| From the Chair | Dear Colleagues, Coworkers, and Friends of the English Department
Welcome to the first Fall 2025 edition of Reading Matters, wherein we celebrate ourselves, sing our praises, and lean into learning for yet another semester together. Below you can see what a productive summer we had; it was truly a joy to hear about these achievements and activities in person at the departmental retreat. And below you can also see how many wonderful new faculty we are welcoming to our community of writers and readers, along with a new cohort of graduate students and undergraduate majors, all eager to learn from and with us. As I said in my “State of the Department” address at our first meeting, we are staying stable through turbulent times, and I’m honored to serve as DEO of a department dedicated to creativity, criticism, and community.
My office hours this semester are M 2-3:30 and T 12:30-2, but I’m in my office most afternoons and would love to chat. I also am continuing my “lunch with the chair” initiative and would welcome the opportunity to catch up, hear you concerns, and share ideas about upcoming challenges and opportunities.
| | Are you an alumni with news to share? Were you forwarded this email and want to receive it directly next time? Send us a message; we'd love to hear from you. | | | Faculty Matters | The end of summer brought new faculty-penned books: from Will Rhodes, The Work of Reform: Literature and Political Ecology from Langland to Spenser; from Matt Brown, The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth Century British America; from David Gooblar, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable; and from Dave Wittenberg, Big Culture: Toward an Aesthetics of Magnitude.
--And the beginning of the school year brought new faculty: Assistant Professors Zara Chowdhary and Cherrie Kwok; Associate Professor of Instruction, Justin Cosner; Assistant Professor of Instruction PJ Zaborowski; Visiting Assistant Professors Chelsea Burk-Betts, Richard Frailing, and Katie Randazzo; CLAS Postgraduate Visiting Writers Spencer Jones (Nonfiction), Josh Balicki (Fiction), Eli Campbell (Playwriting), and Brian Orozco (Poetry); and Adjunct Assistant Professors Caelainn Barr, Molly Biskupic, hurmat kazmi, and Amy Parker.
Zara Chowdhary's book review of the International Booker Prize-winning Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq appeared in the forthcoming issue 123 of Wasafiri Magazine, UK.
David Gooblar gave the keynote address at Loyola University Chicago’s Focus on Teaching and Learning Conference.
Eric Gidal's essay "Infrastructural Inversion at Clarens: St. Preux in the Garden" was published this past summer as part of the collection Histories of Science: Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press), edited by David Alff (University of Buffalo) and Danielle Spratt (California State University, Northridge). A second essay, "Experiments in Information Management: Reading Landscape through Sir John Sinclair's Specimens of Statistical Reports" was published on a new AHRC-funded open-access site, Writing the Industrial Revolution, edited by Jeremy Davies (University of Leeds) and Mary-Ann Constantine (University of Wales).
In June, Melissa Febos went on a 15-city book tour for her new memoir, The Dry Season, during which she appeared on Morning Joe on MSNBC and NBC Morning News (around the 45-minute mark). Among other press, the New York Times Styles section published a profile of Melissa, she was interviewed by Emily Ratajkowski for Interview, and an excerpt ran in the New York Times Magazine.
Harry Stecopoulos published “Beyond the Valley of Ashes” in the July issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. An Italian translation is forthcoming in the December issue of Ácoma: Rivista internazionale di Studi Nordamericani. Harry’s article The Hidden Injuries of Class appeared in the June 21st issue of LARB. His essay “The Imperial Sounds of Whiteness” is included in the new anthology Whiteness and American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Sarah Minor’s visual poem “Woman Found Living in Grocery Store Sign” appeared in Southeast Review and three prose poems Smithereens (I, I, II) appeared at Blackbird Journal. Her summer work on “The Mary Project,” an experimental documentary, was supported by a UofI Investment in Strategic Priorities grant. | | | Graduate Student Matters | Adare Smith (PhD) is spending the year at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies as an MCEAS Consortium Dissertation Fellow.
Rachel Poppen (MA) presented as a part of the “Making Invisible Archival Labor Visible: Leveraging Data for Advocacy, Transparency, and Sustainability in Our Work” panel at the Society of American Archivists conference this summer.
Caite Dolan-Leach (PhD)'s novel Dead Letters is in development with Netflix as a TV show.
Camille Davis shared her third chapter of her dissertation at the College Book Art Association in Madison, Wisconsin, in a presentation called "Poetry Power to the People" in June. Camille also had the opportunity to travel to Japan with a research group from the University of Pennsylvania to learn more about Japanese woodblock printing and hand papermaking. While with this group, Camille was a participant in a woodblock conference hosted by the Korean Studies Institute in Andong, South Korea.
| | | Staff Matters | Alicia Wright's début poetry collection, You're Called By The Same Sound, was published in August by Thirdhand Books, an imprint of Bull City Press. It has been covered in LitHub and today in Southern Review of Books. A poem from the collection, "Hot Blast Furnace," was published in June in the Chicago Review. Also in August, Alicia defended her dissertation received her PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver.
| | | Alumni Matters | David Wolf (BA '82), Professor Emeritus of English, Simpson College, published his seventh collection of poems, "Seven" (In Case of Emergency Press).
In August, Aaron Pang (NWP '24)'s Falling: A Disabled Love Story, directed by Connie Chen (NWP '25) played at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Ajla Dizdarević (BA '20) has been published or has work forthcoming in the Hopkins Review; Southword; Cheekwood Botanical Garden's Verse and Vision Exhibit; Plainsongs; We the Interwoven, an immigrant anthology; and others. Her full-length poetry manuscript, To Belgrade, was a finalist for the 2025 Ohio University Press Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and the 2025 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship and received an honorable mention for a 2024 Academy of American Poets Prize. Additionally, two of her poems were shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Poetry Prize. She also received an honorable mention for the National Russian Essay Contest in 2024 and 2025. She is the recipient of a David Hamilton Prize, a scholarship from the Department of Cultural Affairs, and a Fulbright grant.
Since her graduation, Sydney Mayes (BA '23) has earned the following publications and awards: Poets.org “the walker system”, The Atlantic “Lula Bell”, Booth Two Poems, Gulf Coast Journal “at the grocery store, fainting in”, Poet Lore “Grand Isle”, ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year, finalist for the Adrienne Rich Award and finalist for the Furious Flower Prize.
Sydney Smithgall (BA '25) Elisa Burba (BA '25), Eva Brooks (BA '24), and Josephine Geiger-Lee (BA '25) were published in The Peer Review.
Mike Chasar (PhD '07) edited and introduced The Poetry of Bob Dylan: 30 Essays on 30 Songs, his fourth book. An innovative resource for Dylan fans and scholars alike, these thirty essays by leading scholars of poetry, music, and literature illustrate how and why the work of the 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate is in fact so literary. Chasar is a Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. | | | |
