As the glorious Seattle summer gives way to the shorter days of Fall, and as I start my fourth year as department chair (fifth if you count my year as acting chair), I continue to be buoyed by the energy, dedication, creativity, care, and compassion of our faculty, staff, program directors, and students. Throughout the pandemic disruptions and the continued urgency to confront legacies of racism and ongoing inequities, we have been working hard to listen and be receptive, to transform exclusionary practices, to be ethically transparent and accountable in our decision-making, to create processes that allow us to think relationally and find common cause, and to build a sustaining community based on trust and belonging.
In addition to a remarkable team of staff colleagues with whom I am grateful to work every day, I am pleased to say that Habiba Ibrahim returns for a third year as the department Associate Chair, while our program directors continue to lead our many programs: Suhanthie Motha (MATESOL), Eva Cherniavsky (Graduate Studies), Megan Callow (Program for Writing Across Campus); Jesse Oak Taylor (Undergraduate Studies); David Crouse (Creative Writing), and Stephanie Kerschbaum (Program in Writing and Rhetoric). Michelle Liu continues as Associate Director of Writing Programs, Colette Moore as department scheduler, Henry Laufenberg as English Matters editor, and Jessica Burstein as London Study Abroad program director.
In addition, we welcome four new staff colleagues to the department: Winnie Lin as Administrative Specialist; Tim Cosgrove as Graduate Program Advisor; Shannon Mitchell as Creative Writing Program Coordinator; and Amanda Steinberg as Program in Writing and Rhetoric Coordinator. With gratitude, we bid farewell to Wendy Asplin, who retired this past Spring after serving faithfully as advisor, mentor, and instructor in the MATESOL program, and to Jake Huebsch, who in addition to serving with distinction as EWP Coordinator also helped us launch the department’s Literature Language and Culture Dialogue series.
I would like to extend special congratulations to Habiba Ibrahim for her promotion to the rank of Full Professor and to Josephine Walwema for her promotion to the rank of Associate Teaching Professor. Prior to his retirement, Mark Patterson was recognized with 2022 Departmental Teaching Award. This issue of English Matters highlights these and other faculty awards and honors.
We also successfully completed a faculty search for an Assistant Professor in African American and Black Diasporic Literary Studies, and I am delighted to welcome Dr. Janelle Rodriques to the department, whose expertise in West Indian, Caribbean literature and culture of the 19th to 21st centuries; African/Caribbean religious and spiritual praxis; and cultural and literary forms of the Black/Caribbean diaspora will add richly to our department.
We have a busy but exciting year ahead. We will be conducting four faculty searches for an Assistant Professor in American Indian and Indigenous Literary Studies, an Assistant Professor in Latinx Literature and Culture, an Assistant Teaching Professor in Program for Writing Across Campus, and up to three Assistant Teaching Professors in Technical and Professional Communication, the latter approved as part of the Provost Values-Based Initiative. In addition, this Fall we will be reassessing our department five-year hiring plan, which will give us a chance to articulate connections across our various hiring needs.
I am especially excited about building intellectual community around our newly revised undergraduate major curriculum, which was successfully led by Jesse Oak Taylor and formally approved by the UW to go into effect this Fall. We will be discussing how English 202 (the Gateway to the Major) can introduce students to the learning goals guiding our three new distribution areas (Historical Depth, Power and Difference, and Genre, Method, and Language), and we will be working on short videos promoting the new major and courses, including a video episode featuring faculty dialogue about the interconnections among the distribution areas.
Two of our writing programs have changed their names: The Expository Writing Program (EWP) is now the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), and the Interdisciplinary Writing Program (IWP) is now the Program for Writing Across Campus (PWAC). The new names better reflect the programs’ work and emerged through consultation with various campus stakeholders over the 2021-22 academic year. Together, PWR and PWAC serve about 75% of all UW first-year students annually, and their courses satisfy either the UW Composition (“C”) or Writing (“W”) credit. In their curriculum and teacher development, both programs are committed to antiracism, social justice, and accessibility. Along with the name changes, the Padelford office suite housing both programs will be undergoing a renovation this Fall to create more creative and collaboration spaces.
Speaking of space renovations, thanks to Eva Cherniavsky and our department staff, the department’s graduate lounge has undergone a refurbishment with new furniture and seating to support intellectual community. Led by Eva, we will inaugurate the space this Fall with the new Works in Progress Colloquium series featuring graduate students and faculty. In addition, thanks to Stephanie Kerschbaum, we will continue a Graduate Student Peer Mentoring Program begun last year.
With donor gifts, we are beginning work on an internship program this year led by Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges that will support English majors in connecting what they are learning in the major with their professional aspirations. With support from the Mary and Allan Kollar Endowed Scholarship in English, we will also this year start a mentoring and community-building program for English majors who are interested in teaching careers, led by Candice Rai and Cristina Sánchez-Martín.
In addition, this Fall we will launch, with support from the Humanities Division, the new Humanities Data Science lab. Led by Anna Preus, the lab will offer classroom space for humanities data studies courses as well as offer workshops and resources for programming, text encoding and archiving, data analysis, and digitizing texts. You can learn more about this digital humanities work in the department’s Literature, Language, Culture dialogue series episode featuring Anna Preus and Geoffrey Turnovsky (Professor and Chair of French and Italian). Please support the department by subscribing to our YouTube channel so you can stay up to date on the series, or check out the series webpage for the latest episodes. Our new Public Pedagogies webpage includes teaching materials related to some of the episodes.
We will also spend time this year developing design templates for hybrid courses as we continue to build on what we learned about accessibility and various modalities for supporting student engagement during the pandemic.
This issue of English Matters introduces you to our new faculty colleague and highlights faculty and staff accomplishments, including Stephanie Kerschbaum’s mentoring award and Maya Sonnenberg’s new book. It also features a story about recent PhD Stevi Costa’s work adapting classic works of theater and literature, and the EM editor offers recommended readings.