Graduate Studies

Geoffrey Sirc (PhD 1985) is now serving as the interim chair of the Department of English. Professor Sirc is the author of English Composition as a Happening (Utah State University Press, 2002) and, with Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, and Cynthia L. Selfe, Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (Utah State UP, 2004). He joined the Department in 2006 from the University of Minnesota General College. Former chair Paula Rabinowitz wrapped up her three-year term at the end of June. The Department offers our thanks for her dedicated service! . . .Thank you also to Professors Lois Cucullu and Julie Schumacher, who finished their terms as Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Creative Writing Program, respectively. Professor Ray Gonzalez takes over as the Director of the Creative Writing Program. Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether is Director of Graduate Studies.

The Graduate School awarded Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships for 2009-10 to the following four English PhD students: Sara Cohen for "Medical Screening: Illness, Cyber-bodies, and Digital Death in 21st- Century Visual Culture" (advisers Paula Rabinowitz and Siobhan Craig); Molly Kelley Gage for "Sorting Scraps: The Archive and the Future of Democracy" (adviser Paula Rabinowitz); Kevin Riordan for "Dying Words and the Mechanics of Haunted Reading" (adviser John Mowitt); and Sharin' Schroeder for "Non-consensus Realities: Fantasy and the Child in Victorian Religious Debates" (adviser Brian Goldberg). . . . The Graduate School also awarded Thesis Research Grants to PhD students Amy Griffiths, Nicholas Hengen, and Laura Zebuhr. Congratulations!

Adam Schrag has received the Graduate School’s Leonard Film Fellowship. Steve Healey will teach next year at Michigan State University as the CIC Postdoctoral Fellow. Anne Roth-Reinhardt won the Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship. The first Garner/McNaron/Sprengnether Dissertation Fellowship goes to Renee DeLong. Emily Anderson received the Samuel Holt Monk Memorial Prize for Published Scholarship. The two winners of the Audrey Christensen English Library Acquisition Prize are Sunyoung Ahn and Gregory Murray. Donald Swanbeck won the FLAS Fellowship for this summer and the coming academic year. Congratulations!