Before joining the Department of English at The University of Alabama in 2015, Dr. Cindy Tekobbe taught classes for Arizona State University’s Department of English, Writing Programs, and Herberger School of Arts, Media + Engineering. She covered topics such as digital design and rhetoric, social media literacy, gender and sexuality, rhetoric of memory and identity, academic writing and research, and first-year composition. Dr. Tekobbe is a career software developer and project manager, specializing in enterprise financial applications and web platforms. […]
Category: News
A Professor with Global Reach Joins the UA Department of English
Dr. Duncan Yoon came to Department of English in 2015. He holds an MA from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He also serves as the co-director of the Global South Cultural Dialogue Project. Dr. Yoon specializes in Africa and China cultural relations, the Cold War postcolonialism world, and world literature. Tell me about your areas of expertise. As an undergraduate, I majored in English and French, and so I was interested in writing that had […]
Read More from A Professor with Global Reach Joins the UA Department of English
Coming Soon to the Department of English
Each day, Morgan Hall welcomes students and professors from all corners of UA’s diverse campus, from First-Year composition students to sophomores fulfilling survey requirements to English and Creative Writing majors and minors. Theater and Dance students often occupy Morgan’s first floor auditorium. While this bright array of people will remain constant, changes are underway for the Department’s English major. The English faculty have updated the Department’s foreign language requirement, allowing students to take computer science in place of a language. […]
Meet The University of Alabama’s Outstanding Dissertation Recipient
An old king wishes to leave his kingdom to his three daughters whom he loves dearly, yet his generous wish leads to the death of his entire family. This dark and twisted tragedy centers on manipulation and power struggles, but what else can we expect from the Bard? Dr. Nicholas Helms, an instructor at The University of Alabama, first found his passion for Shakespeare after studying the carefully crafted plot of King Lear. “I felt like they were such deep […]
Read More from Meet The University of Alabama’s Outstanding Dissertation Recipient
Nathan Parker’s The Locust Diagrams
“I feel really lucky,” admits Nathan Parker, an English instructor at The University of Alabama and author of The Locust Diagrams, as he sits outside Starbucks, his multicolored beanie making him stand out from the crowd on a spring day. “After The Locust Diagrams came out, I did a reading tour up the East Coast with one of my dear friends. We did readings, slept on people’s floors, sold a few books, and met some new people,” Parker recalls. “My […]
Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow
In Hunting Season, Beau Taplin’s collection of poetry and prose, Taplin asserts that “Sunsets are proof that endings can often be beautiful too.” Beautiful endings are a fitting goodbye to one of our beloved professors, Sharon O’Dair, who retired after the spring semester of 2016. O’Dair was a Hudson Strode Professor of English and the Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies for The University of Alabama. She organized both of the 2016 Shakespeare Symposia to honor the […]
From the Chair
To the English Department Community, Greetings from Morgan Hall! I welcome this opportunity to share with you the current situation of the Department and our accomplishments over the past year. In 2015-2016 the English Department had 39 tenure-track faculty (12 Assistant Professors, 14 Associate Professors, and 13 Professors, 2 NTRC Assistant Professors, 46 Full-time Instructors and 27 Part-time Instructors. We hired two new Assistant Professors (L. Lamar Wilson in Creative Writing and Dorothy Worden in Linguistics), one new Associate Professor […]
What We’re Reading
Shanti Weiland I recently read Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff. This book provides both a biography of the personal and political aspects of Cleopatra’s life, and an exploration of the numerous historians, poets, and actresses who have portrayed her in writing, literature, and film. Schiff never completely commits to one interpretation of some of Cleopatra’s actions. Rather, she suggests that a patriarchal history has painted her as an irresistible siren, or even a demonic evil genius. That history, she argues, has […]
What We’re Reading
John Burke Since I have been in the process of developing ideas about the representation of the East in western literature, I determined it was time for me to take a close look at Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1979; rpt. 2004). It’s a very famous book, I know, but (blush) I never succeeded in finding the time to give it a careful look. I’m very glad that I finally did. As I suspected, Saïd’s argument is an incisive deconstruction of western […]
Interview with Andy Johnson
Andy Johnson is an instructor of English at The University of Alabama, specializing in African American Literature. How long have you been teaching? What made you want to teach your subject? I’ve been teaching for about six years now. When I tell people what I do for a living, they always say, “Oh, I hate writing! I’m terrible at it.” I had the same experience—my high school teachers told me my writing skills were weak at best. I went into […]