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Emily Wittman’s New Book, Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing

Emily Wittman has been a member of UA’s Department of English for 16 years. Her research primarily focuses on self-writing: autobiography, memoir, and travel writing. Her most recent book, Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing, examines the notion of “authenticity” in travel writing of the interwar period, a time when new technologies enabled traveling in ways not previously possible. Emily’s book questions these interwar writers’ senses of authentic experience in foreign places as well as how they […]

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Brooke Champagne’s Nola Face

Brooke Champagne

Your collection Nola Face includes several bilingual essays. Can you talk about the Spanish influence both in your life and work? My bilingualism is in some ways the subject of my life. I spent much of my childhood as unofficial translator for my grandmother Lala, who spoke no English. Or I should say, she understood it only when convenient. The bawdy, often outrageous things she said to strangers—asking what small rodent had died in their mouth to cause such severe […]

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Robert Poole’s Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics

detail of the English Building

Robert Poole received his PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona in 2015 and his MA in TESOL from the University of Alabama in 2011. His research primarily concerns corpus-aided discourse study, using corpora in language teaching and learning, and ecolinguistics. His most recent book, Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics, was published in 2022 by Bloomsbury Academic, and he has recent articles in Applied Corpus Linguistics, Corpora, the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, and the Journal of […]

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Dewpoint Magazine: Sigma Tau Delta’s Literary Journal

Dewpoint Magazine is a literary magazine designed to showcase the best original poetry, prose, and critical works by students and faculty at The University of Alabama. During the 2022 academic year, the Phi Xi chapter of Sigma Tau Delta decided to take our award-winning publication to the online realm. While Dewpoint has been produced in the past, the current Sigma Tau Delta executive council is dedicated to getting the works of students and faculty showcased. A lot of opportunities to submit pieces for […]

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Grey LaJoie, Recent MFA Graduate, Wins Outstanding Teaching Award

Grey LaJoie, recent MFA graduate and Prison Arts and Education Fellow, won Outstanding Teaching by a Master’s Student in Spring 2022. LaJoie attributes their success in teaching to their influential instructor in community college: “Yesho Atil provided a model for me and saw what I was capable of becoming, and invited me to step into it, to try it on. She ‘loved me into being,’ as Mister Rogers would say.” LaJoie’s mission as a teacher is to allow students to […]

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Professor Heather White Wins the Current-Garcia Award

the cover of Books Promiscuously Read

Perhaps it is not surprising that a literature professor would write a book in praise of the habit of reading—yet Dr. Heather White’s Books Promiscuously Read (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2021) is a superb surprise, with apologies to Emily Dickinson. With eclectic and extravagant generosity, White dispenses wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of reading and thinking about reading. In White’s own words, Books Promiscuously Read considers how the printed word is “the means by which all readers hear the gods’ […]

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Setting the Scene: Sara Pirkle and the University of Alabama Visiting Writers Series

Margaret Atwood. Neil Gaiman. Alice Walker. The University of Alabama Visiting Writers Series has brought notable voices to campus and fostered creative relationships with students and faculty alike since its inception in 1972. The immense task of scheduling and hosting visiting writers is where UA’s creative writing community and Assistant Director Sara Pirkle’s dedication shines. Sara Pirkle began her administrative work with the creative writing program back in Spring 2018 and has been instrumental in organizing events. Pirkle reflects on […]

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Emily O. Wittman’s The New Midlife Self-Writing and Ongoing Optimism

The end of spring semester always brings with it a fleeting sense of conclusion. Another set of grades and the rush of students up and out of Tuscaloosa. Graduating seniors leave their final exams with a mixed sense of triumph, assuredness, and relief. Their graduation the next societal marker of progress they’ve met. Another checkmark or rung on whichever ubiquitous and linear metaphor we use to describe living. However, in The New Midlife Self-Writing, Dr. Emily O. Wittman documents and […]

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Flexible, Free, and Flipped: COVE in the Classroom 

When Albert Pionke and Dan Novak first used COVE (Collective Organization for Virtual Education) for their courses, each immediately saw the vast possibilities, both pedagogical and scholarly, the system offered. For Novak, that meant providing his EN 349 students with a “custom-made and free anthology” during the height of the pandemic, and for Pionke it allowed his EN 537 class to “build a critical edition of a forgotten 19th century novel.” COVE is an online collection of material from all periods of literature, with a […]

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Preparing for a Pandemic: Safety in Flexible Approaches

It was one of my students who notified me halfway through my last course of the day. It was March 12th, 2020, and the course was World Literature. Students and faculty had been on pins and needles throughout the week as news from Italy, Seattle, and New York grew increasingly dire. When my student raised his hand, I was expecting a question in relation to José Martí’s poetry, but, in retrospect, I should have been aware my students were tracking […]

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