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. Marie Farr, Associate Professor Emerita, served as the Founding Director of the Women’s Studies Program, Acting Chair of the Department of Communication, Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Associate Chair of English.
Farr served nearly 35 years at ECU and received the Robert L. Jones Alumni Award for Teaching Excellence. She especially enjoyed teaching in the Women’s Studies and Honors Programs. Professionally, she served as president and steering committee member of the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association. Her presentations, articles, and reviews focused on women’s literature and issues.
A gathering of friends will be announced later. Memorial donations may be made to EqualityNC.org or the Arthritis Foundation.
On March 2, Amanda Klein’s film studies class students attended The Substance screening.
Film student Haley Richards provided a brief recap of the event, “The Substance is a contemporary horror film that explores themes of aging women and stardom. I was so excited that the English department graciously provided us with pizza and wings. We have been discussing abject horror in class, so the experience of mutual group disgust deepened my understanding of this concept. It literally brought the subject to life. I loved squirming, cringing, shouting, and eating with everyone during The Substance. I would go to a second screening for class if I could.”
Writer and scholar Renée K. Nicholson delivered the 2025 TAG Lecture. Her creative and academic work has appeared widely in venues such as The Gettysburg Review, The Millions, Electric Literature, Poets & Writers, and Bellevue Literary Review. A past Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona College, Nicholson recently directed the Humanities Center at West Virginia University, where she regularly collaborated with health professionals and patients to tell authentic stories from healthcare.
The Tag Lecture is endowed through a generous gift from Dr. and Mrs. Ella Tag, and the event was co-sponsored by the ECU Medical Humanities Program.
Christy Hallberg’s podcast, Rock is Lit, the first podcast devoted to rock novels, has been named the 2025 American Writing Awards Podcast of the Year in Music. The podcast was also named a finalist in the Arts and Fiction categories.
Dr. Desiree Dighton, Mallory Picken (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.