We’ve got a lot of good news this month!

Faculty News

Andrea Wolfe will be presenting a session entitled “Facing International Students: Building Empathy through Storytelling” with Lizz Alezetes and Deborah McMillan, both of the Intensive English Institute at Ball State, at the 2017 INTESOL Conference on November 11th

Molly Ferguson was elected president of the Midwest Regional American Conference for Irish Studies. On October 6th, she presented a paper, “‘To say no and no and no again’: Fasting as Resistance in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder” at the Midwest ACIS at the University of Missouri.

Katy Didden’s essay “A Poetics of Tectonic Scale: The Great Distance Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Marianne Moore, and Layli Long Soldier” was published by Poetry Northwest.  They also published her interview-style “double erasure” (a poem that engages with a historical text that critiques the naming of Mt. Rainier).

Jill Christman’s book Borrowed Babies has been adapted into a play by Ball State professor Jennifer Blackmer. This play will be produced at Ball State University in Spring 2019 in Strother Studio with Karen Kessler directing.  

The ADE (Association of Departments of English) has invited Cathy Day to join Dr. Robert Matz (dean at George Mason) and present on “Reversing the Decline in English Majors and Enrollments” at the ADE workshop in Ann Arbor, MI July 9-12, 2018.

Pamela Hartman was honored at the CAEP/SPA Reception. This event honors the programs that received National SPA Recognition and the faculty who wrote the reports in preparation for the CAEP Accreditation Process.

Emily Rutter was selected to serve on the Editorial Board for Performing Celebrity, a new book series from the University of Delaware Press.

Darolyn “Lyn” Jones was invited to present on both flash memoir and telling the story of your life at the Indiana Author’s Fair, held annually in Indianapolis at Central Library in Indianapolis.  

Rani Deighe Crowe’s poem, “My First Love,” has been accepted to the American Journal of Poetry for its Fourth Volume, published New Year’s Day. Her short film, Beautiful Eyes, was screened in Final Girls Women In Horror “Best of” screenings in Innsbruck, Austria on October 6, and in Tel Aviv, Israel on October 24. Beautiful Eyes was also screened in the Final Girls’ special Halloween screenings in Nuremburg and Berlin on October 31. 

Megumi Hamada (faculty) and Nuha Alsalem (Applied Linguistics graduate student) presented their paper, “Role of Semantic Transparency in English L2 Lexical Inference” at Second Language Research Forum, on October 14, at Columbus, Ohio.

Megumi Hamada’s article, “L2 Word Recognition: Influence of L1 Orthography on Multi-syllabic Word Recognition,” was published in Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

Joyce Huff presented a paper entitled “Digging Up the Past: British Victorian Constructions of the Corpse Trade in James Blake Bailey’s The Diary of a Resurrectionist (1898) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ (1884)” at the Midwest Conference on British Studies on September 29, 2017. She had the honor of being on the panel with Ball State English graduate student, Anthony Salazar.

Mary Lou Vercellotti’s article, “Do interactive learning spaces increase student achievement? A comparison of classroom context,” was published in Active Learning in Higher Education.

Mark Neely’s poem “Subvocal (3)” was published by Willow Springs in their summer issue. The poem also appears on their website along with a brief interview. He also had three minimalist poems appear in Juked.

Sean Lovelace has three new hybrid texts (letters), “Letters to Jim Harrison,” in New Limestone Review. Passages North has taken six of the “Letters to Jim Harrison” to appear in Spring 2018. Juked Magazine has taken a “Letter to Jim Harrison” for Spring 2018.

Student News

Emily Ford defended her dissertation, “BRING THEM INTO TRAINING”: EMBODYING THE VICTORIAN TEACHER.”

Anthony Salazar’s article “Curing the Vampire Disease with Transfusion: The Narrative Structure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula” was accepted for publication by English Language and Literature Studies.

Kathryn Powell (Undergraduate English Studies) won Best Presentation for her creative work, “The Listening Horizon.”

Abdullah Albalawi (Practical Criticism Midwest) also won Best Presentation for presenting his research, “Gender Differences in The Speech Act of Thanking in Saudi Arabic.”

Hannah Bovino won the Doggeral Contest at PCM for presenting her poem, “I’m sorry iPhone.”

Alumni News 

Kelsey Englert (MA in English, 2014) had her flash fiction piece “Textbook Endings” published in Passages North. She was also featured in our Grad School Confidential series in 2015.

Nikole Darnell (Creative Writing, May 2017) accepted a position as the Editorial Production Coordinator at the Lebanon Reporter.

Do you have anything cool happening in November? We want to brag on you, #bsuenglish! Send us your November Good News at bsueng@bsu.edu!