Robin Behn’s latest book, Requiem for the Innocent: El Paso and Beyond (2020, George F. Thompson Publishing), is a poignant and elegant commemoration of the victims of the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. The poems—jarring and provocative—are accompanied in the book by the photography of John Willis, all images of flowers of remembrance placed in the aftermath of the tragedy. However, the work is intended as a larger collaboration with the music of Matan Rubinstein, so that image, […]

Read More from What Art Can Do: Robin Behn’s Requiem for the Innocent

UA English professor Heather White’s Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life, was published in July 2021 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Professor White has edited several volumes of Marianne Moore’s poetry, including the New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), which won the 2019 Modern Language Association Prize for Best Scholarly Edition. Professor White has also published critical essays on Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and Lorine Niedecker. Alongside the reading […]

Read More from Heather White’s Books Promiscuously Read

Many English faculty will already know Seth Stewart, a six-year veteran of the department. His approachable personality and continual faculty support—holding frequent teaching workshops and guidance sessions for his fellow teachers—make him a prominent and invaluable colleague. But along with his passionate commitment to teaching and faculty service, he is also an accomplished scholar with a substantial contribution to pioneering scholarly work on the lesser known but influential poet, John Wieners. Stewart’s newest book, Yours Presently: the Selected Letters of […]

Read More from Seth Stewart’s Yours Presently: Opening a New Chapter in History

Professor Jessica Fordham Kidd’s debut book, Bad Jamie, is a magical realist poetry collection that tells the story of the tragic everyman of its title character, who embodies family tension and connection to nature.   Jamie has complicated relationships with every character in the collection. Despite strong family ties, there are social and economic blocks that keep Jamie from fulfilling his role as a “good” dad, brother, and son. His addictions keep him from fully expressing his longing to be […]

Read More from Jessica Kidd’s Bad Jamie: Ties that Bind

Amber Buck is an assistant professor of composition and rhetoric in the University of Alabama’s Department of English. She received her Ph.D. in English and Writing Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Buck specializes in digital literacies, multimodal composition, and social media. She recently co-edited a collection of essays on the multiple facets of Netflix, Netflix at the Nexus: Content, Practice, and Production in the Age of Streaming Television (Peter Lang, 2019). Can you explain the background of […]

Read More from Amber Buck’s Netflix at the Nexus

PhD student, Khadeidra Billingsley, is on a roll (Tide!). In 2019, she placed second for the Carolyn P. Handa Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition and won the “People’s Choice” award at the Graduate School’s 3 Minute Thesis Competition. In 2020, Billingsley was awarded National Council of Teachers of English Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award and presented “High School English Teachers’ Perceptions of Academic Writing” at NCTE’s annual convention. “Though I don’t need the recognition because teaching […]

Read More from Interview with Khadeidra Billingsley, Winner of the National Council of Teachers of English Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award

Professor Elizabeth E. Tavares joined the Department of English in Fall 2020 as part of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. Tavares comes to the Department from her prior Assistant Professorship at Pacific University near Portland, Oregon. With a wide range of talents and interests, she brings unique and contemporary approaches to researching and teaching early modern English theatre to the Department. Tavares’s love of the theatre is rooted in her passion for music. She originally traveled from her […]

Read More from Faculty Profile: Professor Elizabeth E. Tavares

For members of the UA Department of English, Dr. Steven Trout is well-known for his role chairing the Department through the challenges of an ongoing pandemic. However, his work on war and remembrance—specifically in terms of Modernist literature, and in broader cultural studies—is extensive and impressive. His most recent works, both published in 2020, are The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire: War, Remembrance, and an American Tragedy, and Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War, a […]

Read More from The Work of Dr. Steven Trout: A Study of Memory and Conflict

Syllabus diversity; class accessibility; inclusivity and accommodation: These concerns are front and center in higher education. For The University of Alabama Department of English, Lauren Cardon and Jenifer Park have helped develop programming to show practical ways that teachers can address these concerns, both in the classroom and in the campus community. Cardon and Park are co-coordinators of the Diversity Initiative. The project began as a goal of 2019-2020 department chair, David Ainsworth “to promote efforts to integrate more diversity […]

Read More from Lauren Cardon and Jenifer Park: Helping Build Diversity in the Classroom and Community

Dr. David Ainsworth is an associate professor of seventeenth century British literature as part of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance studies here in UA’s Department of English. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This past year, Professor Ainsworth served as interim chair of the Department of English. Prior to his departmental leadership, Ainsworth served as the first communications director of the Milton Society of America from 2013-2017. His latest book, Milton, Music, and Literary Interpretation: Reading through […]

Read More from Of Milton, Music, and Literature: A Conversation with Professor David Ainsworth