Letter from the Chair

L. Haines Faculty Research Fellowships to both Pritha Prasad and Professor Jonathan Lamb (his book in progress is How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare’s England ) to assist them with the completion of their books. I also want to take this moment to honor the long and illustrious careers of our two professors who retired this past year: Dorice Elliott and Doreen Fowler. They are being remembered in these pages, so please read about their incredible research, inspired teaching, and their impact on their colleagues over the course of several decades. Thanks to the William Savage Johnson Memorial Fund , we were able to honor both with a tribute of rare books by Emily Brontë and William Faulkner, purchased for the Spencer Research Library in their names.

Our Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction (CSSF) has flourished under the new leadership of Professor Giselle Anatol, who has diligently sought to expand the scope and breadth of our speculative fiction offerings. The J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Memorial Fund as well as co-sponsorships from units across the university supported the first ever Sturgeon Symposium in Fall 2022, at which premier Jamaican-born, Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson was honored with the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for her short story “Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story.” A generous gift from alumna Cynthia Reiss-Clark allowed the Center to offer a cash prize with the award for the first time, as well as to establish a new prize for KU students in STEM fields who are eager to use their writing skills to communicate information about scientific research to a wide audience. The CSSF also was able to offer Gunn Center research assistantships for English graduate students, Anthony Boynton and Sandra Jacobo, while the William Savage Johnson Memorial Fund is being used to expand the Gunn Center’s collection to include more diversity in our speculative fiction library, including writing by prominent speculative fiction writers of color. In a fortunate development, dystopian novel Parable of the Sower by renowned African-American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler will be KU’s common book this fall, on the 30th anniversary of its publication. CSSF’s second annual Sturgeon Symposium, with the theme “Fantastic Worlds, Fraught Futures, will be held Sept. 28 - Sept. 30, 2023, under the direction of Interim Director Kathryn Conrad (our former Chair!), as Prof. Anatol completes her term as Interim Director of the Hall Center for the Humanities.

Our other longstanding Center, the History of Black Writing Project (HBW), is also thriving under new leadership, with Professor Ayesha Hardison having taken over as Director in 2021 from the founder Maryemma Graham—who has been touring for her much anticipated new monograph, The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker , issued in 2022 and hailed as a “masterpiece.” HBW, which continues to receive major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and most recently from the Mellon Foundation, is celebrating its 40-year anniversary in 2023! Please read on to find out about events planned for the 40th anniversary celebration, including the “Black Writing” exhibit, a collaboration with the Spencer Museum of Art. Additionally, generous donor funding has helped HBW to support several graduate and undergraduate students in English, most recently including 2023 KU grads Kai Hansen, Mahala Higginbotham, David Miller, Lucy Whittington, and Brendan Williams-Childs. These students worked in teams to conduct research for HBW programs and to promote its activities and events. A fundraising campaign to sustain students’ professional development will take place in conjunction with anniversary programming in November.

Our study abroad programs are once again thriving, including our Winter Break in Costa Rica and our Spring Break London Review, both led by the magical Mary Klayder, and my own new summer program in Cuba, as last year’s English Accents reported. Our beloved British Summer Institute, which took a hiatus, is scheduled to be back in full swing in Summer 2024, also under Mary Klayder’s leadership. Students continue to report that study abroad is life changing for them; being exposed to the culture, art, music, and nature of another country gives them new perspectives and opens new horizons and possibilities for the future. Through Study Abroad, students come away with the understanding that their world is limitless. None of this would be possible without the help of our generous donors. This year, endowment funds through the Mary A. Klayder Scholarship fund , the Louis P. Caffyn Fund , the Runnels Family Endowment

Fund , and the Gail Johnstone Fund for Graduate Students all made possible the participation of our deserving undergraduate and graduate students in these Study Abroad programs. The David and Louis Cicotello Memorial Fund and the Justin Hampton Memorial Health Opportunity Fund stepped in to support graduate students facing skyrocketing medical bills. The Patricia Cleary Miller Fund assisted graduate students in the purchase of new computers for their teaching and research. And so many of our generous donors, over many years have provided funding to recognize and support the excellent writing of our students. We are truly and deeply grateful.

As you can see, the gifts provided by our generous donors have truly allowed us to enrich our students’ experiences, by giving them hands-on research experience with groundbreaking projects, the opportunity to travel and research abroad, the means to supply themselves with the technology they need to do their work, the celebration of their best work, and so much more. Emerging from COVID has, needless to say, put renewed financial strain on our students, our faculty, and our department as a whole. We simply could not do so much of what I’ve reported above without the unstinting assistance of alumni, retired faculty, and friends who went on to give back, recognizing the need to sustain a rich and varied education in literature, writing, language, and the many forms of communication through which we make meaning in the world. If you are in a position to do so, please consider making your own mark on our current and future students by supporting the English Department. I can assure you, the students will forever remember the effect of your contributions.

Here’s to a year rich in the beauty of language that makes us all human.

Sincerely yours,

Marta Caminero-Santangelo University Distinguished Professor Chair, Department of English