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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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 […]

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

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 […]

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

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 […]

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

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 […]

Read More from Flexible, Free, and Flipped: COVE in the Classroom 

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 […]

Read More from Preparing for a Pandemic: Safety in Flexible Approaches