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!