English faculty and staff updates: Summer 2021
Wayne State's Department of English congratulates our faculty and staff on their recent achievements!
Promotions
Academic services officer
Anglesia Brown has been promoted to the rank of academic services officer III on the basis of her accomplishments in facilitating HR and course scheduling for the Department of English. Ms. Brown was one of the inaugural cohort of Academic Leadership Academy Fellows (2019), and she has had a major impact on department scheduling practices through her digitization of personnel records.
Full professor
Jaime Goodrich and Donovan Hohn have earned promotion to the rank of full professor on the basis of their accomplishments in research, teaching and service. Professor Goodrich specializes in early modern British literature and the centerpiece of her promotion case was her forthcoming book "Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600-1800."
Analyzing a corpus of over 1,000 manuscripts and printed books, this monograph argues that early modern nuns' writings hold philosophical importance for the existentialist question of how humanity relates to God. Professor Goodrich is also known for her rigorous and experimental approach to teaching, which foregrounds community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary collaboration and project-based learning.
Professor Hohn is a creative writer and his promotion case rested on the publication of "The Inner Coast: Essays" (2020). This outstanding example of creative nonfiction offers a distinctive take on literary ecology or literature of place, by exploring the fluid boundaries between geography and memory as well as the interrelation of nature and humanity, past and present.
Professor Hohn has also made important contributions to the teaching of creative writing at WSU both in the classroom and in his role as coordinator of creative writing, most notably by redesigning the curriculum and leading the development of new programs such as the Minor in Creative Writing.
Tenure
Natalie Bakopoulos and Natalia Rakhlin have received tenure on the basis of their accomplishments in research, teaching, and service. Professor Bakopoulos, a specialist in creative writing, was also promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. Her tenure and promotion case rested on the publication of her second book, "Scorpionfish (2020)."
This moving, lyrical novel tells a story about exile, migration, and love in contemporary Greece, probing the moral contours of the refugee crisis as well as the nature of identity. In addition to her outstanding creative work, Professor Bakopoulos is a beloved teacher who encourages students to find their voices and develop their own craft. Professor Rakhlin is a specialist in linguistics, and her work focuses on child language acquisition and developmental language disorders.
Her promotion case was based on a series of important publications (14 articles, 10 book chapters) conveying her research into the nature and causes of developmental language disorders, the impact of environmental adversity on language acquisition, and the ways that we acquire sentence structure. Professor Rakhlin has also made important contributions to teaching within the Linguistics Program at Wayne State, where she has mentored students at all levels and developed several new courses.
Senior lecturer
Ruth Boeder and Kathy Elrick, who both specialize in the field of composition and rhetoric, have been promoted to the rank of senior lecturer on the basis of their accomplishments in teaching and service. Dr. Boeder's research focuses on the research and writing process, and her work has resulted in curricular innovation within and beyond the general education program in composition.
She also spearheaded the development of an open-access textbook for ENG 3010, which has improved equity and access for our students while also saving them, collectively, thousands of dollars. Dr. Elrick specializes in feminist irony and the rhetoric of satire, and she has made an important contribution to the general education program in composition by developing coursework in the field of technical and professional writing.
In addition to partnering with entrepreneurs at Tech Town, she has worked with the WSU Libraries to help create digital resources for students in technical and professional writing.
Retirements
Three faculty members from English retired during the past academic year: Margaret Jordan (senior lecturer), Ellen Barton (professor) and Michael Scrivener (distinguished professor). Each of them had a long and distinguished career within the department, with many accomplishments worthy of celebration.
Dr. Jordan, a specialist in African-American Literature, joined the Department of English in 1993, where she taught highly popular courses on African-American literature, Native American literature and women writers. A beloved instructor whose classes were favorites among our undergraduates, she won the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teaching Award. In addition, she published a book entitled African American Servitude and Historical Imaginings: Retrospective Fiction and Representation (Palgrave, 2004) that analyzed the cultural role of Black servants and slaves.
Professor Barton was hired in 1985 as a specialist n rhetoric and composition as well as linguistics and her research focuses on medical communication, medical rhetoric and ethics in health and medicine. Over the course of her career, she published over fifty articles and book chapters (including four award-winning articles in top journals within her field) as well as one book (Nonsentential Constituents: A Theory of Grammatical Structure and Pragmatic Interpretation, John Benjamins, 1990) and two edited collections. In addition to earning an international reputation for her cutting-edge research agenda, Professor Barton made important contributions to the department and university by serving as director of the Linguistics Program (1997-2002), director of the Rhetoric and Composition Program (2007-2010), chair of English (2010-2015) and associate provost for Academic Personnel (2017-2018). Furthermore, Professor Barton received the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching and a Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award for her outstanding teaching and mentorship.
Professor Scrivener-who specializes in Romantic Literature, Jewish Literary History and Irish Literature-entered the Department in 1976. A distinguished and prolific scholar with an international reputation, Professor Scrivener published over forty articles and book chapters, three co-edited volumes and four monographs: Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton University Press, 1982); Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776-1832 (Pickering & Chatto, 2007); and Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
At Wayne State, he was honored with numerous awards for his research and teaching: the Liberal Arts Grant for Research and Inquiry (1998, 2000, 2002), the Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award (2002), Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Award (2003), membership in the WSU Academy of Scholars (2008) and the Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Fellowship (2013). Outside the university, he was recognized with the Keats-Shelley Distinguished Scholar Award (2006) and with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007-8). In addition to his world-class research career, Professor Scrivener has been a beloved instructor and mentor to students at all levels at Wayne State, teaching popular courses on romantic poetry, Victorian literature, Irish literature and Jewish studies. Professor Scrivener also helped shape graduate education in our department by serving as the director of graduate studies for three separate terms of appointment.
Wayne State congratulations to all three on their retirement and best wishes for the future!