Associate Professor and prolific author Dr Fred Arroyo received MTSU’s 2025 Distinguished Senior Career Activity Award. His award-winning books include Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging (2020), Western Avenue and Other Fictions (2012), and The Region of Lost Names (2008). For more, see this recent interview with Dr. Arroyo, “On Writing Your Obsessions.”
Professor of English and Honors Associate Dean received the 2025 Career Achievement Award. “Except for being recognized by students, there’s no greater honor for a professor than to be recognized in this way by his peers,” said Phillips. For more information, visit the full announcement via MTSU News.
Inside Higher Ed has recently published a conversation by Dr. Kate Pantelides, alum Samira Grayson, and Holly Hassel: “A Quick Convo All Writing Teams Should Have” (8 July 2025).
Professor Philip E. Phillips has just published “Robert Frost” in Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, edited by Jackson Bryer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025).
Congratulations to English Lecturer Brian Dudak, who was honored by University College as this year’s Outstanding Dual Enrollment Faculty Member, and Instructor Honey Denson, who was also honored as a finalist.
Congratulations to English Master Instructor Candie Moonshower, who was recently selected as the Honors College’s Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She has also been inducted into Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.
Associate Professor Kate Pantelides has published a special section on Methods of Student Self Placement in the Journal of Writing Assessment.18.1 (2025). Her introduction to the section is entitled “Collaboratively Building Our SSP Scholarship (Because Placement Is Still Everyone’s Business).”
Professor Philip E. Phillips served as the keynote speaker at the International Conference on “Humans, Animals, and Natural History: Ecocritical Approaches to World Literature” at Ravenshaw University in Cuttack, Odisha, India. For more information, visit https://mtsunews.com/phillips-delivers-keynote-international-literature-conference-india/.
We congratulate Professor Mohammed Albakry on two publications and an international speaking invitation.
Dr. Albakry’s co-authored article “Navigating Academic Arguments: Teaching Reporting Verbs in Transitional Reading Courses” appeared in the Journal of College Reading and Learning 54(3).
He has a forthcoming chapter entitled “Language Shift and Cultural Identity: Younger Generation’s Attitudes Toward Cajun French,” to appear in the edited volume Language in the Changing South, University of Georgia Press.
And he has been invited to be the keynote speaker at the 4th International Sacred Texts Conference in Accra, Ghana (June 2025), organized by the University of Ghana and the University of South Africa.
Professor Elyce Rae Helford has published a chapter entitled “Traumatic Timescapes: Holocaust Memory in Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Nava Semel’s And the Rat Laughed in editor Marleen S. Barr’s new collection from Lexington Books, Jewish Women Science Fiction Writers Create Future Females: Gender, Temporality — and Yentas.