Donna Qualley’s Afterword, “With and Because of Genevieve,” was published in the online collection, The Rhetoric of Participation, in March of 2019. This collection honors the scholarship of the late Genevieve Critel who was to have begun her career as an Assistant Professor in English (Writing Studies) at Western in the fall of 2012. Donna published a second chapter, “How Digital Writing Sustains Reading” in a the edited collection, Digital reading and Writing in Composition Studies, also published in 2019 by Routledge.
Bruce Goebel
Bruce Goebel’s article, “What’s So Funny about Social Justice?” was published in English Journal. The article focuses specifically on breaking down stereotypes of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent and is a direct response to anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Trump administration. Over the past year, he’s collaborated with Jennifer Green and Beth Dillard from the ELL program in creating an English major with a combined ELL/Bilingual Education emphasis. Currently there is no ELL “major” which means the ELL program is an “add on” that takes an additional year. This major is designed to allow a student interested in being an ELL teacher to complete GURs, the English major, and the Secondary Education program in four years rather than five. It should also make ELL and Bilingual Education more visible at Western.
Kami Westhoff
Kami Westhoff’s Your Body a Bullet, a collaborative book with alumna Elizabeth Vignali, was published by Unsolicited Press in November 2018. She presented “Immensities” at the PMLA conference, a poetry project that seeks to honor women who’ve been murdered in Whatcom County. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction appeared in various journals including SWIMM, Ghost City, Stirring, Hippocampus, Threadcount, Permafrost, A-Minor, and Contrary, received six Best of the Net nominations and two Pushcart Prize nominations, and will be included in three anthologies: Mansion, by Ghost City Press, and Ways of Looking, by Carve, and the Running Wild Novella Anthology, by Running Wild Press.
Elizabeth Colen
In Fall 2018 Black Lawrence Press published Elizabeth Colen’s sixth book, a fiction collaboration entitled True Ash. This spring she entered her third year as an editor at Tupelo Press. This summer she hopes to spend a lot of time returning to a novel project, as well as preparing for several new courses she’s developing for next year, including AIDS Literature and Black Feminist Dystopian Narratives, which was inspired by the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive.
Dayna Patterson
Dayna Patterson’s chapbook, Titania in Yellow, is forthcoming in 2019 (Porkbelly Press), and her full-length collection of lyric essays and poetry, If Mother Braids a Waterfall, will meet the world in 2020 (Signature Books). She recently gave a reading in Salt Lake City sponsored by the Sunstone Foundation. This past year, she received three Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won second place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest for her piece “Fledge.” Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, North American Review, Cave Wall, and others. She was awarded a 2019 SAF Mineral School Fellowship, and she continues her work as Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal that makes its home at the intersection of faith and doubt.
Katherine Anderson
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.