Department of English, College of LAS, University of Illinois


Illinois Department of English Blog

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Welcome to the Department of English blog.



My name is Vicki Mahaffey and I took over as
head of the department on July 1, 2016. I'll be using this site to post updates and information of interest to our faculty, students, and alumni,
along with reflections about our discipline(s) in particular and the humanities in general. As anyone who has ever worked or studied here knows, the Department of English is a vibrant place. If you have something you'd like to see posted here, or if you want to contact me about the content of this blog, drop me an email at vmahaffe@illinois.edu.


Saturday, February 21, 2015

Super Teachers, Super Scholars, and Superheroes

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to update this blog and in that time a lot of good news has accumulated.

It’s been the season of awards and fellowships and our colleagues and students have been winning a bunch. Just yesterday the campus teaching awards were announced. Andrea Stevens, an Associate Professor and specialist in early modern drama, and Ann Hubert, a graduate student who just finished a dissertation in medieval studies, both won Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Awards! Earlier, Andrea had won our college’s LAS Lynn Martin Award for Distinguished Women Teachers and Ann had won the LAS Humanities Council Teaching Excellence Award. There are also departmental teaching awards to announce: Ann Hubert (again!) and Jessica Mercado won the awards for Graduate Teaching Assistants, and Mary Hays and Scott Ricketts won in the category of Specialized Faculty.

Late last year we heard that a number of our alumni had won high-visibility national fellowships. Mark Neely, who received his BA with us, and Sara Gelston and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, who received their MFAs with us, all won Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Meanwhile, two English PhDs, Humberto Garcia and Melissa Girard, won National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships.

Back on campus, current faculty and graduate students have been doing well in university competitions. In 2015-2016, Professors Renée Trilling and Ted Underwood will be appointed as Fellows of the Center for Advanced Study, the most prestigious research unit on campus. Professor Lindsay Rose Russell was awarded Humanities Released Time for next year, and graduate students Silas Cassinelli and John Musser have been selected as Fellows of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Other good things are happening these days too. Our non-tenure track faculty—Specialized Faculty, in the university’s terms—have organized a wonderful series of research presentations called “Research Off the Tenure Track,” which features monthly talks about the creative, critical, and pedagogical activities of NTT faculty in English. Here's the schedule of events:


Perhaps the most surprising news of late has been the ascendency of a new superhero in the orbit of the English department. Rowan Trilling-Hansen, the 11-year old daughter of faculty members Jim Hansen and Renée Trilling, has made waves around the world with her letter calling for more (and better!) representation of girls and women in superhero comics. As you will see if you watch Rowan’s interview with the Today show, the critical skills you can learn from hanging out with English professors shouldn’t be underestimated. They can be world-changing!




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