News of our students, faculty, and alumni
- Upcoming Events
- News from the Department
| May - June 2013 | MSU Four-Week TESOL Practicum in Iquique, Chile: Students will gain experience as English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers while immersing themselves in Chilean culture. In addition to attending English Language Teaching classes at Universidad Arturo Prat, students will observe EFL courses at a variety of age and proficiency levels, intern as an EFL teacher for two weeks, and lead student workshops. |
| April | Don Shaffer's article, titled '"Harlem is Nowhere': Blues Spaces in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man," won the Yvonne Ochillo Memorial Award for the best article in the 2012 Journal of African American Studies. |  |
| April 2 | Before a nearly packed house, the four faculty of the Creative Writing program celebrated Forty Years of Creative Writing at Mississippi State. Rich Lyons, Catherine Pierce, Michael Kardos and Becky Hagenston read from their works-in-progress and offered a brief Q&A panel at the end of the presentation. |  |
| March | Caroline Baker earned second place for her thesis presentation at the Graduate Research Symposium. Her thesis was titled "Student and Instructor Perceptions of the Use of Online Translators in English Composition." | |
| March | Students Katylynn Wright, Field Brown, Megan Turner, and Molly Beckworth were among those participating in the Undergraduate Research Symposium. Field Brown won a first place award and Molly Beckworth a third place award in the Humanities and Arts division. | |
| March | The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters has selected Catherine Pierce for their award in poetry in recognition of her excellent book of poems, The Girls of Peculiar. |  |
| March | Field Brown has been selected to receive the College of Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research Award for 2013. | |
| March | Holly Johnson received the College of Arts & Sciences Award for Excellence in Humanities Research. |  |
| March | Catherine Pierce received the College of Arts & Sciences Award for Excellence in Humanities teaching. | |
| Feb. | Field Brown has been awarded the SROP 2012 Exemplary Summer Research Citation as awarded by representatives from a partnership between the Committee of Institutional Cooperation, the faculty in the SROP Program in Iowa, and the University of Michigan's National Center for Institutional Diversity. | |
| Jan. | Lorraine M. López, Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, will be our visiting fiction writer for Spring 2013. She read from her fiction on Thursday, January 31.. | |
| Jan. | Announcing this year's winners of the MSU Writing Contest. If you see any of these folks in your classes or in the halls, please be sure to congratulate them on their accomplishments. The first and second place winners in each category will also go on to represent MSU in the Southern Literary Festival competition. Poetry: |
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| Jan. 2013 | Natalie Nations has been selected to receive the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools 2013 master's thesis award in the category of Humanities and Fine Arts. | |
| Jan. 2013 | Senior English major Charlotte Owens is featured in the MSU "Our People" profile . | |
| Dec. | Rich Raymond's "Considering Claims and Finding One's Place" will appear in volume 14.3 of Pedagogy. Drawn from his book on Kosovo, this piece focuses on teaching twentieth-century American poetry. |  |
| Dec. | Ted Atkinson has been elected to serve a five-year term on the executive committee of the MLA Discussion Group on Southern Literature. |  |
| Nov. 26 | Mississippi State Humanities Teacher of the Year Shalyn Claggett delivered her public lecture at Shackouls Honors College Tuesday. http://www.msstate.edu/web/media/detail.php?id=5794 |  |
| Nov. | Raven Redmond, one of Lyn Fogle's linguistics students, has been awarded the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal Undergraduate Research Award. | |
| Nov. | ORED has awarded $2,000 to Lyn Fogle in support of her Cross-College Research Proposal |  |
| Nov. | Andrea Spain's "Event, Exceptionalism, and the Imperceptible: The Politics of Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup has been published in Modern Fiction Studies 58.4 (2012): 747-72. Dr. Spain has also received an invitation to present a week-long workshop with novelist and poet Bhanu Kapil at Naropa University, |  |
| Nov. | The winner of the 2012 Peyton Williams Award is Cortney Baroni for her paper, " 'I think I deserved strong reproof': Repression of Female Agency in Charlotte Bronte's Villette."
The honorable mention goes to Leslie Joblin for her paper, "Caring for the Commodity: The Object as Palimpsest in Don DeLillo's White Noise." |
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| Oct. 17 | Sandra Beasley read from her poems at Fowlkes Auditorium (3rd floor of Colvard Student Union). | |
| Oct. | Ted Atkinson, Associate Professor of English, has been named the College of Arts & Sciences Researcher of the Month for October, 2012 (http://www.cas.msstate.edu/research/). | |
| Oct. | The College of Arts and Sciences has announced that Shalyn Claggett has been selected as the Humanities Teacher of the Year. | |
| Sept. | The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies will soon publish Don Shaffer's essay titled "Harlem Is Nowhere: Blues Spaces in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man."
Also, the winter volume of Western Journal of Black Studies will publish Dr. Shaffer's article on "African American Folklore as Racial Project in Charles W. Chesnutt's 'The Conjure Woman.'" |
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| Sept. | Jabberwock Review is pleased to announce the publication of the Summer 2012 issue (33.1), featuring work by Christina Elaine Collins, Jeffrey Condran, Sondra Friedman, Judd Hess, Nancy Hewitt, Rochelle Hurt, Eric LaFountain, Patrick Nevins, and Shelley Puhak. | |
| Sept. | The Mississippi State Sigma Tau Delta English honorary chapter had an extremely successful book drive last year, so successful that the chapter has been recognized by Better World Books: http://www.english.org/sigmatd/about/partnerships/BWB_top25.shtml | |
Sept. |
Holly Johnson's essay, "A Fifteenth-Century Sermon Enacts the Seven Deadly Sins," is included in the collection Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins. | |
| Sept. 18 | Michael Kardos read from his new novel, The Three-Day Affair at Rogers Auditorium. |  |
| Sept. 15 | Ginger Pizer offered a presentation on language in households including both hearing and non-hearning family members at the fall Departmental Symposium, hosted by Michelle Crescenzo. |  |
| Sept. | The Mississippi College English Department has named Ted Atkinson their Distinguished Alumnus of the Year. | |
| Sept. | Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature has published Kelly Marsh's article on "'This posthumous life of mine': Tragic Overliving in the Plays of Marina Carr." |  |
| August | Michael Kardos introduced the fourth Maroon Edition book selection, Unbowed: A Memoir by Maathai, the fourth Maroon Edition book selection in presentations the Colvard Student Union and the Starkville Public Library. |
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| August 21 | Noel Polk, emeritus faculty member, Faulkner scholar, and Editor of the Mississippi Quarterly, passed away August 21. Noel Polk was a kind and generous colleague and a dear friend. We join many others in feeling a profound sadness over his passing as well as a deeply felt appreciation for having known him and worked with him over the years. May he rest in peace. | |
| August | Department head Rich Raymond has returned from his spring term at the University of Pristina in Kosovo. He made the visit as a Fulbright Scholar, his second such teaching opportunity. http://reflectionsonkosovo.wordpress.com/ |  |
| July | Lyn Fogle's book is now in print. Titled Second Language Socialization and Learner Agency: Adaptive Family Talk, it is published by Multilingual Matters. | |
| June | Noel Polk's article "Inside Agitators: Civil Writes in Mississippi: Jack Butler's Jujitsu for Christ" appears in the new issue of Southern Literary Journal. | |
| June | Lara Dodds' book, tentatively titled Margaret Cavendish and Literary History, has been accepted for publication by Duquesne University Press. |  |
| June | Ginger Pizer's article "'We communicated that way for a reason': Language practices and language ideologies among hearing adults whose parents are deaf" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. | |
| June 18 | Robert West's poems "Lawnmower" and "Butterfly tagging . . ." are in the new issue of Four and Twenty, on p. 17 and p. 21. (Once the pdf opens, click fullscreen for the best way to see the issue.) http://4and20poetry.com/ |  |
| June | Ted Atkinson's "'Blood Petroleum': True Blood, the BP Oil Spill, and Fictions of Energy/Culture" will be appearing soon in the Journal of American Studies. | |
| June | Robert West's poems "Retrospect" and "Top Step" can be found in the latest issue of the Alabama Literary Review. | |
| June | Don Shaffer's article " 'When the Sun Goes Down': The Ghetto Pastoral in Jean Toomer's Cane" has been accepted for publication in The Southern Literary Journal. | |
| May | One of Robert West's poems, first published in _American Tanka_, has just been reprinted in _Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka_ (Vol. 4). This volume of approximately 280 poems was selected from over eighteen thousand tanka in English | |
