ENGLISH ACCENTS

INSIDE the Awards Issue: Hello & Goodbye to English Faculty; Graduate Student Research in Cuba; HBW turns 40; Alumni Notes; and more.

SUMMER 2023 | english.ku.edu

ISSUE 8

Department of English

1445 Jayhawk Boulevard • Wescoe Hall Suite 3001 Lawrence, KS 66045

(785) 864-4520 • english@ku.edu • english.ku.edu

A Note About Giving

In the University of Kansas English Department, we believe that an education grounded in the humanities provides individuals with the intellectual tools and perspectives to engage successfully with a complex world. Our students are trained to think critically, write effectively, and appreciate fully the ways that language, ideas, and stories reflect and shape our lives. Whether through the study of literature, writing, or rhetoric, the English Department is dedicated to providing students with both academic and life skills. We believe that what students learn during their time in our programs of study will serve them continually, whatever they do or wherever they go.

A gift to the KU English Department helps us offer opportunities to our students in a variety of ways, such as recruitment fellowships, research scholarships, internships, and study abroad and graduate travel funding.

Gifts to the KU English Department are tax-deductible. You can give to the Department as a whole, or target giving to specific programs, degrees, or areas of study. Gifts of all sizes help.

If you would like to make a financial contribution to support the award-winning work of our students and faculty, visit https://tinyurl.com/kuenglishgiving

Dear Friends of the English Department,

After my first full year as Chair (again), I am happy to report that we seem to finally have achieved a sense of post-Covid normalcy. Department meetings returned to in-person, and we had our first in-person retreat in several years. The retreat led us to try several new developments, including “Dinners of Eight” with two faculty members and six graduate students (some of these were dinners, and some were lunches), a new expanded break room for the department—with a water cooler!—where faculty and students can sit and talk while warming up their lunches or coffee, and a new “salon” event in which faculty and graduate students present their work-in-progress to our colleagues. In 2022-2023, topics included “ChatGPT, AI, and English Studies,” “Afro-Futurism,” and “Kansas and the Midwest”—a range showcasing the incredible diversity of the work our colleagues and students are doing! We consider all of these new initiatives to be successes that allow us to share our work and our concerns with each other, both formally and informally.

Our faculty garnered several prestigious awards and fellowships this year, including Phillip Drake, who was honored with the university-wide Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award, and also won a Keeler Family Intra-University Professorship for Fall of 2023, which will allow him to work closely with the Economics Department in support of his new, interdisciplinary book-in-progress, Parasite Economies . Pritha Prasad was the winner, with her co-author Louis M. Maraj, (University of British Columbia), of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)

Richard Braddock Award for Outstanding Article, for their article: “‘I Am Not Your Teaching Moment’: The Benevolent Gaslight and Epistemic Violence.” Prasad also has been awarded a Hall Center Research Fellowship for 2023-2024, to work on her book manuscript, Rematerializing Race/ isms: Rhetoric After Ferguson . Thanks to the generosity of donors, we were able to award Shirley Cardiff and Jordan