Every year, so many BSU English grad students do cool stuff, like give public presentations, run media projects, and receive scholarships. We want to use the Good News post for March to honor these expectation-exceeding individuals.

To learn more about our amazing graduate programs, check out our website!

Shane Lanning

  • He attended Navigating Normativity: Queering Institutions and Challenging Inequality at the University of North Carolina. While he was there, he gave a presentation titled, “A Gay/Straight Comparison of Performed Gay Voices.”
  • He also went to a conference run by the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Toronto, Canada. His presentation was titled, “Gay Humor in American and British English: A Gricean Approach.”
  • Last but not least, he gave a group presentation with Phuong Tran, Hana Altahi, Seula Han, and Thomas McAlister at the Second Language Research Forum in South Carolina. Their presentation was called, “Acquiring Non-Lexicalized L2 Words: Strategy and Task Type.”

Phuong Minh Tran

  • Gave a presentation with Shane Lanning, Seula Han, and Thomas McAlister. “Teaching Considerationsfor Non-Lexicalized L2 Words.” It took place at the INTESOL Conference, hosted by Purdue University.
  • Gave a presentation with Hyoejin Yoon called, “The Presence of Asian/Asian American Scholars in College Composition and Communication (1950 -2010).” It was at the Conference of College Composition and Communication in Tampa, Florida.

Seula Han

  • Won the Dr. Janet Ross English Studies Scholarship.
  • Gave a presentations at the 33rd Annual Second Language Research Forum in Columbia, South Carolina: “Role of Morphological and Contextual Information in L2 Lexical Interface.”
  • Seula also gave a presentation at the Korean Society for Language and Information Workshop on Meaning and Cognition in Seoul, South Korea. His research findings were titled, “The Influence of Syntactic Similarity of L1 on Perception of English Relative Clause Grammaticality – A Study of Korean L1 Learners.”

Nichole Pena

  • Presented “‘If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear’: Ungendering Emotion in As You Like It” at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Convention in Boise, Idaho. Former Ball State faculty member Miranda Nesler advised the event.
  • Won the ASPiRE Research Grant. She’s using it to do archival research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Carrie Duke

  • Presented “John Muir’s Wild Gardens: Negotiating a Healthy Relationship with Nature” at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
  • She also presented at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference in Detroit, Michigan. Her research was titled, “Re-imagining the Unimagined through the Space of the Garden: A Study of Slow Violence in Tropic of Orange and Gardens in the Dunes.”

Matthias Raess

  • Won an ASPiRE Travel Grant to go to the Second Language Research Forum 2014 in Columbia, South Carolina, where he presented “Semantic Transparency and Idiom Retention.”
  • He also had another presentation called “The New N-Word” at Practical Criticism Midwest, where he was the runner-up for best paper.

Ritassida Mamadou Djiguimde

  • Received the “Best Poster” award at Practical Criticism Midwest, where he presented “The Internal Structure of a Jula narrative.” He also presented “English Clubs: A Way to Create and Authentic Language Learning Environment in EFL contexts.”
  • Published “Understanding Data and Research Analysis,” a digital textbook for first-year writing.

Sharifa Djurabaeva

  • Presented “Discourse Markers in Uzbek.” at the Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics. Dr. Carolyn Mackay advised the event, which took place at Indiana University.

Mary McGinnis

  • Presented “Using Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home in First-Year Composition” at the National Pop Culture Association Conference in Chicago.

Nicki Litherland Baker

  • Presented her research, which was titled, “After the auto-ethnographic empirical research: Longitudinal course efficacy.” This took place at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis.
  • She also presented at the Indiana College English Association Conference. Her research was titled, “Beyond the lens: English teaching and learning off the record.”

Carie King

  • Presented “Adapting Educational Theory and Practice to Context: Learning from Renaissance Scholar Teachers” at a conference run by the Indiana College English Association.

Mustafa Harb

  • Published “Contrastive Lexical Semantics of Biblical Soul and Qur’anic Ruħ: An Application of Intertextuality” and “A Closer Look at the English Article System: Internal and External Sources of Difficulty Revisited” at the International Journal of Linguistics.
  • His research, “An Optimality-Theoretic Account of English Loanwords in Hawaiian,” is also under consideration for publication in Rutgers University’s archives.

Joseph Hurtgen

  • Published “The African Imaginary in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African” at Text in Context: A Graduate Journal.

Did we miss anything? Tell us! We want to add it to the list. 

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