualism: The Rhetoric of Anti-Academic Discourse.” 

Mark West was awarded the2026 Children’s Literature Association’s Mentoring Award. He also delivered the presentation “The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter” at the Barclay Retirement Community at South Park.