In the latest installment of our “Good News” series, The Ball State English Department highlights the accomplishments of the department’s graduate students and faculty during the Fall 2013 semester:

Amit Baishya wrote an article titled “The Act of Watching with One’s One Eyes: ‘Strange Recognitions’ in Siddhartha Deb’s An Outline of the Republic,” which is forthcoming in Interventions: International Journal for Postcolonial Studies. Another article by Baishya titled “The ‘secret killings’ of Assam in literature” was published in November in Himal Southasian. He also has an article named “Close Encounters of the Real Kind: the Avatars of Terror in Two Contemporary Assamese Short Stories” that has been accepted for publication in a collected edition of essays titled Frames of Culture. Routledge will publish the collection in November 2014.

Baishya was also invited to deliver a presentation titled “Countryless Countries: the Poetics of No-Man’s Zones in Contemporary Militant Fictions” at the Materialism and the Colony colloquium at Bard College at Simon’s Rock on May 23, 2013. In addition, he is co-organizing a seminar titled “Differential Capital” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference at New York University in March 2014.

Doctoral student Nicki Litherland Baker’s article “’Get It off My Stack’: Teachers’ Tools for Grading Papers” is in press, to be published in Assessing Writing. The paper was first presented at the national College English Association Conference in Savannah, Georgia last April. Litherland Baker also presented her paper “Students’ Own Engagement with Technology as Their Research Focus” at the Indiana Teachers of Writing conference held in Noblesville, Indiana in September. In addition, at the Indiana College English Association Conference in Evansville, which took place in October, she presented “College Composition and the Five-Paragraph Essay: An Example of Academic Othering.”

Adam R. Beach co-edited (with Srividhya Swaminathan) Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination, and the book was published by Ashgate in July 2013.  Beach’s essay “The Good-Treatment Debate, Comparative Slave Studies, and the ‘Adventures’ of T.S.,” is included in the volume. Beach also published “African Slaves, English Slave Narratives, and Early Modern Morocco” in Eighteenth Century Studies.

Peter Davis’s third book, TINA, came out from Bloof Books in 2013. It has received good reviews in Fanzine and H_ngm_n. A poem from TINA was featured at Versedaily. He has done a fair amount of readings this semester for TINA, most notably at the KGB reading series, The New School, Manchester University, and Illinois State University. He is doing a workshop and reading at Columbia College in Chicago in February. Davis is also featured in a new anthology, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which was edited by Daniel Nester.

Cathy Day published a short story, “Mr. Jenny Perdido” in Volume 9 of Pank Magazine in 2013. She also received a grant called “Publishing + BSU Students” that provided funds for 20 students to participate in the 40th annual Midwest Writers Workshop from July 25-27 last summer. It is a Discovery Award Grant given by the Discovery Group of Muncie, Indiana in 2013 for $15,398. Click here to read the department’s blog post about her involvement in the event.

Day also wrote a guest post for the Indiana University Press blog called “The Book Behind the Old Washington Street Festival” on August 30, 2013. She wrote it in an effort to publicize her neighborhood’s annual historical festival and the work of Muncie author Emily Kimbrough.

Frank Felsenstein is the joint author (with John Straw, Katharine Leigh, and James Connolly) of “Reading Library Records: Constructing and Using the What Middletown Read Database,” which has appeared as a chapter in Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2013. The chapter is based on a team presentation at the 2010 conference, “Libraries in the History of Print Culture,” which is sponsored every five years by the American Library Association. Given the rarity of their survival, the editors of the volume describe the discovery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century circulation records of the Muncie Public Library as “an extraordinary find.” Information about the project and digitized records can be accessed through Ball State’s website. The freely accessible database is now being regularly employed both by researchers and by teachers and students across the United States and abroad.

Robert D. Habich published the chapter “Biography” in Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context with Cambridge University Press, as well as the online research guide “Ralph Waldo Emerson” in Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature with Oxford University Press. His review of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10, appeared in the New England Quarterly in September, and his review of “Not Altogether Human”: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance by Richard Hardack was published in the Journal of American History in June. Habich is completing a two-year term as president of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society.

Darolyn Jones was awarded the Outstanding Proposal Submission at the Diversity and Inclusivity Teaching and Research Symposium at Indiana University Southeast on October 13. She was also awarded the university-wide Excellence in Teaching (EXIT) award for her project “Rethinking Children’s Literature: Reading for Change” at Ball State University in 2013.

Jones’s work with the Indiana Writers Center has been featured on the Ball State University website since October. Also, she was featured in an article titled “TTK: Fight for your Writers” in an online publication for the Arts in Indiana called Sky Blue Window on October 12. A memoir collection she edited along with English department faculty member Liz Whiteacre called Monday Coffee and Other Stories of Mothering Children with Special Needs was released in November.

Sean Lovelace released a flash fiction collection published by Bateau Press titled The Frogs are Incredibly Loud Here. It was the winner of the 2013 Keel Prize for short fiction. Two more of Lovelace’s flash fiction pieces titled “I Roll into a Ball and they Throw me at Derek Jeter” and “Separation” were published in Fall 2013 in Quarter After Eight literary magazine. During the summer of 2013, his flash fiction piece titled “Saturday” was published in Juked magazine.

Craig O’Hara’s short story “The Corner,” which recently appeared in the North Dakota Quarterly, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Emily Scalzo had three poems, “The End of Childhood,” “The Process of Grief,” and “Comfort Food,” featured in the online literary magazine Dead Snakes. Also, her short memoir piece, “Degradation,” was published in the online literary magazine Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie.  Scalzo’s poem, “To Adam,” is forthcoming in February at Deep Water Literary Journal, and two poems, “My Reason for College, 2003,” and “Homeless Man, Purdue University,” are forthcoming in April at Eunoia Review.

Trey Strecker reviewed Evan Dara’s Flee for the TLS: Times Literary Supplement (22 Nov. 2013) and Joseph McElroy’s Cannonball for the Quarterly Conversation 34 (Winter 2014).

Mary Lou Vercellotti’s article “Use and Accuracy of Verb Complement in English L2 Speech” was published in October in the Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics. Also, she had an article published in TESOL Quarterly titled “Examining the Impact of Self-Correction Notes on Grammatical Accuracy in Speaking” in June. In addition, she wrote a chapter called “Language Acquisition and Language Assessment” in the book The Companion to Language Assessment.

Vercellotti also presented twice at the Second Language Research Forum in Utah this November. Her presentations were titled “Not All Clauses are Created Equal: Classifying Grammatical Complexity in ESL Speech” and “Profiles of Noticing in L2 English Learners: Examining Online and Post-production Noticing Moves.”

Maria Windell’s article titled “Moor, Mulata, Mulatta: Sentimentalism, Racialization, and Benevolent Imperialism in Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita” has been accepted for publication in J19:The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, the journal of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Andrea Wolfe completed her Virginia Ball Center seminar entitled “Down to Earth: Small Farm Issues in a Big Farm World” this semester. Take a look at the documentary and other related materials.