The English Department is home to a productive, award-winning faculty whose members pursue research and creative activity across the many diverse fields of English Studies today. In celebrating that work, we would like to acknowledge some of our recent accomplishments.

Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci will be giving a talk entitled, “Serials Cataloging and Alternative Access in the Classroom, or the Making of Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print,” with Dr. Molly Hardy (Digital Curator at the American Antiquarian Society) at the Rare Books School conference on Bibliography Among the Disciplines in Philadelphia on October 14, 2017.

Professor Michael Fallon’s essay, “Red Ferry, Blue Ferry,” was accepted by the Broad Street Literary Journal and will be the featured essay on its website this fall.

Dr. Kate McKinley’s essay, “Ampullae and Badges: Pilgrim Paraphernalia in Late Medieval England,” will be published in the festschrift, Materiality, the History of Ideas, and Later Medieval Literature, edited by Brian Castle and Erick Kelemen (Newark: University of Delaware Press), this December. She received a small grant from the Dresher Center for the Humanities to help cover image-related costs.

Dr. Christopher Varlack and Gian McCann, Graduate Assistant, hosted the Banned Books Week discussion on “Censorship, Cultural Taboos, and the Tradition of Contesting Books” on September 29, 2017 before a gathering of over one hundred students and faculty.

The English Department is home to a productive, award-winning faculty whose members pursue research and creative activity across the many diverse fields of English Studies today. In celebrating that work, we would like to acknowledge some of our recent accomplishments.

On June 26, Dr. Jessica Berman gave a lecture, "Trans Reading and Comparative Modernism," at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Later that week, she organized and took part in a roundtable on "Woolf by the Book: Reflecting on Woolf Editions and Companions," at the 28th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, University of Reading, UK. In July, she also gave a paper on "Resourcing Modernism Today: Handbooks, Companions, Guides," on a panel on "Packaging Modernism Today," at the Modernist Studies Association Conference, Amsterdam.

 In July, Professor Corbett was the subject of a column in the San Francisco Chronicle celebrating the role of the Pony Express in linking California with the rest of the nation in the early 1860s. To read the article, please visit http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-the-Pony-Express-linked-an-isolated-SF-to-the-11306475.php He was also a panelist in June in Kansas City on a panel discussion about Mark Twain in the 19th century West. The panel was sponsored by the Western Writers of America's annual meeting that also feature the writer William Least-Heat Moon, author of Blue Highways.

Professor Michael Fallon's non-fiction essay, "The Woman in the Window," was accepted for publication by the Concho River Review. 

Dr. McKinley will present a paper, "The Survival Table in Boccaccio's Decameron 5.9," at the 4th Annual Conference on Food History and Culture, "The Table of the Senses and the Senses of the Table," to be held at the Centre of Classical and Humanistic Studies/Food Heritage/DIATA, University of Coimbra, Portugal from October 25 to 27, 2017. She has also been invited to present a lecture on her book on Chaucer and Boccaccio in the lecture series of the Grellet & Dorothy C. Simpson Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredricksburg, VA, in March 2018.

Professor Purpura was on faculty this summer at the Chautauqua Writing Festival. She has a contract for a new collection of essays (as yet untitled) due out in 2019 with Sarabande Books. New poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni and Tin House. A broadside of her Pushcart Prize winning essay, “Scream, or Never-Minding,” will be issued in October from Washington College, where she will give a reading. Haystack School of Crafts recently published her monograph “In the Presence of Makers” (which included a photo by UMBC student Jane Lee). She was the recipient of a Dresher Center Scholarly Completion Grant last spring.  She recently performed with the Poulenc Trio at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC.

Dr. Christopher Varlack's book chapter, "'Towards a Trans-Atlantic Approach: Tracing the Modernist Psychodrama and Wasteland Critique--The Poetry of the Political Imagination," was published in Writing the Harlem Renaissance: Revisiting the Vision (Lexington), edited by Emily Allen Williams. This summer, he was invited to serve as the Special Topics Chair for African-American Literature for the 2018 College English Association Conference in St. Petersburg, FL. He will organize all African-American literature panels for the conference, helping to orchestrate the dynamic conversations of texts, history, and popular culture that attendees look forward to each year. He also accepted an invitation to serve as Program Director for the 2018 Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Triennial Conference in Denver, CO. 

As the Fall 2017 semester approaches and classes begin next week, the English Department faculty would like to extend a warm welcome back. There are a number of exciting and informative classes with spaces still available if you are searching for courses to invigorate your semester or to meet some of the requirements toward your English degree. Please take some time to look at each of these options and consider signing up today:

ENGL 320: Topics in Communication and Technology

Topic: Sonic Studies

This course challenges students to think through issues of culture, ideology, race, class, and gender through the lens of sonic studies. Students will be introduced to histories of sound reproduction, emerging sound technologies, music, and the presence of sound in various forms of media. In conjunction with covering a diverse array of current scholarship, this course will explore the intersection between communication, culture, and technology. More specifically, students will have the opportunity to build competencies in sound aesthetics as a historical and political object of inquiry and, most importantly, put those competencies into practice. Students will collect, create, and analyze sound in addition to images and texts. Category B CT Track Diversity

ENGL 330: Researching Communicative Practices

Topic: Digital Writing Research

In this course we will explore research practices in Rhetoric and Composition with an emphasis on writing and communication in digital media. We will review research studies in our discipline that introduce issues of digital creation and circulation by using emergent technologies, entering hybrid or digital contexts, or studying communication across a variety of media. Our readings will also provide a foundation for understanding each part of the research process, from study design to writing for presentation. Students will pursue a topic of their choosing and decide upon appropriate methods, ethical practices, and research tools for their projects. Category C CT Track

ENGL 343: Introduction to Genre Analysis

Topic: Genre as Social Action

This course explores the role of genre in shaping society and the everyday actions of individuals. Students will explore the following questions: What constitutes genre, and what functions does it accomplish in the world? How does genre work to stabilize knowledge and particular realities in various contexts? How can use of genre promote social change? What happens when genre expectations are not met, that is, when the genre conventions accepted by a particular community are flouted either intentionally or by mistake? As students formulate answers to these questions, they will come to understand genres not as static categories but as dynamic ways of processing information that shape the world we inhabit. Category B CT Track Diversity

ENGL 391: Advanced Exposition and Argumentation

This course shows students how to locate, gather and arrange information to produce sophisticated arguments. The course will contain readings drawn from various disciplines.

ENGL 392: Tutorial in Writing

This course of individualized instruction in writing should be taken in conjunction with an upper-level course in the student's major field. Students will write on topics in ENGL 392 that are not assigned in the upper-level course. This course requires instructor permission to register.

Summer courses are a great opportunity for students to take additional courses or to meet general education requirements here at UMBC. The English Department is offering a number of exciting courses this coming summer for consideration. Use the "Search for Classes" feature on myUMBC for more information about the following courses:

• SPCH 100: Public Communication

Preparation and practice in forms of oral communication. Emphasis is upon formal speaking in small-group and public address formats. Units to include selection of materials, organization, outlining, word choice, delivery and development of simple visual aids, and listening skills.

• ENGL 100: Composition

A course in critical thinking, reading, and composing, with an emphasis on integrating academic research and documentation. Students read and produce work for a variety of purposes and audiences, focusing on strategies for researching, organizing, drafting, sharing, and revising. To satisfy the composition general education requirement, this course must be taken within a student’s first thirty credit hours of enrollment at UMBC.

• ENGL 190: The World of Language I

Language as a distinctive characteristic of the human species. In this course, we examine the structure of both written and spoken forms of language across cultures, comparing them with animal communication and human gestural systems. We explore language’s neurological basis, theories of origin, and first- and second-language learning.

• ENGL 210: Introduction to Literature

An introduction to the conventions and characteristics of the major genres of literature – prose, poetry and drama. Some attention also may be given to film, television and other materials. This course is intended primarily for non-majors.

• ENGL 271: Introduction to Creative Writing—Fiction

An introduction to the writing of prose fiction.

• ENGL 393: Technical Communication

This course teaches students from various disciplines to communicate technical information effectively. The course's emphases on critical thinking, synthesis, analysis, and the writing process help students to inform and persuade their audiences through the composition of technical documents. Reflecting a professional writing style and document design principles, these documents demonstrate how text and visuals work together to reach different audiences with specific needs. Students also develop oral communication and collaborative skills along with technological and visual literacy.