English

Departmental Activities

Highlights from academic year 2001-2002 (including activities and events our department sponsored, produced, or participated in):

• We held our annual World Poetry Day (an event celebrating poetry, with community members reading poems of their choosing);
• We sponsored (with the Humanities Division and the college at large) a Medieval Symposium on "Women in the Middle Ages";
• We celebrated the publication of Cantilevers 2002 (our creative writing magazine) with readings from Cantilevers contributors;
• We awarded the Wesley Ryals Creative Writing Awards to John Davis, Jr. (poetry) and Susan Cain (short fiction);
• We taught classes in the May Option/Travel Abroad Program;
• We taught courses in the Honors Program;
• We improved the use of our new computer laboratory and made presentations to the faculty on how to use computers in the teaching of composition;
• We co-sponsored, with the Humanities Division, an presentation by Antonio Vallone of MAMMOTH press;
• We co-sponsored, with the Music Department, an evening with The Irritable Tribe of Poets;
• We taught courses in the Women's Studies program;
• We taught courses in the various community outreach programs like Upward Bound;
• We celebrated the hiring of Dr. John Crow as a full member of the English Department;
• We expanded our curriculum with the addition of a linguistics course;
• We brought Dorothy Redford, author of Somerset Homecoming and site director for Somerset Place Plantation in Creswell, North Carolina, to campus for her lecture "Antebellum Women: Barriers and Bonds to Relationships";
• We had students and faculty volunteer their time and energy with such charitable organizations as Paint Your Heart Out and Habitat for Humanity;
• We had faculty members make various presentations to the college community, to the families of students, and to the community at large;
• We received a $10,000 grant from Verizon to develop an ESL program to be instituted by new faculty member Dr. John Crow and student Laura O'Bryant; 
• Our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society, made improvements to the Humanities building as a whole and sponsored a book sale;
• Students from both the Lakeland and Orlando campuses joined alumni in attending productions of The Taming of the Shrew and of Much Ado About Nothing at the Orlando Shakespeare Festival;
• The Mechanicals (the organization for all Humanities majors) co-sponsored the Ryals Writing Awards with Cantilevers, did volunteer work at the Disabilities and Religion Conference in November, and sponsored, along with the English and Art/Art History Departments, the showing of Princess Mononoke;
• Students Sarah Lanius and Michael Heider worked with Dr. Pharr and Dr. Schreffler (respectively) on intense summer research projects;
• Danielle Whaley, Sarah Lanius, and recent graduate Lisa Reynolds gave papers at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association in the South on the film Spy Kids, and Melissa Slavicz also presented a paper at that same conference;
• Sarah Lanius also presented at the annual meeting of the Florida College English Association;
• We celebrated English majors who won awards at the Honors Convocation: Brittany Melson as the Phi Eta Sigma outstanding freshman, Laura O'Bryant as the Outstanding English Senior, and Elizabeth Peloso as one of the Reuter scholars;
• We tipped our hats to outgoing chair Dr. Paula Buck and welcomed our new chair (starting in Fall 2002), Dr. Keith Huneycutt.

Faculty Achievements

Dr. Peter Schreffler supervised and coordinated a summer research project, working with student Michael Heider on a study of the kinds of writing done in several local workplaces. The professions represented in this study are ones which, for the most part, are not typically associated with significant writing demands. This faculty-student research was funded in part by a grant from the Jesse Ball duPont Foundation.

Dr. Alexander Bruce continued his tenure as Assistant Academic Dean, published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, saw his essay "An Education in the Mead-Hall: Beowulf’s Lessons for Young Warriors" published by the e-journal The Heroic Age, had three items published in the Encyclopedia of the Ancient World and six others in the Historical Dictionary of Late Medieval England, and finished his work on his book Scyld and Scef: Expanding the Analogues, which will be published by Routledge in July of 2002.  He was also named "Faculty Volunteer of the Year" for his work with Paint Your Heart Out Lakeland.

Dr. Rebecca Saulsbury was awarded a summer stipend in 2001 to conduct research at the University of California-Berkeley Libraries; she examined nineteenth-century travel narratives written by British, French and American travelers about their journeys in the Near East.  This research will contribute to her planned book on Maria Susanna Cummins, a best-selling nineteenth-century American novelist.  Dr. Saulsbury was also invited to contribute essays on two nineteenth-century women writers, Alice Cary and Maria McIntosh, to the forthcoming book Writers of the American Renaissance: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook.  As well, she published three articles on-line: "Cult of True Womanhood" and "The Lamplighter" in The Literary Dictionary and Encyclopedia and "Can One Be a Christian Feminist?" in Women Writers: A Zine.

Dr. Mary Pharr directed a student, Sarah Lanius, in a summer research project (funded by the duPont Foundation) focusing on representations of the epic in contemporary film.  Dr. Mary Pharr also published a review of The Rise of Supernatural Fiction by E. J. Clery in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

Dr. Bernard Quetchenbach  led a workshop session in poetry at the First Annual Conference in Honor of Rachel Carson at Boothbay Harbor, Maine.  He published an article in Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (The University of Utah Press) and wrote an entry on Rachel Carson for the forthcoming Dictionary of Literary Biographies volume on Prose Nature Writers.  Dr. Quetchenbach also has poems coming out in Hubbub and the Connecticut Poetry Review.

Dr. Keith Huneycutt, returning from his sabbatical, shared the results of his research on the Anderson-Brown Letters Project both to the faculty and to the Lakeland community; Dr. Huneycutt also submitted his book manuscript to the University of South Carolina Press.  As well, Dr. Huneycutt attended the Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in March to learn more about incorporating computers in the composition classrooms.

Dr. Claudia Slate continued her work on Harriet Jacobs, leading to the creation of the "Harriet Jacobs Walking Tour" handout for the Edenton Visitors Center in Edenton, North Carolina.

Dr. Catherine Eskin  published “Hippocrates, Kairos and Writing in the Sciences,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin.

Various professors read papers at conferences:

Dr. Quetchenbach presented an essay, chaired a session, and participated in an author's reception at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment biennial conference at the University of Northern Arizona.

Dr. Bruce  read a paper on the Anglo-Saxon poem "Andreas" at the meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.  He also was on a panel focusing on "Careers and Composition" at the meeting of The Florida College English Association and, with three Honors Program students, participated in a panel entitled "Moving Beyond the Major: Interdisciplinary/Collaborative Honors Projects at Florida Southern College" at the annual meeting of the Florida Collegiate Honors Council.

Dr. Schreffler also served on the "Careers and Composition" panel at the meeting of The Florida College English Association.

Dr. Eskin read “‘Let her prepare . . . to fyght’: The Mobile Woman in Late Elizabethan Romance” at the GEMCS conference and "’She Found Her Tongue the Best Weapon’: The Chivalric Heroine in Elizabethan Romance,” at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.

Dr. Pharr served as a panelist on the Florida Southern College research panel at the Florida College English Association meeting; in the spring, she was on two panels at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. She also chaired a panel of FSC students at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association in the South.

Dr. Saulsbury presented a paper, "A Morally Transforming Regeneration: The Virtuous and Colonial Body in Maria S. Cummins's El Fureidis," to the Southern American Studies Association Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Slate presented papers on Harriet Jacobs to the AAUW and to American Women Writers of Color Annual Conference; she also presented "Bloodshed on the Beach: A Personal Reflection of St. Augustine, 1964." at the Second Annual African American Heritage Conference.

Previous Years: 1999-2000 2000-2001