KU English Welcomes New Faculty...

Silvia Park

Silvia Park is the author of the novel Luminous (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Before Kansas, she taught creative writing at Oberlin, the University of Utah’s Asia Campus, and NYU, courses ranging from Speculative Fiction to Digital Storytelling.

Her specialty slants speculative, applying it as a lens to render the strange ordinary and the ordinary strange. Her fiction won the 2018 Fiction Prize from the Sonora Review and was chosen as a finalist for the 2019 Black Warrior Review Contest. Her stories have been published in Black Warrior Review, Tor.com, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere.

For the Fall, she will be teaching Fiction I and Fiction II, and will be working closely with the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. If she’s able to scrounge up some spare time, she’ll take a ceramics class and try her hand at making ugly mugs.

Wen Xin

Wen Xin joined the KU English faculty as an Assistant Teaching Professor of English in Spring 2023. Xin received his Ph.D. in English from KU in 2021. As a former graduate, Xin’s been excited about coming back home and working with old colleagues and friends.

Xin’s taught a wide range of courses in both English Language Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. In all the courses, He develops an understanding in students that language is not about what is “right” or “wrong” but more about what is appropriate in a context. He also guides students to analyze how and why language variations occur in different contexts, particularly the academic context, where students are often involved. In addition, He cultivates students’ critical language awareness, with which students understand when and why language is used to empower them, but more importantly, when and why language is used against them.

Xin’s research lies at the intersection of English Language

Faculty Highlight:

Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. He focuses primarily on the use of pragmatic features, such as metadiscourse and stance, and variations of those features in writing classrooms with a goal of cultivating a better work environment for writing instructors as well as helping students become better writers.

Xin has training in Data Science and holds a certificate of advanced study in Data Science from Syracuse University. He is excited to bring his knowledge and experience with quantitative research, statistics, data analytics and visualization, and text mining to the department.

First AI & Digital Literacy Educators’ Summit led by KU English Professors

To learn about teachers’ specific concerns and what solutions they’re considering to meet the challenges posed by rapidly evolving and increasingly accessible AI-based technologies, the Hall Center for the Humanities hosted the first AI & Digital Literacy Educators’ Summit on Thursday, June 1, 2023. The program, co-directed by KU English professors Kathryn Conrad and Sean Kamperman, brought together instructors and administrators from secondary schools, community colleges, and 4-year colleges and universities to discuss the impact, concerns, and educational potential of AI technologies in Humanities classrooms.

For additional resources on AI literacy for educators, visit the Padlet resource at https://tinyurl.com/KUAIEdResources