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. Mark Johnson delivered a keynote plenary presentation at the Second Language Writing Research Seminar at the University of Murcia in Murcia, Spain. His presentation, “Formal Genre-Specific Knowledge as a Resource-Dispersing Feature of Cognitive Task Complexity: Implications for Task Complexity Theory and Research,” dovetailed models of working memory in writing and task complexity frameworks in order to better situate genre and its effect on the linguistic complexity of written second language (L2) production.
Dr. Marianne Montgomery has just published a chapter, “Using Power for Illumination: Advancement Paths for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty,” in Strategic Shakespeare: Transformative Leadership for the Future of Higher Education, edited by Ariane M. Balizet, Natalie K. Eschenbaum, and Marcela Kostihová.
Strategic Shakespeare demonstrates the value of humanities-trained scholars as leaders in higher education. It features contributions from Renaissance and Shakespearean scholars in leadership roles in North American higher education, who collectively aim to leverage traditional assumptions about Shakespeare in the service of a more inclusive and sustainable academy.
Dr. Brian Glover has just published an article titled “The Boswell Club of Chicago, 1942-1973” in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, volume 25.
The Boswell Club of Chicago, which flourished between 1942 and 1973, was a decidedly non-scholarly men’s club dedicated to both social and literary pursuits. Its eccentric founder, Rousseau Van Voorhies, imagined an imitation in Chicago of both the real eighteenth-century social life depicted in James Boswell’s writings and the imaginary Academy that Boswell and Johnson dream up for St. Andrews in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides. This article argues that the club’s social vision put the eighteenth century in service of mid-twentieth-century anxieties about bureaucratized capitalism, communications technologies, and corporate masculinity.
The Student Scholarships and Awards Committee is pleased to announce Ilaria Grace Noonan as the Paul Farr Memorial Essay Award recipient. Noonan’s essay “Not the Typical Murder Mystery: Understanding Humanity in De’Shawn Winslow’s Decent People” was nominated by Margaret Bauer.
Laureen Tedesco (Student Scholarships and Awards Committee Chair), Tracy Ann Morse, and Carla Pastor chose Noonan’s essay as the recipient from the nominees.
Gabrielle Freeman’s book of poetry, DISSENT, has been accepted by Small Harbor Publishing’s print house, Harbor Editions. Written in collaboration with poet Kathleen Nalley, the book will be published in November.
Small Harbor Publishing is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Its goal is to publish unique and diverse voices as a feminist press. It strives to fiercely promote the work of its authors and to bring new voices to a devoted and expanding readership.
Dr. Kirstin Squint collaborated with staff from Joyner Library, Kristen Daniel and Alston Cobourn, and from the Ledonia Wright Cultural Center, Nichole Maldonado, to host a program for eleventh graders from Pamlico High School on the topic of Native American literature. Students learned about subjects ranging from oral traditions and non-alphabetic texts to contemporary Indigenous science fiction and fantasy novels. They also had the opportunity to engage with the Neyuherú·kęʼ wampum belt, gifted to the state of North Carolina in 2013 by the Tuscarora Nation, and kept in Joyner Library’s Special Collections
Four doctoral students and four RWPC faculty members have published a co-edited special issue of Technical Communication and Social Justice. The special issue is on Digital Activism, Pedagogy, and Advocacy, and it includes an introduction by the editors: Nicole Allen, Mina Bikmohammadi, Codi Renee Blackmon, Amanda Patterson Partin, William Banks, Erin Clark, Desiree Dighton, and Michelle Eble.