Celebrating the 'Fantastic Four'

FOUR FACULTY MEMBERS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH RECENTLY PUBLISH BOOKS

by SHAWN RYAN

KAREN BABINE, Assistant Professor of English

All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, winner of the Minnesota Book Award for memoir/ creative nonfiction, was written throughout her mother’s battle with cancer and is a narrative of food and illness and loss. Cooking comforting meals for her mother gave Babine purpose, she says. She fed her mother mashed potatoes “spiked with as much butter and heavy cream” as she could manage, nourishing with a complete protein after a chemo treatment when her mother wanted to eat only the blandest of foods.

“In those days, I was really trying to work through how I was feeling about cancer and this really mirrored cancer and her treatment and things that should not exist. It was nice to know that A plus B equals C if I do this in a recipe. At least I had something tangible in my hands to work with.”

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AARON SHAHEEN, George C. Conner Professor of American Literature

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture was written by Shaheen, the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature. He specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century literature. His teaching and research interests include disability and gender studies, Southern literature and World War I.

“The book helps to explain how our current reliance on technology dates back to World War I, when prosthetists developed the idea that the prosthetic device should be an extension of a person’s soul or ‘personality.’ These ideas were then reflected in much of the war-related literature produced during the 1920s and ‘30s. At the practical level, this meant designing prostheses with an eye for physical compatibility. It also implied a more sophisticated rapprochement between humans and machines.”

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EARL S. BRAGGS, Herman H. Battle Professor of African American Studies

Obama’s Children is Braggs’ 15th collection of poetry. He is the winner of, among others, the Jack Kerouac International Literary Prize, the C&R Press Poetry Prize, the Anhinga Poetry Prize, the Cleveland State (Ohio) Poetry Prize and others. At UTC, he has won two Student Government Association Outstanding Professor Awards, the University of Tennessee Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award and the Horace J. Traylor Minority Leadership Award.

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MEGAN FAVER HARTLINE, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing

Along with being one of the editors for Mobility Work in Composition, Hartline was an editor on Writing for Engagement: Responsive Practice for Social Action (Cultural Studies/ Pedagogy/Activism). She came to UTC in August of 2020 after three years at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she was associate director of the Community Learning Initiative before being promoted into the director position.

“Mobility Work in Composition examines how a mobilities perspective allows new ways of thinking about concerns across the field of rhetoric and composition, taking up questions of how the movement of texts, ideas and people, both geographically and socially, affect the ways we think about writing, language, literacy and teaching.”

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