Many great things happened to our faculty over the summer! Read below to find out more about what they have published and presented.

Faculty Good News

Prof. Mark Neely’s latest poetry manuscript, Ticker, was one of three finalists for Southern Indiana Review Press’s Michael Waters Poetry Award. It was also a semi-finalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Press, and the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize.  He had new poems recently accepted by Cimarron Review, Florida Review, Louisville Review, and Faultline. 

Prof. Sean Lovelace published a hybrid text titled “A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF EXAQUA [N ZONG!,] BY JAN-HENRY GRAY” in the latest Diagram magazine, issue 19.3.  

Prof. Cathy Day has been selected as a 2019-2020 fellow in the MAC-Academic Leadership Development Program (MAC-ALDP). She will meet once a month with other Ball State fellows and travel to the University of Buffalo and Northern Illinois University for leadership workshops. 

Prof. Darolyn “Lyn” Jones

  • successfully released an updated second volume of her edited collection, Where Mercy and Truth Meet: Homeless Women of Wheeler Speak. This was an 8-month project working with homeless, addicted women at Wheeler Mission.  Ball State English Dept. Alum Rita Mitchell-Maxey was a then BSU student intern for that project.
  • with BSU Engish Dept. recent Alum, Eileen Porzuczek, published the 8th volume of I Remember: Indianapolis Youth Write about Their Lives. Jones edited the collection, Porzuczek helped co-design and lay out the anthology.  The volume was released on August 1, 2019.
  • along with her BSU students, Eileen Porzuczek, Megan Santin, and Katelyn Warner presented “Disability Rights and Representation in Children’s Picture and Young Adult Books” at the National Children’s Literature Conference held this year in Indianapolis, Indiana on July 13, 2019.
  • her essay titled, “Casper” was accepted in May and published with the Facing Autism project on July 23, 2019.  That essay can be found here.

A Symphony of Possibilities

Prof. Pam Hartman

  • had a book, A Symphony of Possibilities: A Handbook of for Arts Integration in Secondary English Language Arts, which she wrote with three current teachers and former students, Jessica Berg and Brandon Schuler (both undergrads and post-bac licensing students) and Erin Knauer (former EE student), released.

Prof. Michael Begnal

  • his review-essay “Poetry and the War(s)” was published in American Literary History, vol. 31, no. 3. The essay takes up the recent critical studies American Poetry and the First World War by Tim Dayton, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin, and A Shadow on Our Hearts: Soldier-Poetry, Morality, and the American War in Vietnam by Adam Gilbert. ALH has also made the piece available online here.
  • his poem “Baseball” appears in the latest issue of Aethlon, vol. 35, no. 1 (print).
  • his poem “Elegy for the Republic” was published recently in Scoundrel Time, here.
  • his review of Kate Behrens’s latest collection Penumbra recently appeared in Empty Mirror.

Prof. Emily Ruth Rutter

  • recently won the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. Her volume of critical essays and contemporary poetry, Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (co-edited with Sequoia Maner, Darlene, Anita, Scott, and the late Tiffany Austin), is now available for pre-order from Routledge.
  • published “Nate Marshall and the Power of the Word” in the Summer issue of The Fight & the Fiddle.

Prof. Rai Peterson

  • her article, “Janet Flanner’s The Cubical City and the Life She Left Behind” was published in Revue Électronique d’Etudes sur le Monde Anglophone, vol. 16, no. 2 (Spring 2019).
  • along with undergraduate students Paige Baker, Alyssa Burdine, Lane Carey, Kyli Brown, Dillon O’Nail, and Dakota Savage presented a paper and workshop at Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Convergence, in Bloomington, IN on May 2019.
  • completed an internship in fine letterpress printing and small arts business management at Signal Return Press in Detroit, MI in June and July 2019.

Prof. Emily Jo Scalzo’s poem “Exclusion” won Poets Reading the News’ Photo of the Week ekphrastic challenge for the second week of May. The challenge focused on African runner Caster Semenya. Also in May, her poem “Reprieve” was published in New Verse News.

Prof. Alex Kaufman

  • published a collection of critical essays that he co-edited with Penny Vlagopoulos, Food and Feast in Modern Outlaw Tales. Alex co-authored the introduction and contributed to the volume of the chapter “Food Fight!: Excess and Deficiency in National Lampoon’s Animal House.”
  • presented three peer-reviewed presentations at international conferences: “The Matter of the (English?) Greenwood and Otto Bathhurst’s Robin Hood,” at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University; “Mobile Texts and Shifting Ideologies: Modern Robin Hood Political Memes,” at the 12th Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies at the University of Montevallo; and “The Mutable Bodies of Gilbert with the White Hand,” at the 26th International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds.

Prof. Ferguson

Prof. Molly Ferguson

  • presented a paper, “Folklore and Fairy Tale as Feminist Critique in Louise O’Neill’s The Surface Breaks” at the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
  • her article, “The First Five Minutes: Teaching with Twitter in the Feminist Classroom,” was accepted to Modern Language Studies, forthcoming this winter.

Prof. Gui Garcia

Prof. Kathryn Ludwig’s article “To Dwell in Grace: Physical and Spiritual Situatedness in Marilynne Robinson’s Lila” has been accepted for publication in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Humanities. 

Prof. Rani Crowe directed from Prof. Kathryn Gardiner’s script, Welfare Check, starring Ball State alumna, Cynda Williams, was accepted to its first festival, The Chi-Town Multicultural Film Festival in Chicago.

Prof. Rani Crowe

  • her half-hour pilot television script, Recess Duty, based on her short story of the same name, advanced to Round Two of the Sundance Episodic Lab application.
  • her half-hour pilot comedy television script of Heather Has Four Moms was selected for the Austin Revolution Film Festival.
  • her short film, The Test, was accepted to Austin Micro Short Film Festival and Broad Humor Film Festival in LA.
  • her short film, Heather Has Four Moms was recently accepted to Out Connecticut Film Festival in Hartford, CT, the CINEMQ Film Festival in Shanghai, China, Woods Hole Film Festival in Woods Hole, MA, Cardiff Mini Film Festival in Wales, Out for Reel LGBT Film Series in Northampton, MA, Atlanta ShortsFest in Atlanta, GA, the Freiburger Lesbian Festival in Freiburger, Germany, La Frontera Queer Film Festival in Brownsville, Texas, Macon Film Festival in Macon, GA, the San Antonio Film Festival in San Antonio, Texas, Women in Comedy Film Festival Atlanta, and the Iowa Independent Film Festival.
  • her short film Heather Has Four Moms won the Best Comedy Award at the Equinox Women’s Film Festival in Alaska, and Best Narrative Short at the First Sandy Dennis Film Festival in Hastings, Nebraska, and Best Written Work at the Louisiana LGBT Film Festival in New Orleans.
  • Heather was invited by Pride Pictures to screen at The Communal Queer Youth Center at Karlsruhe, Germany as part of a special event for queer teenagers. It was also asked by Beeston Film Festival in the UK to participate in a special screening program curated around issues of identity. It was also invited to screen in Sacramento at Art Mix Pride at the Crocker Museum, at the Pride Festival in Champaign, Illinois at the Art Theater, and Cincinnati at Homebrewed Independent Movie Night as Outreels Audience Favorite from 2018.
  • presented her short film script, The Shoot, at the UFVA (University Film and Video Association) Conference 2019 screenwriting panel, and her paper,  Introducing Mixtape: The Inclusive Educator’s Diverse Playlist, for a panel on inclusive pedagogy.
  • was awarded a $1,500 grant from The Puffin Foundation to produce her short film, The Shoot, about a sexual assault that occurs on a film set while filming a sex scene.
  • shot principal photography in July on her next short film, The Shoot.

Prof. Silas Hansen published an essay, “15 Things I’ve Noticed While Trying to Walk 10,000 Steps Per Day: Muncie, Indiana Edition,” in Hobart in May 2019. He also edited his second issue as Nonfiction Editor of Waxwing (Summer 2019 issue).

Prof. Vanessa Rapatz presented a paper, “Utopian Fancies/Dystopian Drama: Contemplative Action in Margaret Cavendish’s The Religious” at the International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference in Trondheim, Norway.

Prof. Katy Didden had a new poem accepted for Spoon River Poetry Review’s Illinois Poet Redux anthology, which will be published this Fall. She had two panels accepted for this year’s AWP conference, including “Towards a “Third Language”: Rethinking Text + Image Assignments in the Workshop,” and “One Hundred Years of Poetry in the Sewanee Review: A Celebration.”    

Heim, Powell, and Prof. Huff

 

 

Prof. Joyce Huff presented a paper entitled “The Fat Uncanny: Abjection and the ‘Phantom of Fat’” at the International Gothic Association in Chicago, IL. Presenting with her on the panel “Phantoms, Medusas, and False Selves: Abjection in Film and Literature” were Ball State English graduate students Melissa Powell and Leah Heim.

 

If you have good news you’d like to share, send it to us at bsueng@bsu.edu.