Better late than never! In the latest installment of our “Good News” series, the Ball State English Department highlights the accomplishments of the department’s students and faculty during the Spring 2014 semester:

Adrienne Bliss:

  • She had a chapter published in Fabricating the Body: Effects of Obligation and Exchange in Contemporary Discourse.
  • In addition, she had a paper accepted for presentation at the American Society of Criminologist’s Annual Convention last November.
  • Bliss has also been accepted to develop a class for the Interactive Learning Space Initiative in the Office of Educational Excellence for the 2014-15 school year.

Scott Bugher (B.A. 2013) has been accepted into the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Cathy Day’s book The Circus in Winter was selected as the Common Reader at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana.

Kelsey Englert (M.A. 2014) was accepted into West Virginia’s MFA program with a full tuition waiver. 

Robert Habich received the Distinguished Achievement Award for 2014 at the American Literature Association meeting in Washington. The award, given annually by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, recognizes accumulated scholarly work and service in support of Emerson studies.

Darolyn Jones:

  • She was featured in an “Interview with Lyn Jones and Liz Whiteacre,” published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature.
  • She was also awarded Outstanding Proposal Submission, Diversity and Inclusivity Teaching and Research Symposium in the fall of 2013.
  • Jones also received the Excellence in Teaching (EXIT) University-Wide Award, for “Rethinking Children’s Literature: Reading for Change from Ball State University.”
  • Additionally, she received the Accessibility Faculty Member of the Year University-Wide Award from Ball State’s Office of Disabled Student Development

Craig O’Hara published his short story “New World Record,” in the upcoming spring issue of december magazine.

Paul W. Ranieri received the C. Warren Vander Hill Award for Outstanding Honors Faculty.

JoAnne Ruvoli:

  • JoAnne presented “Italian American Literature: Transnational Circuits and Contradictions” at the Modern Language Association’s Chicago Convention.
  • At the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS) Conference in Oklahoma City, she participated in a pedagogy roundtable and a comics panel: “Teaching Inter-Ethnic Encounters: Conflicts and Alliances in Italian American Literature” and “Local Histories in Lila Quintero’s Darkroom: Feminist Mapping of Inter-Ethnicities.”
  • For the Calandra Institute’s conference, MAFIAs: Realities and Representations of Organized Crime, she co-presented “The Godfather, Media Excess, and Transhistorical Spectacle” with Dr. Mary Jo Bona in New York.

Emily Scalzo:

  • She published several haikus, including “thousands of windows” in Three Line Poetry,“Chess in Uganda” in Haiku Journal, “‘I brought the first stone'” at 50 Haikus, “Every now and then” at The Germ, and “Science is dogma,” “Lynch the President,” and “The Cubs’ new mascot” at Kalkion.
  • She published the poem “Ten thousand sharks” for River Poets Journal‘s National Poetry Month 2014: Pocket Poems, “Raspberry Sorbet” in Ms. Fit Magazine, and “Fourteen Months After the Motorcycle Crash” in Melancholy Hyperbole. 
  • Scalzo has also published her personal essay “Fat-Shaming: Why do I owe an excuse?” at The Mindful Word, and her photograph, “Flooded River at Muncie, Indiana After February 2014 Thunderstorm” was published in Midwestern Gothic.

Maria Staton:

  • She had her paper, “The Indian Maiden on the American Stage, 1800s-1850s” published in the HumanitiesDirectory, an international journal of contemporary scholarship relating to the arts and humanities.
  • Her paper “Teaching Writing in the Interactive Learning Space Environment” was also accepted for publication in the special issue of NUML Journal of Research in Social Sciences (JRSS) on Quality Higher Education.
  • Staton presented at the “Integrating Technology in Student-Centered Collaborative Leaning,” conference.
  • She also presented at the “Teaching Writing in the Interactive Learning Space Environment,” International Conference on Quality Higher Education in Islamabad, where she gave the keynote address.
  • In addition, she obtained $3,500 for the English Department from the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan for hosting and advising a graduate student from the National University of Modern language.

Merrielle Turnbull’s Virginia B Ball Center for Creative Inquiry seminar’s student-created film Unconditional Acceptance: The Human-Animal Bond has been nominated for an Emmy.

Mary Lou Vercellotti:

  • She presented “The Development of Accuracy (Or Lack-there-of) in English Second Language Learners,” and “The Interaction between the Development of Lexical Variety and the Use of Trigrams in ESL” at the American Association for Applied Linguists (AAAL) Annual Conference held in Portland, Oregon.
  • Vercellotti was also chosen as an alternate for the Summer/Short-term Research Publication Grant by the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

Andrea Powell Wolfe’s film Down to Earth: Small Farm Issues in a Big Farm World, was screened at two film festivals and nominated for regional Emmy awards in six categories. You can check out the website and trailer here.