Scholarship, Writing, and Career Preparation Grow
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 Language certificate for students who want to teach abroad. Meanwhile Lisa King’s powerful and moving Homelands exhibit, created in partnership with four Indigenous nations, opened at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture, bringing new ways of thinking about Native American life to museumgoers, with a website for those at a distance.
In the undergraduate classroom, courses like Appalachia Now, taught by Bill Hardwig, open students’ eyes and minds to the literature and culture of Appalachia in their first year. The class has been so popular that we are going to have to get a bigger room for it next year. Professor Seshagiri launched the Odysseys project, which gives First Year Studies students a taste of the best short stories being written today, starting with Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Interpreter of Maladies. Students are gifted a copy of the book, an incredible session with Seshagiri on one of its stories, and time to reflect on the experience. Their responses describe the experience as the kind of transformative class they dreamed of having when they imagined college.
In the coming year, we’ll be launching three new exciting ventures that meet the needs of students.
The first is a new concentration in publishing, made possible by our new relationship with the University of Tennessee Press. Students will take a new course in publishing and a range of existing courses that provide a great background for a variety of publishing careers, plus have an internship with UT Press.
In conjunction with the art and theatre departments, we are also part of the new visual and interactive storytelling major, an interdisciplinary path for students who hope to be content creators in a range of digital, visual, written, and live media.
Finally, our digital humanities efforts, led by Hilary Havens, have produced a certificate for graduate students, and next year, a digital humanities minor will be available to undergraduates.
Our department continues to grow through study abroad in London or theatre classes in New York, supported by scholarships that alumnae Carolyn Thompson and Kristen Ledig-Bryant have provided; through the new professorships in American literature made possible by Chris and Watty Hall and Kirby and Ann Davis; and through all of you who keep in touch, offer to mentor students through our Careers for English Majors course, and share your stories on our alumni profiles page.
Thank you for every student you send our way, and thank you for helping the next generation of English majors find their way by contributing to scholarships. Please keep in touch and share your good news with us. You never know who might be inspired by your story.
Sincerely,
Misty G. Anderson