The English Department has much to celebrate from 2025 in terms of our faculty's awards and achievements. This article captures just a selection of all that our wonderful colleagues accomplished over the past year.
Promotion, Retention, and New Leaders
The English Department would like to extend special congratulations to Megan Callow and Josephine Walwema for their promotions to the rank of Full Teaching Professor earlier this year.
Additionally, congratulations are in order for Frances McCue, Jonathan Radocay, and Alexandria Ramos for their recent reappointments.
This year, we welcomed three new faculty members: Rhema Hokama (Assistant Professor of English Literature), Hunter Little (Assistant Teaching Professor in the Program for Writing Across Campus and Program for Writing and Rhetoric), and Frank Macarthy (also Assistant Teaching Professor in PWAC and PWR). To learn more about our three newest faculty hires, check out this recent news article profiling their exciting work. We also welcomed a new department administrator, Maria Francom.
And we celebrated three new program directors:
Jonathan Isaac as Director of the Program for Writing Across Campus
Josephine Walwema as Director of the Program in Technical and Professional Communication
Andrew Feld as Director of Creative Writing
Awards and Honors
Writing@UW, directed by Megan Callow, won the 2025 award for Exemplary Emerging Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program, given by the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.
Catherine Cole was awarded with the 2025 Distinguished Scholar Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship in the Field of Theatre Studies from the American Society for Theatre Research.
Rhema Hokama was selected for a three-year term as the English literary discipline representative for the Renaissance Society of America, the largest membership society in early modern studies with a conference that draws around 3,000 attendees each year.
Matt Poland (PTL) won the Donald Gray Essay Prize, one of the major prizes in Victorian studies, for his essay "Eliot at Yale," which appeared in George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies. The prize is awarded annually for the "best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies" by the North American Victorian Studies Association.
Chadwick Allen's 2024 essay “Post-Removal Mounds: Earthworks Rising in Oklahoma" received an Honorable Mention from the Western Literature Association for its 2025 Don D. Walker Award for best essay in western American studies.
Maya Sonenberg received the English Department’s Faculty Teaching Award for the 2024-2025 academic year.
David Shields’s film How We Got Here is an official selection of the 2025 Seattle Film Festival.
UW and National Fellowships and Grants
Jonathan Radocay was selected as a 2025 Cherokee Scholars Fellow, part of the Digadatseli’i ᏗᎦᏓᏤᎵᎢ Cherokee Citizen Scholars Academic Project Development Workshop in spring 2025.
Alexandria Ramos received the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) “Rooted and Relational” Summer Research Fellowship at Hunter College to spend two weeks researching in the Jesús Colón papers at their archives in East Harlem.
Cristina Sánchez-Martín received the Community Literacies Collaboratory (CLC) Literacies Research Grant funded by the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas to support her continued work on the Translationships project.
Nancy Bou Ayash, Stephanie Kerschbaum, and Anis Bawarshi received the 2024-2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication Research Initiative Grant for “Learning from Student Writing to Understand the Impacts of Antiracist and Equity- Oriented Writing Program Transformation.”
Stephanie Kerschbaum, Stephanie Clare, Chris Holstrom, and Douglas Ishii received an English Department Collaboration Grant to study "Classroom Cultures and Attendance."
Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges, Jonathan Radocay, and Candice Rai received an English Department Collaboration Grant to study "Equitable Dept. Assessment Practices, Grading Norms & Guidelines."
Simpson Center Awards
Anna Preus was awarded a Simpson Center grant to support her collaborative project, "Cultural Analytics Praxis." In addition, Preus received Simpson Center support for a First Book Manuscript Workshop.
Stephanie Kerschbaum was awarded a Simpson Center grant to support her collaborative project, "Transforming Knowledge-Making Practices Through Research on Equity-Oriented and Antiracist Writing Program Initiatives across the UW." This project is being conducted alongside colleagues Anis Bawarshi, Nancy Bou Ayash, Megan Callow, Josephine Walwema, Jonathan Isaac, Candice Rai, and Hunter Little.
Alexandria Ramos, Alys Weinbaum, and Kathleen Woodward were selected for the Society of Scholars Fellowship for 2025-2026.
Rhema Hokama was selected for the Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship for 2025.
Megan Callow and Jonathan Radocay each led Simpson Center-supported Faculty Writing Groups in 2025.
Speaking Appearances and Public Scholarship
Monika Kaup gave an invited talk at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, entitled "Bargaining with the Future: Economic Narratives from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis."
Cristina Sánchez-Martín facilitated a discussion at the UW Language Learning Center entitled, “Navigating unequal language spaces and cultivating connections through critical language pedagogy” (November 19).
Shawn Wong will perform a reading and chat with novelist Ishmael Reed at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco (December 18). Both Wong and Ishmael Reed are featured in the book Blind Persistence: The History of The Before Columbus Foundation, edited by Ishmael Reed and Justin Desmangles.
Calvin Pollak gave a public talk in the Teaching@UW Reflection and Practice series entitled “Teaching Critical Literacy of ‘AI’” in February 2025.
Kate Norako gave a public talk, "Stories from a Queer Middle Ages," at the Edmonds Public Library for Under the Rainbow's speaker series, and the organization has invited her back to give a second talk on queer representation in contemporary fantasy literature this coming winter.
Anis Bawarshi delivered a lecture (“Communication across Radical Difference: Uptake, ‘Disruptake’, and the Possibilities for Rhetoric”), led a workshop, and participated in an interview about the field as part of a visiting lectures series at Florida State University October 16-17, 2025.
Frances McCue interviewed the Head of Ireland's National Library at Town Hall (October 10). This was part of the Irish Art and Literature Showcase presented by Folio.