ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OF
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
TREADING THE BOARDS WITH
THE LORD DENNEY’S PLAYERS see page 6
2015 English Graduate Organization (EGO) Symposium speakers: Assistant Professor Jacob Risinger, doctoral students J. Brendan Shaw and Jonathan Holmes
2015 English Graduate Organization Prom
Family and friends help seniors celebrate at the Spring 2015 English Senior Graduation Breakfast
English Alumni panelists Alyssa Denisky, Jarod Anderson, Faith Durand and Khalila Hayden at Autumn 2014 English Undergraduate and Alumni Dinner
Attendees at Autumn 2014 English Undergraduate Dinner and Alumni Panel
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DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Department of English News • 2015 Contents
2 Chair’s Message
Debra A. Moddelmog, Chair and Professor of English
4 Cartoons at Ohio State: Professor Jared Gardner 6 Introducing The Lord Denney’s Players 8 Interview with Assistant Professor Christa Teston 10 Buckeye Creativity on Display — Lima Campus 11 Karin Hooks: The Road to Academia 13 Inaugural R. L. Stine Scholarship 14 Recent Alumni Boggs and Mann Interview 16 Emeritus Professors Write History of English Dept. 17 English Dept. Advisory Committee
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Message from the Chair
Every June when it starts to get hot, I am carried back — almost 40 years now — to the summer when I traveled to Italy, Greece and Crete on a study abroad trip organized by the University of Georgia. I spent the summer living in an unairconditioned pensione, studying Greek and Roman culture, history, archeology, mythology and literature, and visiting cities and sites I had only read about in books, including Rome, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Athens, Delphi, Mycenae, the Greek islands and Heraklion. It was my first trip abroad, and I was slightly older than most of the other students since I had already graduated from college and had been working for two years in the hotel business and taking English classes at a university up the street as a way to figure out if I might be a candidate for graduate school. During this trip, I often told my classmates and teachers that I was having one of the best times of my life, and although I’ve had some pretty amazing times since then, I still stand by that opinion. I think frequently about that trip to Rome and Greece when I talk to our undergraduate students who have signed up for one of our study abroad programs. For example, our Literary Locations course enables students to study the literature of Debra A. Moddelmog a place for a semester and then, at the end of the semester, make a 10-day trip to that area. Some of the literary locations studied and visited lately: Paris (led by Associate Professor Manny Martinez); and Rome (led by Associate Professor Sean O’Sullivan). This coming spring 2016, Professor Robyn Warhol will take her class to Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy country.
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Also, a successful, new study abroad course, the Literature and Culture of London, was set up and taught this past May by Professor Chris Highley, and will be offered in May 2016 by Professor Sean O’Sullivan. Finally, our faculty members regularly teach “Global May,” an arts and sciences course that, like our Literary Locations course, can focus on any city or location around the world that has a connection to the subject matter we teach in English — a pretty broad range of possibilities. Our undergraduate students seek out these study abroad opportunities because they know, as I learned 40 years ago, that they will be educational, enlightening and fun. A study abroad trip adds vivid substance to literature and history, it expands the ways in which our students view other cultures and people, and it cultivates relationships and memories that can last a lifetime. We are proud to have such a thriving assortment of study abroad opportunities for our students as well as a travel-grant fund (the Arnold and Frances Shapiro International Scholar Fund), which assists them with the costs of these educational adventures. *
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Last year, I suggested that those of us in the field of English Studies might do a better job of explaining the value and relevance of our degrees in an academic and professional context given the prioritizing of other fields of study — such as business, science, technology, engineering, medicine — both at Ohio State and nationally. I invited readers to tell their stories about how their Ohio State English degree or English classes helped them in their professional or personal life. The response to this invitation was remarkable. A number of alumni wrote to tell me about books — novels, critical works, biographies, etc. — recently published or coming out soon. Others identified their job title — business systems analyst; lawyer (a number of these); dual credit specialist at a community college; underwriter for an insurance company; founder, manager and writer for a community theatre in Pennsylvania; professor; and so on — and explained how their English degree had prepared them for these professions.
Many provided eloquent defenses of the value of an English degree. Two striking examples: Ashley Fournier (BA, 2012) put it this way: Writing skills, editing skills and the ability to communicate well are all important in today’s job market. While English majors may not have the comfort of a direct career path, there is incredible opportunity and joy in the uncertainty — and the challenge — of carving one’s own path. It takes more thought and personal exploration, and I believe leads to a more meaningful life. Fred Strickland (BA, 1966; MA, 1971) offered a number of reasons why studying English is worthwhile, including these: . . . the study of literature and language makes you better at solving problems, expands your imagination, increases your empathy, makes you question advertising and political claims, makes you a more interesting person, and in general makes life more enjoyable. What career can you think of that would not be helped by these virtues? I want to thank all of you who rose to the challenge of explaining the value and relevance of English studies in today’s world. In addition, there has been a recent increase (or so it seems to me) in the number of well-argued articles and books that have taken up this topic on the national stage. Many of these sources demonstrate not only that students continue to choose English as a major at almost the same rate they did thirty years ago (thereby de-bunking the argument that there has been a steady decline of interest in our field) but also that the skills, aptitudes and enthusiasms we nurture (in areas that include communication and writing, research, critical thinking, creativity, empathy, social justice, a deep awareness of history and cultures other than one’s own, a love of language) — will benefit students long after graduation. I am also grateful to those who responded to last year’s message by donating to one or more of our many departmental funds dedicated to specific causes (such as graduate student fellowships, creative writing prizes, or the Shapiro travel fund mentioned above) or to the general advancement of the department (Friends of English and our Discretionary Fund). Your support makes a difference in the life of the department and in expanded opportunities for our students.
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We are stepping up to expand and highlight the value of the English degree in today’s rapidly evolving world. We are finding ways to take advantage of our strong affiliations with interdisciplinary programs, such as American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Critical and Cultural Theory, Disability Studies, Film Studies, Folklore Studies, Jewish Studies, Latino/a Studies, Literacy Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Professional Writing, Religious Studies, Sexuality Studies. This year, the new Human Rights minor joins these, and we are contributing a key course in the area. We are also involved in starting a new interdisciplinary minor in Medical Humanities. We are moving into the arena of Game Studies, adding to our strength in popular culture studies, and will design courses that give students a critical humanities approach to video games, the fastest-growing genre of the international media sector, surpassing both film and music. And a new class, “Career Preparation for English Majors,” is helping our majors become more aware of the many career paths they might pursue and how they might put together compelling job letters and hone the skills needed for achieving success in the path that most appeals to them. Please continue to connect. Send me your stories about your post-graduation paths and successes (some of which we can profile on our website); tell me about the difference one of our study abroad trips (remember Greenwich!) made in your life; sign up for our Buckeye English Alumni Mentoring (BEAM) program; and, please talk to your friends, family, co-workers and communities about the value of the English degree and of the Humanities more generally. We need your help in spreading this message!
Debra A. Moddelmog, Chair and Professor of English
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CARTOONS AT By Professor Jared Gardner
The state of Ohio has produced more influential cartoonists than any other — a claim I will continue to make until contrary evidence is entered into a court of law. From the origins of the modern form of sequential comics in the 19th century to the present, our state has contributed some of the most influential artists in the history of the form. The first celebrity newspaper cartoonists — R. F. Outcault and Frederick Burr Opper — were both born in Ohio, and the creator of the form’s first true masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland, came of age as an artist working for the Vine Street Dime Museum in Cincinnati in the 1890s. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two teenagers from Cleveland, came up with Superman, the man in tights who would launch a billion comic books beginning in 1938. Harvey Pekar would transform the quotidian life of a file clerk at a VA hospital into one of post-war America’s great works of autobiography beginning in 1976. Arguably the last true masterpiece of newspaper comics — Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes — was first born out of Ohio soil in 1985. As a comics scholar I’ve often pondered the reason for the connection between my native state and the comics’ history I love, one that reemerges at almost every key moment in the strange and wandering history of the form. I don’t have any good answer for how comics first got mixed up in the soil of our state, but working closely with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum I’ve had countless opportunities to enjoy the fruits of the land. In fact, even focusing our gaze solely on the city of Columbus and Ohio State, we discover a rich tradition of comics’ history and history-making. Here are just a few of my favorites from the capital of comics.
1. The first woman to work full time as an editorial cartoonist and one of the first to have a syndicated comic strip, Edwina Dumm, began her long career at the Columbus Monitor in 1915. This is an example of her most famous creation, Tippie & Cap Stubbs, which ran from 1918 until her retirement in 1966. (I particularly love this original because of its inscription to her fellow-cartoonist, Ed Wheelan, who sadly has nothing to do with Ohio but whose mother, Albertine Randall, was another pioneering woman cartoonist.) 2. No discussion of comics in Columbus is complete without Billy Ireland, in whose honor our cartoon library and museum is named. Ireland began working at the Dispatch around 1899, and in 1908 he created his weekly strip, The Passing Show, which chronicled the life of his city. Ireland turned down many offers for national syndication to remain in Columbus, and he continued to tell its many stories until his death in 1935. Here is Ireland’s “Carmen Ohio” from a 1923 Passing Show which he created in honor of the football team and university he loved.
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3. Billy Ireland mentored many young cartoonists during his long career at the Dispatch, but none were more illustrious than Ohio State’s own Milton Caniff. After his time as an assistant with Ireland, in 1934 Caniff would create what many consider the masterpiece of the adventure strip genre, Terry and the Pirates, which he drew until 1946 when he left the strip in other hands to start his first creator-owned strip, Steve Canyon, which ran until Caniff’s death in 1988. I have this original over my desk, and it offers an example of the ‘chiaroscuro’ technique Caniff perfected alongside his friend and fellow Ohio State cartoonist, Noel Sickles. 4. Billy Ireland was such an effective mentor that sometimes his classroom at the Dispatch interrupted cartoonists’ studies at Ohio State. Dudley Fisher was one such cartoonist, and for me he remains one of Columbus’s least appreciated masters of the form. He worked at the Dispatch in the 1910s, ultimately dropping out of his architecture program at Ohio State to pursue comics full-time. During WWI, Fisher served in the air force, allowing him to see the world for the first time from on high, a vision he brought to his post-war comics in the form of a new “birds-eye” perspective that was most fully realized in his wonderful Sunday strip, Right Around Home. This example is from 1943.
OHIO STATE
5. John Backderf, or Derf as he’s known to his readers, studied journalism at Ohio State and began his career as a cartoonist at The Lantern in the early 80s, where he skewered sacred cows and brought a punk sensibility to the often buttoneddown student paper. Beginning in the 1990s, Derf began publishing his comic The City in alternative weeklies. These pages are from his remarkable 2012 graphic memoir, My Friend Dahmer, which details his experiences going to high school in suburban Akron with the future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. 6. Jeff Smith is the face of Columbus comics today and a man who has made it his mission to make our city a world capital for comics for generations to come. Last fall he announced that he was founding, along with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum’s founding curator Lucy Caswell, a new annual festival, Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC), which officially got rolling in fall 2015. But for countless readers of all ages, Jeff is best known as the creator of Bone, a magical epic he first started as an undergraduate at Ohio State in the Lantern. For English majors everywhere, but especially here at Ohio State (where we love us some Melville), the character Fone Bone is especially beloved for his deep devotion to Moby Dick, even in the face of many contrary opinions.
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INTRODUCING THE LORD DENNEY’S PLAYERS by Marie Bordley, Patrick Esguerra, Kristen Gramajo, Emma Royce, Richard II Promotions Team The Lord Denney’s Players, Ohio State’s newest theatre company, was founded in fall 2014 to perform plays relevant to Ohio State’s English community. Thanks to a generous donation from an anonymous alumnus, the Lord Denney’s Players’ (LDP) first production, William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard II, premiered on April 17, 2015, and ran for four nights. One of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard II, depicts the deposition and untimely death of England’s King Richard II by his cousin Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV. The play featured the acting talents of Ohio State undergraduates, graduate students, staff and faculty, and was directed by Assistant Professor Sarah Neville. Richard II was crewed entirely by undergraduates in Neville’s upperlevel Shakespeare class, seven of whom both served in the crew and acted in the production.
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The students designed the set, costumes and props to illuminate motifs of luxury and mortality in Richard’s story. Integral to the set design was the concept of vanitas paintings, a concept that encompasses extravagance and authority’s temporal nature. To convey Richard’s hedonism, the designers placed the action in front of a hoard of trinkets and death imagery, which included a human skull, collection of jewelry and a stuffed deer’s head. The white stag ‘gorged’ with a crown around its throat was the historical Richard II’s icon, and served as the play’s logo in the student-designed posters. The controversial scene in which King Richard is dethroned (about 160 lines of scene 4.1, which features King Richard removing the crown from his own head and placing it on Bolingbroke’s) is absent from the first printed editions of Richard II; the full scene was not included until 1623. Scholars still debate whether the scene was originally censored for political reasons (highlighting the possibility that a sitting king could be deposed had unfavorable implications for the
Photo Credits: John P. Howard and A.J. Zanyk
OHIO STATE’S NEWEST THEATRE COMPANY
monarchy) or if it was simply written and added later. To explore both critical options, LDP performed the play as it was originally printed (without the infamous deposition scene) for the opening weekend, while the closing two shows included the deposition scene to display the version of the play more familiar to modern audiences. Omitting the scene qualifies the LDP performance as one of the few modern productions that mirrors how the original play may have debuted. The added deposition scene (and its omission in the first two performances) generated audience interest and questions during the cast and crew post-show talkbacks that accompanied every performance. Audience and actors alike enjoyed examining how the deposition scene affected their experience of the play. Some sympathized with Richard more when the scene was presented, while others thought that its absence made Richard’s usurpation “dirtier.” Audiences also were intrigued by the production’s commitment to gender-blind casting, which speaks to recent professional casting trends that pair a female King Richard with a male Bolingbroke, ultimately suggesting Richard’s deposition to be attributable to his supposed effeminate nature. If both Richard and Bolingbroke are women (as in the LDP production), such an interpretation becomes impossible, forcing audiences to reconsider the ways in which Richard was a bad king and Bolingbroke might be a better one.
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The audiences’ interest in the talkbacks is symptomatic of the play’s success: Lord Denney’s Players delivered four sold-out performances of Richard II during their debut semester, and they look forward to presenting future productions with the support of the English department. You can learn more about the performance (and see mini-documentaries about the production) at go.osu.edu/lord-denneys-players. Lord Denney’s Players’ next show will be the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play and the Wakefield Annunciation, directed by English Professor Richard Green, planned for November 19-21, 2015. For more details, visit go.osu.edu/lord-denneys-players and click upcoming shows.
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CONVERSATIONS ABOUT COMING HOME, CROSS-DISCIPLINARITY, AND THE RHETORICAL CHAOS OF CANCER: AN INTERVIEW WITH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
CHRISTA TESTON
On a more personal note, living in Columbus was desirable since my family lives in the Cleveland area. Despite the beauty of the Palouse and several exciting encounters with Moose while teaching at the University of Idaho in my second job, I was eager to get back to living in a place where it took fewer than 24 hours to get “back home.” Now that I’m at Ohio State, I’m so honored to be a part of a community that takes seriously innovative thinking with respect to scholarship and teaching. I’m excited to continue partnering with you, Jonathan Buehl and the rest of the department as we make Ohio State an even more desirable place for learners to study medical humanities and rhetorically sound technical communication. What is your current research project? Before I answer this one, it might be best to provide some backstory: After I successfully defended my dissertation, a colleague in my cohort gifted me David Bohm’s (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Since then, I’ve been both haunted and intellectually inspired by Bohm’s assertion that “Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself (61). After having conducted a longitudinal study of a community hospital’s weekly tumor board conference, losing colleagues, family and friends to cancer, and watching the difficulties my mother has had as a physician while caring for her cancer patients, I can’t help but see the role of rhetoric and writing in making sense of the flux — especially as our bodies are pursued relentlessly by the threat of biomedical chaos. Even now as I answer this question, I grieve the recent loss of my uncle to brain cancer. I say all this to provide exigency for the emergence of my book manuscript about rhetoric, medicine and uncertainty (to be published by University of Chicago Press).
Teston interview conducted by Professor Jim Phelan What attracted to you to Ohio State’s English Department? The simplest answer to this question is: the Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy (RCL) program’s excellent reputation. The longer answer? Well, in my first job at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ, I planned to meet a colleague from Ball State University to collaborate on an article, and as kismet would have it, we determined Columbus was a good midway point between our mutual locations. We met on the top floor of Thompson Library. I’ll never forget looking out onto the Oval and thinking, “Wow. I would love to work here.” I had absolutely no idea that a few years later I would have that opportunity. After being invited to interview here, I grew more and more excited at the prospect of working with doctoral students for the first time in my career. Moreover, I was eager to collaborate with the very scholars whose work I’d been reading for years.
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In my book — tentatively titled Bodies in Flux: Doing Rhetoric, Dwelling With Disease — I explore four ways medical evidence does rhetorical work. That is, medical evidences help deliberators (1) visualize disease, (2) statistically assess survival data, (3) synthesize best practices, and (4) compute genetic vulnerabilities. Each chapter takes on one of these four methods of medically managing bodies in flux. I’m hopeful that this research will help build sustainable communicative bridges between various stakeholders (e.g., science and the humanities; laypersons and experts; citizens and policy-makers). You’ve talked about working with Jonathan Buehl and others on shared interests. Obviously, your book about medical uncertainty is going to make its own distinctive contributions to rhetorical studies of medicine, but let me give you the opportunity to say more about how your work in research, teaching, or both, connects with that of others in the department or elsewhere at Ohio State
It’s easy to see ways my work overlaps with disability studies, rhetorical theory and writing studies. In addition to these connections, you’re right — I’ve always found it difficult to draw boundaries between what I do and what others in the department/elsewhere at Ohio State do. Here’s why: while many (even in my own field) see rhetoric as mere persuasion, I’m more aligned with theories about rhetoric as epistemic in an ontological sense. That’s a fancy way of saying that rhetoric isn’t just getting people to do what you want them to do; it’s a way of making sense of the world. So, for example, when I listen to Molly Farrell talk about her research on population science in early American literature, I can’t help but think about my own work on inferential statistics as rhetoric. I see ways my work coincides with colleagues in the department whose expertise lies in narrative studies, feminism, materiality and folklore.
job market, I never thought of myself as someone who does classroom-based research. That doesn’t mean I didn’t see teaching as a core component of being an educator, but that I believed that by focusing on workplace writing, I had to eschew the classroom as a rich space for studying writing and rhetoric. I see now how misguided that was. Because all of my research is concerned with writing and rhetoric as it happens in the world, I’ve found that every semester I sit down to design syllabi I feel daunted by the task of making the classroom feel less artificial. I’m still figuring this out, but I’ve discovered a few ways to craft learning experiences in which students write for audiences other than me. For example, I’m thankful that Jonathan has maintained a partnership with the non-profit organization, Multiple Myeloma Opportunities for Research and Education (MMORE) — founded by our colleague Steve Fink and his wife, Nancy Kauffman, so that our business writing students have experience with designing marketing proposals for MMORE, which include public service announcements, social medial plans, promotional flyers and budgets.
I WAS EAGER TO COLLABORATE WITH THE VERY SCHOLARS WHOSE WORK I’D BEEN READING FOR YEARS.
While finalizing my book’s manuscript, I sat in various offices and communicated with colleagues all around campus: Ohio State’s associate director of human genetics; a biostatistician in the College of Public Health; and a physician and director of pathology who allowed me to observe his lectures with medical students.
I’m eager to continue fostering productive partnerships between the humanities and the sciences. I think you can see how Ohio State is a perfect fit for the kind of work I do.
I’m also grateful to have had the recent opportunity to teach Rhetoric & Community Service for the first time. In this class, students are paired with and do writing work for a nonprofit organization in the Columbus community. Because students’ experiences with their community partners were somewhat uneven (which is understandable, given the constantly changing nature of nonprofit work), the classroom was a space that supplemented what students may not have learned in their community-based projects.
Yes, and you seem to be the exemplar of Henry James’s dictum that “relations stop nowhere.” As you know, it’s typical to ask how your research informs your teaching and vice versa, but, let me be atypical and ask about the ways in which your teaching goes beyond or otherwise requires you to draw on skills and/or ideas that aren’t central to your research.
Inspired by these pedagogical problems and experiences, I look forward to finding ways to extend my research to include the classroom. Examining the classroom more methodically can help warrant changes to pedagogical practices.
Hmm, well — again, some context: Professor Steven Witte was the founder of the Literacy, Rhetoric and Social Practice program at Kent State University from which I received my PhD. Although Steve died of brain cancer just before I began my doctoral work, Kent’s program was designed deliberately to reflect what he saw as a gap in the field: researching writing and rhetoric as it happens in the world. In fact, although it no longer exists at Kent, he began the Center for Research for Workplace Literacy.
The extreme temperature fluctuations in my 5th floor Denney Hall office,
All through my graduate education, completing my dissertation and describing my work while on the
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Finally, what, if anything, has surprised you about your experiences at Ohio State so far?
That the orange barrel seems to be more a mascot than Brutus Buckeye, How not-so-big the university has felt to me, And most importantly: how genuinely supportive and accommodating all of you have been to me as a junior faculty member. Thanks for this opportunity to share more about me and my work, Jim!
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2015 Buckeye Creativity Award Winners
BUCKEYE CREATIVITY ON DISPLAY The Ohio State University at Lima Department of English partners with Allen County High Schools to Celebrate Student Creativity By Doug Sutton-Ramspeck 2015 marks the 13th year of The Buckeye Creativity Awards for Allen County High School Students, a competition sponsored by The Ohio State University at Lima and designed to encourage and reward the creative efforts of students attending the 13 high schools in the county, which is located on the western part of the state. The project began as an outreach effort arising from the two hats I wear on campus: as a member of the English department and as the Coordinator of the Writing Center. The competition now receives 800-1,000 entries each year in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, art and photography. Each year we publish more than 100 works in the online journal Hog Creek Review, and, from those published efforts, we select approximately 20 students for Buckeye Creativity Awards. In the first week of each May, we invite the winning students, their parents, their sponsoring teachers and their principals to the Lima campus for an Awards Ceremony. Excerpts from all the written works are read and celebrated, and the art and photography are displayed with great pride. Two local Optimist clubs, the Lima Breakfast Optimists and the Lima Noon Optimists, supply prizes for winning students: gift cards for $60 (freshman/sophomores) and $100 ( junior/seniors). Two students receive a Grand Prize Award, which doubles the award to gift cards of $120 or $200. To top off the prizes, The Ohio State University at Lima offers each of the 20 winning students a $300 scholarship, should the students choose to attend our campus. In 2015, there were 22 winning students out of 1,200 entries.
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Students, parents and teachers tell us how excited the winners are to see their work recognized and appreciated; and much of that work is, indeed, impressive, particularly for students so young. What’s more, I have had the privilege on several occasions to find these same students in my creative writing classes at Ohio State-Lima. One such student, Sam Newport, received four Buckeye Creativity Awards while at Lima Senior High School, five Arbuckle Awards (our top prizes for poetry and fiction at Ohio State-Lima), and is now a graduate student in Social Work on the Columbus campus. I still receive regular emails from Sam asking me to take a look at a poem or a short story. When asked what it meant to him to receive the Buckeye Creativity Awards, Sam responded: In high school, I think the Buckeye Creativity Awards meant something to me because I felt like my creativity was valued (which is often not the case in traditional schooling). Writing felt like it was appreciated for its own sake rather than just as something required to get a grade. Now that I’m older, I realize that the awards helped me connect to Ohio State in a personal and meaningful way, which encouraged me to get my undergrad degree from there when I couldn’t decide on a school — and now I’m working on my grad degree at Ohio State as well. Doug Sutton-Ramspeck is the author of five poetry collections, and has received numerous awards for his work, including an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include, The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Georgia Review and The Southern Review.
THE ROAD TO ACADEMIA: THE JOURNEY OF
KARIN HOOKS
Karin Hooks received her PhD in English with an emphasis on American Literature and an interdisciplinary specialization in Literacy Studies. Born in Kansas and raised in Oklahoma, she holds a BA in English from Middle Tennessee State University, where she was a McNair Scholar; and an MA in English from the University of Delaware, where she trained as a generalist. After receiving her doctorate, she worked as an Ohio State lecturer before her arrival at LCCC. In her short time at LCCC, she has been awarded LCCC’s Center for Teaching Excellence’s Quality Course Design Award (2014) and the Outstanding Faculty Award (2015).
Ohio State English Professor, Dr. Elizabeth Renker, interviews her former doctoral advisee, Dr. Karin Hooks, graduate of The Ohio State University English Department doctoral program and currently an assistant professor of English at Lorain County Community College (LCCC) in Elyria, Ohio.
I’m sure our readers would like to learn a little bit about your background and your own path through the educational system. I attended a small liberal arts college for only one year after graduating from high school, taking what turned out to be a lengthy hiatus during which I married and raised a family. In 2002, I was working as a public school education assistant when I learned that newly enacted legislation required that I either pass a proficiency test or have two years of college credit. As the county had yet to design the test, I decided to attend college, taking a single history course during that first summer. My success led me to reenroll that fall and to continue well beyond the credits I needed to keep my job. For the next two years, I took night and weekend courses while continuing to work full time. Eventually, my work schedule interfered with the classes I needed to complete my degree, and I quit my job and became a full-time student. I am eternally grateful to my family for supporting me in that decision. Were you always a motivated student who felt able to thrive in the world of schooling? Were there particular factors or experiences that helped you to realize that advanced education could create a professional path for you? Midway through earning my bachelor’s at MTSU, one of my instructors encouraged me to explore the McNair Scholars Program. Part of the U.S. Department of Education’s initiative of promoting educational excellence for all Americans, the
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Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Program identifies undergraduates from underrepresented groups in graduate education who desire to earn a doctoral degree and provides them with mentoring activities designed to improve their preparation and motivation for graduate study. Entrance into the program required me to document my eligibility and interview with the McNair program director and advisory board to discuss my research interests and career goals. I was elated when I received my acceptance letter. My McNair experience helped me realize my dream of using advanced education to create my own professional path. In addition to semester-long seminars designed to teach me the literacy of graduate school, two McNair summer stipends funded my undergraduate research that ultimately led to my acceptance into graduate school. What led you to a large land-grant university like Ohio State for your doctoral work? As both a graduate student and a Graduate Teaching Associate during your time here, what aspects of Ohio State’s environment and programs did you find to be either especially helpful to students or in need of positive change? Two things drew me to complete my doctoral work at Ohio State: the Literacy Studies program and the strong Americanist field. The first event I attended on Ohio State’s campus was a Literacy Studies seminar, where I met Harvey Graff and a number of graduate students interested in studying the impact of literacy on individuals and communities. During that same visit, I met with several professors of American literature to discuss how my research interests intersected with theirs. The warm encouragement I received from Susan Williams and Elizabeth Hewitt stands out in my mind to this day. While at Ohio State, I capitalized on the range of teaching opportunities open to graduate students to position myself strongly on the job market. I taught writing through the Digital Media Project, where teachers and students are encouraged to explore the use of digital media in their creation of knowledge. I also taught a range of literature courses relevant to my field of study, including both halves of the American literature survey course, Introduction to Fiction, and the English Bible. I found it particularly gratifying that Ohio State recognized the quality of my scholarship and teaching with various awards and grants reserved for graduate students. My gratitude to my various committee members and to you knows no bounds. Through ways too numerous to list here, Ohio State’s vibrant scholarly community provided me invaluable support in building my teaching resume, completing my coursework, writing my dissertation and navigating the job market. Tell us about your experience with the McNair Scholars Program. The pre-professionalization skills I gained through McNair offered me not only the skillset I needed to thrive in
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graduate school but also the means of achieving social mobility and economic change. While my undergraduate advisor steadfastly attempted to steer me toward a (more economically practical) four-year teaching degree, McNair gave me the strength and the inspiration to spread my wings and soar. As a scholar, I spent two summers conducting literary research and writing about my results. I also attended mandatory weekly seminars during the semester on topics ranging from writing a personal statement to strategies for taking the GRE to compelling accounts of graduate study from former McNair scholars. My favorite McNair memory comes from attending one of the required cultural events designed to teach us social networking: the etiquette dinner. In the weeks leading up to the dinner, we learned about decorum, deportment and the art of small talk. Although we laughed among ourselves over the confusing array of silverware and how to politely eat salad and soup, I still employ the valuable social skills I learned when I interact with my colleagues at social functions. Far beyond credentialing me for graduate school, McNair provided experiential learning situations that prepared me to embark on my academic career. What are some of your areas of research focus? My areas of scholarship include 19th-century American literary history; the role of female literary historians in canon formation and in the so-called “canon wars” of the 20th century; the efficacy of literacy on social mobility; the impact of pre-professionalization programs, like McNair; digital literacy; Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins; Constance Fenimore Woolson; and teaching composition using adaptive technologies. My profile of “Ellen Mackay Hutchinson” appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (2013). Forthcoming publications include an article entitled “A Lost Generation of Literary Historians and Their Impact on Current Studies of American Literature” in Reconceptualizing the Turn of the Century, edited by Meredith Goldsmith and Melanie Dawson; and a review of Jill Bergman’s The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. I recently presented my research on Woolson at LCCC’s Arts & Humanities Conference, where I was the Keynote Speaker, and at the Eleventh Biennial Conference of the Fenimore Woolson Society in Washington, D.C. Institutions of higher education have begun to turn in a new way to issues of access to college for low-income and other disadvantaged populations. Thinking in the very big picture, what are some areas where you would like to see colleges build better practices to facilitate educational access?
At LCCC, I serve on committees evaluating prior learning for college credit, investigating the impact of faculty advising, and implementing the 2008 Second Chance Act that helps to facilitate the reintegration of ex-felons into the workforce. Each of these committees is charged with envisioning ways to improve access to college for lowincome and other disadvantaged populations. Providing some college credit for documentable life and workplace experience that demonstrates critical thinking, reading and writing skills; training faculty to better understand the needs of first-generation, low-income, and/ or adult learners and thus guide them more effectively through their chosen academic pathways; and funding training courses to help ex-offenders find sustainable employment are just a few of the ways that I think colleges can begin building better practices to facilitate educational access and success. Recent budget cuts at the state and federal levels have reduced funding to preparatory programs like McNair. Though it may seem a bit idealistic, I would like to see initiatives to fund and sustain programs like McNair, that are designed to steer members of underrepresented groups toward graduate degrees, implemented at the community college level. Already, LCCC students can earn their AA or AS degrees concomitant with their high school diploma, and they can then go on to complete their BA and MA degrees on our campus through one of our University Partnership agreements. I cannot imagine a better environment in which to foster graduate student success. As a first-generation college student who not only completed college successfully but went on to earn a PhD, what are some of the kinds of advice you offer your own community-college students now? I made a lot of mistakes as a student! The important thing — and I tell my own students this on a regular basis — is that you don’t let those mistakes keep you from reaching your goals. If you don’t already have a support network in place, get busy forming one. Make friends with your professors, letting them know of your academic successes. Keep up with family and friends, especially those who support your academic endeavors. Collegiality starts in the classroom, long before you have professional associations. Keep your eye on the goal. Don’t let life or others interfere with your individual plan for success. Finally, enjoy the journey! Don’t think that you’ve put your life on hold to complete college. For now, college is your life. Hopefully, you’ll soon look back on your college experience as one of the best times of your life.
english.osu.edu
SAM ZAFRIS AWARDED FIRST R.L. STINE SCHOLARSHIP The Department of English is pleased to announce that Sam Zafris (BA, spring 2016) is the winner of the inaugural R.L. Stine Scholarship, an undergraduate scholarship for Ohio State English majors who have demonstrated a serious interest in Creative Writing. Zafris will receive a scholarship of R.L. Stine $11,000 to be used toward tuition and fees, room and board and other educational expenses. Generously provided by noted author and columbus native, R.L. Stine, an Ohio State English alumnus (BA, 1965) and award-winning author of children’s horror stories, R.L. Stine Scholarships in this same amount will be offered for the next four years (2016-20). Stine’s most famous stories, the Goosebumps series, has been turned into a motion picture. Released in October 2015, the movie stars Jack Black as Stine. Author of hundreds of children’s horror stories, including the Goosebumps, Fear Street and Rotten School series, Stine has sold more than 350 million books around the world.
Department of English Chair, Debra Moddlemog and R. L. Stine Scholarship Recipient Sam Zafris
THE BUCKEYE ENGLISH ALUMNI MENTORING PROGRAM (BEAM) The Buckeye English Alumni Mentoring Program (BEAM) was launched during the 2012–13 academic year and is designed both to ensure that English majors have a unique and memorable experience and to create more opportunity for alumni to stay connected to the life of the department. BEAM matches alumni with current English majors and asks that they be in touch at least once per month whether in person, by phone, or via email. Alumni need not live in Ohio, or even in the United States, to participate! The only requirement is a willingness to reach out to a current English major — whether you’re located across an ocean or across Lane Avenue. For more information and/or to participate as an alumni mentor or student mentee, please visit english.osu.edu/beam-program.
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BUILDING SUCCESSFUL CAREERS FROM COAST TO COAST: AN INTERVIEW WITH UNDERGRADUATE ALUMNI
SAGE BOGGS (BA, 2013)
DANIEL MANN (BA, 2011)
Have you ever watched The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, or posted on Facebook? Ohio State English alumni Sage Boggs and Daniel Man certainly have. In fact, they’re part of the collective “brains” behind these two media operations. Sage has worked at The Tonight Show, which is broadcast from Rockefeller Center in New York City, for the past two years, and Daniel recently relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to begin a position with Facebook. The Department of English had the opportunity to catch up with Sage and Daniel during the summer of 2015. We invited them to reflect on their undergraduate experiences and how the English major prepared them for the jobs they have today. Why did you decide to pursue the English major at Ohio State? What about your minors? Sage: I spent my freshman year in the University Exploration program and took all sorts of classes. One week, I wanted to be an anthropologist. The next, a genetic engineer. I eventually settled on English because it’s what I enjoyed the
Sage Boggs on the set of Late Show with David Letterman, where he interned before joining The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
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DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
most. I liked reading, writing and being creative. The English classes I took freshman year drove that feeling home, and I committed to the department early sophomore year. My desire to write fiction mutated into a desire to write for TV and film, so I took on minors in Professional Writing and Media Production and Analysis later in college. I didn’t end up finishing the minors, but they helped me get internships that changed the trajectory of my career. Daniel: I pursued the English major because writing was something that I enjoyed doing outside of school. Writing was my biggest strength, and I wanted to pursue a career where I could utilize that and have fun. What did you value most about your experience as an English major? Sage: I really valued how classes became discussions instead of lectures. A specific example: English Professor Michelle Herman’s music and creative writing class my junior year was refreshing because the final project was “do whatever you think you should do.” I wrote a six-minute rap about nothing
Daniel Mann in Instagram’s Gravity room located at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California
and performed it in class. That class was about pure creativity and trusting your instincts as a writer and thinker — and being given that agency was huge for me. Daniel: I enjoyed the diversity of courses offered. I also liked the flexibility in course requirements. What do you currently do for a living? Sage: I’m a video researcher at The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. I’ve been with the show for a little over two years. Daniel: I am a content specialist (technical writer) at Facebook. What does a typical day look like for you before, during and after work? Sage: I get to work at 7 a.m. every day, so there’s not much happening in my life before that. At work, I’m responsible for digging up any relevant video (from TV, the Internet, anywhere) that we could use for that night’s monologue. I send those video set-ups to the writers’ assistant around 9:30 a.m., then work on my own video pitches. A video pitch is some sort of edit that revolves around a topical news story. For example, I found four or five instances of John Kasich name-dropping Bono recently, so I threw them together and pitched it. The pitch made it on the show the next day. From 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., I’m producing pitches — either my own or one pitched by a writer. This involves researching footage, sitting with an editor to properly package it, working with graphics (if the pitch calls for video manipulation) and updating the writer along the way. Everything goes into monologue rehearsal around 3:30 p.m. and final taping is at 5 p.m. From 5-7 p.m., I’m working on pitches for the next day.
responsible for other tasks like coordinating the translations process and granting internal permissions for our tools. How did our English department community and the major help you get the job you have today? Sage: I had a strong set of people within the department who really took the time to meet with me and give me advice on pursuing TV writing as a career. Academic Advisor Ruth Friedman kept me sane. She met with me regularly and helped me decide which minors to take (minors that resulted in my getting an internship at The Late Show with David Letterman, senior year.) Michelle Herman and English Professor Leslie Lockett also were immensely supportive and provided me with insights and connections that ultimately led me to New York. I don’t think every department provides its students with these close relationships (and with a sense of community) and I don’t take that for granted. Daniel: I knew I wanted to write in a professional setting, but the only career that I knew of was journalism. I was a journalism major prior to becoming an English major. I woke up one day, and I had suddenly lost my passion for the field. I took English Professor Jonathan Buehl’s technical writing class and realized technical writing was the perfect fit for me. What side projects or activities are you engaged in outside of work? Sage: I’m active with the Upright Citizens Brigade, which is an improv theater in New York. I take sketch and improv classes there and perform around town with my indie group when I can. I’m also a freelance contributor for Men’s Health, Playboy and the Weekend Update segment on Saturday Night Live. I’m always on Twitter.
After work, I usually end up doing more research so I can come into the office the next day with a strong edit idea. I’ve become really invested in the presidential campaign (it’s great late-night fodder), so I spend nights watching C-SPAN and rolling my eyes like a weird elderly man.
Daniel: I like to sing in my free time. At Ohio State, I was in several musical ensembles on campus. I also mentor new grads on how to break into the field of technical writing. I find it very fulfilling to give others the type of guidance that I wish I had received.
Daniel: I wake up every morning and catch the Facebook shuttle from Oakland to the Menlo Park headquarters. Once I arrive on campus, I usually head to a cafeteria to grab breakfast before I start working. After I eat, I check my emails and write a plan for what I want to accomplish before the end of the day.
What was the most valuable skill you honed through your English major coursework?
As a content specialist, I write instructions for Facebook’s Ad products in the help center. During a typical day, I meet with various stakeholders such as software engineers, content strategists, product managers and product marketing managers to understand the needs of our global content audience. I use an internal CMS (content management system) to author content using HTML and XML. I also am
english.osu.edu
Sage: Critical thinking, 100 percent. To look at a text, skim it and boil it down into a cohesive three-page argument was frustrating at the time (I felt like I was writing 100+ theses a week), but looking back, that repetition made me a better writer, better thinker, better everything. Nowadays, it’s my job to look at a day’s worth of footage and boil it down to a handful of relevant edits. The relentless training I received in the English department prepared me well for this. Daniel: Analytical thinking. As a technical writer, strong analytical skills are imperative.
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EMERITI PROFESSORS WRITE A HISTORY OF THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Morris Beja
Christian Zacher
The Ohio State University will commemorate its 150th year in 2020. So will the department we now call English, which began with the university and, in fact, originally also included “the modern languages, by which is intended French and German.” We plan to compile a history of the department, the first since one was composed shortly before its 100th anniversary in 1970. It will cover the entire history up to the end of the 20th century, and will no doubt place some emphasis on the latter half of the century and the living memories of a number of us still around. The department, like the profession, underwent vast changes during that time — in the canon of course, but ultimately in what it means to be in the field, to be “in English.”
Clearly, the breadth of English has fundamentally changed, although it still encompasses the fields listed then (well, not DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
In trying to give a fair sense of so complex a history, the two of us realize that we cannot achieve our goals alone. We have already sought the help of a number of senior or emeriti professors to research and write sections on the fields we’ve mentioned, including African-American Literature, Valerie Lee; American Literature, TBD; Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Graeme Boone (Music); Creative Writing, Michelle Herman; Film studies, Morris Beja; Folklore, Pat Mullen; Project Narrative, James Phelan; Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, Andrea Lunsford; Sports, David Frantz; Theory, James Phelan; and Women’s Studies, Valerie Lee. As we research and write, we are sure to expand this coverage. To assist us, the department has provided us with a graduatestudent associate who is helping us in digging up — for example, out of the University Archives — much of the material we need. In addition, we are pillaging individual memoirs already published by a number of present or retired faculty members. We seek advice from alumni as well as from staff. Contact us if you have information to share. We fully intend to confront the most important controversies the department and the profession faced during the 19th and especially 20th centuries, in curriculum and teaching and, too, in issues of promotion and tenure. We hope and believe that the distance provided by our proposed time scheme — up to the year 2000 — will help us present a balanced but not whitewashed sense of those disputes, and of the central issues they entailed.
THE DEPARTMENT, LIKE THE PROFESSION, UNDERWENT VAST CHANGES…
An early description, in the 1870s, of the four-year course of study concentrates on “Higher English Grammar,” Francis A. March’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, John Earle’s Philology of the English Tongue, “Early English,” Chaucer, Middle English, George Craik’s The English of Shakespeare, “Rhetoric,” and the “History of Language and Literature.” (Oh, and “a full course of French and German.” Incidentally, “requirements for admission to any of these courses” included “the elements of Algebra.”)
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French, German or Algebra). No “traditional” field has been untouched, and new or once non-traditional areas have arisen or expanded greatly: to mention just a few, rhetoric and composition, African-American and ethnic studies, Women’s Studies and gender studies, theory, creative writing, folklore, film studies, special courses on literary figures, American literature as a major respected field, and of course all the rich array of “period” studies.
We’ll perhaps disappoint some people by not providing a scandal sheet, but at any rate we hope not to produce a dry account that forgets all the fascinating personalities who created our history, or one that ignores all the excitement and fun it can be — and has been — to be within the Ohio State University Department of English.
THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALUMNI ADVISORY COMMITTEE In 2007, under the leadership of former chair Valerie Lee, the Department of English Advisory Committee (EAC) was established. With its membership expanding, this year to 10, the EAC members are Ohio State English alumni from across the U.S. who are engaged in a variety of careers and who share a passion for giving back to their home department. As stated in the Advisory Committee’s charter, “the Department of English Advisory Committee is an alumni group designed to serve as a multi-purpose resource to the Department of English. The Committee’s roles include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) supporting the goals of the Chair and the English Department, (2) generating resources to further the Department’s initiatives, (3) raising awareness of the Department’s priorities and strengths, and (4) serving as a liaison between the Department, alumni and the community at large.” Members serve three-year terms and attend an annual fall and spring meeting in Columbus. Below is the current roster of the members of the English Alumni Advisory Committee. If you are an alumnus who would like to be considered for membership on the committee or who would be willing to help with future projects, please contact Professor Debra Moddelmog (moddelmog.1@osu.edu).
Kristen Blum, BA, 1988 Senior Vice President, CIO Commercial Solutions, Data & Analytics, Pepsi Co. Ruth Ann Hendrickson, PhD, 1988 Associate Vice President and Director Office of Research Proposal Development Office The Ohio State University Courtney Howard, BA, 2003 Assistant United States Attorney Stacy Klein, PhD, 1998 Professor of English, Rutgers University Lisa Latier, BA, 1993 Executive Director and Assistant General Counsel Legal Department, Consumer Regulatory JP Morgan Chase
Ex-Officio David Frantz, Emeritus Professor Debra Moddelmog (Department Chair and Professor) Tracee Mohler (Assistant to the Chair of English) Beverly J. Moss (Chair of Communications and Development Committee and Associate Professor) John Swartz (Director of Development, College of Arts and Sciences) Shalonda-Makupson-Tilford (Associate Director of Development, College of Arts and Sciences) Fall Meeting: November 9, 2015 Spring meeting: April 25, 2016
Andrea Lunsford, PhD, 1977 Professor Emerita of English, Stanford University Frank Maucieri, BA, 1987 Founder, Smog Veil Records William O’Neil, BA, 1978 Assistant Headmaster, Director of Upper School, University School Scott Powell, BA, 1989 (Chair) Partner, Vorys Sater Seymour and Pease LLP Pamela Wilson, PhD, 2002 Higher Education Consultant
english.osu.edu
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Dear Alumni and Friends, Please consider a gift or donation to the Department of English. Each and every gift makes a tangible difference in the lives of our students and faculty. (All gifts are tax deductible as permitted by law.) YES, I WANT TO SUPPORT The Department of English (fund # through an annual pledge of: $2,500*
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For the department to realize its opportunities for excellence, it must build upon the base established with state and tuition funding by drawing support from its alumni and friends. Here are a few ways you can invest in this department and its programs. The David Frantz Fund Fund #48077
The Edward P. J. Corbett Fund Fund #641447
Arnold and Frances Shapiro International Scholar Fund Fund #309620
Dr. Marlene B. Longenecker English Faculty Teaching and Leadership Award Fund #312659
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These funds are but seven of many that support the department. For a complete listing of funds that support the department, please visit: english.osu.edu/alumni/ways-give
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WE WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU! Please take a moment to fill out this form and return it so that we can share your stories in our next newsletter. Email to moss.1@osu.edu or mail this form to: Department of English Beverly J. Moss The Ohio State University 421 Denney Hall 164 W 17th Ave. Columbus, OH 43210-1370 Name Address
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MAIL DONATION INFORMATION TO: OSU Foundation 1480 W. Lane Avenue Columbus, OH 43221 OR CONTACT: John Swartz swartz.9@osu.edu (614) 688-1834 IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, CONTACT: Wayne Lovely, HR and Fiscal Manager Department of English (614) 292-6065 lovely.9@osu.edu
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DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
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Department of English 421 Denney Hall 164 W 17th Ave. Columbus, OH 43210-1370
english.osu.edu