Since joining Western’s English department in fall of 2018, Katherine Anderson has been hard at work on her first monograph, entitled Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain. Her review essays, “The Banality of Empire” and “On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism,” have appeared in Public Books. In her teaching, she developed several new courses, focusing on “The Dark Side of Dickens” for ENG 423: Major Authors, and “Post-9/11 Literature” for ENG 418: Senior Seminar, as well as a graduate course (ENG 560) exploring issues of empire and globalization as depicted in British literature. She has also partnered with Professor Nick Galati in Biology to pilot a new program for interdisciplinary community office hours at Western.
Mary Janell Metzger
Mary Janell Metzger presented “Teaching the Tragedy of White Supremacy in Shakespeare’s Othello” at the British Shakespeare Association meeting in Belfast. Her essay “Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice” is forthcoming in Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare (Birmingham UP). She was invited to present a paper on “Teaching Shakespeare for Social Change In, and Beyond, The College Classroom” as part of a 2020 plenary panel at the Shakespeare Association of America on Pedagogy and Social Justice. In spring term, she and her Senior Seminar participated in a national project called “The Qualities of Mercy” in which college Shakespeare students across the country each produce a video of one scene in The Merchant of Venice, after studying the play in light of contemporary, and local, issues of immigration and structural inequality. The linked videos will be uploaded in sequence for viewing on Youtube
Dawn Dietrich
Dawn Dietrich recently published “’For America to Rise, it’s a Matter of Black Lives/And We Gonna Free Them, so We Can Free Us’: 13th and Social Justice Documentaries in the Age of ‘Fake News,’” in Pacific Coast Philology, Special Edition: Ways of Seeing: Visuality, Visibility, and Vision, vol. 54, issue 2 (2019), forthcoming. She was also honored to be featured as part of a roundtable on The Impact of N. Katherine Hayles’s NEH Summer Seminar on the Field, 1995-2001, Special Session. Modern Language Association Conference, Chicago, IL, January 3-6, 2019, in honor of N. Katherine Hayles’ retirement. Dawn will offer two news courses next year: English 423 Major Authors: Haruki Murakami and English 238 Society & Literature: Horror across Media.
Christopher Wise
Christopher Wise’s À la recherche de Yambo Ouologuem (Paris: Les Èditions Philae, 2018) was selected as La Livre de la Semaine [Book of the Week] by Africa No.1 Radio in Paris, France. He also translated Jean-Michel Djian’s The Manuscripts of Timbuktu: Secrets, Myths, Realities (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2019), which was launched at the “Global Africa, Migration, and the Arts” Conference at Rutgers University at a panel honoring Kassahun Checole and Africa World Press on March 28, 2019. Wise was a plenary speaker at the conference and spoke on the topic of “Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence at 50.” Wise also published an article “Après Azawad: Le devoir de violence, djihad, et idéologie chérifienne dans le Nord du Mali” in Fabula/Les colloques: L’oeuvre de Yambo Ouologuem: Un carrefour d’écritures (1968-2018). In January 2019, Wise was invited to speak at Green College, UBC in Vancouver Canada, where he gave a talk on the crisis in Mali, entitled “The Jihad of Iyad Ag Ghali”. He gave another talk at Université Hassan II in Casablanca, Morocco on “American Studies in the Arab University: 9/11 to Azawad”. In Paris, Wise also gave a teleconference on Yambo Ouologuem for UBIZNEWS, “Yambo l’Utime Témoignage: Téléconférence” on February 28, 2019.
Kristiana Kahakauwila and Christopher Wise
This past Winter term (2019) Kristiana Kahakauwila and Christopher Wise co-led a Study Abroad class to Senegal, the first of its kind for WWU and the English department. Christopher taught two courses in West African literature, covering the pre- and post-colonial eras, while Kristiana taught contemporary Senegalese women writers as well as travel writing and its pitfalls. Fourteen undergraduates, almost all department majors, went on the trip and spent time in the cities of Dakar, Touba, St. Louis, and Saly. Western Today wrote about the trip in an article titled “Postcards from Senegal,” and the experience was deemed such a success that the same trip will be offered in Winter 2020.
Andrew Lucchesi
Andrew Lucchesi just finished his first year as Director of Composition. His work has included training and mentoring the thirty English graduate students who teach English 101, and designing new curriculum for the writing program, including a Poster Showcase where six-hundred students display their research for the public every quarter. He publishes in the fields of curriculum design (see his chapter in Next Steps: New Directions for/in Writing About Writing, 2019) and critical disability studies (see his edited special issue in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2015). He is currently writing about game-based pedagogy and “playable” course documents for college writing classes. Along with Allison Griffin, Andrew was awarded a Diversity and Social Justice grant to develop new English department courses in the field of Disability Studies at both the senior level and as large GUR courses. Andrew teaches courses on first-year writing pedagogy, disability studies and rhetoric, comic books, and developmental writing.
Kathryn Trueblood
Kathryn Trueblood’s new novel, Take Daily As Needed, treats parenting while chronically ill with the desperado humor the subject deserves (forthcoming September 2019 from the University of New Mexico Press). She will be offering a workshop to celebrate the Whatcom Library System’s Anniversary: 75 Years of Sharing Stories called “Telling Tough Stories: Writing Illness,” in the fall of 2019. This year, Trueblood co-taught a Red Badge Project weekend workshop in Walla Walla with Shawn Wong in October 2018, and a month-long workshop at The Bellingham Veterans Center in April 2019. She was invited to attend a workshop sponsored by the Great Books Foundation “Help Veterans Help Each Other,” in Chicago, October 26-27, 2018, fully funded. From October to May, she then co-moderated a book club, “War Through the Eyes of Women” at The Bellingham Vet Center, and she again served as writing coach and faculty advisor for “Stories Deployed: the Veteran Chronicles,” now in its sixth year.
Brenda Miller
Brenda Miller, with her colleague Suzanne Paola, has been hard at work on the updates for the Third Edition of Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, scheduled for release this summer. Her poetry and essays have appeared in such venues as Tupelo Quarterly, Jet Fuel Review (with alum Julie Marie Wade), and Psaltery & Lyre (edited by alum Dayna Patterson). Brenda’s essay “The Shape of Emptiness,” originally published in Brevity, received recognition as a “Notable Essay of 2018” in Best American Essays. Her article “The Fine Art of Containment in Creative Nonfiction” appeared in the March issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. In her teaching, she developed a new course focused solely on “Hermit Crab Essays” for ENG 458: Topics in Nonfiction Writing, and a graduate course (ENG 598) exploring the assumptions and practices of creative writing pedagogy.
Kelly Magee
Kelly Magee’s story “Nobody Understands You Like You” was selected by Antonya Nelson to be included in New Stories from the Midwest 2018, her story (with Carol Guess), “With Killer Bees” was included in an anthology of collaborative writing, They Said, and her story (with Kami Westhoff) “The Unbearable Here” was published in Contrary. She developed a new course in “Queer Memoir” and taught a Graduate Fiction Workshop around the idea of “influence”—what things contemporary writers are influenced by, and how they can best exert their own influence. She also spoke on a panel on “The Speculative and Fantastic in LGBTQ+ Writing” and organized “Taste of Western,” a reading of WWU faculty at this year’s AWP conference in Portland.
Laura Laffrado
Laura Laffrado and her work on Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson were featured in the Seattle Sunday Times Magazine cover story “Poetic Justice.” Her project for a bronze bust honoring Higginson was completed in November with installation of the bust in the Wilson Library foyer and the Ella Higginson Celebration (watch the event). Her book Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature received the 2018 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Edition Award ( watch her acceptance speech in Denver). Her essay, “The Value of Digitized Newspaper Collections in Researching Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing: Two Newly Recovered Poems by Ella Rhoads Higginson,” appeared in the Readex Report and her Op-Ed “The New West” appeared in The Seattle Times.