Departmental Activities

Highlights from academic year 2004-2005 (including activities and events our department sponsored, produced, or participated in):

• We continued our "The English Department Presents . . ." series with presentations by Dr. John Crow ("What do you know when you 'know' a word?), senior Melissa Wagner ("One with Herself or One with Man: The Role of the Goddess in Two Myths"), Dr. Claudia Slate (“Harriet Jacobs: Slave, Author, Abolitionist”), senior Brittany Melson ("The Bishop and His Rocks"), and junior Lisa Dillman ("Ludwig Van Beethoven: The Embodiment of Romanticism").
  
• We sponsored (with the Humanities Division, the History and Political Science Department, the Roux Library, and the college at large) a Medieval Symposium on "The Fourteenth Century: Crisis and Response";
  
• We taught classes in the Study Abroad Program;
  
• We taught courses in the Honors Program;
  
• We taught courses in the Women's Studies program;
  
• We taught courses in the African-American Studies program;
  
• We taught various freshman seminar sections (The Examined Life);
  
• We taught courses in the various community outreach programs like Upward Bound;
  
• Our faculty continued to be involved across campus by writing columns for The Southern and making presentations to student groups such as the Multi-cultural Student Council, to families at Parents' Weekend, and to alumni at Homecoming;
  
• We had faculty members make various presentations to the community at large, such as at McKeel Academy, the Polk County Historical Society, and the Jacksonville Historical Society;
  
• We co-sponsored a presentation by Dr. Maurice O'Sullivan on the diversity of Florida's literature (as part of the Florida Lecture Series);
  
• We had students and faculty volunteer their time and energy with such charitable organizations as Paint Your Heart Out, Habitat for Humanity, and Best Buddies;
  
• We had students get involved in The Mechanicals (the Humanities organization) and attend cultural events around Lakeland;
  
• Members of our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society, held their annual book sale, participated in Paint Your Heart Out Lakeland, and sponsored (with the Roux Library) a reading of all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets;
  
• We celebrated the publication of Cantilevers 2005 (FSC's Journal of the Arts) with readings by guest poet Peter Meinke as well as Cantilevers contributors;
  
• We awarded the Wesley Ryals Creative Writing Awards to Victoria Sandbrook (poetry) and Ashley Acor (fiction);
  
• We presented the Cantilevers Student Writing Awards to Victoria Sandbrook and Jessica Helm;
  
• We presented scholarship awards to winners of the Polk County Council of Teachers of English writing competition;
  
• We welcomed author Frances Mayes as a guest lecturer in the Poetics class;
  
• We celebrated our faculty who received summer stipends to further their professional work (Drs. Slate, Bruce, Pharr, and Quetchenbach);
  
• We welcomed Martha Kolln, author of two seminal works on English grammar (Understanding English Grammar  and Rhetorical Grammar) and author of articles in CCC and English Journal, as a guest lecturer in the Advanced Grammar class;
  
• We applauded the work of Dr. Quetchenbach, who was a featured poet at Florida Dance Theatre's "Poetry in Motion" performance and was featured in the Platform Art Show's poetry exhibit in Lakeland;
  
• We hosted about 60 students from Lakeland High School for our first "Readying English Learners for Another Year" (RELAY) conference, with presentations by Professors Bruce, Buck, and Crow and students Rick Davidson, Kristina Heitman, Heather Mock, and Matt van Pragg;
  
• We celebrated the work of Brittany Melson, who won the Robert Lee Zimmerman award for Excellence (and who was nominated for FSC's highest honor, the Honor Walk student);
  
• We celebrated having multiple English majors graduate with honors;
  
• We admired our graduates going on to graduate study or to work in the legal profession, the fine arts, publishing, and education.

Faculty Achievements

Dr. Keith Huneycutt published, with Dr. James M. Denham (History and Political Science Dept.) Echoes From a Distant Frontier: The Brown Sisters' Correspondence from Frontier Florida, 1835-1850 (University of South Carolina Press, 2004). He and Dr. Denham also collaborated on the article "Lieutenant James Anderson and the Second Seminole War, 1842," published in The Florida Historical Quarterly, 82:1.

Dr. John Crow published "Feeding Reading: Writing from an Information Processing Perspective" in the English Journal, the National Council of Teachers of English flagship publication for high school teachers of English.  

Dr. Claudia Slate published “The Birth of a North Carolina Symposium” in Carolina Comments (Vol. 52.2, April 2004). The essay outlines her efforts in developing the highly successful Harriet Jacobs symposium in 2003.

Dr. Bernard Quetchenbach published an essay entitled "Black-Throated Blue" in the online journal Wild Thoughts (wildthoughts.org) and had seven poems accepted by the literary magazine HazMat Review.

Dr. John Crow presented "Coherence and Cohesion: The GUESS Exercise" at the meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Dr. Huneycutt was a guest speaker, with Dr. Mike Denham, in the Florida Lecture Series. Huneycutt and Denham discussed their new book, Echoes from a Distant Frontier. He also delivered a paper on the place of the Brown sisters in the Florida literary canon at the meeting of the Florida College English Association.

Dr. Slate read "Zora Neale Hurston Celebrated” at the African American Conference and Festival held in Bartow, Florida

Dr. Alexander Bruce read "Get Thee in My Pick-Up Truck: Medieval Ballads and Modern Country Songs" at the annual meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and "Folklore Studies at Florida Southern College: Urban and campus legends and 'disneyfied' fairy tales in Lakeland, Florida" at the annual meeting of the Florida Folklore Society. He presented "Building Community: The Folklore of Physical Space at Florida Southern College" to the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research and "'Fly, you fools!': Atoning for Byrhtnoth in The Lord of the Rings" to the International Congress on Medieval Studies. He also participated as a commentator on three different papers at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium.

Dr. Peter Schreffler presented “What Can One Book Do? A Discussion of a Common Reading Assignment Among Freshmen at Florida Southern College” at the annual meeting of the Florida College English Association.

Dr. Pharr presented “Ce N’est Pas le Guerre: Hollywood’s Failure to Fathom the Iliad” at the War in Literature and Film Conference in Dallas, Texas.

Previous Years: 1999-2000 2000-2001 2001-2002 2002-2003 2003-2004