It’s been a tough fall, but that hasn’t stopped #bsuenglish students and faculty from having a myriad of good news. Continue reading to celebrate all of our department’s achievements from the past couple of months as we near the end of 2020. 

Faculty Good News

Peter Bethanis has a painting, an essay, and several poems recently published or forthcoming in San Antonio Review, Book XI, Hinterland, And So It Goes, and Talking Writing.

Rani Deighe Crowe

  • Professor Rani Deighe Crowe’s short film Quiet on Set has recently been selected to Tallgrass Film Festival in Witchita, KS, International Short Film Festival Kalmthout in Belgium, Cayenne Short Film Festival, NYC, NY, and Centre Film Festival in State College, Pennsylvania.
  • Rani’s feature screenplay, Our Prestigious Faculty, is an official selection of the Austin Revolution Film Festival.
  • Professor Crowe’s short short film, Shelter Alone at Home, was a semi-finalist for Best Actress in the Couch Film Festival in Toronto.

Michael Begnal’s chapbook Tropospheric Clouds was published by Adjunct Press.   

Emily Ruth Rutter’s current book, Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists, has been accepted for publication by University of Delaware Press and will be in print in November 2021.

Andrea Wolfe’s book, Black Mothers and the National Body Politic: The Narrative Positioning of the Black Maternal Body from the Civil War Period through the Present, was published by Lexington Press.

Indiana Writing Project is thrilled to partner with Burris Laboratory School to support student writers in middle and high school. Dr. Susanna Benko is working with middle and high school ELA teachers to study students’ writing needs, support struggling writers, and to develop peer tutoring programs for Burris students. This project is made possible through funding from the Indiana Department of Education.

As part of the work with IWP and Burris, Dr. Susanna Benko and Dr. Jackie Grustch McKinney are leading professional development for a team of teachers from six local school districts. In their work together, the team will study peer tutoring and student-run writing centers, and teachers will work to develop peer tutoring programs for their middle and high schools.

Ben Bascom organized and chaired a panel on “Queer Eccentricity in the Long Nineteenth-Century” and presented a portion of his book project at the digital conference for C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He also published a review of digital teaching resources for Early American Literature.

Molly Ferguson is presenting to the Newberry Library Irish Studies Seminar a chapter of her book project, “Shame, Silence and Escape in Mermaid and Selkie Stories” on November 13th. Attendees read the essay in advance and an assigned respondent from the field will comment and lead discussion. 

Kathryn S. Gardiner’s feature-length screenplay “Adults of an Undescribed Species,” an entomological fairy romcom, advanced to the second round of the 2020 Austin Film Festival and Screenwriting Competition.

Students/Alumni Good News

Emilie Schiess has won the university’s Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award (Masters Level).  

Check out Indelible co-creator and Creative Writing student Rebekah Hoffer’s “Writing with Indelible Ink” in Ball Bearings Magazine. 

Hayat Bedaiwi, who earned her PhD in English Literature from Ball State in 2019, has launched the Writers Backstage podcast. The purpose of the podcast is to explore the stories behind the literature of immigrant writers and ethnic literature in the United States. Some episodes are in Arabic and some are in English.