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Achieved a 100% pass rate on our English Secondary Education majors’ EdTPA exams.
Took 16 participants to the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA for a weekend of plays, workshops, and tours.
Hosted two Lena-Miles Wever Todd Emerging Writers Series Cultural Events (Adele Elise Williams and brittny ray crowell), Fall and Spring Creative Writing Student Showcases, a Graduate Scholars’ Forum, a Women’s History Month Recital with the Department of Music, an Undergraduate & Graduate Student Research Conference, a Banned Books event, a Bancroft Trick-or-Treating event, and a Welcome Back Department Social.
Senior Instructor Ms. Kara Beasley reinstated the English department’s travel courses with the development of ENGL 321, London’s Calling: Longing, Love, & Lust in British Literature, which will take place in Fall 2026.
English major Zach Bell won the prestigious College of Arts & Sciences Inez Bell Caskey Award for Research in the Humanities and Arts.
English major Meghan Miglorie received the highly competitive Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Rising Senior Scholarship.
Thirteen students presented their scholarly work at the 2026 Department of English Undergraduate & Graduate Student Research Conference.
Seven students were inducted into Sigma Tau Delta in the Spring 2026 Induction Ceremony: Keri Nicole Beatty, McKenna Bruce, Marcy Davis, Autumn Edwards, Gabriela Griggs, Nicole Guernsey, and Ariel Moscat.
Sixteen students were recognized for exceptional writing and outstanding academic achievements at the English Department’s 2026 Scholarships & Awards Ceremony: Dalayna Hill, Joshua Chintapalli, Gabriel Tristano, Cody Byrdic, Keri Nicole Beatty, Davyn Osborne, Zachary Bell, Ainsley Fraser, Megan Hewes, Simon Cherry, Gabriela Griggs, Izzy LaBounty, Emory Ivie, Liam Floyd, Hayden Roach, and Sophia Moore.
English MA student Wren Miller presented “The Vampiric Other in Dracula and Carmilla” at the 2025 Victorians Institute Conference.
English MA student Jzurnee Myers presented “‘No, No, No, No, No! Too loud, Too Reckless, Too Ghetto’: Black American Popular Culture & American Flag Symbolism” at the 2025 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference.
English MA student Cody Byrdic presented “Neither Here nor There: Prosthetic Gender, Racial Subjectivity, and the Lacanian Split in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Garden of Eden’” at the 2026 College English Association Conference.
English MA student Keri Beatty presented her paper “Unbound: Tracing Margery Kempe’s Scars” at the 46th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum.
Graduate students Rachel Bradley, Cody Byrdic, Cheyenne Helfrich, Jordan Kindig, Wren Miller, and Jzurnee Myers passed their MA oral comprehensive exams.
English MA graduate Cody Byrdic was accepted into UNC Greensboro’s PhD in English program.
English MA student Kenya Williams read original poetry and introduced the featured speaker, brittny ray crowell, at the Spring 2026 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Emerging Writers Series Cultural Event.
English major Chase Duncan was awarded Second Place in the Feature Story category by the 2025 SC Press Association’s Collegiate Under 10K Division for “Remembering Guy Reel: A Man Who Shaped Lives With Words,” a piece about late WU MCOM Chair and Professor Guy Reel.
English major Gabriela Griggs won the 1970 Johnsonian Endowed Scholarship and had two poems, “Homes” and “Displaced (Caryatid),” published in the Oakland Arts Review.
Students Gabriela Griggs and Greta Oswald read original poetry at the March 2026 Women’s History Month Recital.
English alum Bryn Eddy was named one of E&P’s 2026 Tomorrow’s News Trailblazers.
Ms. Amy Bagwell received the 2026 Department of English Faculty Teaching Award. She was also selected as a Writer in Residence at the Weymouth Center for the Arts in October 2026.
Dr. Leslie Bickford presented at Cornell’s Symposium celebrating the 70th anniversary of Toni Morrison’s Cornell MA degree: “Literature and Public Life.” She also delivered the keynote address at the 19th Annual English Department Graduate and Undergraduate Conference: “Toni Morrison v Jacques Lacan, or How the Literature We Read Speaks Back to the Theory through Which We Read It.”
Dr. AJ Campbell successfully defended her dissertation, “Tracing Blood Lines: Menstruation and Female Sociability in Female Coming-of-Age Novels,” at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She also presented a paper titled “Facing AI: Knowledge Transference and a Metacognitive Approach to Pedagogy” at the 2026 College English Association Conference.
Dr. Casey Cothran presented “Careless Children: Exploring Apathy in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’” at the 2025 Victorians Institute Conference and “Discovering Hidden Treasure: Allowing Students to Choose (some of) Their Own Readings in the British Literature Survey” at the 2026 College English Association Conference. She also co-presented “Si Spencer’s Bodies: Metaphysical Endings, Complex Readings” with Dr. Robert Prickett at the 2026 Pop Culture Association of America Conference.
Dr. Devon Fitzgerald presented “Grief Unfolding: Time Travel Narratives and Looping Sorrow” at the 2025 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, presented “Perennial Panic: Tracing Declarations of crisis from the printing press to Generative AI” at the 2026 College English Association Conference, and facilitated a workshop titled “Intellectual Renewal: A Reflective Community Workshop on Unrealized Projects & Pedagogies” with Dr. Heather Listhartke at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Dr. Fitzgerald published “Lost Girl Fandom and Bisexual Community Building” in Rhetoric Review and has a forthcoming publication titled “From Sonic Intimacy to Social Advocacy: Becoming an Activist Podcaster” with Charles Woods in Practicing Digital Activisms.
Dr. Raven Gadsden successfully defended her dissertation, “(Un)Celebrated Women: Three Women and Their Imprint on the Gullah Geechee Literary Tradition,” at the University of South Carolina.
Dr. Amanda Hiner’s article “Theorizing British Women Satirists of the Long Eighteenth Century: Genre, Practice, and Tradition” (co-written with Elizabeth Tasker Davis) was published in Handbuch Satire, and her article “Critical Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Offloading: Implications for Teaching and Learning” was published in Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines. She presented “Preserving Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Generative AI: Implications for Teaching and Learning” at Winthrop University’s Multidisciplinary Colloquia Series on AI and at the 2026 College English Association Conference. Dr. Hiner served as the invited speaker at the 2026 Critical Thinking Foundation Conference and received the 2026 Department of English Faculty Scholar Award.
Dr. Jo Koster presented “The Passion of Margery Kempe” at the 2025 International Anchoritic Society / Early Middle English Studies Annual Conference and “Continuing the Hunt for Ege MS 6: An English ‘Cambridge’ Bible of the Early 13th Century” at the 2025 Research Group on Manuscript Evidence Autumn Colloquium. She served as the invited speaker at the 20th Annual Department of English Graduate Scholars’ Talk and co-hosted a cultural event called “Things That Go Bump in the Night: The Supernatural in Medieval Culture.” She also received a special recognition for long-term service and excellence in teaching and scholarship at the 2026 Department of English Scholarships & Awards Ceremony.
Dr. Heather Listhartke presented “Crafting Agency: The Perceived Body and Rhetorical Practice in Extended Reality Spaces” at the 2025 Computers & Writing Conference and “Revisiting Literacy Practices: Crafting Writing Assignments to Worry Less about AI and More about Student Learning” at the 2026 Conference on College Composition and Communication. She developed and successfully launched the Grant Fellows Program, which had five student interns and five participating junior faculty. Dr. Listhartke also co-presented “Learning in/with VR: Implementation Models, Accessibility, and Student Practices” with student Hayden Roach and “Grant Writing Basics w/ Internships at Winthrop” with Michael Szeman.
Dr. Kelly Richardson presented “Encounters with Enchanted Islands: Herman Melville’s The Encantadas and Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals” at the Fourteenth International Melville Society Conference and “Fashionable Declarations: Clothing and Class Identity in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth” at the 2026 College English Association Conference. She also received the 2026 Department of English Faculty Service Award.
Dr. Ephraim Sommers’ third book of poetry, Diabetic Gumdrops, will be published by Main Street Rag. His poem “Ode to Spouses of Diabetics and How They Find Us” was published in Mid-Atlantic Review, “To Something Rough in Me on Its Way to Smooth” was published in Months to Years, “Ode to Boxed Breathing with a Still-Life Cigarette” & “To a Colby I Once Knew Who Wrote Me After Many Years” were published in LETTERS, “Ode to All That Is or Ever Will Be Creative” was published in PHIL LIT, “Ode on Returning to a California Beach After Twelve Years” was published in The Argyle Literary Magazine, and “Ode to All the Failed Poems Too” was published in Summer’s Mixtape: An Eclectic & Short Anthology of Poems/Midsummer Dream House.
