Category: The Scarlet Newsletter


UA English Offers a Wealth of Student Publishing Opportunities 

Gaining experience as a beginner can be both overwhelming and stressful yet a crucial key to future success. Fortunately, University of Alabama students have many opportunities to find their place in the publishing process through a variety of UA English programs. Whether they want to share their own work or lift the voices of others by getting involved in the editorial process, students have many options available to gain know-how in the publishing world. These creative and scholarly outlets allow […]

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Associate Professor Delia Steverson: Making the Past Visible and the Future Free 

For Associate Professor Delia Steverson, 2023 has been an eventful year, marked by her hiring at—and homecoming to—The University of Alabama, where she specializes in 20th an 21st Century African American Literature, Critical Disability Studies, and Southern Studies. Additionally, October 15 brough the release of Stumbling Blocks, Steverson’s edited collection of Delores Phillips’s unpublished works.     As she was finishing her PhD at Alabama, focusing on representations of disability in African American literature, she heeded the suggestion of a colleague and read […]

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Gregory Ariail’s Novel, The Gospel of Rot 

Gregory Ariail, a native of Buford, Georgia, earned graduate degrees from Oxford University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Alabama where he currently teaches. In 2019 he thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. The Gospel of Rot is his first book, and Van Newell recently interviewed him to discuss for the Scarlett Newsletter.   I’m interested in learning more about your decision to attend UA’s MFA program after obtaining your PhD from another institution. What did you find attractive or intriguing […]

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Albert Pionke’s Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform 

Albert D. Pionke is the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor of English at the University of Alabama. He is the author and editor of eight books and dozens of shorter articles and essays. His newest publication is Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Van Newell recently interviewed him to discuss his research.  Do scholars studying the middle-class status of the Victorian era create their own definition of middle […]

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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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