In the latest installment of the “Good News” series, the Ball State English department highlights the accomplishments of our faculty and students.
Dr. Susanna Benko spent much of her summer working on a research project with her colleagues, Dr. Serena Salloum (Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Ball State) and Dr. Emily Hodge (Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University). Together, they are conducting analyses of professional development resources for secondary English teachers that are sponsored by state departments of education. Over the summer, they presented these papers:
Prof. Cathy Day has been accepted into Ragdale’s Residency Program for the 2016 residency year. She’ll spend February 2016 there, which falls during her special assigned leave. She’ll be working on her novel-in-progress.
An addition to the What Middletown Read database has been published by Dr. Frank Felsenstein and his co-author James J. Connolly. The volume is entitled What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City, and an early review in the London Times Higher Education Supplement can be found here.
Dr. Bob Habich was an invited participant at a panel on the academic job market at the American Literature Association annual conference. The conference was held in Boston this past May.
Dr. Pam Hartman, a member of the Gender and Literacy Assembly of National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (formerly known as the Women in Literacy and Life Assembly (WILLA) of NCTE), helped contribute to a guideline NCTE recently published on their blog that advocates teaching gender non-conformity in grades 7-12 curriculum.
Dr. Elmar Hashimov, recent PhD graduate, is joining Biola University, a private liberal arts school in Southern California, as a 
tenure-track Assistant Professor of English. He will be teaching rhetoric, writing, and pedagogy courses; directing the university writing center; and helping to develop and coordinate the writing in the disciplines initiative. He will also continue researching and writing about interdisciplinary writing and multiliteracies.
Dr. Kristine Kotecki spent three weeks this summer in Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Croatia doing follow-up research for her book project on how transnational belonging is imagined through cultural memory practices in the region. She visited events and exhibits addressing the 20-year anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica and attended the Pula Film Festival, among other things.
Recent graduate Brittany Means has accepted a position as a development assistant here at Ball State University.
Prof. Craig O’Hara’s short story collection, One Thirty Five South, was named a finalist for the 2014 St. Lawrence Book Award. His flash fiction piece, “Tailor,” has been published in the August 2015 issue of DecomP MagazinE. It is available online at here. And his short story, “It Aint Easy,” was named a semi-finalist in The Mark Twain House and Museum’s Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Contest.
After publishing a piece in Issue 17 of Midwestern Gothic, recently graduated M.A. student Alysia Sawchyn was featured in the magazine’s “contributor’s spotlight,” which can be found here.
Prof. Emily Scalzo has been published in HOOT, and an audio file of her reading the poem can be found here.
The Intensive English Institute is hosting two groups of Fulbright scholars, a group from Iraq and a group from Lebanon. The Project Director is Dr. Mary Theresa Seig, and Dr. Liz Riddle, Dr. Megumi Hamada, Dr. Lyn Jones, and Dr. Mary Lou Vercellotti are working with the IEI on the project, and are giving/have given week-long workshops.
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