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
Traci Brimhall, “The Road to Quivira” (poem), KANSAS Magazine, vol. 80, issue 2, 2024, p. 64.
“Genealogy,” “Speculative Elegy” and “Unknown Etiology” (poems), NELLE, issue 7, 2024, pp. 6-9.
“Totality” (essay). Terrain.org 3 April 2024: https://www.terrain.org/2024/nonfiction/totality/
Hunter Scott, “Facing Sameness: Reconsidering the Radicality of Tom of Finland.” InVisible Culture: A Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 36, 2004: https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/pub/7vwsuc18/release/1?readingCollection=3393f8b7.
Presentations
Traci Brimhall, “Why Can’t the Heart Stop Asking?” (laureate talk). Minerva Club, Topeka, KS. 1 April 2024.
Dusty Bookshelf Open Mic Night (emcee). Manhattan, KS. 21 Mar. 2024.
“Understory” (commissioned poem and reading). Merriam Public Library Opening, Merriam, KS. 20 Mar. 2024
Zoey Dutcher (MA ’25), “How Did Hozier Become a Sapphic Icon? A Study in Recoding by Queer Fandoms.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 30 Mar. 2024.
Gregory Eiselein, “The Many Versions of Little Women” (invited talk). Clemson University, Clemson, SC. 7 Mar. 2024.
Elizabeth Elliott (MA ’25), “The Utopia of Awaeke Emezi’s Pet: A Home for Jam.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 29 Mar. 2024.
Rob Hilferty (MA ’24), “Horrify Her: Navigating the Engrossment and Patriarchal Spaces Within the Bluebeard’s Bride RPG.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 27 Mar. 2024.
Mary Kohn, “Sociolinguistic Variation in the Free State: Perceptions and Spread of the Low Back Merger System” (invited lecture). University of Kansas Linguistics Department. Lawrence, KS. 28 Mar. 2024.
Sierra Knipe (MA ’25), “Meta-Conversation of Representation in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: Bisexuality, Womanhood, and Agency.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 30 Mar. 2024.
Eli Long (MA ’24), “Good to be Bad: Theorizing Camp and Abjection in Slumber Party Massacre.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 29 Mar. 2024.
Margo Losier (MA ’25), “‘Can we cut the gay shit?’: Bottoms and Deconstructing Heteronormative Nostalgia in Teen Film.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 28 Mar. 2024.
Fereshteh Majdi (MA ’24), “Individual and Collective Determination: Anarchism and Utopianism in V for Vendetta.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 28 Mar. 2024.
Theresa Merrick, “‘That Doesn’t Sound Like Me’: Experiments with Professional Voice and GenAI in the Writing Classroom.” College English Association Annual Conference. Atlanta, GA. 22 Mar. 2020.
Sarah Morgan (MA ’24), “Community Support and Collective Action: #MeToo Themes Reflected in Women Talking.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 29 Mar. 2024.
Philip Nel, “Banning Children’s Books” (panelist, via Zoom). Maurice Sendak at 50 Years, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND.
Cosette O’Brien (MA ’25), “The Damsel in Distress a Position of Power in Your Turn to Die -Death Game by Majority.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 29 Mar. 2024.
Gabriell Padua (MA ’25), “American Empire, Exile, and Existentialism: Bienvenido N. Santos’ ‘The Day the Dancers Came.’” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 29 Mar. 2024.
Tom Sarmiento, “Formations of the Midwest” (invited panel discussant). APIDA/A (Asian Pacific Islander Desi American/Asian) Crossroads: 180 Years of Inclusion, Exclusion, and (In)Visibility, Asian Pacific American Studies Symposium. Michigan State University. Lansing, MI. 23 March 2024.
Kinsley Searles (MA ’24), “Wii Fit when We (‘re) Fat: A Rhetorical Analysis of Fatphobic Rhetorics in Nintendo’s Wii Fit.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 28 Mar. 2024.
Maggie Steuer (MA ’24), “Enola, Alone — The Girl Detective Archetype Without Masculine Interference.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 27 Mar. 2024.
D. K. Smith, reading from No Art Without Sin (novel). Oak Street Salon. Kansas City, MO. 6 Mar. 2024.
Delaney Sullivan, “American Monarchies, Adolescent Fiction, and Anti-Democratic Feminism: Reevaluating the Royal Romance,” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. 28 Mar. 2024.
Awards
Adolfo Blanco (BA ’24, News and Sports Media; Film Studies Certificate) received three 2024 Kansas Association of Broadcasters Awards: Best Episodic Entertainment Program (Audio) First Place, “Dungeons & Dragons Radio Show”; Best Podcast (Audio) First Place, “Dungeons and Dragons: Blasphemer of the Night”; and Best General News Story (Audio) Second Place, “Audio Back 9 Development.”
Delaney Sullivan (MA ’24) has received a Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools Excellence in Teaching Award.
Shirley Tung has received a 2024 Teaching Prize from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for her course “The Cult of Celebrity: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day.”
Announcements
Cassidy Hartig (BA ’24) was one of four undergraduate K-State students selected to present undergraduate research at the Kansas Capitol on March 1. Lisa Tatonetti served as mentor for Cassidy’s project on “The Middle of Everywhere: One Kansas Effigy’s Storied Past and Present.”
Karin Westman visited with congressional staff on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, to advocate for funding for the humanities as part of the National Humanities Alliance’s 2024 Humanities Advocacy Day on March 12.
Achilles Seastrom (MA ’23) has just joined the editorial staff of Terrain.org as an assistant nonfiction editor. He is currently a Hogrefe Fellow at Iowa State University, where he is pursuing his MFA.
K-State English 