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 […]