English Department
Florida State University
405 Williams
Building
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-1580
Phone: 850 644 4230
Fax: 850 644
0811
The Department of English offers work leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA), Master of Arts (MA), Master of Fine Arts (MFA), and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees in English and American literature, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition. It also offers course work and degree options in a number of related fields including popular culture, folklore, critical theory, women's studies, and film studies. read more
Meegan Kennedy's Revising the Clinic Focuses on Victorian Novelists and Physicians
Meegan Kennedy was still taking in the news that she had been awarded tenure and a promotion to associate professor—delivered in a letter that she had just finished reading—when she sat and talked in her office about her other recent significant career accomplishment, the Jan. 2010 publication of her first book, Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel (Ohio State UP). "It's a wonderful feeling to see my argument in print, and to know that my research can now be useful to other scholars instead of just sitting in notes in my files," she says. Combining her study of the novel and of medical narratives; relying on hundreds of primary sources; building on current scholarship on the Victorian novel and medicine, Kennedy focuses on the similar ways Victorian novelists and physicians debate methods of "seeing and stating"—on how to observe the world and how to record those observations.
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Anne Coldiron wins NEH research fellowship
Anne Coldiron's fall term ended in a whirlwind with the news of her National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) award that during 2010 will send her to Paris, London, Oxford, New York, Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas. This prestigious yearlong $50,400 research fellowship is supporting the research and writing of Coldiron's third book, tentatively titled Printers Without Borders: Translation, Transnationalism, and Early English Print.
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Gary Taylor's work on Middleton collects MLA award.
The process to produce the MLA-award-winning Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford UP, 2007) required the work of seventy-five scholars from thirteen countries; twenty years of research and editing; and a bit of passion. And the leader of this effort? Our own Gary Taylor played the primary editor for the first-ever one-volume collection of Middleton's works. A more tangible reward for his efforts will come December 28 when he accepts the Modern Language Association Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition.
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David Kirby composes a tight, energetic biography of rock
'n' roll legend Little Richard.
How often does an author's inspiration for a book arrive more than 50 years before its creation? Professor David Kirby believes that the spark for his new biography on the dynamic, charismatic musician Little Richard flew from his little green Westinghouse radio back in 1955, when he first heard Richard's soul-shaking signature scream, "A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!"
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Kristie Fleckenstein's book encourages student empathy, change through identification.
Kristie Fleckenstein's new publication—Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom (Southern Illinois UP, 2009)—might sound a bit academic, even impersonal, to the layperson, but her purpose is quite the opposite: "to help students connect to their surroundings with an empathic eye, leading them to become compassionate participants, not indifferent observers." Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action is premised, she says, on the idea that changing the world "requires changing the way we see the world."
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Virgil Suarez's Cuban roots influence his poetry and prose.
Professor Virgil Suarez has been a fixture in the Department of English since 1992, and he says that working and creating among his high-quality colleagues has always motivated him to be productive. In fact, since arriving at the university Suarez has published fourteen books of poetry and prose and received several awards for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
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Amit Rai offers up a well-timed critique of India media with Untimely Bollywood.
Associate Professor Amit S. Rai shines a spotlight on Indian popular culture in his new book, Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India's New Media Assemblage (Duke UP, 2009). The result, writes Corey K. Creekmur, co-editor of Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia, is an accomplishment that "stands out not only for its originality but also for its audacity. Its deft coordination of what at first would seem wildly heterogeneous topics is simply dazzling."
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Paul Outka wins ASLE award for Race and Nature.
The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment awarded the prize for the best scholarly book on literature and the environment published in 2007 and 2008 to Professor Paul Outka for his recent book, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (Palgrave: 2008). With more than 1,200 members in 24 countries, ASLE is the principal organization for those authors who write on Literature and the Environment. In their commendation, judges agreed that Outka "makes good use of literary theory with a strong historical context." Judges also pointed out the "sophisticated way it addresses the intersection of race and nature" in the work of both Anglo-European and African American writers. → read more
Poet Barbara Hamby makes words tango.
Reviewers are making room on their dance cards for Barbara Hamby's new book of poems, All-Night Lingo Tango. Former winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Hamby combines in her fourth book an intricate verbal play with tongue-in-cheek eroticism to produce off-beats lyrics almost as exciting as the fabled Argentinian dance. → read more
Eric Walker discusses modern marriage.
Eric Walker's new book, Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen after War (Stanford University Press: 2009) is destined to change what we mean when we say, "Marriage is difficult." → read more
