Dear Alumni and Friends,
I am delighted to send you this alumni newsletter and to introduce myself as the new chair of the Department of English, a position I began this past summer. Although I’m a new chair, I’ve been a professor in the department for the last 25 years and I’m sure I was lucky enough to have had some of you in my classes.
Spring semester is always a busy one as we make plans to celebrate our graduating majors at our annual departmental award ceremony. It’s one of my favorite events because the whole community of undergraduate and graduate students, their families, professors, and staff gathers together to confer our departmental awards. And it’s because of your generous donations that we’re able to give our students these awards celebrating their research and creative expression and supporting their education, internship experiences, and study abroad opportunities.
We are also in the heart of admissions season, and Undergraduate Program Manager Elizabeth Falter and Undergraduate Studies Director Jennifer Higginbotham have been sending letters and materials letting future Buckeyes know about the amazing opportunities our department provides to its students. Some of these opportunities are showcased in this alumni newsletter.
In reading through the stories assembled here, I was struck by the exciting work that our students and graduates are bringing to the world: teaching video storytelling, writing and publishing romance novels, running a successful business dedicated to teaching folklore and fantasy literature, producing radio broadcasts. I was also inspired by the explanations of why and how their studies of language, literature, and storytelling were so critical to their accomplishments. As recent alum Kira Kadar observes, what she learned in her English classes was foundational to many fields that perhaps don’t seem “typical English major things.” And, as the profile of Professor Jamison Kantor’s class reveals, even things that seem more “typical” English major activities—like reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula—become occasions for learning about genre, media, research methods, and perseverance.
The metaphor I like to share with my students follows from William Carlos Williams’s claim about poetry: “a poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.” Our human world runs on these word machines (in prose and poetry). You and our current students are the mechanics who get under the hood to make our word machines and world work better, and I am immensely grateful to you for this labor.
Warm thanks,
Beth
Elizabeth Hewitt
Professor and Chair
