It has been another great academic year in Drown Hall. Like most people on the planet, we spent the last few weeks of the summer leading up to the Fall semester watching the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. But unlike most casual spectators, we had the opportunity to cheer for one of our own: Darian Cruz, an English major who graduated from Lehigh in 2018, wrestled for Team Puerto Rico at 57 kg and took fifth place overall. We also spent the summer cheering on a cohort of our current English majors who received funding from the department’s new Summer Experiential Learning Fellowships. These fellowships, made possible in part by alumni donations, supported Audrey Clancy as an intern at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.; Julia Rock-Torcivia as a research assistant at the University of Galway in Ireland; Jamie Marshaleck as a camp director at Touchstone Theater in Bethlehem, PA; and Marcella Rodio as an intern at Keystone Equality, based out of Philadelphia, PA. We’re so grateful to be surrounded by hard-working English majors who are already making a difference in the world.
As the Fall semester began, we cheered on two of our English faculty members who offered innovative, team-taught interdisciplinary seminars for first-year students. Professor Brooke Rollins partnered with Professor Will Lowry from the Theatre Department to create “All Fun & Games: How Does Play Change Us?” a course that incorporated game studies theory (drawn from philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies) with theatre-based practices in emergent storytelling, creative problem solving, and embodied narrative. And Professor Lorenzo Servitje teamed up with Professor Elizabeth Young from the Department of Chemistry on “How do Explosives Catalyze Change?” a course that covered not only the physics and chemistry of explosives, but the cultural and ethical implications of how explosives have been used in war, colonialism, and trade.
This year we have been excited to have new faculty members join our department. Professor Simone Alexander began her new role as the Director of Africana Studies and Professor of English, bringing with her over twenty years of experience as a teacher and scholar of African American and Caribbean Literature. The faculty in our first-year writing program has also grown dramatically in the past two years as we have welcomed Renée Bailey, Nicole Batchelor, Lee Bauknight, Renee Buesking, and Isabelle Karleskint as Teaching Assistant Professors in the department.
Outside of the classroom, English department faculty and students alike have been busy pursuing research projects that are being recognized at the highest levels.
- Professor Emily Weissbourd recently published her first book, Bad Blood: Race and the Place of Spain in Early Modern English Literature, with the University of Pennsylvania Press, the premier venue for publication of research in Early Modern literary studies. She followed up this success by publishing an invited essay for The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race on “Shakespeare, Race, and Spain.”
- Professor Amardeep Singh was the co-PI on a Digital Humanities grant, “Responsible Datasets in Context,” funded by the Mozilla Foundation, which gave him the opportunity to partner with faculty at five different universities. Professor Singh also involved Lehigh MA student Katherine Hennessey in grant-funded research activities before she graduated and joined Lafayette College as the assistant director for student-athlete success.
- Professor Michael Kramp continues to partner with colleagues in Lehigh’s College of Health to mentor undergraduate students working on the Mothers of Sierra Leone project, which includes a series of social-impact documentary short films that students make under Professor Kramp’s mentorship during summer research trips to West Africa.
- Professor Stephanie Powell Watts was chosen as a featured speaker for the Plutzik Reading Series at University of Rochester in April 2024. This is one of the most prestigious and longest-running reading series in the country, and has featured Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and National Book Award Winners. Professor Watts was chosen on the strength of her novel No One Is Coming to Save Us and short story collection We Are Taking Only What We Need, which was reissued in 2023 as part of the Olive Editions series from Harper Perennial.
We’ve had no shortage of reasons to cheer in Drown Hall the past year, and we’ll end the year cheering again as English major Colleen McQuillen, #31 on the Lehigh Women’s Basketball Team, graduates after back-to-back seasons of defeating Lafayette on the court and earning a spot on the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll.
Dr. Edward Whitley, Department Chair