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.
— Dr. Julia Horiates
English News
Dr. Erwin Hester, a devoted faculty member and administrator who served ECU and our department for 30 years, recently passed away. His life will be celebrated on Tuesday, August 20, 2024, at 2 PM at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Committal of cremated remains will follow the service in the church’s columbarium, and the family will then receive friends in Parrish Hall.
In 1966, he joined the English Department at East Carolina College and served as Department Chair for 14 years. He eagerly embraced the opportunity to grow and shape the department during tremendous development and change for the entity that had become East Carolina University, recruiting many talented and gifted colleagues. During his 30-year tenure at ECU, his administrative skills led to his service as interim dean of the School of Art for two years and later as interim dean of the School of Music. However, he loved teaching most, and he excelled at it. Beyond his subject matter expertise, he had a unique ability to bring out the best in others, which endeared him to generations of students.
Codi Renee Blackmon is one of the winners of the second annual CPTSC Graduate Student Research Award. The committee selected three winners from an excellent pool of applications. Codi Renee’s project, “Implementing A Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Institute on Race and Ethnicity,” was awarded $250.
Codi Renee has also recently been published in Programmatic Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal by the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC). In “On Developing a TPC Program Graduate Orientation,” Codi Renee uses survey data to inform technical and professional communication (TPC) programs about the perspectives of currently enrolled graduate students and alums regarding the key components necessary for a successful orientation program, which can then be used by TPC program faculty and administrators to improve their orientation program and better support their students.
John Hoppenthaler has two poems in the Gallery for Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders: A companion to the First National Nature Assessment (NNA1), Forthcoming, Fall 2025 from Paloma Press, in collaboration with Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University and Poets for Science. Nature Still Serves This City and The Whale Gospel are available on The Gallery’s website.
In addition, Hoppenthaler is featured in the latest Verse Daily Podcast, has two poems in the newest issue of Chautauqua, and has another poem in The Ocean State Review.
ECU Creative Writing grad Dean Marshall Tuck has published a chapter from his forthcoming novel, “Before Crossing the Desert,” in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Tuck was a CW grad student, an advisory editor for Tar River Poetry, and an English instructor at ECU. He teaches composition and creative writing at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina.
Tuck’s work has been featured in the Los Angeles Review, Zone 3, SmokeLong Quarterly, Vestal Review, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He has work forthcoming in Natural Bridge.
A news article about Marame Gueye’s work and upcoming Fulbright stay Gueye receives Fulbright to teach, research the politics of feminism, wifehood has been published on the Harriot College website.
Also, Marame Gueye’s book review Boubacar Boris Diop’s Un tombeau pour Kinne Gaajo: The Value of Memory, Writing, and Translation has been published in World Literature Today.
Dr. Helena Feder has published an article in Green Letters titled “Desexualisation of the Species or Frankenstein and Possibility of an Island.” In the article, Feder writes, “Shelley imagined the creation of a being as an assemblage of contingent nature and culture. While the novel invites us to consider the political promise of the poor monster, who never asked for his lonely fate, it is also a commentary on the dangers of failing to understand social and ecological contingency, the entanglement of knowledge and agents in the pursuit of knowledge.”
She also has a poem, “Ecstatic Truth,” in the new issue of North American Review.
Dr. Margaret Bauer was a featured scholar in a documentary on Paul Green that aired on PBS North Carolina on July 11.
Additionally, her new co-edited (with Georgann Eubanks) collection of essays on Green is coming out from Blair in early August. Green is best known for his outdoor historical dramas, which are still performed across the United States. However, he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an activist committed to human rights, racial equity, prison reform, and ending the death penalty. This anthology includes frank reflections from an award-winning array of contemporary North Carolina writers. Their essays about Green’s work and relationships are meant to launch new conversations about a man seen as progressive, even radical, in his time.