The UCF English Department is very pleased to welcome six new faculty hired over the 2021-22 academic year. The following people will be joining us this fall:

Amrita Ghosh joins our faculty as an assistant professor of South Asian Literature. Her book, Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts, is forthcoming from Rowan and Littlefield, and a co-edited collection, Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning, has recently been published by Brill. Ghosh has a PhD from Drew University, held a research fellowship at the South Asia Center at Lund University in Sweden and taught at Seton Hall University.

Veronica Joyner joins our faculty as an assistant professor of Technical Communication. She has recently completed her PhD at George Mason University and has also taught at Howard University. Her work has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly.

Peter Kispert joins our faculty as an assistant professor of Creative Writing in Fiction. He has an MFA from Indiana University where he was managing editor for the prestigious Indiana Review. He has worked in the New York publishing industry for several years and is the author of the story collection I Know You Know Who I Am, published by Penguin.

Vincent Robles joins our faculty as a Lecturer in Technical Communication. He has a PhD from Iowa State University and has previously taught at the University of North Texas and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Manuel “Blake” Sanz joins our faculty as an assistant professor of Creative Writing in Fiction. He has an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and was previously a faculty member at the University of Denver. His story collection The Boundaries of Their Dwelling is published by the University of Iowa Press.

Pavithra Tantrigoda joins our faculty as an assistant professor of Environmental Literature. She has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and has most recently been an American Council of Learned Societies Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. Her scholarly work has appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and Postcolonial Text.

The hiring of … talented new faculty … will have a profound effect on the future of the department.

The hiring of these talented new faculty represents a considerable investment of time and energy by the current faculty and staff and will have a profound effect on the future of the department.

Our current faculty have been active in publishing their research in addition to hiring new colleagues. Highlights include Christian Beck’s edited anthology Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse from Palgrave; Rochelle Hurt’s newest volume of poetry, The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press); Tison Pugh’s co-edited anthology, The United States of Medievalism (University of Toronto Press); Anastasia Salter’s book with Stuart Moulthrop, Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (Amherst College Press); and Laurie Uttich’s poetry collection, Somewhere a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt (Riot in Your Throat).

Faculty members have garnered new and continuing grants as well: Jason Gregory and Chrissy Kolaya from the Florida Humanities Greater Good program; Stephen Hopkins from the American Philosophical Society, the Elaine Kochanske Stock Endowment, and a UCF SEED grant; Emily Johnson, UCF SEED grant; Mark Kamrath, NEH grant for the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research and the Florida Humanities Council; Louise Kane, University of Virginia Lillian Gary Taylor Fellowship; Barry Mauer and Kevin Meehan, Pabst-Steinmetz Foundation; Anastasia Salter, Disney Foundation; Sarah Singer, UCF SEED grant; Sonia Stephens, Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Science; and Beth Young, National Endowment for the Humanities.

Several of our faculty have been honored by awards this year. Chrissy Kolaya received the UCF Reach for the Stars Award, which recognizes prominent early-career faculty and provides $30,000 of research support. Mel Stanfill was awarded the Gloria Anzaldúa Research Excellence Award from the UCF Women’s and Gender Studies Program and the UCF Award for Faculty Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students. Mark Kamrath was awarded a Research Incentive Award. A number of faculty received teaching awards: Anastasia Salter received the CAH Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award, while Farrah Cato and Tison Pugh each received the CAH Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.

In April, the Department of English joined the Department of Writing and Rhetoric in presenting a Celebration of the Orlando Poet Laureate at UCF Celebrates the Arts. The event featured a readings from Orlando Poet Laureate Shawn Welcome, inaugural Poet Laureate Susan Lilley (both English alumni) and current UCF faculty who were finalists in the competition: Terry Thaxton (English), Chrissy Kolaya (English) and Martha Brenckle (DWR).