The department was again selected by Forbes as the best online English undergraduate degree in the nation.
Our faculty published four books in the year: Amrita Ghosh’s (with Bhakti Shringarpure and Rohit Dasgupta) India’s Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives, (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter’s Critical Making in the Age of AI (Amherst College Press), Tison Pugh’s Southerners Acting Southern: On Celebrities and their Star Personas in the Imagined South (LSU Press) and Mel Stanfill’s Fandom is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture (NYU Press). Additionally, Rochelle Hurt was awarded the Dorset Prize in poetry from the Tupelo Press and Anastasia Salter was selected as Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor in Digital Arts and Humanities at Carleton College. Our faculty published an additional forty-three articles, stories, poems and essays on a huge variety of topics from Chinese surrealism in the 1930s to the work of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kewi Armah.
The department sponsored several public events including the Writers in the Sun series, which featured poet Jessica Q. Stark, fiction writer Brenda Peynado, novelist Ana Menéndez and a panel on publishing with representatives from three companies. Our graduate students organized and ran the 14th annual English Symposium with the theme of Planetary Prisms; this two-day event featured ten panel sessions and had the highest attendance we have seen post-pandemic. The department also sponsored an appearance at the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research by Alana Lancaster from the University of the West Indies. And we ended the academic year with readings from the graduating MFA students as part of UCF Celebrates the Arts.
Three of our long-time colleagues retired this year. Terry Thaxton joined us in 2000 and has played more important roles in our department than can be named. Most recently, however, she has been our graduate director and champion of our MFA program. Jane Vaughan has been with UCF since 2010 and for many years taught both for English and for Interdisciplinary Studies. And Trey Philpotts came to us as department chair in 2015 as well as teaching British literature. We wish all these colleagues the best as they enter retirement.
