English

Departmental Activities

Highlights from academic year 2003-2004 (including activities and events our department sponsored, produced, or participated in):

• We held our annual World Poetry Day (an event celebrating poetry, with community members reading poems of their choosing);
  
• We continued our "The English Department Presents . . ." series with presentations by Dr. Rebecca Saulsbury ("Christian Conversion and the 'Foreign' Body in Maria S. Cummins' El Fureidis"), the students from Dr. Buck's Honors 115 course ("To Anchovy or Not to Anchovy"), Dr. Mary Pharr ("Within the Literary Pantheon? Harry Potter and the Epic Question"), and students Joy Beurrier ("Ordering Thoughts: A Discussion and Analysis of Electronic Publication and its Effects on the Scholarly Community") and Michelle Mann ("Stifled Conversations and the Usurpation of the Female in Mythology").
  
• We sponsored (with the Humanities Division, the Roux Library, and the college at large) a Medieval Symposium on "The Making of the Middle Ages";We hosted guest speaker presentations by Ken Waldman (in conjunction from the Dean's Office and Roux Library) and by Caiman Islands writer Curtis Barnett (in conjunction with the International Students Association);

• We taught classes in the Study Abroad Program;
   
• We taught courses in the Honors Program; 
  
• We taught courses in the Women's Studies program;
  
• We taught courses in the African-American Studies program;
  
• We taught courses in the various community outreach programs like Upward Bound;
  
• We taught new courses on J.R.R. Tolkien and on sports and film;
  
• Our faculty continued to be involved across campus by writing columns for The Southern and making presentations to student groups such as Pathfinders, to families at Parents' Weekend, to alumni at Homecoming, and to friends of the college through the "Bite of FSC,"
  
• We had faculty members make various presentations to the community at large, such as at the Lakeland Nostalgia Club, the Rotary Club, and The Lakeland Book Society; Students and faculty attended productions of Macbeth and Othello and The Shakespeare Review;
  
• We had students and faculty volunteer their time and energy with such charitable organizations as Paint Your Heart Out and Habitat for Humanity; 
  
• Members of our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society, presented papers at STD's annual international conference; the group also won the T-shirt contest at the convention, placed second at FSC's academic competition, the Brain Game, and participated in Paint Your Heart Out Lakeland;
  
• Our students took the lead roles in editing, designing, and writing for The Exposition, a newsletter sponsored by The Mechanicals;
  
• We celebrated the publication of Cantilevers 2004 (FSC's Journal of the Arts) with readings from guest poet Dr. Yvonne Sapia as well as Cantilevers contributors;
  
• We awarded the Wesley Ryals Creative Writing Awards to James Ziegler (poetry) and Sandy Roddenberry (fiction); We presented a new award, the Cantilevers Student Writing Awards, to Brittany Melson (fiction) and Joy Beurrier (poetry)--each received a $500 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble;
  
• We presented scholarship awards to winners of the Polk County School District's Writing Awards;We initiated the PDK scholarship contest for community college writers;
  
• Our students made presentations to area high school students: "Nymphs, Shepherds and Pastoral Lyric in Elizabethan England" (presented to AP English Seniors at Lakeland High School) and “‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him’: The Funeral Orations as Press Conference" (presented to high school honors English sophomores);
  
• We had a student, Heather Mock, named a Reuter scholar (and get money!);
  
• We celebrated the work of Brittany Melson, who won an internship with the National Endowment for the Humanities and won a Delta Sigma Pi scholarship to study in Ecuador;
  
• We celebrated the accomplishments of Joy Beurrier, who received the Robert Lee Zimmerman award for Excellence (and who was nominated for FSC's highest honor, the Honor Walk student);
  
• We applauded with delight the commencement speech given by graduating senior Joy Beurrier who was chosen by her campus peers to be the "Senior Speaker"--and who was chosen by President Reuschling to receive the President's Medal;
  
• We celebrated having multiple English majors graduate with honors;
  
• We admired our graduates going on to graduate study or to work in the legal profession, the fine arts, publishing, and education.

Faculty Achievements Dr. Keith Huneycutt published, with Dr. James M. Denham (History and Political Science Dept.) Echoes From a Distant Frontier: The Brown Sisters' Correspondence from Frontier Florida, 1835-1850 (University of South Carolina Press, 2004). He and Dr. Denham also collaborated on the article "Lieutenant James Anderson and the Second Seminole War, 1842," published in The Florida Historical Quarterly, 82:1.

Dr. Mary Pharr published "Within the Pantheon? Harry Potter and the Epic Question." Potter and All <www.potter-and-all.com>. Webmaster Judy Nathanson. July 2003. She also reviewed multiple books, acting as pre-publication reviewer of Reading Stephen King, by Heidi Strengell, for the University of Wisconsin Press, endorsement evaluator of Hollywood's Stephen King, by Tony Magistrale, for Palgrave-McMillan (blurb on dust jacket), and endorsement evaluator of The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television, by Atara Stein, for Southern Illinois University Press.

Dr. Alexander Bruce published "Yes, but . . .: The Negating of the Germanic Past in Andreas" in Florida English 1 (2003).

Dr. Catherine Eskin published “The Rhetorical Double-Bind: Self-representation and Self-fashioning in Court(ier)ship,” in Self-fashioning and Metamorphosis in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Olav Lausand and Stein Haugom Olsen (Oslo, Noway: Novus Forlag, 2003), 45-57. She also reviewed two works: Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England by Lori Humphrey Newcomb (reviewed for Renaissance Quarterly 56.3) and The Reader Revealed, comp. and ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron with Elizabeth Walsh and Susan Scola (reviewed for Sixteenth Century Studies Journal XXXIV).

Dr. Bernard Quetchenbach published his poetry chapbook The Hermit's Act (Finishing Line Press, 2004). He also published poems in Rosebud and The Worcester Review as well as an essay in Organization & Environment. (He reviewed manuscripts for that journal as well.) Dr. Quetchenbach also serves on the Program Planning Board for Nature and Environmental Writers-College and University Educators (NEW-CUE).

Various professors read papers at conferences:

Dr. John Crow presented “The Bridge System: A New Approach to the Teaching of Coordination and Subordination” to the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar Annual Conference, “The GUESS Exercise: Coherence and Cohesion Made Accessible” to the Florida College English Association, and “New Public Grammar and Language Awareness” to the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Dr. Peter Schreffler presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Florida College English Association. His paper, "From the Reflective to the Ridiculous: Using Russell Baker, Alice Munro, and Jean Shepherd to Inspire Autobiography in Freshman Classes," discussed the student responses to these three writers in his Examined Life section.

Dr. Huneycutt read "The Brown Sisters Contemplate Marriage on the Florida Frontier" at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Conference and "Victorian Medievalism" at The Florida Southern College Medieval Symposium.

Dr. Quetchenbach organized a panel and presented the essay "Peregrines" at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) biennial conference at Boston University. He and his wife Cara Chamberlain (adjunct professor) held a poetry reading at the Birch Tree Cafe in Lakeland.

Dr. Bruce read "Suffering for Salvation in the Poems of Cynewulf" at the 14^th Biennial New College Conference on Medieval-Renaissance Studies and "Fire on the Water as the Aurora Borealis: A New Perspective on Beowulf 1365-1366a" at the annual meeting of The South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He also participated in a "Teaching Tolkien" panel at Mythcon XXXIV.

Dr. Eskin read “Putting Susannah in Perspective: Renaissance Constructions of the Apocryphal Susanna as Silent Rhetorical Subject,” at the Fourteenth Biennial New College Conference on Medieval-Renaissance Studies and "‘I would weepe more and speake less’: Women’s Story-telling in Male-Authored Elizabethan Romance” as part of the Sandwich, Salad and Substance program at Florida Southern College.

Dr. Pharr presented "Within the Pantheon: Harry Potter and the Epic Question" at Nimbus-2003: A Harry Potter Symposium, "'Pretty Complex Stuff': Form Over Theme in American Splendor" at the Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, and "'There Must Be Ghosts All Over the World': Angry Wraiths in Millennial Film" at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.

Previous Years: 1999-2000 2000-2001 2001-2002 2002-2003