The English Department’s In Process series has just announced its exciting Fall 2023 schedule:
For more information, visit the In Process Blog.
Magic in the United States
Lecturer (and alum) Cory Hutcheson is the humanities advisor for a three-season nationally distributed podcast entitled Magic in the United States: 400 Years of Magical Beliefs, Practices, and Cultural Conflicts. The project received $388,863 over three years from the National Endowmen for the Humanities, and the podcast will be marketed and distributed by Public Radio International (PRX), which reaches up to 28 million listeners.
Fallible Aesthetics
English faculty member and Associate Director of the University Writing Center, Dr James (Jim) Hamby is releasing a book of poetry entitled Fallible Aesthetics. He offers readers a reflective collection of poems on themes such as finding beauty in an uncertain world; epiphany and crossing thresholds; and the futility of impermanence. The book can be read in serial fashion or pre-ordered for its October 2023 release from Signum University Press.
Down the Back Lane
Professor Emeritus and musician Kevin Donovan presents Down the Back Lane every Sunday from 4-6pm (CT), a radio program featuring traditional and contemporary Celtic recordings with an emphasis on Irish music with occasional journeys both nearby and well beyond. Listen in to enjoy Dr Donovan’s familiar voice, sharing his love and knowledge of Celtic music.
NACLO 2023 at MTSU
Dr. Aleka Blackwell is a national team coach for NACLO, the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition. The contest is for high school students who are competing to make the national team. Top performers on the open round will be invited to compete in the invitational round. The winners of the invitational round will be eligible to represent the USA at the International Linguistics Olympiad at Bansko, Bulgaria on July 21-29, 2023.
Dr Albakry in the News
Dr Mohammed Albakry, Professor of English, has recently contributed two important opinion pieces to Inside Higher Ed and The Tennesseean. The first, published December 6, “On Writing and Decoding Recommendation Letters,” advises on best practices for writing recommendation letters — a genre rarely taught to junior faculty members. The second, published December 8, “Tennessee Constitution and Its Amendments Have a Language Problem,” addresses the problems of of hyper-formal and ambiguous phrasing in proposed Tennessee constitutional amendments.
Faculty Service Awards
We are proud to announce MTSU’s 2022 service awards for the following English faculty members:
- Will Brantley, 30 years
- Elyce Helford, 30 years
- Randy Mackin, 25 years
- Ron Kates, 25 years
- Robert Lawrence, 20 years
- Jennifer Kates, 20 years
- Laura Dubek, 20 years
- Jennifer Wilson, 15 years
- Aaron Shapiro, 10 years
- Brett Hudson, 10 years
- LeAnne Hennessy, 10 years
Many thanks to our colleagues for their dedication and ongoing efforts on behalf of our department!
English Graduate Student Makes Most of New York Public Library Fellowship
English PhD candidate Harlow Crandall was awarded a short-term fellowship by the New York Public Library to conduct research in their archives. Read Crandall’s engaging article on his experience, published in the NYPL blog: “Starts Like a Kiss and Ends like a Curse: The Enigma of Jim Carroll.”
Graduate Student Samira Grayson Published
English PhD candidate Samira Grayson published the article “Writing Together or (Co)-Writing Together?: Collaboration and Co-Authorship in 10 years of Peitho” in the journal Peitho 24.4 (Summer 2022).
Abstract: This article presents an exploration of trends in co-authorship in the Peitho journal archive inspired by a Twitter exchange between Damon Albarn and Taylor Swift, where Albarn was quoted in an interview with the LA Times as stating that Swift doesn’t write her own songs—that co-writing is not the same thing as writing. Swift responded to Albarn via Twitter, saying that not only was his claim false, but damaging. The public uptake of the exchange draws attention to conversations surrounding co-authorship and perceptions of its credibility and reputability. Given Peitho’s decade of publishing feminist work and in this way representing feminist scholarship, it is useful to examine this archive to better understand if we have fared any better than Taylor Swift in our work to understand co-authorship and collaboration in nuanced ways.