In the latest installment of the “Good News” series, the Ball State English department highlights the accomplishments of our faculty and students.

jackiegrmck

Prof. Jackie Grutsch McKinney delivered the keynote address at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing in Salt Lake City. Jackie is the current director of the Ball State Writing Center and has conducted extensive research on writing center labor and how technology has changed the functions of writing centers. The theme of NCPTW ’15 was (De)Center: Testing Assumptions about Peer Tutoring and Writing Centers. Congratulations, Jackie!

Prof. Michael Begnal had three poems published in the literary magazine The Pickled Body. One of these poems, “Paris of Appalachia,” was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize.

Matthias Raess gave a poster presentation of “Because formality: The conjunction-noun construction in online text corpora” with Kenneth Baclawski (UC Berkeley) and Justin Bland (Virginia Tech) at the joint annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society, in Washington D.C.

Dr. Adrienne Bliss presented her paper entitled “Flipping/Flopping, Tech No and Techno” at the Lilly Conference: Evidence-Based Teaching and Learning in Austin, Texas.

Prof. Emily Scalzo published a haiku in the 2015 anthology of Element(ary) My Dear, through Kind of a Hurricane Press.

Dr. Frank Felsenstein‘s essay “‘If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh?’: Stereotypes of Jews in English Graphic Humor of the Georgian Era” was published in No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity. 

Dr. Mary Lou Vercellotti co-wrote a research paper with Dr. Nel de Jong of Amsterdam, Netherlands, entitled “Similar prompts may not be similar in the performance they elicit: Examining fluency, complexity, accuracy, and lexis in narratives from five picture prompts”. It will be published by Language Teaching Research and is currently available online ahead of print. Mary Lou also presented “Maximizing Students’ Interactions With An Expert” at the Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Ohio.

Dr. Robert Habich has published “An ‘Extempore Adventurer’ in Italy: Emerson as International Tourist,” in a collection entitled A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture.