This post will be the first in our Good News series, which will highlight our faculty and graduate students’ accomplishments. Without further ado, here’s what our Ball State University English professors and students are doing:

Cathy Day attended the Indiana Historical Society’s Holiday Author Fair on December 4^th, the largest book-signing gathering for Indiana-related material, featuring 75 Hoosier authors. The Holiday Author Fair allows visitors to converse with authors, have books signed, and listen to special presentations.

Ashley Ellison’s (PhD program, Applied Linguistics) short essay, “Connecting Memory and Research through Eco-Composition,” has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Indiana English. It will be published in an upcoming “Green Issue.” This is Ellison’s first peer-reviewed publication.

Robert Habich’s “Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir,” appeared in the Oxford Handbook to Transcendentalism, edited by Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls. Dr. Habich also co-directs the Steinbeck Lecture Series with John Straw of Bracken Library. Its next lecture is scheduled for Monday, March 21, 2011 at 7:30 p.m.

Joyce Huff’s “Fosco’s Fat Drag: Performing the Victorian Fat Man in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” appeared in Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture, edited by Elena Levy-Navarro from Ohio State University Press. Here‘s a link to the book on the OSU blog. Huff also read an excerpt from the chapter at the Midwest Popular Culture Association in October 2010.

Angela Jackson-Brown’s short story “Something in the Wash, ” which appeared in The New Southerner, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Casey McArdle’s (PhD program, Rhetoric/ Composition) article, “Using Web 2.0 to Foster Community and Public Writing in Composition Classrooms,” was published in the Fountain Head Press book Web 2.0 Applications for First-Year Composition Assignments (December 2010).  He also presented “Working Web 2.0: User Generated Content and Global Writing” at the Watson Conference Louisville in October.

Miranda Nesler has had two essays accepted for publication. The first was “Closeted Authority in The Tragedy of Mariam,” forthcoming (52:2) in spring 2012 in Studies in English Literature. The second was “Review: Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity,” forthcoming (63:4) in winter 2010 in Renaissance Quarterly.

Chaehee Park (PhD program, Applied Linguistics) has two articles forthcoming in Korea:  “Subject-Verb Agreement: A Corpus Study of the Collective Nouns Majority and Minority” in The New Korean Association of English Language and Literature and “The Use of Polite Verbal Suffix –yo and –yeo in Korean Internet Café” in Linguistic Style of Korean.

Jeffrey Paschke-Johannes (PhD program, Rhetoric/ Composition) presented two papers at the Rhetoric Society of America’s 14th biennial conference in Minneapolis last May: “Burke and Butler: A Merger of Acts” and “Abandoning the Faculties: Association Psychology and Alexander Bain’s Rhetoric”; additionally, he sat on a panel, “The Ghosts of Rhetoric Past: Nineteenth-Century Assumptions and Their Legacies for Rhetoric,” along with Tess Evans and Karen Neubauer.

Craig O’Hara’s short story, “The Corner” was named second runner-up for the Second Annual Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction sponsored by Philadelphia Stories. More info can be found here. His short story “Rodent Town” has been accepted for publication in Altered States, a fiction anthology forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing.

Corby Roberson (PhD program, Literature) presented her paper “Pedagogically Fat: A 16-Year-Old Perception of Body Size” on the “The Fat Body in Academics:  What’s a Teacher and Student to Do?” panel at the Midwestern Popular Culture Association conference in Minneapolis last October.

Jennifer Stewart (PhD program, Rhetoric/ Composition) presented her paper “Curriculum Design in Multiple Contexts” on a panel at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

Trey Strecker delivered the keynote address, “Powers’s Disease: Narrative and ‘The Killing Responsibility of Care,'” for an international conference on “Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers,” hosted by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Erlangen, Germany.

Elizabeth Young (PhD program, Literature) presented her paper “Samuel Johnson’s Fat Cells: An Illustrated Guide to Fat, Food, and National Identity” on the “The Fat Body in Academics:  What’s a Teacher and Student to Do?” panel at the Midwestern Popular Culture Association conference in Minneapolis last October.

It is also worth noting that all four student Fulbright recipients this year were from the Department of English. Those students are as follows:

Steven Jones, a doctoral candidate in English literature, has been awarded a full Fulbright grant to the United Kingdom, the most competitive of all Student Fulbright Grant programs. Jones will use the Fulbright to study the correspondence of two 20th-century authors, letters that are held in the archives at the National Library of Wales.  This research is part of his dissertation on the role of Wales in the British Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Two graduating seniors, Katherine Kovac and Erin Loch, have received Fulbright English teaching assistantships to Germany, where they will teach English as a second language to middle school or high school students. Kovac also plans to develop an American literature book club at her school, and Loch will offer tutoring services and conversation sessions that allow students to practice English skills. Staci Defibaugh received an English teaching assistantship in Romania, where she will teach English as a second language at a university and an educational advising center. Defibaugh will also offer free English tutoring lessons and will create a bilingual craft circle, on knitting and traditional Romanian embroidery and weaving.

The English Department at Ball State is very proud and honored to have such diligent and accomplished faculty and students. Keep up the great work!