Category: The Scarlet Newsletter


Lauren Cardon’s Inclusive College Classrooms: Teaching Methods for Diverse Learners

Creating an inclusive learning environment is a chief goal for educators in today’s diverse college classrooms. Recently, UA English Department’s Dr. Lauren Cardon partnered with Dr. Anne-Marie Womack of Rice University to publish Inclusive College Classrooms: Teaching Methods for Diverse Learners. This book offers valuable insights and practical strategies for instructors and emphasizes the transformative power of inclusive teaching practices. Cardon and Womack’s motivation for writing the book stems from a gap they observed in pedagogical training for faculty. While […]

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Freely We Serve: David Ainsworth and Thomas Festa’s Locating Milton: Places and Perspectives

David Ainsworth is a Professor of English Literature and a member of the Hudson Strode faculty at The University of Alabama. He teaches Seventeenth-Century British literature as part of the Strode Program, specializing in the works of John Milton. He received his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005. In addition to his own writing and scholarship, Ainsworth was named as the first Communications Director of the Milton Society of America in 2013. His latest work, a […]

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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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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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