Dear Alumni and Friends,
We’re well into autumn semester as I write — that energizing time when students are again packing the Oval, the Union, the libraries, and the classrooms and lounges in Denney Hall. In our departmental Commons Room on the third floor, we have hosted a week-long training workshop for new graduate teaching associates and an orientation for new MFA and PhD students, and recently students gathered there to audition for the autumn production of Lord Denney’s Players (and to eat pizza). In our classrooms, students are sharing their writing, discussing their readings, and challenging themselves to consider new ideas and perspectives.
And yet, it feels like summer, and I’m still relishing the memory of the Young Writers Workshop in July, when high school students descended on Denney Hall for a week of practicing their creative writing with a group of visiting faculty. I’ve also been finishing my summer reading. Many thanks to those of you who sent in your suggestions for what to read: the complete list is below. One of my own favorite picks was Banyan Moon , the beautiful debut novel by Thao Thai (’12 MFA). The absorbing story of three generations of mothers and daughters, Banyan Moon offers a haunting meditation on the convergence of the past and future. Early in the novel, Thai memorably captures the richness of that “in-between space” in her character Ann’s description of dusk as the time of day “where the warmth of the sun begins to give way to the squeeze of the night.”
As the Department of English begins a new year, we are in an “in-between” space not only between summer and fall, but also between the old and new, or as Buckeyes would have it, between time and change. This semester, our faculty are teaching new courses like Literature and Leadership alongside special topics courses on Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and we continue to think about when and how to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools into our courses. (View the university’s statement on AI here.)
As always, our students help drive interest in new areas of English studies. Below, you will find several examples of how our graduate students, in particular, are working as change agents. Carlos Gabriel Kelly González (’22 PhD) has pushed the study of narrative and storytelling to action-adventure video games in his new book Ready Player Juan. Erin Bahl (’18 PhD), who studies new media and digital technologies, collaborated with Associate Professor Margaret Price to design a prize-winning webtext that explores audio description as a digital-composing practice. And current PhD student Caleb Gonzalez ’s research on writing programs at Hispanic Serving Institutions and teaching Ohio State’s Young Scholars program was recognized in May by Vice President Kamala Harris.
I hope that you enjoy these stories and the innovation they represent. At the same time, I hope you reflect on your own memories of Ohio State. The College of Arts and Sciences is hosting a Homecoming celebration on October 7 if you’d like to return to the Oval on a beautiful fall Saturday.
Susan Williams
Professor and Chair
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