Faculty and Staff Accomplishments
The English Department was the best represented department in nominations across the University for the 
14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards, followed by the Murrow College of Communications with seven nominees.
Jana Argersinger will present a paper on Sophia Peabody's Cuba Journal at MLA December 2009.
Chris Arigo has three new poems in the brand new issue of Oranges and Sardines. His translations of Italian poet Dome Bulfaro appeared in a new Italian anthology entitled, 5PX2: Five Italian Poets and Five Scottish Poets. The anthology is a collaborative effort between Luath Press (Scotland) and Torino Poesia Press (Italy) and was sponsored and organized by Edizioni Torino Poesia, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh and under the patronage of the Scottish Poetry Library, One Night Stanzas, Poesia Presente, International Journal of Scottish Literature. Additionally, his poetic collaboration with Palouse photographer Jerry McCollum, entitled "I am Palouse" went on display in the Capitol Building in Olympia in the beginning of April. He also participated in a poetry reading at the San Francisco Poetry Center (information here) and his translations of Dome Bulfaro's chapbook "Ossa" (Bones) have been released in a new anthology of contemporary Italian poets.
Kristin Arola was presented with the English Graduate Organization Award for Best Graduate Seminar as well as the 2009 Most Supportive Faculty Member. She acted as presenter and facilitator at a Pre-Conference Workshop "Assigning and Assessing: Multimodal Composition and Classroom Practice" at the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Nancy Bell presented a paper entitled "Participant Identities and Reactions to Humor in Second Language Learning” at the 2009 conference of the International Society for Humor Studies held in Long Beach June 17th-20th. She has been awarded a Language Learning Research Grant of $5718 for a project titled “Development and Developmental Effects of Language Play.” She has also received a WSU New Faculty Seed Grant of $13,000 which will allow her to hire a research assistant (M.A. student, Becky Robinson) to aid in collection of data that will help answer the question of whether playing with/in a second language facilitates its learning.
Boyd Benson has received a 2009 Jeanne Lohmann Prize for his poem "Leaves." One of three Washington state recipients, he gave a reading and received the prize on June 17 in Olympia. Four of his poems appeared online in the winter issue of the Oregon Literary Review.
Trevor Bond's article "A dialog on teaching an undergraduate seminar in special collections" co-written with Todd Butler appears in the most recent issue of Library Review. It discusses their experiences in co-teaching their Spring 2008 senior seminar on print culture.
Kim Burwick has two poems forthcoming in International Poetry Review.
Todd Butler was tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. His article "A dialog on teaching an undergraduate seminar in special collections" co-written with Trevor Bond appears in the most recent issue of Library Review. It discusses their experiences in co-teaching their Spring 2008 senior seminar on print culture. He was also among the faculty recognized at this year's Athletic Department's Faculty Excellence Recognition Event at a Cougar baseball game on May 1st.
Donna Campbell presented“ ‘It could have been any street’: Ann Petry’s The Street and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s In ‘Steenth Street Stories” at the April 2-5 MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States) conference in Spokane, WA. Her article “A Literary Expatriate: Hamlin Garland, Edith Wharton, and the Politics of a Literary Reputation” appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of the Edith Wharton Review. She has also won the Edith Wharton Collection Research Award for her project “Wharton and the Transnational Body: Gabrielle Landormy, Citizenship, and Modernity in the Late Works of Edith Wharton.” The award provides funding for research in the Edith Wharton Collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. In addition, her article "A Forgotten Daughter of Bohemia: Gertrude Christian Fosdick's Out of Bohemia" appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 25 (2008): 275-285. She was also nominated for the 14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards. She recently presented “Land, Revenge, and Redemption in the Western Stories of Mary Hallock Foote and Rose Wilder Lane” at the Pacific Northwest American Studies Association Conference. Also, her essay “Naturalism: Turn-of-the-Century Modernism” has been published in A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900-1950, ed. John T. Matthews (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Peter Chilson joined Andrea Mason, Debbie Lee and novelist Jill Widner for a group reading event called "Personal Regions," on January 30 at the Center for Arts and History in Lewiston, Idaho. He also gave a keynote address on Feb. 19 at the Forum on International Education Abroad Conference in Portland, OR, speaking on Africa's troubled borderlands and the problem of doing research in difficult places. He has had two essays in a new anthology of travel writing called "Near Death in the Desert" published this summer by Vintage Departures. The essays are selected from his book, Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa.
Bill Condon has won a $113,000 three-year grant from the Spencer Foundation to find out whether we can trace the effects of faculty development into student learning outcomes. He conducted a workshop on writing assessment May 11-12 at Illinois Wesleyan University. The workshop is part of an ongoing consultancy at IWU, under the auspices of a Mellon Foundation grant to improve writing across the curriculum at the university. He was then a featured speaker at the University of Minnesota's "Writing-Enriched Curriculum: A Symposium Exploring New Directions for Undergraduate Writing," joining leading faculty and administrators as a panelist on May 13. Condon serves Minnesota's Writing-Enriched Curriculum Project as an outside consultant/evaluator.
Paula Coomer gave a featured presentation titled "Why We Love Memoir" at the Write on the River Writers' Conference in Wenatchee, Washington, May 15-16. She also presented the book Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence at the Prairie River Library District's Kamiah Branch on May 19 as part of the Idaho Library Commission's, "Let's Talk About It" series. Her unpublished novel, DOVE CREEK, has been recorded for serialized broadcast over Moscow radio station KRFP and aired the week of Jan. 19. A focused website accompanied her broadcast as well as a launch party at Bookpeople in Moscow and a related article appearing in the Jan. 9 Arts and Entertainment section of the Lewiston Tribune.
Michael Delahoyde was interviewed about werewolf movies by a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Speaking about Shakespeare, he was featured in a short edition of “Experience WSU” that ran on KWSU (Channel 10) last month. Additionally, he was named the 2010 award winner for scholarship at the recent Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference in Portland, where he presented "Lyrical Poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare." He recently published "Oxford's Railing Muse" in Shakespeare Matters.
Robert Eddy was awarded the 2009 Most Supportive Faculty Member.
Patricia Ericsson presented a panel "Invisible Classrooms Revealed: Digital Technologies as Hidden Teachers" at the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication. She was also tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. She acted as presenter and facilitator at a Pre-Conference Workshop "Assigning and Assessing: Multimodal Composition and Classroom Practice" at the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication. She organized and facilitated the Second Annual WSU Grad Student "Happening" at the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Jason Farman’s article, "Surveillance Spectacles: The Big Art Group’s Flicker and the Screened Body in Performance” was published in the current issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, one of the UK's top journals in theatre and performance studies.
Rebecca Goodrich was promoted to the rank of Senior Instructor.
Dene Grigar's essay, "Elit: Where Is It?," appeared in the January 2009 issue of ebr
Michael Hanly was presented with the 2009 Chair's Award. He also presented a paper on Crusade and Muslim-Christian conflict in the late Middle Ages at the conference of the Medieval Association of the Pacific which was hosted by the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He has been elected a member of the MAP Council. He also took part in an international symposium this summer, entitled "The Age of Philippe de Mézières" and features fourteen scholars from the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, which took place in Nicosia, Cyprus, in June.
Crag Hill presented "Integrating Young Adult Literature Into Other Disciplines: What Books Work in Other Classes?" at the National Council of Teachers of English Region 7 Conference in October 2009 in Vancouver, B. C. The conference focus was Asking the Right Questions: Engaging Today's Learners. He will then present a classroom demonstration entitled "Reading Classical Chinese Poetry to Write New Poems" at the 2009 Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Philadelphia on November 20, 2009. The focus for the conference is "Once and Future Classics: Reading Between the Lines."
Linda Kittell joined an interdisciplinary research team, which includes Roxanne Vandermause, Sheila Kearney-Converse, Laurilyn Harris and Pauline Sameshima, has been awarded a grant from the American Nurses Foundation for $3500 for continued research and exploration on the topic involving multi-genre responses to “Women and Methamphetamine: Portraits of Addiction and Recovery.” They presented at the Qualitative Health Research 14th International Interdisciplinary Conference, Banff, Alberta, Canada, in October 2008 and in April 2009 at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference in San Diego, CA.
Debbie Lee joined Andrea Mason, Peter Chilson and novelist Jill Widner for a group reading event called "Personal Regions," on January 30 at the Center for Arts and History in Lewiston, Idaho. She gave an invited guest lecture titled "'Cries coming from the mountain-head': Wordsworth’s Single Mothers in London and the Lakes" at the University of Montreal, Canada on June 12, 2009. She also received a CLA Major Extramural Grant Development Award and was nominated for the 14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards.
Buddy Levy was an invited guest on the Dennis Prager Radio Show, a nationally-broadcast talk radio show, on December 23, 2008. Prager, who is a frequent guest on CNN, interviewed Levy live for a full hour about his book Conquistador, which was recently shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards. A podcast of the interview is available here. Also, on March 22, Levy was flown to LA to film a screen test “sizzle reel” for a History Channel Reality Program called Decoded. The team of adventure-historians Buddy proposed to the production company was selected by the History Channel and is being considered for a pilot for the series Decoded, which would set out to contemplate, uncover, and debunk historical myths and conspiracy theories in American history. He gave readings entitled "History Is In the Making of It," "Designing a Writer's Life" and "Borne on Air Reading" and also sat on a panel as an invited guest at this year's Get Lit! 2009 
Literary Festival in Spokane, April 10-19th as well as being a featured blogger on the Festival's Guest Blog. Jane Smiley was among the featured headliner authors for this year's festival. Previous headliners have included Sherman Alexie, Kurt Vonnegut, David James Duncan and Tobias Wolff. On May 1st, he gave a talk, reading, and Q & A involving his book CONQUISTADOR, as well as the book he will deliver to Bantam Dell in May, RIVER OF DARKNESS: Francisco Orellana's Historic Descent of the Amazon as a return visit to the Gulf Shores Literary Society in Naples, Florida which features nationally recognized authors from all over the country. Buddy Levy was nominated for the 14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards and was promoted to the rank of Clinical Associate Professor.
Thabiti Lewis presented with Wendy Olson (English), and Sky Wilson (American Studies) at the annual Pacific Northwest American Studies Association. Their panel, “Rhetorical Moves in Popular Culture: Rhetorics in, of, and on Race in Contemporary American Culture,” focused on how race is constructed, performed, and reappropriated in television, sports culture, and political activism.
Lesa Luders presented a discussion of "Having Our Say, the Delany Sisters' First 100 Years," as part of the Idaho Commission for Libraries and the Idaho Humanities Council at Kamiah, Idaho, on February 17.
Jacqueline Lyons has had an essay accepted for publication in the next issue of the new literary journal The Normal School, for which she is a contributing editor. Jacqueline Lyons has had a book review of Brandon Shimoda's poetry collection THE ALPS accepted for publication by Colorado Review.
Andrea Mason’s article concerning research into how human bodies behave in an avalanche appeared in High Country News. She also joined Debbie Lee, Peter Chilson and novelist Jill Widner for a group reading event called "Personal Regions," on January 30 at the Center for Arts and History in Lewiston, Idaho.
Larry Mayer was nominated for the 14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards.
Kirk McAuley delivered a paper titled "'Art Transforms the Savage Face of Things': Scottish Identity and the '45 Jacobite Rebellion in James Grainger's West-Indian Georgic, The Sugar Cane," at the 2009 Symbiosis (transatlantic studies) Conference in Boston - Boston and the New Atlantic World - at Suffolk University in Boston on June 25 - 27th.
Barbara Monroe has a contract with The University of Pittsburgh Press to publish her book Plateau Indian Ways with Words. This print publication will be part of the Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture, edited by Dave Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr. In another contract, The University of Pittsburgh Press, Digital Editions, in collaboration with the University Library System, will be publishing a digital collection of additional speeches and letters, with critical commentary, to complement the print edition. Access to Digital Editions is free. She was nominated for the 14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards.
Pavithra Narayanan presented a paper "Speaking in Tongues: Transnation and Transnationalism" at the ICLALS (Indian Association for Commonwealth Studies) Annual Conference on Translation and Postcolonialities on Feb. 17th, 2009 at Dharward, India. Her paper was shortlisted for the C.D. Narasimhaiah Prize. She was interviewed by The Columbian (Vancouver) about Bond films, "Bonding to Bond," and Valentine's Day film suggestions, "Dinner and movie - a perfect pair" and by US Weekly (Los Angeles) about Slum Dog Millionaire. Her English 342: Documentary Film Theory & Production class at WSU Vancouver swept every award category at the Kenworthy Film Festival held April 3 – 5 in Moscow, Idaho. WSU Vancouver competed with films from WSU Pullman and University of Idaho. Read More Here.
Aaron Oforlea presented a paper entitled: "James Baldwin: Influences and Nuances" at The James Baldwin Conference on March 19-21 at Suffolk University. Additionally, he presented at American Men’s Studies Association on April 3 at Machill and Concordia Universities in Montreal, Canada. His presentation was entitled “Black Masculinity in a White World.” Aaron also presented a paper entitled “Mapping Male Subjectivity in James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, and Nathan McCall” at College Language Association March 25-28 in Baltimore Maryland.
Wendy Olson presented her paper “Theorizing Place in WPA Work” at the CCCC Annual Convention in San Francisco, in March. Her article, “Rhetorics of Basic Writing,” has also recently been accepted for publication in Open Words: Access and English Studies. She also presented with Thabiti Lewis (English) and Sky Wilson (American Studies) at the annual Pacific Northwest American Studies Association. Their panel, “Rhetorical Moves in Popular Culture: Rhetorics in, of, and on Race in Contemporary American Culture,” focused on how race is constructed, performed, and reappropriated in television, sports culture, and political activism.
T.V. Reed presented a paper on postcolonial ecocriticism at the Association for Literature and the 
Environment conference in Victoria, BC in June. Reed currently has seven pieces accepted or commissionedfor publication: “Toxic Colonialism, Environmental Justice and Cultural Resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” MELUS Multiethnic Literatures of the United States (Summer 2009); “Globalization, Culture and the Strategic Use of the Arts for Peacebuilding,” in Shin Chiba, ed. Building New Pathways to Peace (Seattle, U of Washington P, 2009); “The Northwest Literary Left: Robert Cantwell and His Comrades,” in Michael Steiner, ed. Regionalism on the Left (University of Oklahoma Press, forthcoming); “The US Peace Movement in Global Perspective,” in Johann Galtung, ed. Towards an Interdisciplinary Peace Studies (London & Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Press, forthcoming); “Protest as Artistic Expression,” in Thea Brophy et al. eds. Handbook of European Protest Movements (Berghan/Oxford Press, forthcoming); and “Rehistoricizing the Study of Culture,” in Paul Lauter, ed., The Blackwell Companion to American Literature (Blackwell Press, forthcoming).
Susan Dente Ross presented her paper, "Limning Terror: The Limits to the Power of ‘Terrorism’ Discourse," at the international conference on Conflict, Terrorism and Society held at Kadir Has University in Istanbul in April. Anadolu University in Eskisehir, Turkey, will help support her participation. She has also received a week-long writer's residency at Wild Acres Retreat in New Switzerland, NC, during September 2009 and a one-month writer's residency at the Lillian E. Smith Center for the Creative Arts in Clayton, Georgia, during this past summer. Also, an article titled "A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Changing Media Frames of Arafat and Sharon" following the Cataclysmic Events of Sept. 11, 2001, coauthored with George Tsekouras and Philemon Bantimaroudis and based on their collaborative work during Susan’s 2005 Fulbright in Greece, is at last forthcoming in The Open Journal of Communication (Vol. 2, 2009). Additionally, she has been named to the International Advisory Board of the Kurgu Online Journal of Communication Studies. Kurgu is a refereed, bilingual (Turkish and English) journal produced in Eskisehir, Turkey. Susan was also one of three invited speakers in a featured panel on "Media in conflict: Propaganda and Counterstrategies" at the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression, organized by the Peace Journalism Research Network in Oslo, Norway, in June.
Linda Russo has been awarded an Artist Residency at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington. She'll travel there in August.
Carol Siegel presented her paper, "Oh, So American: Kathy Acker's Spiritualization of the Erotic," at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston.
Leslie Jo Sena's abstract entitled "Common Reading Impact on First Semester Student Experience" was accepted for this year's WSU Academic Showcase. Issues in Writing has accepted her review of Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan's Beyond the Archives: Research as Lived Experience. The review will appear in issue 17, Number 1/2. She was also nominated for the 14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards and was among the faculty recognized at this year's Athletic Department's Faculty Excellence Recognition Event at a Cougar baseball game on May 1st.
Anne Stiles' article, "Literature in Mind: H.G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist" is forthcoming in the April 2009 issue of Journal of the History of Ideas. She was also recently named co-editor of the Victorian section of Literature Compass Online, published by Blackwell. Literature Compass is an online journal featuring articles on the state-of-the-field or sub-field that foreground important trends. Generating a strong sense of dialogue and engagement, of research with a public face, Literature Compass gives desktop access to the driving ideas, current issues and controversies that enliven the discipline and fuel literary research. It provides a critical platform for the scholar and an ideal entry point for the non-specialist.
Victor Villanueva was promoted to the rank of Regents Professor and was nominated for the 14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards. He was also the first recipient of the People of Color Leadership award of the National Council of Teachers of English (the largest discipline specific organization in the world, even though MLA is the most famous) back in November. In March, he was named the 2009 Exemplar by my specific field--the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the 16th exemplar in a sixty-year history of the organization. He the first latino to be Regents and to be C's Exemplar. He's also been part of an effort in establishing a US chapter of la Sociedád Latinoamerica de Retórica--the Latin American Society of Rhetoric, for which he will chair two session at the Rhetoric Society of America/The International Society for the History of Rhetoric meeting this coming summer. One panel will feature US Latino/Latina Rhetoricians. The other panel will feature rhetoricians from Latin America (Chile, Costa Rica, and Bolivia). He and Damián Baca had a special edition of College English come out this summer--the first dedicated to the rhetorics of Latinidad. Their book will be out in December from Palgrave--the first book dedicated to pre-Columbian rhetorics of the Americas. In addition, he had a piece in each--one on the Puerto Rican nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos and one on the rhetoric of the Taíno, the people Columbus first met and named "Indians." And finally, he and Bob Eddy sent delivered their revised manuscript on Language and Power in a Post-Racial Era to McGraw.
Karen Weathermon was nominated for the 14th annual Women and Leadership Forum Outstanding Mentor Awards.
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The English Department also wishes to thank our fabulous staff for all their hard work. You keep our department running smoothly and we could not get along without you!