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

Prof. Susanna Benko has been hard at work on a research project with Dr. Emily Hodge (Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University) and Dr. Serena Salloum (Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Ball State University). Together, this team is investigating how state educational agencies (SEAs) provide support to secondary English/Language Arts teachers via curricular resources that SEAs post on websites, analyzing the major organizations to which states link. To date, the team has coded 116 webpages of English/Language Arts resources for state standards, from 51 state department of education websites, for a grand total of 2,013 resources!

Drs. Benko, Hodge and Salloum will be presenting this work at the annual convention for the American Educational Research Association (AERA)  in April 2016 in Washington, DC.  One paper, titled “Common Core Connections: A Social Network Analysis of State-level Instructional Resources” will provide an overview of all 2,013 resources.  The second paper, titled “Policy into Practice: Investigating State-Endorsed Writing Resources for the Common Core State Standards” will focus specifically on resources focused on the teaching of writing.

Prof. Pat Collier has been named co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies beginning in January. He will share editorial duties with Barbara Green, associate professor of English at Notre Dame.

Prof. Cathy Day gave a presentation on “The Gilded Age’s Society Pages” at the 924 Gallery in Indianapolis. The event, TILT: An Arts and Humanities Mixer, was to celebrate National Arts & Humanities Month sponsored by the Indy Arts Council and Indiana Humanities  TILT featured two rounds that paired one arts expert and one humanities expert.

Prof. Frank Felsenstein‘s work on the “What Middletown Read” project has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities during its fiftieth anniversary. The project has been deemed one of fifty selected “Projects that have enriched and shaped American lives” and “shaped what we think and what we know about ourselves and our culture.”

Prof. Jackie Grutsch-McKinney‘s second book came out in October, and can be found on her publisher’s website here.

Prof. Silas Hansen presented as part of the panel “Honesty, Not Sensationalism: Creative Nonfiction After the Memoir Craze” at the NonfictioNow Conference in Flagstaff, AZ.

Prof. Lyn Jones has been very busy this month. She published “Building a Rainbow: One Writer at a Time,” (book chapter) in Living the Work: Promoting Social Justice and Equity Work in Schools Around the World, edited by Christa Boske,and Azadeh F. Osanloo. Volume 23 of Book Series Advances in Educational Administration, Emerald Publishing, October 10, 2015.

Jones was featured in

-College Planning and Management, Disability Offices, Accessibility, Privacy Attractive to Students Using Wheelchairs, October 22, 2015 (https://webcpm.com/articles/2015/10/22/accessibility.aspx)

-Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education Magazine, Students Using Wheelchairs have Thoughts for Colleges, October 22, 2015 http://www.hispanicoutlook.com/latest-news/2015/10/22/report-students-using-wheelchairs-have-thoughts-for-colleges

-University Business, Students Using Wheelchairs have Thoughts for Colleges, Article featuring my research project, October 22, 2015 (http://www.universitybusiness.com/news/students-using-wheelchairs-have-thoughts-colleges)

Jones also presented “Worlding: Rewriting the World and the Word in Disability Studies,” at the Diversity Research Symposium at Indiana State University.

Prof. Mai Kuha presented “Street Harassment in the Curriculum: Risks, Rewards, and Dynamics” at the Diversity Research Symposium at Indiana State University.

Prof. Sean Lovelace published “Memory,” a flash fiction in Smokelong Quarterly Magazine, which will come out November.

Prof. Matt Mullins’s filmpoem “Our Bodies” was recently screened as part of a curated exhibition called Text(e)/Image/Beat at the Emmedia Wordfest in Alberta, Canada. The filmpoem can be found here.

Prof. Mark Neely was a featured reader/ presenter at the Pygmalion Festival in Champaign, Illinois and the Texas Book Festival in Austin Texas. New poems of his were recently accepted by Rhino, Chattahoochee Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and DIAGRAM.

Undergrad and grad students Amory Orchard, Kathryn Hampshire, and Morgan Gross all received Aspire Student Travel Awards this month to present at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing in Salt Lake City, UT.

Prof. Emily Scalzo had two haiku published in an anthology entitled The Four Seasons through Kind of a Hurricane Press.

Prof. Vanessa Rapatz presented a paper titled “Intransitive Atonement in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus” at the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference in Vancouver. She was on a panel called Remembering Antiquity: Roman Frames, Renaissance Matters.

Prof. Emily Rutter published an article entitled “‘Isolated Togetherness’: Archival Performances in Harmony Holiday’s Negro League Baseball” in Studies in American Culture 38.1.