Commendations
Students and faculty in the English department are involved in numerous creative, scholarly, and leadership activities. The following lists summarize the wide range of these activities -- not only within the campus, region, and state but also nationally and internationally.
If you'd like your achievement to be listed here, simply send an email to Marjory Lange.
Click to see:
Student Highlights | Faculty Highlights
2007-2008 English Student Highlights
- Katie Tvrdy is the winner of this year's $500 Meyer Prize for Excellence in Literature. Daniel Bruner finished in second place and will receive $100. Allison Houck finished in third place and will receive $50. These students and the English department extend their appreciation for the Meyer family's generous support of this award.
- Chelsea Pfund received the inaugural Leta Edwards Writing Scholarship.
- Talia Hess was awarded the English department's Outstanding Student in Literature award. Kayla Rau received the Outstanding Student in Writing award. Marge Lawrence received the Outstanding Student in Linguistics award. And Karyn Taylor was awarded the Outstanding Student Service award.
- 19 students delivered presentations at the English department's Academic Excellence Showcase. These included Katie Tvrdy, Daniel Bruner, Allison Houck, Talia Hess, and Kayla Johnson (literary analyses); Evan Christopher, Padraig Maloney, Jessica Evans, Tyler Bentley, and Andrea Taskinen (poetry and creative non-fiction); Rob Harriman, Christina Cain, Stacey Reimers, and Elise Andersen (WR 440); and Julie Rementeria, Timothy LaDuke, Jessica Harper, Melissa Stanley, and Cydne Tullis (linguistics). Click here to visit the university's Academic Excellence Showcase page.
- Marge Lawrence, Chelsea Pfund, and Kayla Rau have been appointed as Writing Associates.
- Numerous of our students work as Writing Center Tutors. Click here to visit the Writing Center staff page for a full listing of current tutors majoring or minoring in Literature, Linguistics, and Writing.
- Nine students presented papers at the 2008 Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature. Evan Christopher and Jessica Evans read original poetry. Jeff Elliott, Kayla Rau, and Darian White presented scholarly essays on Wuthering Heights and the poetry of W.B. Yeats, respectively.
- Evan Christopher has been appointed the new editor-in-chief of Northwest Passage, Western Oregon University's student journal of literature and the arts.
2006-2007 English Faculty Highlights
- Kit Andrews's article on Walter Pater and Michael Field was recently published in the book Michael Field and their world. He also annotated 3 articles for the fall 2006 Walter Pater Newsletter, with another 3 to follow in Spring 2007. In fall 2007 he will present a paper at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference on the Bourgeois Interior in Walter Pater's works
- Meg Artman's article "Comprehension Requests in Writing Conferences" was published in the Spring 2007 issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly. She also conducted workshops on writing across the curriculum for teachers at South Umpqua High School and West Albany High School
- Meg Artman, Katherine Schmidt, and Cornelia Paraskevas presented papers at the CCCC in New York in March. Cornelia Paraskevas also conducted an all day workshop with scholars Martha Kolln, Deb Rosen-Knill, Craig Hancock, and Lori Gray at this conference
- Henry Hughes studied the works of Herman Melville as a fellow at the National Humanities Center last summer in North Carolina. He also published the poems "Singles at Seventy" (Seattle Review 29.1) and "Underwater Lightning" (Isotope 4.2). His poems“Steelhead Almost,” “Guarding the Dump,” and “Together in the Ice-Storm” were reprinted in David Biespiel's collection Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets. Dr. Hughes's creative non-fiction essay “Life Drawing” also appeared in Art Times (September 2006). He delivered presentations at two scholarly conferences: "Between Industry and Idleness: Fishing in American Literature” at the Pacific Northwest American Studies Conference; and “A Humorous History of the Sycamore Review” at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs convention. He also delivered the commencement address during WOU's 2007 ceremony.
- Keiko Kagawa's article "Jane Austen, The Architect: (Re)Building Spaces at Mansfield Park" was published in the March 2006 issue of WOMEN'S STUDIES: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She also presented her paper "Archi-spatiality in George Eliot's Middlemarch: An Architectural Reconstruction of the Renaissance" at the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association at Pepperdine College in October
- Gavin Keulks's edited collection Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond was published in September. He also published a creative nonfiction essay in the collection Aldous Huxley: Modern Satirical Novelist of Ideas and a scholarly essay on Salman Rushdie in The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism. He is the administrator of the scholarly website The Martin Amis Web and was the recipient of the 2007 Mario and Alma Pastega Award for Excellence in Scholarship.
- Cornelia Paraskevas's article "The Geography of the Cemetery" was published in Studies in Literary Imagination (39.1). Another article -- "Bridging the gap between standards and engaged writing: Looking at 9-year old biography makers" -- was published in the Oregon English Journal. In April she delivered a presentation on gravemarkers of foreign immigrants to Greece at the American Culture Association annual conference. She also continues to be part of the 20-member Language Arts Content and Assessment Panel for the Oregon Department of Education
- Katherine Schmidt organized a session with four of her Writing Center tutors (Marta Bunse, Kynzie Dalton, Nicole Perry, and Kayla Rau) for the Pacific Northwest Writing Centers Association conference. Their session was titled "Lessening the Divide: Strategies for Promoting Effective Communication between Hearing Consultants and Deaf Student-Writers"
- Uma Shrestha and David Hargreaves co-authored an article titled "Pragmatics at work: Translating Chittadhar Hrdaya’s 'Andhakar'" that is forthcoming in the Himalayan Languages Proceedings. They also presented a paper titled "Semantic and Pragmatic Issues in Translating Chittadhar Hrdaya's 'Andhakar'" at the Twelfth Himalayan Languages Symposium in November in Kathmandu, Nepal.
- Curtis Yehnert was recently appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board for Oregon Humanities magazine. He continues to serve as an Oregon Chautauqua host scholar, speaking on Chautauqua culture, folklore, and history throughout the state