Department of English
News
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Inside Higher Ed: Opinion
English Professor Dr. Mohammed Albakry published “Why Authenticity Is the Wrong Standard for Faculty Hiring,” an opinion piece, in Inside Higher Ed (20 May 2026).
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Oxford Handbook Essay on Chinonye Chukwu
Dr. Laura Dubek’s essay, “Resisting Erasure: Chinonye Chukwu’s Cinematic Portrayals of Black Women’s Grief,” has been published in The Oxford Handbook to African American Women’s Writing, edited by Simone Drake and Valerie Lee (Oxford University Press, 2026).
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The Abbey of Clugny Critical Edition
Congratulations to Dr. Bridget Donnelly on the publication of her Routledge Critical Edition of Elizabeth Meeke’s The Abbey of Clugny. Especially exciting is the collaborative element of this project, including the work of many MTSU students—both undergraduate and graduate.
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Poe Studies Award
Congratulations to Dr. Philip Phillips, whose recently published edited collection of essays, Poe Spaces: Within and Beyond the Spatial Turn, published by Palgrave Macmillan in its Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series, has just received the J. Lasley Dameron Award for 2025 from the Poe Studies Association (PSA).
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New Book of Poetry
Congratulations to Dr. Gaylord Brewer, who has just released his newest book of poetry, Goodbye, Baby, with Accents Publishing.
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Creative Pedagogy and MTSU Students
We proudly share Dr. Chandler Mordechai’s most recent refereed publication in the February 2026 issue of the journal ImageText. The article explores a creative pedagogical activity featuring the works of five MTSU students. You can read “Developing Reflexive Research Approaches through Multimodal Positionality Poems” at the attached link.
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Feminist Rhetorical Practices of Healing
Congratulations to Dr. Chandler Mordechai, who has published “Storiographies of #HealingJourney: Online Feminist Rhetorical Practices of Healing through Content Creation and Care” in the Winter 2026 issue of Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric.
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Digital Archive Research in Teaching
Congratulations to Dr. Bridget Donnelly, who published the article “‘We Have to Be Detectives’: Digital Archival Research in the Undergraduate British Literature Survey Course” in the January 2026 issue of the journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture.
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Invited Talks
Professor Rima Abdallah shared her research on effective strategies for teaching virtual students in two talks at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi at the invitation of Dr Karine Germoni. Her presentations were “Teaching Writing Across the Disciplines” and “Teaching Texts Remotely: Challenges and Strategies for Teaching Asynchronously.”
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The Bluest Eye and Civil Disorder in the 1960s
Dr. Laura Dubek has just published her chapter “Rewriting ‘The Ugly Duckling’: The Bluest Eye and Civil Disorder(s) in the 1960s” in Critical Insights: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, edited by Jericho Williams (Salem Press, 2025).
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Department of English
Mailing Address:
Department of English
Middle Tennessee State University
Box 70
1301 East Main Street
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
Main Office: Peck Hall 302
Chair: Dr. Stephen Severn
Email: stephen.severn@mtsu.edu
Telephone: (615) 898-2648