UMBC English Department
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The English Department is a vibrant center for teaching, learning, and research, offering courses on literature, communication, writing, rhetoric, journalism, creative writing, and digital media. The Master of Arts in Texts, Technologies, and Literature provides an opportunity for advanced students to further their understanding of literature and a broad array of other texts, including digital, academic, and those that function in everyday use, in relation to both historical and contemporary culture.
The English Department takes great pride in our combination of award-winning research and deep commitment to students and teaching. Our faculty are among the most productive researchers at UMBC and have interests in a wide range of specialties in literature, writing, communication, and technology. UMBC’s outstanding English faculty past and present includes winners of the Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo fellowships, as well as recipients of the American Book Award, the American Studies Network Prize, the James N. Britten Award for Inquiry in the Language Arts, the James Thurber Prize for Comic Fiction, the Society for Professional Journalists’ Award for commentary, the City and Regional Magazine Award for column writing, and Baltimore Magazine‘s Best of the Web award.
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Recent Submissions
Item Becoming A Hero: An Analysis of the Presentation Of Theme In Nintendo’s The Legend Of Zelda Franchise(2023-01-01) Perez, Ivan Carlos; Tran, Sharon; English; Texts, Technologies, and LiteratureMy work proposes using theme as a scope for video game analysis to generate a more wholistic understanding of how the parts of a game interact to generate meaning. When applied to video games as a purely narrative property, themes become relatively static. If we use theme as a scope for analyzing and understanding other elements of the text, however, then we come away with a more complex and dynamic understanding. Using Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda franchise as a case study, I propose that the gameplay expands upon themes put forward in the franchise’s narratives, with my primary focus being on the hero. In Zelda games’ narratives, the hero is discussed in static, traditional terms. But, if we use this theme as a scope for understanding the gameplay, the player has opportunities to both reinforce and play against this understanding, producing a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the hero.Item ASSIMILATING THE ARTS: On Poetry and Difference in Yoko Ono's Grapefruit(Amodern, 2024) Finberg, Keegan CookItem Afghanistan, Gendered Subjects, and Border Politics in Lillias Hamilton’s A Vizier’s Daughter: A Tale of the Hazara War (1900)(Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 2023-06) Fernandez, JeanItem AFTER SAPPHO(University Of Virginia, 1999) Pekarske, NicoleItem The Dead Can’t Dance(University Of Virginia, 2003-12-12) Pekarske, NicoleItem Early Canvas(University Of Virginia, 2003-12-12) Pekarske, NicoleItem Intermissa, Venus(University Of Virginia, 2003-12-12) Pekarske, NicoleItem ON THE BIRTH OF MY MOTHER''S YOUNGEST BROTHER(VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW) Pekarske, NicoleItem Early Canvas(Verse Daily, 2004) Pekarske, NicoleItem Reading a Memoir at Cedar Island(POETRY FOUNDATION, 2007-11) Pekarske, NicoleItem Carolina Journal(POETRY FOUNDATION, 2007-11) Pekarske, NicoleItem MONET’S WATERLOO BRIDGE(Alaska Quarterly Review, 2016) Pekarske, NicoleItem WHY MONET STILL MATTERS(Masque & Spectacle, 2016-05-31) Pekarske, NicoleItem Attending the School of Pain: Disabled Children in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction(2023-01-01) Jett, Emma; DiCuirci, Lindsay; English; Texts, Technologies, and LiteratureThis thesis is concerned with looking at several common character archetypes of disabled children in mid-nineteenth-century American fiction, exploring an intersection between childhood and disability studies that previously has not been given significant attention. To fill this gap, this study offers a reading of some of the many nineteenth-century disabled child characters that filled both popular children?s literature and domestic literature of the period. As these genres of literature are concerned with the bildungsroman, the presence of disability complicates our expectations and understanding of childhood growth. Through this research, the archetypes of the sickly Angel in the House, the disabled child whose body is leveraged as an object lesson, and the child chastened by pain are explored, turning to disabled literary children both to bring their disabled bodies out of the shadows and to critique the moral, educational, societal, and representational work that these characters perform in nineteenth-century American fiction.Item Working With Faculty Partners to Change Conceptions of Writing Beyond University Walls(Clemson University, 2023) Olejnik, Mandy; Wardle, Elizabeth; Maher, Jennifer Helene; Chesher, Will; Glotfelter, AngelaThis article argues that writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs are well-positioned to change not only faculty (and student) conceptions around writing within the university, but also to collaborate with disciplinary faculty who have crossed conceptual thresholds about writing and work together with them to advocate for changed conceptions of writing beyond the university. Faculty can and do change their conceptions around writing when engaging in WAC programming that is intentionally designed around conceptual and systemic change. Similar methods for change-focused work can also be used beyond the university, and disciplinary faculty can become ambassadors and messengers in our efforts to help change public misconceptions of writing. This article argues for and demonstrates how to take advantage of the methods and heuristics used in WAC programming to reach the larger public through the example of the online Miami Writing Institute, designed around common myths about writing and alternative threshold concepts based in writing research.Item BBC at 100: a Trusted International News Source, but it is Important to Remember Whose Values it Reflects(The Conversation, 2022-10-17) Berman, JessicaItem Louise Blakeney Williams, Modernism and the Ideology of History and Paul Sheehan Modernism and Humanism(University Of Chicago Press, 2004-11) Berman, JessicaItem Tango, Gendered Embodiment, and Acousmatic Listening in Argentina(Stanford University, 2021) Berman, JessicaThis essay considers the modernist cultural production of tango within the contexts of broadcast radio and popular print in the 1920s and 1930s, when both tango and radio were reaching their heyday. Because of its deep engagement with the changing social, economic, and media dynamics of Argentine modernity, its emphasis on cultural “newness” and experimental forms, as well as its play with matters of identity, embodiment, and belonging, tango deserves to be considered among the forms of Argentine modernism. I explore the connections between tango-canción (tango song) as broadcast on the radio, cultural conceptions of voice, and the new and changing understandings of gender identity, embodiment, and women’s roles as they emerge in popular magazines of the time. When we consider the modernism of tango or the shifting notions of embodiment, intimacy, and relation that accompany broadcast radio in the early twentieth century, we must recognize popular print as central to those developments and part of an intermedial nexus of responses to the situation of Argentine modernity. By examining the changing roles of tango’s cancionistas (female singers) in the twenties and thirties in the context of writing about women in the popular press, I show how the protocols and practices of radio and popular print offered crucial challenges to existing notions of gender in the mediascape of 1920s and 1930s Argentina.Item Making "Digital Cruikshank": A Special Collections Collaboration(2023-04-21) Graham, Susan; DiCuirci, Lindsay; Library & EnglishIn Fall 2022, students in Lindsay DiCuirci's combined undergraduate and graduate English seminar participated in a semester-long collaboration with UMBC Special Collections. This course was supported by a Hrabowski Innovation Grant which allowed Susan Graham and her team to digitize a collection of donated materials related to George Cruikshank. Cruikshank was nineteenth-century England’s most prolific caricaturist and illustrator; the Merkle family's donation included unbound manuscript materials and over 120 printed works. Working in teams to build a digital resource based on these materials, students produced "Digital Cruikshank: Etching & Sketching in Nineteenth-Century England" (https://library-dev.umbc.edu/wp/specialcollections/cruikshank/) The resource features over 130 sketches gathered into collections with accompanying explanatory content. This presentation will share elements of the project management workflow and student-created guides and templates. We will also highlight the interdisciplinary affordances of collaborative, archival work as well as the significant pedagogical benefits of a project-based class in the Humanities.Item "It's About Damn Time": Lizzo and the Rhetoric of Body Positivity(2022-01-01) Sterling, Desiree S; Brooks, Earl H; English; Texts, Technologies, and LiteratureThrough rhetorical analysis, I argue that popular culture sensation Lizzo emulatesrestorative literacy practices for fat, Black women to navigate harmful cultural norms manifested as anti-blackness, misogynoir, and fatphobia on and offline. This analysis explores how the public sphere often weaponizes contrived notions of desirability, health, and authentic happiness to read marginalization. Lizzo's public and highly active social media presence exposes these assumptions through her polarized reception by users across platforms, shedding light on 1) eugenics-inspired logic that informs social biases and 2) subversive counternarratives engaged in through her content creation. I explore seven case studies by which Lizzo maximizes her exposure online to not only increase the visibility of celebrity but also curate multi-media cultural work remedying limiting representations of fat, Black women by rejecting dehumanizing imagery and reductive social expectations. Lizzo replaces tropes projecting unattraction, disease, and solemnity with anecdotal accounts that exude self-confidence, vitality, and Black joy.