English

The Department of English continues to strive for excellence in creative writing, literature and technical communication. We are pleased to serve a fine group of undergraduate and graduate majors, as well as minors in digital humanities, Florida studies, linguistics and medieval and renaissance studies. A few highlights of our eventful year are listed below.

Forbes Advisor has named UCF English as the top English online degree of 2024. We are gratified to have been selected by such a respected source of educational information.

Our faculty published eight books in the previous year. Tison Pugh published Bad Chaucer: The Great Poet’s Greatest Mistakes in The Canterbury Tales (U of Michigan P), Will and Grace (in Wayne State UP’s TV Milestones Series) and Understanding Agatha Christie (U of South Carolina P). Amrita Ghosh co-edited ReFiguring Global Challenges: Literary and Cinematic Explorations of War, Inequality and Migration (Brill) and wrote Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts (Lexington). Fayeza Hasanat translated Sufia Kamal’s 1971: A Diary (Bangla Academy), Sara Raffel and Mark Kretzschmar published The History and Allure of Interactive Visual Novels (Bloomsbury) and Mel Stanfill published Rock This Way: Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy (U of Michigan P). Additionally, our faculty published forty-one articles, stories and poems on a vast variety of topics, from Irish poetry to the digital humanities.

Grants are increasingly important in the humanities, and our department has dramatically increased its grant production in the last few years. This year, Emily Johnson received a significant grant from the U.S. Department of Education to explore language learning with educational computer and VR games, the culmination of a project which she’s been working on for several years. Veronica Joyner received funding from the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication to study anti-racist programs and pedagogies. These grants will help our faculty accomplish essential work that benefits well beyond UCF’s campus.

English department faculty also increased the visibility of UCF by giving a remarkable number of keynote addresses and invited talks this year. Amrita Ghosh provided a keynote at Ex Aequo: Portuguese Association of Women’s Studies and an invited talk at the Institute of Language Studies and Research in Calcutta, India; François-Xavier Gleyzon gave invited talks at the University of Toulouse and the University of Paris-Nanterre in France; Veronica Joyner was a keynote speaker at the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Conference; David James Poissant was a featured author at FILBA International in Buenos Aires and the MACA Museum of Contemporary Art Atchugarry Literary Festival in Maldonado, Uruguay; and Anastasia Salter provided keynotes at Ohio University’s Popular Culture Speakers Series, the Leveling Up the Classroom Conference at the University of Kentucky, and the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling in Kobe, Japan.

Our more public-facing local events included the tenth annual UCF Celebrates the Arts festivities, in which English participated through the Write of Passage: Creative Writing MFA Student Reading and AI Across Creative Frontiers events. The Writers in the Sun visiting reader series sponsored public readings from authors Kelle Groom and Courtney LeBlanc, and a publishing panel featuring representatives from Harper Collins, Black Lawrence Press and the Friedrich Agency. We were pleased to host Paulette Richards’ talk on puppet ministry and object performance in the Black church, which was featured on WMFE’s Spotlight program with Talia Blake.

We are extremely proud of our approximately one thousand English majors who continue to demonstrate the enduring importance of the humanities in the twenty-first century. One standout is graduating senior Alyssa Bent, who was awarded Best Honors Undergraduate Thesis in the College for her project directed by Cecilia Milanés. Our alumni had a strong presence this year with the release of the motion picture version of creative writing graduate Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel Spaceman of Bohemia, released as Spaceman in February and currently streaming on Netflix. The movie stars Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan and the voice of Paul Dano.

UCF’s literary magazine, The Florida Review, completes its forty-seventh year overall and its first under the new editorship of David James Poissant The Spring 2024 issue, which is particularly beautiful and uniquely Floridian, is now available. Additionally, The Cypress Dome, our student-edited literary and arts journal, has published its thirty-fourth annual issue this year.

We are excited to welcome six new colleagues hired during the 2023-24 academic year. Joseph Shack will be our new assistant professor of literature and linguistics: he recently completed his PhD at Harvard University, while David Schwartz, our new assistant professor in creative writing, has just completed received his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Two new lecturers are joining us in creative writing: Kianna Greene is an MFA graduate of UCF’s program, while Siew David Hii comes to us with an MFA from North Carolina State University. Matthew Stapleton is joining us as a visiting lecturer in technical communication from UCF’s Texts and Technology PhD program, while Jane Aman will serve as a visiting lecturer in literature; she holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. We are very excited to have these excellent new faculty members aboard.