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
Third-year PhD student Mina Bikmohammadi had her co-authored article (with Ekaterina Sudina and Luke Plonsky), “Self-citation attitudes and practices in applied linguistics: A mixed-methods study,” published in the latest issue of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. The article arose from a research collaboration that began in 2024, when Mina was assigned as a research assistant to Dr. Sudina.
Alumna Morgan Banville (PhD ’23) and her colleague Gavin Johnson won the Council on College Composition and Communication’s Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship in the “Nontraditional Scholarly Text” category for their Cluster Conversation: “Talking Back Through Rhetorical Surveillance Studies: Intersectional Feminist and Queer Approaches,” published in Peitho, the journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. Banville is currently an assistant professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
Dr. Amy E. Wright of Saint Louis University will serve as the David Julian and Virginia Suther Whichard Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in East Carolina University’s Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences with the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in partnership with the Department of English.
“I feel deeply honored and grateful. This distinguished professorship is both an affirmation of my work with Latin American/Spanish-speaking media and my passion to serve broader communities. I’m excited to join ECU to spotlight the value of languages, literatures and cultures — and to amplify the voices and artistic traditions of Spanish-speaking communities on campus and across the region.”
Read more about Harriot College’s Whichard Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Announcement.
Abigail Fletcher, a BS-PWID student, is featured in the most recent issue of Harriot College’s Cornerstone newsletter.
Flecther is not only a BS-PWID major but also a creative writing minor, and has taken courses across the English curriculum from more than a dozen English faculty. She was among the students featured in the NCLR-partnered ENGL 2885: Writing and Document Design class taught by Desiree Dighton in fall 2023.
Dr. Rebecca Bernard’s “Standard X-Ray Precautions,” won The Baltimore Review’s Flash Creative Nonfiction Contest judged by Mandy Moe Pwint Tu.
The Baltimore Review was founded by Barbara Westwood Diehl in 1996 as a literary journal publishing short stories and poems, with a mission to showcase the best writing from the Baltimore area, from across the U.S., and beyond.
Alina Hernandez Patlan, one of Dr. Kim Thompson’s former English 3880 students, nominated them as an influential figure in their academic journey. Alina is a Marketing major who is considering a minor in Professional Writing and Design. Thompson says, “Alina is an outstanding student who is dedicated to growing as a professional communicator, writer, and researcher! I am proud of Alina’s growth!”
Dr. Thomas Herron presented a public lecture on “Edmund Spenser and the medieval Irish landscape: old and new approaches” at the Centre d’études supérieures de la civilisation médiévale (CESCM) in Poitiers, France.
Also, Herron just published an article on a related topic, on teaching Renaissance poetry using VR in the classroom: “The Place of Reading in VR: Pedagogy, Spenser’s Kilcolman Castle and Amoretti 65,” in New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies IV: the Changing Shape of Digital Early Modern Studies. Ed. Randa El Khatib and Caroline Winter (Toronto: Iter, 2025). Both the talk and the article feature recent work on the website Centering Spenser: A Digital Resource for Kilcolman Castle, which has been built and is supported at ECU. The website was recently reviewed positively in the online publication Reviews in Digital Humanities.