Welcome
海角社区 English is home to world-renowned faculty, innovative course offerings, and talented students. At the heart of our work is an attention to verbal communication in spoken and written form 鈥� what humans do with language, how we do it, why we do it, and to what effects. Through the study of literature, linguistics, rhetoric, film, theory, and the craft of writing in a variety of genres and forms, we challenge students to ask questions of texts, to read beyond literal meanings, to understand how context and text interact, and to create compelling texts of their own. The value of an English degree is that the person who can write with elegance and precision, and who has the skills to interpret and analyze texts, is needed 鈥� and valued - in every area of work and life.
Go to Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions to see examples of what our Department has to offer and browse 鈥淎bout Us鈥� to learn about our faculty, graduate students, publications, events, and more.
Professor Sue Weinstein
Chair, Department of English
Congratulations to Our Recent Award Winners
Chris Rovee has won the 2025 海角社区 Distinguished Faculty Award. He is a path-breaking and influential scholar in the field of British Romanticism, published by top academic presses. His creative and pedagogically rigorous approach to teaching is both intensive in supporting our students and campus community, and extensive in connecting them with various professional opportunities in the field such as The Dickens Project. Dr Rovee has for years epitomized the record of outstanding teaching, research, and service that this award recognizes.
Nolde Alexius has been awarded the 2025 Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award. This award recognizes a faculty member who has made significant contributions in service to 海角社区 students and faculty via the Communication Across the Curriculum (CxC) program. The award letter reads, in part:
This year鈥檚 applicant pool was highly competitive, yet your impact on the scholarship of communication-intensive teaching and learning and the CxC program itself is unparalleled. The testimony of our 海角社区 community members who wrote to document and uplift your extensive and continuing work in this area was genuinely inspiring to read, and it is clear that you have shaped CxC and communication-intensive discovery in landmark and enduring ways.
These faculty will be recognized at the university鈥檚 annual faculty awards ceremony at Juban鈥檚 in April.
Chris Barrett has won the 2025 Mid-Career Rainmaker Award. 海角社区's Rainmakers are researachers who have built strong track records in securing external research funding, publishing in high-impact journals, and gaining national as well as international recognition for their work. This is Chris's second Rainmaker, as she won the Emerging Scholar version of the award in 2017. Read more at .
海角社区 Sophomore and First Generation College Student Publishes First Book at 20 years old
"Ten-year-old Tyhlar Holliway knew what she was going to be from an early age: a writer.
鈥淗i. I鈥檓 back. Did you miss me,鈥� she wrote in her fourth grade journal. 鈥淣ow I know what I want to be, which is a writer. I love to write, so this was easy for me to pick.鈥�
Now, at 20 years old, the 海角社区 student has become a published author.
Holliway released her first book 鈥淣avigating the Maze: The High Schooler鈥檚 Roadmap to College Readiness鈥� on Nov. 11, 2024. The book is a guide to help high school students have a successful transition into college. With 100 pages divided into eight chapters, it is a quick and insightful read that progresses from advice for freshman to seniors."
Read the full in The Reveille.
Spring 2025 Speakers and Events
- , March 20 at 3:00PM, Hill Memorial Library (co-sponsoring w/ WGSS)
- , David Lynch's American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema, March 20 (co-sponsoring with Screen Arts)
- Delta Mouth Literary Festival, March 21-23
- (hosted by Chris Rovee), March 27
- , will have a mini-residency April 7-8 hosted by Alex Meany. As part of this residency, Professor Goldstein will deliver a public lecture titled 鈥淲hat is Colonialism Now?鈥� on Monday at 3:30 pm on April 7 in the Hill Memorial Lecture Hall. At noon on April 8th, we will host a workshop open to all graduate students and faculty titled 鈥淭he Politics and Processes of Collaboration鈥� (Hodges Hall 155).
- IDEA Committee speaker from GWU, April 11 at 11:30 a.m. in Hill Memorial Lecture Hall.
- IDEA Committee speaker , April 15 on Zoom at 12:00 p.m. link (Co-sponsored with WGSS)
- Creative Writing visiting author, April 22, 7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m., The French House.
- 鈥淭he Stories We Tell: Rethinking the Disciplinary Past,鈥� symposium to be held in Hill Memorial Library lecture hall (hosted by Casey Patterson and Chris Rovee). Speakers include: (Minnesota), (Bucknell), (South Carolina), (UConn), (UL-Lafayette), and Olivia Xu (Northwestern). Friday, April 25 (all day)
- MFA Third-Year Reading, Sunday, April 27 at 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m., Baton Rouge Gallery
- Department awards celebration, Tuesday, April 29
English Department News
Congratulations to Distinguished Instructor Ann Martin on being named a CxC Teaching Fellow. Ann directs our English Dual Enrollment Program and is an invaluable member of 海角社区 English.
Congratulations to Distinguished Instructor Nolde Alexius, who has been awarded the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society of 海角社区 2024 Outstanding Instructor Award! Nolde has been a valued member of the English Department for many years and we are thrilled that her many contributions to students and to English have been recognized with this prestigious award.
Faculty Accomplishments
Ariel Francisco's (Assistant Professor) forthcoming fourth collection of poems, All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins, mourns a Miami already ruined by climate change and development, and meditates on the future ruins of a city reclaimed by the sea. The collection will be available this October with Burrow Press. Ariel also has four translations available now: Dominican poet Mateo Morrison's Hard Equilibrium with Spuyten Duyvil; Dominican poet Francisco Henriquez's Moonless Night with Spuyten Duyvil; Haitian-Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud's Poet of One Island with Get Fresh Books; and Chilean poet Cristian Gomez Olivares' Burning of the Reichstag with Editorial Ultramarina (Spain).
Henry Goldkamp has multiple poems in Yalobusha Review, Prompt Press, NOIR SAUNA, Rougarou, Coma, Chicage Review, Poetry Northwest, Not My Style, peel lit, and mercury firs. He also has new experimental pieces of criticism in Annulet and Blue Bag Press. Last summer (2023) he had the opportunity to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and was recently named Communications Director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
Michael Bibler (Associate Professor) signed a contract with Oxford University Press to co-edit (with Sheri-Marie Harrison of University of Missouri) the Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic. The book is expected to be ready for publication in 2026.
Lauren Coats (Associate Professor), Jennifer Glassford (Instructor), Casey Patterson (Assistant Professor), and Paige Watts (Instructor) completed the Summer 2024 Communication-Intensive (C-I) Teaching Lab for new C-I Teachers and received their C-I certification.
Adam Clay (Associate Professor) participated in a poetry panel at the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson this September. His latest book, Circle Back, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Finally, his poem, 鈥淪elf-Portrait as an Invasive Species,鈥� was published in Mid-American Review.
Brannon Costello (Professor) joined the staff of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society as Associate Editor. This summer, he also presented essays at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature biennial conference in Gulfport, MS (鈥淥f Grit Lit and Steel: On Charles Willeford鈥檚 Cockfighter鈥�) and the Comics Studies Society鈥檚 virtual conference (鈥淭he Glitchy Environmentalism of Rick Veitch鈥檚 Swamp Thing鈥�).
Alison Grifa Ismaili (Senior Instructor) was invited by the Cox Academic Center for Student-Athletes to serve as a guest football coach and to attend the UCLA game in recognition of her work with student athletes.
Saiward Hromadka (Instructor) presented a paper, 鈥淭he New Curb Cut: Ungrading as the Pedagogical Ramp Between Artificial Intelligence and Dyslexia in College Composition Courses,鈥� at the conference in September.
Ann Martin (Distinguished Instructor) was selected by the 海角社区 Office of Academic Affairs and Communication across the Curriculum to join the second cohort of Communication-Intensive Teaching Fellows to inform, create, and disseminate innovative teaching development resources across campus.
Casey Patterson鈥檚 (Assistant Professor) article, 鈥淭owards a Manumissive Black Fantastic in Fandom, Fantasy, and Literature for Young People, or: A Case for the Black Hermione鈥� (2022), received an honorable mention for the Children鈥檚 Literature Association鈥檚 Judith Plotz Emerging Scholar Award.
Pallavi Rastogi (Professor) has received an advance contract from 海角社区 Press for the co-edited book (with Madoka Kishi), 鈥淎sians on the Gulf Coast: Other Races, Other Cultures鈥� in Louisiana.鈥�
Maurice Ruffin (Associate Professor) has had multiple readings this summer and fall, including at University of Oregon and Oregon Humanities Center, Lighthouse Writers Lit Festival (Denver), Sewanee Writers Conference, Mississippi Book Festival, International Black Writers Festival (Howard University), Brooklyn Book Festival, Eudora Welty Symposium at Mississippi University for Women, and Louisiana Book Festival. New editions of his novel The American Daughters are being published, and his work has been recognized by the 2024 John William Corrington Award (Centenary College of Louisiana), a 2024 South Arts Fellowship for Literary Arts Recipient, and the 2024 Inaugural Tennessee Williams Distinguished Arts Award (Tennessee Williams Festival).
Josh Wheeler (Associate Professor) published a feature, , exploring the cultural history of Smokey the Bear in ALTA Magazine鈥檚 special issue Reckoning with the West, edited by historian William Deverell. His previously published feature, (2023), for Distillations (the magazine of the Science History Institute) was included in the magazine鈥檚 annual 鈥淏est of Distillations鈥� issue, published in August 2024.
Graduate Student Accomplishments
Azharuddin (PhD) was the recipient of the 2024 Sarah Liggett Teaching Award. He attended Harvard University's 14th Institute of World Literature 2024 Summer program, hosted by University of Cyprus.
Dahlia Li鈥檚 (MFA) short story, "", was published in The Writing Disorder last summer, and it was selected for the journal's 鈥淏est in Fiction" collection.
Carolina Murriel (MFA) was named one of people doing good in New Orleans for her project , an oral history series of Louisiana's Latin American elders, made in her capacity as a death doula. Legados was funded by a Rebirth grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. This September, her first published poem came out in Harper Collins' , an anthology of poets from the undocumented diaspora, edited by the collective. Lastly, Carolina鈥檚 production company Pizza Shark was nominated for the (akin to the Grammys of podcasting) in the Politics/Opinion category for their show National Emergency, a public health podcast hosted by two ER nurses who look at mass violence, disaster(mis)management, carceral health systems and more through a public health lens.
Ibrahim Nureni (PhD) has published a haiku in one of the most prestigious haiku journals in the United States. He was selected as a Fellow of the Bill Anderson Fund, a fellowship program for doctoral students engaged in disaster or medical hazard-related research across various disciplines.
Sunny Rosen鈥檚 (MFA) short story, 鈥淭he Birthday Party,鈥� received an honorable mention from this year鈥檚 AWP Intro Journals Project.
Taylor Thompson (M.A. 2023) started this Fall as a Visiting Lecturer of English with Specialization in Rhetoric, Writing, and Digital Media Studies at Northern Arizona University while completing her PhD at 海角社区.
Seohye Kwon (Ph.D. candidate) was selected as one of the 海角社区 representatives of the 2023 SEC Emerging Scholars program. She will receive an increase in her graduate assistantship stipend for one year and join students from across the SEC at the University of Arkansas this October for the multi-day 2023 SEC Emerging Scholars Program and Career Preparation Workshop. Seohye also published a book review of Judgment and Mercy by Martin J. Siegel titled ".鈥� She has received a Korean Honor Scholarship from the Korean government, an award given to outstanding students of Korean heritage to encourage high achievement of academic performance and the development of leadership qualities for their future professional careers.
Sunny Rosen (MFA candidate) received a Best of the Net nomination for . She published on Alba de C茅spedes鈥檚 1952 novel Forbidden Notebook. Sunny was also received a scholarship in the summer to attend the Convivio Writer鈥檚 Conference in Umbria, Italy.
Alumni
Erin Little (MFA, May 2024) had her first short story, "Airplane Mode," published by Maudlin House in April 2024, when she also read poetry at the State Library with Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin. In June 2024, Erin gave a reading from her chapbook, Personal Injury, with Sebasti谩n H. P谩ramo hosted in Dallas, Texas by Deep Vellum bookstore and press.
Ian Lockaby (MFA, May 2021) had an excerpt from his forthcoming chapbook, A Seam of Electricity, published in FENCE. He also has poetry in Fall 2024 issue of The Kenyon Review, and his essay on the work of Palestinian-American poet Edward Salem was recently published in Poetry Daily. During Summer of 2024, Ian spent 3 weeks as writer in residence at Art Farm in Nebraska.
Madoka Kishi鈥檚 (PhD 2015, Professional in Residence in English) monograph, The Suicidal State: Race Suicide, Biopower, and the Sexuality of Population is slated to be published this October with Oxford University Press. The book theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era anti-immigrant discourse of 鈥渞ace suicide鈥� and period representations of literary suicide, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts. She is co-editing (with Pallavi Rastogi) a volume titled Asians on the Third Coast: Other Races, Other Cultures in Louisiana, which is under advance contract with 海角社区 Press.