March Missive
Hi all.
This past Friday marked the triumphant return of the EGSA conference to the department’s slate of spring happenings. It has been three years since the EGSA sponsored a conference, and It has definitely been missed. Thanks to Mary-Catherine Berger, Gianna Holiday, Briahna Henry, Julio Lopez-Sosa, Sara Engle, and Amber Rae Hightower for all of the hard work that they put into this event over the past many months. A big shout out too to all of the presenters and to Meghan Barnes for her tireless support. And congratulations to Bryn Chancellor for being named Graduate Professor of the Year by the EGSA!!! I think all of us know that Bryn is a great choice. No one cares more about, is more committed to, our students. I won’t soon forget the terrific keynote address that she gave after accepting the award.
A reminder that this Wednesday, Dr. Riki Thompson will join Pilar Blitvich’s ENGL 4267/5075 class to deliver her Zoom lecture “Beyond the gender binary: Digital dating, discourse, design & normativity.” Faculty and students are invited to sit in. Also Kingston University professor Martin Dines will be delivering the presentation “Teaching Humanities in the Environment” this Thursday at 4pm in the Seminar Room. He’ll also be part of a roundtable on the Environmental Humanities the next day in the Seminar Room with our own Alan Rauch, Juan Meneses, Matt Rowney, Allison Hutchcraft, Katie Hogan, and Anastasiia Malakhova. The following week the department will be sponsoring Honors Colloquiums on Thursday and Friday in the Seminar Room. Thanks to both Matt Rowney and Juan Meneses for putting these together. Lastly, please make sure to put the department’s annual Student Awards Ceremony on your schedule. It will take place on April 18 at 1:00 in Atkins Library’s Halton Reading Room.
Kudos!
MA student Sarah Engle has been admitted with full funding to the doctoral program in the Department of English at the University Georgia. She will be working on popular adaptations of early modern British literature.
Former MA Student Paul Thompson Hunter will defend his dissertation at Purdue on April 17 and has accepted a tenure-track position in the English Department at Longwood University in central Virginia.
Liz Miller presented a paper titled “The co-constitution of language teacher belonging and teacher communities: Learning from language program administrators’ accounts” that was part of a Colloquium she organized for the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference in Denver. Her visit to Denver included two days of meetings with the AAAL Executive Committee. She was recently invited to join the editorial board for the Second Language Teacher Education journal, published by the University of Toronto Press.
Former MA student Christopher Turley published the monograph Anthony Burgess and America with Manchester University Press.
Mark West published a short article on Pippi Longstocking in The Early Children’s Literature and Culture Chronicle and two short essays in the March-April issue of The Arena: Newsletter of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. One is titled “Theodore Roosevelt as an Activist Reader.” The other is titled “Theodore Roosevelt’s Muse-Like Associations with Blue Bloods.” He also participated in a Banned Books Panel Discussion at Cresswind Charlotte Retirement Community.