Each month during the academic year, we assemble a newsletter of the department’s recent publications, presentations, announcements, and awards.
We’re happy to recognize the recent successes in research, scholarship, and creative activity outlined below.
Want to catch up on past successes or to find future announcements? Visit our archive of monthly newsletters Reading Matters as well as related blog posts.
Have news to report? Email us at english@ksu.edu.
— Karin Westman, Department Head
Publications
Ania Payne, “Constricted” (nonfiction). Bending Genres, Vol. 30, Dec. 2022: https://bendinggenres.com/constricted/
Presentations
Traci Brimhall, “What Can’t the Heart Stop Asking: Poetry and Wonder,” Central Lawrence Rotary Club, Lawrence, KS. 11 Jan. 2023.
“Ad Astra,” Inauguration of Governor Laura Kelly. Topeka, KS, 9 Jan. 2023.
Philip Nel, “Learning, Unlearning, and the Freedom to Read.” Commencement Address. College of Arts and Sciences. Bramlage Coliseum, Kansas State University, 10 Dec. 2022.
Shirley Tung, “Creating Cosmopolitanisms: Eighteenth-Century Women Travel Writers and the Re-imagination of Identity.” (Invited talk.) Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Research Seminar, Mansfield College, University of Oxford. 24 Jan. 2023.
“Homeward Gagged and Bound: Recuperating the traveling subject in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence (1796).” British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) Annual Conference. 5 Jan. 2023.
Awards
Greg Eiselein won a Ron Gaches Lifetime Teaching Award, College of Arts & Sciences, Kansas State University.
Cassidy Hartig (BA ’23) and Natassja Norwood (BA ’25) received Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research Awards. Steffi Dippold will serve as Cassidy’s faculty mentor, and Katy Karlin will serve as Natassja’s faculty mentor.
Katy Karlin and Cameron Leader-Picone, along with Shreepad Joglekar from the Department of Art, have won an Interdisciplinary Research Grant from the Chapman Center for their project “The Learning Tree: Still Learning.” The project will be conducted in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Museum in Fort Scott and will revisit Parks’s 1950 photo essay “Back to Fort Scott.” Natassja Norwood (BA ’25) will contribute to the project through an Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research Award.
Sara Partin (MA ’23) and Delaney Sullivan (MA ’24) each received a College of Arts & Sciences Travel Scholarship to present their research at the 2022 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference in San Antonio, TX.
Tom Sarmiento won a William L. Stamey Award for Undergraduate Teaching, College of Arts & Sciences, Kansas State University.
Announcements
Traci Brimhall, Mary Kohn, and Karin Westman served as panelists for “The Highs and Lows of Faculty Life: Lessons from Experience,” a professional development event co-sponsored by K-State’s Graduate School and its Teaching and Learning Center on January 13, 2023.
Herditya Wahyu Widodo (MA ’14) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the State University of Malang in East Java, Indonesia. He has been working there since 2019 and teaching courses in writing, literature, and cultural studies.
Featured in Media
Traci Brimhall was the featured interview on the hourlong program KPR Presents with Kaye McIntyre on Kansas Public Radio, 15 Jan. 2023: https://kansaspublicradio.org/podcast/kpr-presents/2023-01-15/kpr-presents-kansas-poet-laureate-traci-brimhall
Research and Creative Activity from Alumni
Phillip Howells (MA ’18) published “Science Fiction and the Absurd: Lauren Olamina as a Symbol of Hope in Butler’s Parables” in The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 55, no. 5, 2023, pp. 1084-1102: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpcu.13182.
K-State English 