Faculty News

Prof. Susanna Benko and her colleagues Dr. Emily Hodge and Dr. Serena Salloum completed a project for New America and the International Society for Technology in Education. Along with other researchers, their team contributed to the paper titled “Creating Systems of Sustainability: Four Focus Areas for the Future of PK-12 Open Educational Resources.” Specifically, Benko, Hodge and Salloum’s contribution focused on district and state policies that support the use of OER. You can read the report here!

Drs. Benko, Hodge, and Salloum also recently published a commentary in Teachers College Review titled “Instructional Resources and Teacher Professionalism: The Changing Landscape of Curricular Material Providers in the Digital Age.”  

Prof. Frank Felsenstein published “Against the Odds: The Jew in the Medieval Mind,” which appeared in The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 108:3, Summer 2018, pp. 389-399. His article features five book reviews; Beatrice Groves, The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge UP, 2015), Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York, 2014), Kenneth S. Jackson, Shakespeare and Abraham (Notre Dame Press, 2015), Kathy Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Cornell UP, 2016, and Howard Jacobson, Shylock is My Name: The Merchant of Venice Retold (Hogarth Press, 2016).

Frank Felsenstein is an emeritus Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Professor of English at Ball State University

Prof. Alex Kaufman is very happy to report that his book has just been published (ahead of its 2019 imprint!). Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, edited by Lesley Coote and Alexander L. Kaufman (New York and London: Routledge, 2019) is a cutting-edge volume of eleven essays and a critical introduction demonstrates both the literary quality and the socio-economic importance of works on “the matter of the greenwood” over a long chronological period. These include drama texts, prose literature and novels (among them, children’s literature), and poetry. Whilst some of these are anonymous, others are acknowledged canonical writers, such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Keats. The editors and the contributors argue that it is vitally important to include Robin Hood texts in the canon of English literary works, because of the high quality of many of these texts, and because of their significance in the development of English literature.

https://www.routledge.com/Robin-Hood-and-the-Outlaw-ed-Literary-Canon/Coote-Kaufman/p/book/9781138336919

Alex Kaufman is a Reed D. Voran Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, Honors College

Prof. Rani Crowe

• Professor Crowe’s short film, Heather Has Four Moms, has been accepted to more festivals including: Portland Film Festival in Oregon, South Carolina Underground Film Festival, New Haven International Film Festival in Connecticut, Syracuse Film Festival, Crown Heights Film Festival in Brooklyn, Merlinka Queer Film Festival in Belgrade, Serbia, Alexandria International Film Festival in Virginia, Another Hole in the Head San Francisco Genre Fest, Flicks By Chicks Women in Film Dallas Festival in Texas, Chicago Reel International Shorts Film Festival, Greenwich Village Film Fest, San Francisco Indie Shorts, Carborro Film Fest NC, Rainbow Visions LGBT Edmonton Festival in Canada, Sardinia Queer Film Festival Italy, and the Oregon State International Film Festival in Corvalis, Oregon.
• Additionally, Heather Has Four Moms, has been invited to screen at Kinofilm at the Poly: LBGT programme in Cornwall, UK, and Dyke Night at the Movies in Berkely, California.
• Rani’s short film, Beautiful Eyes, has been accepted to some new festivals: Ax Wound Film Festival in Brattleboro, VT, Ithaca Fantastic Film Festival, and Courts Mais Trash Film Festival in Brussels, Belgium. It has also been included in the “Best Of” Final Girls Women in Horror, Seattle, Washington.
• Rani’s original half hour TV comedy pilot script, Recess Duty, was a finalist in the New York Screenplay Contest.
• Rani is currently working with Suzanne Richard of Open Circle Theater on a reading of Rani’s ten minute play, Why You Can’t Put a Wheelchair on the Stage, a theatrical farce addressing disability and performance. Open Circle Theater is Washington DC’s first professional theater company to integrate talent with disabilities.
• Rani was awarded $750 College of Science and Humanities Immersive Learning Mini Grant to implement immersive learning community projects to her Spring 19 Advanced Screenwriting Class.

Prof. Kathryn S. Gardiner’s feature-length screenplay “The Art of Yielding” was named a quarter-finalist in the Diversity category of the Final Draft Big Break Screenwriting Contest.

Prof. Joyce Huff

• Professor Huff presented a paper entitled “Body Tourism: Alexander Walker’s Guidebook for Viewers of the Female Body” at the annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association.
• Professor Huff also has been giving talks at public libraries over the past few months in celebration of some literary anniversaries. In September and October, she spoke about the 200th anniversary of the publication of the novel Frankenstein at the Muncie Public Library and the Newcastle-Henry County Library, while, in July, she gave speech in honor of the 200th birthday of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights, at the Carmel Clay Library.

Prof. Megumi Hamada and her MA TESOL & Linguistics students Ben Bishop and Shelley Spilman presented their paper, “Semantic Relation and Learning of Second Language Noun-Noun Compounds,” at Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) in October, in Montreal, Canada.  

Prof. Gui Garcia

• Professor Garcia was awarded the New Faculty Start-up Grant (for AY 2019).
• He also presented joint work with Heather Goad at the 49th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS), held at Cornell this year (talk: “Feet are parametric—even in languages with stress”). Additionally, he presented joint work with Heather Goad, Lydia White and colleagues at the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF), held at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) this year (talk: “Effects of prosody on L2 interpretation of Italian pronouns”). Finally, the Applied Statistics and R group met Oct 3rd to discuss LyX, a tool for compiling documents such as research papers, handouts, and slides.

Prof. Darolyn “Lyn” Jones

• Dr. Jones presented   “Unschooling and Equity Teaching Practices and Community Literacy:#blacklivesmatter” with Marian University professor of Communications, Michael Baumann at the 2018 International Conference on Literacy, Culture, Language, and Education at Indiana University on October 7th.
• Jones also presented “Resourcing, Teaming, and Margining: Worlding” with her husband, the chairperson and the Larry Roan Distinguished Professor of Construction Management, Dr James Jones as an invited Skype presentation to Doctorate of Physical Therapy (DPT) students in the neuro development pediatric program at Kean University on Tuesday, October 23rd.
• With her students, Jones also held the first Indiana viewing of  the documentary “Intelligent Lives” for the Ball State, Muncie, and surrounding communities.  Jones and her students in the Disability Representation in Children’s & YA Lit also led the audience in a research based discussion after the event on Tuesday, October 23rd.

Prof. Emily Rutter presented “Where Will All That Beauty Go?: A Tribute to Poet-Critic Tiffany Austin” at the Issues in Critical Investigation Symposium on the African Diaspora and the Anthropocene at Vanderbilt University.

Prof. Rai Peterson’s scholarly article, “Janet Flanner’s Transnational, Lesbian, Modernist Novel: The Cubical City,” has been accepted for spring publication by the French journal Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone

Prof. Angela Cox’s chapter “Women by Women: A Gender Analysis of Sierra Titles by Women Designers” was published in the new book Feminism in Play edited by Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen (Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-3-319-90538-9). Her research project “An Inquiry on the Impact of National Novel Writing Month on Participants’ Self-Perception as Writers” was given IRB approval and launches October 25th and will be ongoing through December.

Prof. Jill Christman will be traveling to the 2018 NonfictioNow conference in Phoenix, Arizona this week to present on “Writing the Day,” chair and present on “Our True Voice(s),” and, she hopes, perform in a way that makes everyone @bsuenglish proud in the NonfictionWOW! Quiz Show.

Prof. Silas Hansen will be presenting at the 2018 NonfictioNow conference in Phoenix, Arizona as part of a panel called “Essaying Outside the Classroom.” He also recently published an interview with essayist Sarah Fawn Montgomery–about her recently-published memoir Quite Mad–in The Normal School Online.

Prof. Craig O’Hara’s short story collection, One Thirty Five South was named a semi-finalist for the 2018 Elixir Press Short Fiction Award.

Prof. Molly Ferguson attended the Midwest American Conference for Irish Studies in Minneapolis, MN on October 5-7, where she presented a paper titled, “Inward Migration in Recent Irish Fiction: Moving Beyond the Transactional Migration Model”. She also presided over the business meeting as president of the regional ACIS.

Students

Maisarah Almirabi (PhD English-Applied Linguistics student) had his paper, “Second Language Acquisition Metaphor Development” accepted to present at the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) at the California State University, Fresno, in Nov.

Nuha Alsalem, graduate student in PhD English (Applied Linguistics) received the aspire grant ($1,000) for travel support for the presentation, “A Multimodal Analysis of Saudi Arabic Television Commercials,” at the Hawaii International Conference on Education in Honolulu.

Alumni

Erin Moreno (BA English Studies 2016) has started a new position at Scorpion Internet Marketing in Valencia, CA as a Content and Social Manager.

Thank you all for participating in Practical Criticism Midwest, last Friday. We had about 50 attendees, including faculty, students, and friends/family. For the students who presented at PCM, thank you for sharing your excellent projects with us. It was really inspiring. I am happy to announce that the faculty judges named Marissa Lockhart (English-Creative Writing, Spanish Minor) as the Best Presentation Awardee this year. Her presentation was entitled, “Read, White, and Blues.”