English Department
Go English!
Here at the ECU Department of English, we are a vibrant and energetic collection of teachers, scholars, researchers, and writers. Our department offers four degrees: a B.A. in English; a B.S. in Professional Writing and Information Design; an M.A. in English; a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Writing, and Professional Communication as well as various minors and certificates. The diversity of this department is one of its strengths: you can take coursework in literature, creative writing, technical and professional communication, rhetoric and composition, multicultural and transnational literatures, linguistics, theory and criticism, folklore, children’s literature, teaching English to speakers of other languages, and film studies. In addition, you can expect to benefit from a breadth of faculty expertise across many areas of study. Above all, your success as a student is our first priority.
English News
Dr. Desiree Dighton, Mallory Pickens (BS PWID) and Zebediah Demorest (MA TPC) are part of a team — along with Tiffany Blanchflower (Department of Interior Design and Merchandising, College of Health and Human Performance), Danica Spriggs and John Kros (College of Business), and Rebecca Burnworth (Recreation Sciences) — whose work to create a Destination Marketing Plan and Social Media Toolkit for the town of Roseboro, NC is being funded by NC Department of Commerce’s Creating Outdoor Recreation Economies (CORE).
This work connects Desiree Dighton’s research and advocacy work to include local communities in improving more equitable participatory community design and economic development. She writes, “involving students like Mallory and Zeb demonstrates the high-impact learning opportunities we provide through our PWID BS and MA programs while also leveraging skills we embed in those programs like social media content and strategy creation.”
Dr. David Wilson-Okamura’s article “Uptight Funk,” on Prince and James Brown, was published in PopMatters and linked to at Arts & Letters Daily.
In the article, Wilson-Okamura wites, “In fact, funk was never as free as it seemed, starting with Soul Brother No. 1, His Bad Self, the Minister of New New Super Heavy Funk, James Brown. Like Prince, Brown was raised by an authoritarian father; and, like Prince, he fined his staff when they didn’t meet his standards. The stories about both men point to a larger truth about funk music in general: it might be nasty, but it was never undisciplined.”
At the 24th annual TALGS (TESOL and Applied Linguistics Graduate Student) Conference, former ECU ENGL professor Dr. Ekaterina Sudina (University of Maryland, College Park)was the keynote speaker. Sudina joined students and faculty from throughout the Southeast to exchange their research and teaching practices. This year marks the tenth year of collaboration between ECU’s Department of English and Greensboro College’s Department of English.
The conference was co-directed by ECU English’s Dr. Mark Johnson (English/linguistics) and others in the North Carolina linguistics community. Altogether, four ECU English graduate students (2 MAs and 2 PhDs) made the trip to Greensboro for this event, including one MA student, Shannon McGinnis (MA-English), who presented a very interesting paper, “K-Pop’s Foray into Language Education: Analyzing Learn! Korean With BTS.” (“BTS” is a popular K-Pop “boy band” that released a Korean language-learning app to help its global fans—the BTS Army—learn Korean language, idiom, and culture.)
The 25th annual TALGS conference will celebrate its big anniversary on ECU’s campus in February 2026.
Dr. Rebecca Bernard recently published five stories. She wrote the short stories “The Flirt” in Oxford American, “The Theft” in The Cincinnati Review, and“Wig Shop” in The Los Angeles Review.
In addition, Bernard had two flash fiction pieces published — “The Dream Men” in Redivider and “What Will You Wear” in Wigleaf.
Dr. Laureen Tedesco’s essay “The Little Brown Sister: A Children’s Book Model for William Howard Taft’s Benevolent Paternalism” has appeared in What the Presidents Read: Childhood Stories and Family Favorites, edited by Elizabeth Goodenough and Marilynn Olson (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025).
The essay connects Jane Andrews’s two “Seven Little Sisters” books—fictive introductions to geography for the youngest readers—to President Taft’s policy of so-called “benevolent paternalism” in the Philippines, during his tenure as U.S. governor of the Philippines and in his subsequent presidency. The unnamed “Little Brown Sister” of Andrews’s Seven Little Sisters and How They Grew (1861) and its sequel Each and All: How the Seven Sisters Prove Their Sisterhood (1888) suggests an intriguing parallel to Taft’s later term for Filipinos, “the little brown brother.” Andrews’s exhortation to readers of “the white race” to share their gifts of education and other benefits with “our dark-skinned sisters” has parallels to Taft’s efforts at education and Americanization in the Philippines, undergirded by unacknowledged racial and cultural hierarchies.
Dr. Amanda Klein recently discussed the importance of media literacy in an interview with WNCT.
In the interview, Klein explained, “Understanding, not changing the images that are out there, not changing what’s on the screens, although that might be part of it. It’s not about censorship. It’s about just understanding where it comes from. Because, if you know where it comes from, why it was made, you know what to do with that information. Do I accept it? Do I critique it? Do I dismiss it?”
Dr. Jim Kirkland received the Special Service Award in recognition of his 55 years of service to ECU teaching in the Department of English.
“I never imagined what my career would be when I got here,” said Kirkland, who joined the faculty in 1969 right out of graduate school in Tennessee to teach American literature.
Kirkland teaches predominantly writing-intensive courses, which allows him to spend more time individually with students. He has also taught folklore, directed the English composition program, and served as interim director of the university writing program. “Writing is really the core of everything,” he said. “I still love to do that.”