The English department continues to flourish thanks to its strong faculty and talented students. This academic year began in sadness for us with the loss of our longtime instructor, advisor and friend, Patricia Angley, but ended in tribute to her with the inaugural awarding of the Pat Angley Scholarship to assist undergraduate students in financial need. We miss Pat and her daily impact on our students immensely, and we appreciate the opportunity to continue her legacy through the scholarship.

The department welcomed four new faculty from the Games and Digital Media track of the Nicholson School of Communication and Media when that school moved to the College of Sciences. We are proud to claim Emily Johnson, Rudy McDaniel, Mel Stanfill and Anastasia Salter as colleagues in English, and we look forward to the many ways in which their expertise will continue to benefit our students.

The 2020–21 academic year was of course the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and several technical communication scholars with the English department responded directly to the crisis with their work. J.D. Applen presented virtually on “Florida’s Covid-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard,” while Sarah Singer was awarded an Exploratory Research Seed Grant for “Making Sense of Long Covid: Illness Narratives Within and Beyond the Doctor’s Office,” in which Sonia Stephens is a co-participant.

The English department continues to flourish thanks to its strong faculty and talented students.

The department continues to benefit from ongoing grants, including Mark Kamrath’s NEH grant to expand the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR), Sonia Stephens’ National Academies of Sciences grant to improve housing decisions in coastal regions along the Gulf of Mexico and Anastasia Salter’s NEH grant on humanist research in digital culture. Additionally, Barry Mauer and Kevin Meehan are co-participants in a new Pabst Steinmetz Foundation Arts and Wellness Innovation grant for “Fables versus Urban Legends: Storytelling about Vaccines at the Intersection of Ethnography and Epidemiology.”

Several faculty members also published scholarly books. Mark Kamrath edited volumes four and seven of The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, both of which were awarded the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions seal. Pegasus Professor Tison Pugh published both On the Queerness of Early English Drama: Sex in the Subjunctive and Harry Potter and Beyond: On J. K. Rowling’s Fantasies and Other Fictions. Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill co-authored A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: Gendered Authorship in Transmedia Franchises.

The department’s creative writers also produced great work with multiple poems published by Rochelle Hurt, Lisa Roney, Terry Thaxton and Laurie Uttich. Obi Nwakanma was honored by Orange County Regional History Center with a poetry reading for Celebrating Black Culture: Music, Storytelling and Poetry. Jamie Poissant’s novel, Lake Life, was published to great acclaim and has so far been translated into five languages. Likewise, Brenda Peynado’s recently-published story collection, The Rock Eaters, has already garnered rave reviews and considerable media attention.

We are also very proud of the work Beth Young and her collaborators have done toward the online publication of Samuel Johnson’s 1753 Dictionary of the English Languag3. This project, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is the first searchable, online edition of this influential dictionary.

— James Campbell, department chair