English

Departmental Activities

Highlights from academic year 2002-2003 (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 collaborated with the Humanities Division, the Biology Dept., and the Dean's Office to bring environmental author Deborah Cramer to campus for a presentation;
• We began "The English Department Presents . . ." series with presentations by Dr. Alex Bruce and students Elizabeth Peloso, Laura Tomashek, and Sam Harrison;
• We hosted a joint poetry reading session with Southeastern College;
• We sponsored (with the Humanities Division, the Roux Library, and the college at large) a Medieval Symposium on "Celtic Contributions in the Middle Ages";
• We celebrated the publication of Cantilevers 2003 (our creative writing magazine) with readings from guest poet Phyllis McEwan as well as Cantilevers contributors;
• We awarded the Wesley Ryals Creative Writing Awards to James Ziegler (poetry) and Megan Chodora (short fiction);
• We held our first High School Writing Contest;
• We taught classes in the 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 taught courses in the Women's Studies program;
• We taught courses in the African-American Studies program;
• We taught courses in the various community outreach programs like Upward Bound;
• We made presentations at area high schools;
• One of our freshman English majors (and future teachers), Jermaine Williams, collaborated with Dr. Eskin on “Nymphs, Shepherds and Pastoral Lyric in Elizabethan England,” a presentation made to a senior AP English class at Lakeland High School;
• We had a student, Joy Beurrier, named a Reuter scholar (and get money!);
• 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;
• Our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society, sponsored a book sale and made a trip to Medieval Times;
• Students from both the Lakeland and Orlando campuses joined alumni in attending productions of The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, and Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Orlando Shakespeare Festival;
• The Mechanicals (the organization for all Humanities majors) co-sponsored the Ryals Writing Awards with Cantilevers and the showing of Billy Elliott;
• Students Laura Tomashek, Karli Taylor, Elizabeth Peloso and Melissa Slavicz presented papers at the Florida College English Association annual meeting;
• We had our graduates accepted into graduate programs at Lehigh University, The University of Delaware, The University of Connecticut, The University of Chicago, Villanova University, and The University of Illinois;
• We admired our graduates going out in the world to work as high school teachers, journalists, and Peace Corps volunteers;
• We applauded with delight the commencement speech given by graduating senior Danielle Whaley who was chosen by her campus peers to be the "Senior Speaker";
• We celebrated having six English majors graduate with honors--four of whom were also nominees for FSC's highest honor, the Honor Walk student.

Faculty Achievements

Dr. Catherine Eskin reviewed Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England by Lori Humphrey Newcomb for Renaissance Quarterly and The Reader Revealed, comp. and ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron with Elizabeth Walsh and Susan Scola for Sixteenth Century Studies Journal XXXIV. 

Dr. Mary Pharr edited an anthology, Fantastic Odysseys: Selected Essays from the Twenty-Second International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, for Praeger-GPG. It was published in April 2003. She also published two book chapters: "In Medias Res: Harry Potter as Hero-in-Progress" in The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Publishing Phenomenon and "Synthetics, Humanity, and the Life Force in the Alien Quartet" in No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Dr. Alexander Bruce published two books during the year: Scyld and Scef: Expanding the Analogues and The Folklore of Florida Southern College.  The latter book developed, in part, during a summer student-faculty research project conducted with Rosalie Lathers and Bradley Serata.  He also published“Debating Justification: Faith, Deeds, and the Parables of Pearl and Piers Plowman” in the volume Last Things: Apocalypse, Judgment, and Millennium in the Middle Ages of the Sewanee Mediæval Studies series.

Dr. Rebecca Saulsbury submitted two essays for publication to the Writers of the American Renaissance: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook.  She will also replace Dr. Keith Huneycutt as director of Florida Southern's African American Studies Advisory Board for the 2003-2004 academic year.  

Dr. Bernard Quetchenbach published poems in The Connecticut Poetry Review, White Heron, The Old Red Kimono, and Hubbub. His entry on Rachel Carson appeared in The Dictionary of Literary Biography's American Nature Writers: Prose volume. Dr. Quetchenbach also served as a regional editor for Common Ground, an online interdisciplinary environmental studies journal, and he took part in the college's convocation commemoration of September 11.

Dr. Claudia Slate developed, organized, and directed the Harriet Jacobs Symposium in Edenton, North Carolina, where Jacobs, a writer, abolitionist and reformer, was born a slave in 1813. This symposium represented the first time that scholars of history and literature knowledgeable on Jacobs and her work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), have met for such a focused endeavor.  The project was supported by a North Carolina Humanities Grant authored by Slate.

Various professors read papers at conferences:

Dr. Keith Huneycutt chaired a session on "Alternate Methods of Teaching Composition" at the Conference on College Communication and Composition and, with Dr. James M. Denham of History, made a presentation on “Corinna Brown Anderson and Ellen Brown Anderson” to the Lakeland Book Society.

Dr. Quetchenbach presented "Winning the West in Jimmy Sanitago Baca's Black Mesa Poems" in March at the American Literature Association Symposium on Twentieth-Century Poetry.

Dr. Bruce read papers at six conferences this year on a variety of topics, including “Trojans in Denmark? The Myths of Origins within the Langfeðgatal” at the Sewanee Mediæval Colloquium, “Frank Lloyd Wright Narratives from Florida Southern College,” at the annual meeting of The South Atlantic Modern Language Association, and “‘Th’ milk of human kindness’ or ‘The fine strains of honor’?: Gender Roles in Macbeth and Coriolanus,” at the meeting of The Florida Collegiate English Association.

Dr. Eskin read “‘I would weepe more and speake lesse’: Women’s Speech in Male-Authored Elizabethan Romance” to the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies and "Tongues and Tales: Women Telling Stories in Male-Authored Elizabethan Romance” at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.

Dr. Pharr presented "The Beast Unleashed: Pre-Revolutionary France in Christophe Gans' Le Pacte des loups" at the International Conference on Chaos & Order in Literature and the Visual Arts in Atlanta. She also chaired a session on The Publication Process for Undergraduates at the Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association, and she served as a panelist in a session on Vampires in Film at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.

Dr. Saulsbury presented “Cross-Cultural Conversion and the ‘Foreign’ Body in Maria S. Cummins’ El Fureidis” to the American Comparative Literature Association and “A Power Which is Born of Endurance: Frontier Womanhood and Republican Virtue in Mabel Vaughan, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, and O Pioneers!” to the Film & History League Second International Conference.

Previous Years: 1999-2000 2000-2001 2001-2002