OCU English graduate Brandon Hobson won 2nd place for this novel Street Dogs in the 34th Annual 3-Day Novel contest. Brandon is currently working on a Ph.D. in creative writing at Oklahoma State University. Congratulations, Brandon!
Marc DiPaolo's book War, Politics and Superheroes (MacFarland Press) has been named one of the top 500 academic books of 2011 by CHOICE Magazine (of the American Library Association). Congratulations to Dr. DiPaolo!
On Saturday, September 17, the Center for Interpersonal Studies and the English Department hosted the Oklahoma Council Of Teachers of English's Fall State Conference on campus. Over 70 high school and university teachers from across the state attended the conference in the Kerr McGee Auditorium in the Meinders School of Business. The keynote speaker was the former head of the National Conference of Teachers of English, Carol Jago. The OCU Admissions Office was present in the rotunda offering information on OCU to high school English teachers to return to their schools to share with students and counselors.
Senior Ethan Davis had the opportunity to study at Kingston University in the UK for the month of July, where he took courses on London and Its Literature and British Culture and Society. He was also able to tour many literary and historical sites, such as the Sherlock Holmes Museum, Charles Dickens' home in Camden, Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, Hampton Court Palace, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and the British Museum, as well as sties in Scotland and Paris. He declares it a "once in a lifetime opportunity that enriched my studies of British literature at OCU."
The fall 2011 OCU Honors Composition service-learning class will partner with an honors composition class at Auburn University in Montgomery, Ala., to study material rhetoric and oral history through public memorialization. The Auburn students will be working at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery in parallel with OCU’s work at the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Auburn’s professor representative will meet with Brooke Hessler, OCU professor of English, for a tour of the students’ work at the Oklahoma City memorial. Their class may include a videocast summit, a conference panel and a digital storytelling project about the students' research.
Assistant Professor Amrita Sen has two publications forthcoming: "Playing an Indian Queen: Neoplatonism, Ethnography, and The Temple of Love,” in Indography: Writing the “Indian” in Early Modern England, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris, Palgrave Macmillan (May 2012); and “Classifying the Natives in Early Modern Ethnographies: Henry Lord’s A Display of Two Foreign Sects in the East Indies,” co-authored with Jyotsna G. Singh, in Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing (2012).Professor Emerita Salwa Khoddam's new book Mythopoeic Narnia: Memory, Metaphor, and Metamorphosis in The Chronicles of Narnia has just been published by Winged Lion Press. Dr. Khoddam has also been invited by Cambridge Scholars Press (UK) to be the editor of a volume of conference proceedings (from a conference hosted at OCU in 2010), titled C.S. Lewis and the Inklings: Discovering Hidden Truth.Professor Abigail Keegan’s poetry collection Depending on the Weather was published this spring by Village Books Press.
