English News and Accolades

Faculty News

  • Betty Birner’s Pragmatics: A Slim Guide was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
  • Mark Van Wienen, with Tim Dayton, coedited the collection A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press.
  • Lara Crowley received a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Faculty award for 2020. The CLAS distinguished awards are presented to members of the college community who are celebrated for their prominence in their professional field or have made major contributions to the college.
  • Jessica Reyman coedited, with alum Erika Sparby, Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression for Routledge in 2019.
  • Professor Jeffrey Einboden's recent book Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, Their Arabic Letters, and an American President was published by Oxford University Press. It received a feature from Lapham's Quarterly and was named by Georgetown as part of its "Anti-Racism Toolkit." An interview with Professor Einboden about the book was published June 29.
  • Professor Lara Crowley's recent book, Manuscript Matters: Reading John Donne's Poetry and Prose in Early Modern England, was recognized as a "Distinguished Publication" of 2018 by the John Donne Society.
  • As part of NIU's 125th Anniversary celebrations, Melissa Adams-Campbell and Natalie Joy, Assoc. Prof. of History, have been awarded funding for their collaborative project, "Forward Together: Celebrating NIU’s Native American Past, Present, and Future." One of only eight projects to receive funding across the university, Adams-Campbell and Joy will use NIU’S 125th Anniversary to promote greater awareness of Native American peoples at NIU and in the northern Illinois region by: creating a campus exhibit celebrating NIU's Native American students and their campus activism; commemorating the rich history of Black and Native collaborations hidden in the history of DuSable Hall's renaming; and working to draft language for a public statement acknowledging NIU's location on the traditional homelands of the Sauk, Meskwaki, and Potawatomi nations.
  • Publication of Inquiry Paths to Literacy Learning (Rowman & LIttlefield, 2019), edited by Elizabeth A. Kahn, Andrew Bouque, Dawn Forde, Thomas M. McCann, and Carolyn C. Walter. (Carolyn Walter supervises our English student teachers, and Andrew Bouque is an NIU alum.) Each of the editors has a chapter in the book. There are chapters by additional NIU English alumni: "Managing Group Inquiry" by Patricia Dalton and Suzanne Starnes and "Investigating Text and Self: Inquiry, Literacy, and Social-Emotional Learning," co-authored by Shannon McMullen. There is also a chapter by current NIU English graduate students: "Inquiring in First-Year Composition" by Shayne Dwyer and Faye Scott.
  • Retired instructor John Bradley has won a first prize in the James Tate International Poetry Contest.
  • Deborah DeRosa presentated "The American Short Story: New Considerations' at the recent American Literature Association Conference.
  • Gulsat Aygen has a new publication titled Word Choice Errors in English: A Descriptive Linguistics Approach with Sarah Eastlund. Routledge: New York, 2019.
  • Gulsat Aygen has a new invited chapter in a book titled “Morphosyntax: Morpho-Syntactic Marking of Inflectional Categories in English”. Chapter 4, in Applied Linguistics for Teachers of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners, Nabat Erdogan and Michael Wei (eds.). Hershey: IGI Global, 2019.
  • Jessica Reyman and NIU English alumna Erika Sparby (PhD, 2017) have published a new edited collection, Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression (Routledge). Read more about it.
  • Jeff Einboden was recently awarded the President Research, Scholarship and Artistry Professor and Tim Ryan was awarded the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.
  • Nicole Clifton has a new publication titled "Anthony Foster of Trotton and London, Lincoln's Inn MS 150," from the Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018), 77-126. Read the abstract.
  • Joe Bonomo has a new book out titled No Place I would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life of Baseball Writing, from University of Nebraska Press.

Student News

  • Cameron Simpson recently graduated Summa Cum Laude from NIU with a double major in English and History and a minor in Communication Studies. She was named a Lincoln Laureate Finalist in 2021.
  • Maw Maw Tun was recognized by the NIU Graduate Council for writing the most outstanding thesis of 2020–2021 in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and education category for her M.A. Thesis, “Learners’ Perceptions of Willingness to Communicate in Myanmar,” directed by Doris Macdonald.
  • Jennifer Justice received the 2021 Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, sponsored by NIU’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning.
  • Josh Sopiarz published “Schulberg vs. Robson: Adapting The Harder They Fall” for Literature/Film Quarterly (2021), “Transitory Indignities: Trauma and the Commuter Train in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” for War, Literature, and the Arts (2021), and “Fighters and Fathers: Managing Masculinity in Contemporary Boxing Cinema” for the Popular Culture Studies Journal (2019).
  • Tiffany Messick published “Walker Percy's Netflixer: Transcorporeal Epistemologist” for Mississippi Quarterly (2020).
  • Tabitha M. London, Joey Crundwell, Marcy Bock Eastley, Natalie Santiago, and Jennifer Jenkins published “Finding Effective Moderation Practices on Twitch,” featured in Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression, edited by Jessica Reyman and Erika Sparby (2019).
  • Kyle Killebrew published “The Commission, the Community, and the Cree Woman in the Attic: Lightning's Older than America and Canada's Culture of Redress" for Studies in American Indian Literatures. (2020).
  • Zach Killebrew published "'A Poor, Washed Out, Pale Creature': Passing, Dracula, and the Jazz Age Vampire" for Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (2020).
  • Congratulations to alumna Abbey Zink, named provost and vice president for academic affairs at Slippery Rock University!
  • Congratulations to Jaclyn Swiderski whose article "'Your body must be heard': Uncovering a New Language Through Female Pain and Bodily Empowerment" will be published in a forthcoming issue of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Jaclyn is now working on her Ph.D. at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
  • Congratulations to Elizabeth Lamszus, an alumna of our program, who published "Artistic Anxiety and the Pressure to Perform in Michael Cunningham's The Hours" in Humanities Bulletin (https://www.journals.lapub.co.uk/index.php/HB/article/view/1254)
  • Congratulations to Tanner Underwood, an alumnus of our program, who published "Prior's Blindness: Magical Realism in Kushner's Angels in America" in Humanities Bulletin (https://www.journals.lapub.co.uk/index.php/HB/article/view/1247)
  • Congratulations to Anne Stoughton, who has been awarded NIU’s competitive Outstanding Thesis Award of 2018-2019 in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and education category. Anne’s thesis project, “ITA Language Proficiency Testing: Recommended Replacement for the SPEAK Test,” directed by Professor Doris Macdonald, studies the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) employed at numerous universities to assess oral English proficiency for International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Stoughton interviewed experienced SPEAK administrators and surveyed English proficiency tests administered at multiple Midwestern schools. She proposes oral language testing solutions to replace the SPEAK test. The project, which could have a real-world positive impact on NIU’s ITAs, was particularly noted for its relevance by the Graduate School Award Committee.
  • Congratulations to Greg Locascio, a former student in the Department of English, for a recent article about him in the Daily Chronicle.
  • Marcy Bock-Eastley, Joey Crundwell, Jennifer Jenkins, Tabitha London, and Natalie Santiago have written a chapter on Twitch in the edited collection, Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression by Jessica Reyman and Erika Sparby (Routledge).
  • Cameron Simpson, an English major and English Student Ambassador, wrote a feature article for the NIU Libraries spring 2019 publication of "Founders Keepers"
  • Mia Pidlaoan, an English major, published a piece titled "Video Game Controversy Sparks Meaningful Conversation" for WNIJNews
  • Stonehouse, the new student-run academic journal housed in the English department, held a launch party for the first edition of the journal. The event was held in the Sky Room of Holmes Student Center.
  • Anthony Salazar, an English graduate student, published an article titled "Clive Barker's Sacrament and the Future of Queer Lives during the AIDS Crisis" in the Journal of English Literature and Cultural Studies 2.2 (2019: 46-60.

Upcoming Events

Showcase of Student Writing

  • April 5 2018, 3:00p.m. - 5:00p.m.
  • Duke Ellington Ballroom, Holmes Student Center

Midwest Conference on Literature, Language, and Media

  • April 13th-14th, 2018