As a double major in English and German, Izzy Alexander’s college experience has been truly interdisciplinary. Due to her interest in communicative practices, Alexander’s English concentration is on rhetoric, writing, and linguistics; she added German when she discovered that she would be taking enough classes to earn a major, considering it an opportunity to contrast […]
In 1913, W. E. B. Du Bois’s historical pageant The Star of Ethiopia opened at the Twelfth Regiment Armory with a cast of 350 performers. At the dawn of the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance, it celebrated African Americans by tracing their history back to highly developed civilizations in Africa. According to English PhD student […]
Marie Balsley Taylor joined the department this year as an assistant professor in early-American and Native American literature. Her research examines the role that Indigenous people, places, and practices played in shaping the 17th century colonial literary genres. Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England, her first book, was published […]
It’s hard to pin down Christopher Moyer (’07). He has written about hackers and doomsday preppers for Vice, interviewed cult leaders for Rolling Stone, and covered artificial intelligence for The Atlantic. Moyer has ghostwritten books on everything from raising chickens to Zen meditation. He’s crafted messaging for international conservation projects. Now he’s the vice president […]
Distinguished Lecturer Erin Smith’s 200-level Public Writing course has always been built around working with nonprofits. In the past, students built online presences for local charities, but after social media became commonplace, she decided to restructure the course. She asked herself what nonprofits really need—money—and decided to shift the course’s structure to focus on crowdfunding. […]
Faculty members Mary Dzon and Urmila Seshagiri have uncovered medieval treasures and unknown Virginia Woolf stories in their archival work. Cornelius Eady and Iliana Rocha are winning national awards and publishing new work that makes us a destination program for poets and creative writers. Tanita Saenkhum has launched a new Teaching English as a Second […]
From Homer’s Iliad to the Old English Beowulf, from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene to filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of the Odyssey, the epic is one of the oldest and most prestigious literary genres. So when Oxford University Press invited Associate Professor Anthony Welch to write an introduction to the epic, he welcomed the opportunity […]
Please join in the English Department in celebrating our undergraduate scholarship winners for 2024–2025. Andrew Adorbo is a recipient of the Charles and Frances Mangam Merit Scholarship. The Claremont, California native is a senior English major who enjoys traveling (especially to the beach), hiking, and photography. Senior Technical Communications major Ella Barton is one of […]
In an age of social media, cable news, and hyper-partisanship, the act of engaging with those that one disagrees with seems harder than ever to practice. How, one wonders, can a democracy survive without a shared belief in civic discourse and its respect for different perspectives and a common good? Questions such as this drive […]
“Try as much as you can,” is Autumn Hall’s advice for students trying to find their way in college. “For me, finding my passion has come from trying as many things as I can and really learning what I want to do with my life,” she said. Hall was confident about her direction when she […]
Also joining the department this year as a member of our Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics division is Rima Elabdali, an assistant professor specializing in applied and sociolinguistics. She comes to this position with an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Portland State University and an M.S. in Linguistics and Ph.D. in […]
Dionte Harris joined the department this year as an assistant professor in twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature, film, and cultural studies. His specialties include Black studies, critical theory, queer and trans theory, performance studies, and visual culture. Before coming to Knoxville, he earned his BA from the University of Maryland, College Park, and […]
For multi-award-winning video game designer Rodney Thompson (’04), computer science was the obvious answer for his degree path at UT. Obvious, but not very satisfying. “After three years, I got to the point where I was like, I don’t think I can spend the rest of my career sitting and staring at code on a […]
What do megastar Taylor Swift and the UT English Department have in common? For the one hundred students who showed up for the inaugural meeting of the Taylor Swift Literary Club in September, more than you might think. Sponsored by the English Department, this brainchild of lecturer John Han and Laura Snyder, literature major, brings […]
With each passing year as department head, I become more grateful for our incredible alumni, who support our work through an array of partnerships and gifts. Our website is full of your success stories, which inspire our current students to connect the major they love to exciting careers and fulfilling lives. From law to video […]
Assistant Professor Iliana Rocha has been obsessed with true crime ever since she was a child. “Every week I would want to skip ballet because it was on Wednesday nights,” she said. “And that’s the night Unsolved Mysteries was on.” Rocha’s interest in the genre stems, in part, from an unsolved murder within her own […]