Patrick Phillips, judge of the Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, has chosen:

Prize Winner: Laura Neal for her four poems, “Origin and Obligation,” “Locusts,” “Leaf-burning” and “Town of Bowman, chartered 1867”

Honorable Mention: Ravenna Komar for her four poems, “ Hospice,” “1:11 p.m.,” “Grandmother’s Kitchen,” and “Cowbird | Birth Father”

Lauren Acampora, judge of the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize, has chosen:

Prize Winner:  Tara Kun for her story “Missing: Yumi Itō”

Honorable Mention:  Anna McCormally for her story “The Slaughter”

Congratulations to this year’s honorees, who will read in the Student Prize reading on Wednesday, May 3 at 7 PM in the Ulrich Recital Hall here in Tawes. Many thanks to everyone who submitted work to the competition.

Please join us at the reading next week to celebrate Laura, Tara, Ravenna, Anna, and another wonderful year of Writers Here & Now!

Recent PhDs:

Jamison Kantor will begin this fall as Tenure-track Assistant Professor at Ohio State University, Mansfield. Defended The Life of Honor: Individuality and the Communal Impulsein Romanticism (November 2013); director: Orrin Wang; committee: Neil Fraistat, Jason Rudy, and Kenneth Johnston.

Elizabeth Ellis Miller will begin as Tenure-track Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University. Defended “Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting” (January 2016); director: Jessica Enoch; committee: Jane Donawerth, Shirley Logan, Melanie Kill, Scott Wible, and Kristy Maddux.

Katie Stanutz has just taken over as Assistant Director of the University Honors Program, University of Maryland.  Defended “Hidden Networks of Loss: Multi-Ethnic Media and Mourning in Twentieth Century American Literature” (October 2015); director: Peter Mallios; committee: Jonathan Auerbach, Mary Helen Washington, and Edlie Wong.

Maggie Ray will begin the Prince George's County Resident Teacher's Program this summer. Defended “Context Matters: Intertextuality and Voice in the Early Modern English Controversy about Women” (April 2014); Directors: Theresa Coletti and Jane Donawerth.

Rob Wakeman will begin a Tenure-track Assistant Professor at Mount Saint Mary College (Newburgh NY) this fall; Defended “The Ethics of Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters” (July 2016); Directors: Theresa Coletti and Ted Leinwand; committee: Kellie Robertson, Phil Soergel, and Scott Trudell.

MAs who graduated this spring:

Brooke Feichtl is a Strategic Communications officer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (Springfield, VA). Capstone: “Political Agency in Tennyson’s Early Work;” director: Jason Rudy.

Jessica Harrington is the Program Coordinator for Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students (ACES) at the University of Maryland. Capstone: “Consuming God’s Words: Bibliophagy and Eating Literature;” director: Kellie Robertson.

Trent McDonald will begin a Phd program in English at Washington University, St. Louis. Capstone: “David Mitchell and the Contemporary Network Metafiction;” director: Lee Konstantinou.

Shaun Russell will begin a PhD in English at Ohio State. Capstone: “Stale Tales and Mutinous Members: Coriolanus and the Fable of the Belly,” director: Kellie Robertson.

Emily Smith will begin a PhD in English at the Pennsylvania State University. Capstone: “‘If There Were But One Esther at the South’: Angelina Grimké’s Relationship with Her Audience in An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South;” director: Jane Donawerth.

Lt. Daniel Stepler will be English Instructor, Department of Humanities, U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Capstone: “Professional Writing and the Military Officer,” director: Scott Wible.

Tyler Talbott will begin his PhD in English at Northwestern University. Capstone: “Against the Current: Australian Settler Narratives, Failed Emigrations, and the Mill on the Floss;” director: Jason Rudy.

The teaching of the superb instructors recognized by this year's awards spans our entire academic program, with courses in Academic and Professional Writing as well as literature courses offered for our majors. The teaching materials of these faculty were judged by the selection committee to be outstanding examples of the dedicated and imaginative instruction that our department aims to support.

2016 Dissertation Prizes

Carl Bode Prize (for the Best Dissertation on an American Subject):
Elizabeth Miller, “Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting;” director: Jessica Enoch

Alice L. Geyer Dissertation Prize (for the Best Dissertation in British Literature):
Jonathan Williams, “Melancholy’s Wake: Loss and Literary Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Britain;” director: Tita Chico
 

2016 Essay Prizes

Kinnaird Essay Prize for PhD Essay:
Aqdas Aftab, “The Transnational Bourgeois Realism of South Asian Queer Fiction”
 

Kinnaird Essay Prize for MA Essay:
Shaun Russell, “Stale Tales and Mutinous Members: Coriolanus and the Fable of the Belly”
 

Dissertation Fellowships for 2017-2018

Wylie Dissertation Fellowships:
Sarah Bonnie
Ruth Osorio

Harman Ward Dissertation Fellowship:
Cameron Mozafari    

Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship:
Jeffrey Griswold                                            

 
Other Awards and Fellowships

All STAR Award:
DeLisa Hawkes

Graduate School Summer Fellowship:
Nabila Hijazi
Hillary Roegelein

Kwiatek Summer Fellowship:
Andy Yeh

Departmental Summer Fellowships:
DeLisa Hawkes
Kyle Bickoff
Justine DeCamillis

The complete program is available here.

Highlights include:

Wednesday, March 15, 1:30-5:00 pm Afternoon Preconvention Workshop 12: Engaging Disability & Accessibility in Class Assignments: Integrating Disability Studies in the Fabric of Comp & Technical Communication Curriculum. A107 &A108. Speakers include Ruth Osorio, University of Maryland.

Thursday, March 16, 10:30-11:45 am. A.30: Reconsidering Revision & Reflecton: Two Studies of the (Dis)Connections between Revision Knowledge & Practice. Speakers: Martin Camper, Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore; Heather Lindenman, Elon University; Justin Lohr, University of Maryland

Thursday, March 16, 10:30-11:45. A.38: Women’s Ways of Making Histories: Complicating Feminist Rhetorical Historiography. Chair & Respondent: Jessica Enoch, University of Maryland

Thursday, March 16, 12:15 pm-1:30 pm. B.10: Cultivating Innovation: Design Thinking in the Composition Classroom. Scott Wible, University of Maryland, “Critical Designs for the Composition Classroom.”

Thursday, March 16, 1:45-3:00 pm. C.32: Cultivating Feminist Pedagogical Approaches to Digital Archives. Jessica Enoch, University of Maryland, “Crowdsourcing Suffragists: Recovering Forgotten Picketers in the Undergraduate Rhetoric Classroom.”

Thursday, March 16, 3:15-4:30 pm. D.20: Composing Activist Spaces: The Spatial Rhetorics of Civil, Disability, and Men’s Rights Movements. Speakers: Elizabeth Ellis, University of Maryland; Evin Groundwater, University of illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Ruth Osorio, University of Maryland. Respondent: Jessica Enoch, University of Maryland

Thursday, March 16, 4:45-6:00 pm. E.36: The Utility and Assessment of Writing Centers for Graduate Students. Linda Macri, University of Maryland, “Cultivating Capacity to (Understand) Transfer: Articulating and Assessing Writing Center Outcomes”

Thursday, March 16, 4:45-6:00 pm. E.48: Editing for Inclusion & Change. Jessica Enoch, University of Maryland, “Editing without Appropriating”; Shirley Logan, University of Maryland, “Perspicuity: Writing to Be Understood”

Friday, March 17, 8:00-9:15 am. F.05: What Linguistics Can Offer the Composition Teacher. Speakers: Michael Israel, University of Maryland; Cameron Mozafari, University of Maryland

Friday, March 17, 9:30-10:45 am. G.29: Listening to Learn, Learning to Listen. Lisa Swan, University of Maryland, “Cultural Mismatches: A Case Study of Student Perspectives of Writing Conferences”

Friday, March 17, 9:30-10:45 am. G.43: Emotion & Anti-Racist Rhetorics in Writing Studies: Anger as Performance-Rhetoric. Speakers: Douglas Kern, University of Maryland

Friday, March 17, 2:00-3:15 pm. J.26: Cultivating Capacities in Rhetoric, Mentoring, and Administering. Shirley Logan, University of Maryland, “Cultivating Feminist Rhetorical Research Abilities in Undergraduates”

Friday, March 17, 2:00-3:15 pm. J.49: Past Forward: How Rhetorical Practices before & beyond the Alphabet Can Inform Composition and Cross-Cultural Approaches to Rhetoric. Speakers: Chanon Adsanatham, University of Maryland

Friday, March 17, 3:30-4:45 pm. K.20: Creative Collaborations: Cultivating New Voices from the Undergraduate Legal Writing Community. Willie Schatz, University of Maryland, “Torts & Courts for Undergrads”

Friday, March 17, 6:30-7:30 pm. FSIG.12: Linguistics, Language, and Writing Standing Group Business Meeting. Speakers: Cameron Mozafari, University of Maryland

Send additions, corrections, and revisions to englweb@umd.edu.

These undergraduates spent the spring semester studying techniques, methods, and theories at work in the fields associated with oral history. They also went weekly to the CAFE (Cultural Academy for Excellence) to interview and work with young people there.

Collins assisted students with the process, helped them shape the histories, and edited the final projects; those are compiled in the volume, available here. 2017.06.13_engl361_cafeconnections.pdf

Beyond the Classroom

Catherine Bayly has taught in the Academic and Professional Writing Programs at the University of Maryland since 2012.  She earned her B.A. and M.A. from University of Maryland's English Department. Her teaching focuses on both multimodal composition and the rhetoric of protest and advocacy. In years past, she has taught College Level and Developmental Writing at McDaniel College and literature courses at Howard Community College. She was recently named co-recipient of the 2017 Professional Track Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. In 2014, Catherine also co-edited a book of poems, To Linger on Hot Coals.

John Kim holds a B.A. from Columbia University, J.D. from University of California Berkeley, and a M.F.A. from University of California Irvine.  He began writing fanzines in the pre-internet era, and his cut-and-pasted-and-photocopied labor of love has continued well into the post-internet era. After working as a litigation attorney in Los Angeles for six years, he returned to writing, publishing short stories in Burrow Press Review, Juked, and The Normal School. He has taught Academic Writing and Legal Writing at Maryland since 2013. John has also led a number of professional development workshops for the Academic Writing Program.

Kisa Lape earned her B.A. in English from Washington & Jefferson College and then went on to study literary history at Ohio University, where she received an M.A. She taught college-level English courses at Ohio University and at universities and community colleges in Pennsylvania before joining UMD's English department in 2014. Here at Maryland, she has taught Academic Writing and Writing for the Health Professions as well as literature courses such as British Literature and Literature of Science and Technology.

Susan Pramschufer earned her B.A. in English from UCLA and her M.A. in Literature and Film from Claremont University. Since 2010 she has taught a wide range of courses in UMD's English and American Studies departments, from the general Academic Writing course and special sections of Academic Writing designed for students in the Civicus, Honors, and College Park Scholars programs to such courses as Film and the Narrative Tradition, Writing about Literature, Film and American Culture Studies, Cultural Themes in America, Film and the American Landscape, and Heroes and Villains in American Film. She has published book reviews for Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and she has led several professional development workshops for the Academic Writing Program.

David Todd earned his B.A. from Wesleyan, J.D. from University of Connecticut, and M.F.A from University of Florida. He has taught Writing for Non-Profits at the University of Maryland since 2015.  He has enjoyed a successful career in speech writing and communications, as well as a civil litigation attorney, editor, writer, and reporter, working, among other places, as a Strategic Communications Advisor for the Peace Corps Office of Global Health and speech writer for the President of Amherst College.  He has published articles, essays, short stories, and poems in Yale Review, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Contemporary Southern Writers, Greensboro Review, New Woman, Sewanee Review, Witness, and other periodicals and anthologies.  

Michelle Von Euw holds a B.A. in Political Communication from George Washington University and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland.  She began teaching Academic Writing in 2003 and then in 2006 transitioned to teaching Technical Writing in the Professional Writing Program. She has been a teacher and mentor in PWP’s blended and online learning initiative since its inception in 2011. Michelle also regularly teaches writing workshops for the FDIC’s Corporate University. Her stories have been published in three anthologies, including Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women, as well as the literary journals Aethlon, the Charles River Review, and Elysian Fields Quarterly.  She also has written pop culture nonfiction and sports journalism for various print and online publications.

Join us in congratulating our remarkable colleagues!

Read Trillin's complete column, "By the Book," 20 July 2017, here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/books/review/calvin-trillin-by-the-book.html

Patricia T. O'Connor reviewed My Darling Detective for the New York Times earlier this year; that reveiw is available here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/books/review/my-darling-detective-howard-norman.html

Emily Myrick is a third year MFA candidate in fiction and is at work on a novel of historical fiction about a southern textile mill town. She is originally from Atlanta but currently resides in Washington, DC with her husband. You can read the award announcement here.

Her project is titled Digital Translation and Portuguese/English Edition of the Correio de Africa [Africa Mail] Newspaper, 1921-1924. The grant will provide Nunes with the resources to translate and prepare the publication of an open access bilingual edition of Correio de Africa [The Africa Mail], a newspaper published in Portugal from 1921-1924.

Join us in congratulating Professor Nunes!

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s workshop, “Opening the Digital Anthology: Skills, Tools and Texts,” was a week-long crash course in the digital humanities, in the context of Early Modern English Drama (or EMED for short, as the faculty affectionately referred to it). I and 11 other undergrads from around the country (from California to Texas to New York) met eight leading scholars from a variety of disciplines in the Folger’s ornate boardroom, and we set to work almost immediately, diving deep into many different facets of digital humanities research.

Despite having consumed a wealth of preliminary material before we even stepped into the library, the first couple of days were dedicated to learning en masse—Syd Bauman, coder extraordinaire, gave us a crash course in XML, the preferred language for coding literary materials. Dan Shore, computational linguist and master of idioms, showed us incredible search engines that let us scour a database of early modern plays for specific turns of phrase and parts of speech. Kristen Bennett armed us with many tools of context, including a fascinating interactive map of early modern London (it’s seriously incredible). We went deep into the bowels of the library, got to see and touch rare books (including a Shakespeare first folio!), and were immersed in library life for five blissful days, teatime and all.

The second half of the week was ours for the taking. Given the tools we’d gained and skills we’d learned, we broke off into groups of three and began brainstorming for our very own project. By the end of the week, my group had annotated a scene from Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, highlighting and explaining myriad puns and wordplay. We coded it in XML so clicking on the word would take a reader to a footnote at the end, explaining the pun. Another group used a part-of-speech tracing program to analyze the language in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II to track how characters of different classes spoke (nobles, commoners, etc.). In particular, they analyzed whether there was anything “special” about how Gaveston spoke, considering the influence he had over the King. Yet another group began to encode a digital edition of a play that the Folger EMED database had not yet digitized—Shackerley Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer. Each project was incredibly personal to each group, and several undergrads left the workshop with a basis and plans for a future thesis project.

This workshop was one of the most incredible experiences I’ve had, academic or otherwise. All the undergrads lived together in the Folger’s guest houses, and we spent our evenings gallivanting around Capitol Hill, playing Scrabble, reciting Shakespeare, writing fridge magnet poetry, and even sharing creative pieces we’d written. I don’t know if I’ll ever have such a unique opportunity again to meet such lovely people with such a specific set of common interests. I made friendships that I’m certain will last a lifetime, and gained skills that will make my resume appealing to any graduate program.

2016 Dissertation Prizes

Carl Bode Prize (for the Best Dissertation on an American Subject):
Elizabeth Miller, “Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting;” director: Jessica Enoch

Alice L. Geyer Dissertation Prize (for the Best Dissertation in British Literature):
Jonathan Williams, “Melancholy’s Wake: Loss and Literary Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Britain;” director: Tita Chico
 

2016 Essay Prizes

Kinnaird Essay Prize for PhD Essay:
Aqdas Aftab, “The Transnational Bourgeois Realism of South Asian Queer Fiction”
 

Kinnaird Essay Prize for MA Essay:
Shaun Russell, “Stale Tales and Mutinous Members: Coriolanus and the Fable of the Belly”
 

Dissertation Fellowships for 2017-2018

Wylie Dissertation Fellowships:
Sarah Bonnie
Ruth Osorio

Harman Ward Dissertation Fellowship:
Cameron Mozafari    

Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship:
Jeffrey Griswold                                            

 
Other Awards and Fellowships

All STAR Award:
DeLisa Hawkes

Graduate School Summer Fellowship:
Nabila Hijazi
Hillary Roegelein

Kwiatek Summer Fellowship:
Andy Yeh

Departmental Summer Fellowships:
DeLisa Hawkes
Kyle Bickoff
Justine DeCamillis

Listen here. 

From WBJC's website:

In his new book, due for release by Johns Hopkins University Press later this year, Jason Rudy suggests that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada was vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement in those countries.