Two months of good news means double the accomplishments for our #BSUEnglish faculty, students, and alumni! Please note the actual baseball references below.
Faculty Good News
On April 20, four English faculty were nominated as BSU Softball’s MVPs (Most Valuable Professors): Adrienne Bliss, Kathryn Ludwig, Katherine Greene, and Brianna Mauk.
Prof. Katy Didden won a Junior Faculty Creative Arts Grant to pursue research and develop work for her manuscript in progress, The Lava on Iceland. Three poems from The Lava on Iceland were accepted for publication by Tupelo Quarterly, and two additional poems were accepted by Denver Quarterly. At this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, Prof. Didden moderated and presented a paper on a panel titled “Writing Assignments for the Anthropocene.” Prof. Didden was also recognized with an Excellence in Education award from the BSU Student Government Association.
Prof. Ben Bascom was awarded an NEH/American Antiquarian Society long-term fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards for literary scholars, to conduct research on his book manuscript “Feeling Singular: Masculinity and Desire in the Early United States.” Prof. Bascom was also awarded an Aspire Junior Faculty Research Award through BSU in addition to a fellowship at Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies First Book Institute. This past March he presented a portion of his second book project at C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.
Prof. Jill Christman’s new essay, “Slaughterhouse Island,” will appear in Roxane Gay’s new edited collection, Not That Bad: Dispatches from a Rape Culture (just out from HarperPerennial and appearing on many most-anticipated-for-summer-2018 lists). Another essay by Prof. Christman, “Florida Vacation: An Essay in Third Person” appears in editor Jim Ross’s In Season: Stories of Discovery, Loss, Home, and Places In Between (University of Florida Press).
Prof. Patrick Collier’s 2016 book, Modern Print Artifacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890-1930s, was re-issued in paper by Edinburgh University Press.
Prof. Sean Lovelace received an 2018/19 Aspire CREATE grant to continue research and writing of an ongoing book manuscript, Letters to Jim Harrison.
Prof. Rai Peterson received an Initiative Grant from the Indiana Humanities Council to host ten speakers at Book Arts Collaborative’s weekend book arts festival, called Interrobang. Prof. Peterson also received a Provost’s Initiative Grant to continue Book Arts Collaborative through Spring 2019.
Prof. Molly Ferguson won the Northeast MLA Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus Essay Award for her essay, “The First Five Minutes: Teaching with Twitter in the Feminist Classroom.” Prof. Ferguson was also awarded an ASPIRE Junior Faculty Research Grant for her project on the representation of inward migration in contemporary Irish fiction. In addition, Prof. Ferguson was awarded the Ball State Creative Teaching Grant to pursue her project, “Teaching Digital Humanities in the English Capstone Using GIS.”
Prof. Emily Rutter’s first book, Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line (University Press of Mississippi), is now in print. Prof. Rutter was also awarded an ASPIRE Junior Faculty Research Grant for her current book project, which traces cultural through-lines between the postbellum and contemporary eras in regard to white America’s “love-hate” relationship with black athletes and musicians.
Prof. Darolyn “Lyn” Jones, with undergraduate students Audrey Bowers and Eileen Porzuczek, won Best Poster presentation at the 2018 Benjamin V. Cohen Peace Conference. Their poster, #blacklivesmatter: Rethinking Children’s and YA Lit, was the only undergraduate poster represented. It was an interactive presentation with iPads on stands next to the poster; as students were presenting the content on the poster, participants could interact live with the magazine’s digital content.
Prof. Jennifer Grouling Snider published “The Genre of Teacher Comments from Hard Copy to iPad” in The Journal of Response to Writing 4 (1).
On April 20th, Prof. Vanessa Rapatz directed a group of amazing Ball State undergraduates, grads, and alumni in a reduced dramatic reading of Richard III at the Kennedy Library. This event was coordinated with the Spanish Department and their reading of Calderon’s La vida es sueno. Prof. Rapatz also attended the annual Shakespeare Association of America conference in Los Angeles (March 29-April 1) and presented her paper “Chastity Remodeled in Margaret Cavendish’s The Religious” as part of the “Cavendish Now!” seminar.
Prof. Michael Begnal published two poems in the online journal Rabid Oak.
Prof. Rory Lee (along with Jacob Craig and David Bedsore) published “The FSU Digital Symposium: Origins, Revisions, and Reflections” in Computers and Composition Online in April.
Prof. Emily Jo Scalzo’s poem “After Charleston” was accepted for inclusion in Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, being compiled by Prof. Emily Rutter and Tiffany Austin. The poem is a senryu, a Japanese form similar to a haiku.
Prof. Rani Deighe Crowe’s short film Heather Has Four Moms premiered in April at the Athens International Film and Video Festival in Athens, Ohio. It has also been selected to screen at the Barcelona LGTIB Film Festival in Barcelona, Spain; Dyke Drama Film Festival in Perth, Australia; Provincetown Film Festival, and the University Film and Video Association conference in New Mexico. Rani has been further developing the short film into a half-hour television series, and the pilot just advanced to round two of the Sundance Episodic Storytelling Lab competition.
Prof. Craig O’Hara’s short story, “Palace,” was published in the March 2018 issue of Swamp Ape Review.
Prof. Susanna Benko and her colleagues Serena Salloum (Ball State University) and Emily Hodge (Montclair State University) were invited to present their research at New America’s conference on Open Education Resources in Washington, D.C., in March. They joined researchers, teachers, and organizations from across the country to discuss the future of OER. In April, they also presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) national conference in New York City. Their project, titled “Supporting Teachers in an Era of Common Standards,” shared preliminary data from their Spencer Foundation-funded grant project.
Prof. Sreyoshi Sarkar presented her paper “Rethinking Gendered History and Postcolonial Subjectivity at Sites of Encounters with Plant Life: Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian” at the Northeast Modern Language Association conference. The paper was part of the “Towards a Critical Plant Studies” panel.
Prof. Silas Hansen’s essay, “On Visibility” (published in Waccamaw 18, Spring 2017) was chosen to appear in Best of the Net 2017, published by Sundress Publications in March 2018. Prof. Hansen also moderated and presented on two panels at the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference: “Dispatches from Flyover Country: Building Literary Community in Far Off Places” and “Beyond the Workshop Model: Innovations in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom.”
Student Good News
Morgan Gross, a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition, won the Excellence in Teaching Award (Doctoral) for 2017-2018 at the Graduate School’s annual recognition event, on April 5.
Paula Weinman, a 2018 MA-literature graduate, accepted a position at the University of Connecticut’s Ph.D. program in literature, where she plans to focus on contemporary African-American literature.
Matthew Schmalzer, a 2018 MA-creative writing graduate, has accepted a position in North Carolina State’s Ph.D. program in Communications, Rhetoric, and Digital Media.
Paige Baker, a current Book Arts Collaborative student, art-directed the printing and binding of an edition of 60 artist’s books featuring text by Hoosier author Susan Neville. The Book Arts Collaborative Press publication has sold out.
Valerie Weingart, a 2018 Creative Writing graduate, was published in Tributaries literary magazine. She has accepted a teaching assistantship at BSU and will be earning her MA in Creative Writing here.
Current BSU undergrad Josh Pearson had his poem “Ideal” accepted by Badlands Literary Journal. It will be published in 2019.
Olivia Power, a 2018 Rhetoric and Writing graduate, has accepted a full-time job as the Program Evaluation and Assessment Associate at the National FFA Organization in Indianapolis.
Ball State’s first CUPSI poetry slam team competed from April 4-7th, and placed 25th of about 66 teams.
Alumni Good News
Stephanie Baker, a 2015 Creative Writing graduate, accepted a job at GradGuard in Phoenix, Arizona, in customer service. She is working to update the company’s social media, blog and website.
Lauren Cross, a 2017 Creative Writing graduate, was accepted into the University of South Florida’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
Madison R. Jones, a 2013 Creative Writing graduate, was accepted into the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. She will pursue a masters in performance arts administration.
Makayla Smart, a 2017 English Studies graduate, accepted a job as a Case Manager with the Indiana Department of Child Services.
Comments:
Terrific news! BSU English is gifted with so many talented and hardworking individuals. Just a small note, this was actual BSU’s third-ever CUPSI team, and congrats to them!