Posts

Assistant Professor Amrita Dhar was named the 2019 recipient of the Milton Society of America’s Albert C. Labriola award. The award recognizes a distinguished article written by a graduate student about John Milton that was published or is forthcoming in a journal or multi-author essay collection. Dhar’s article, entitled “Toward Blind Language: John Milton Writing, 1648-1656, was published in Milton Studies, the premier academic journal for Milton scholarship.

Dhar has also been awarded a Huntington Fellowship in autumn 2020 to do research in the Library’s to extend her book project on sight and blindness in early modern literature.

Associate Professor Rob Hughes was awarded the Ohio State Newark Teaching Excellence award for tenured faculty. As one of his student recommenders wrote, “I must admit, my first opinion was that it was going to be a long, dreadful class. But thanks, to Dr. Hughes, I have a love affair with reading. I never would have imagined that. I only read because I had to. Now, I am actually looking forward to reading FOR FUN. I wish there were more people in this world, like him. He has a knowledge that he wants to share, a passion for his subject and his students and a sense of humor.”

Professor Elizabeth Weiser was awarded the Ohio State Newark Service award for tenured faculty. Weiser’s service, in addition to this website and coordination of the professional writing minor, includes two consecutive years as Secretary to the Faculty Assembly, service on multiple faculty committees, including founding one and chairing several, serving as a mentor to STEP, EXP class, and Digital Flagship cohorts, work as the campus liaison to the University Institute for Teaching & Learning, service on two international boards of directors, and management of multiple grants awarded to local community organizations.

Senior Lecturer Don Langford retired this spring after 21 years of teaching on our campus. As he wrote, “Now it is time for me to step away from the fast-paced life I have been leading for more than five decades and return to my love of the wilderness, art, and the creative interactions that I remember experiencing in my teens and twenties…[preparing] for the later exploration of the national parks, hot springs, and other natural wonders of this continent and beyond.”

Here are some of the favorite reads of our faculty, alumni, and students. There’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, for good times and distressing times, whenever you just need a good book!

FACULTY

ALUMNI

MAJORS & MINORS

Autumn 2020 English courses

See the Courses tab on our website for descriptions of all our spring classes!

Currently, Dr. D. B. Ruderman and a class full of eager students are working on putting together a new literary journal for Ohio State Newark, and they want to see your best work! ghost flower is a journal that will celebrate visual and written arts; so, feel free to send your poems, short fiction, creative non-fiction, photos, and other artworks.

If interested, you can submit your work to ghost.flower.lit.journal@gmail.com, and please, feel free to send more than one piece of work! As of right now, the deadline is March 30, 2019, so don’t hesitate to submit! For any questions, contact Dr. Ruderman at ruderman.4@osu.edu. Good luck!

Looking to spread your creative wings but need a little guidance? Well, this summer class might be the exact thing you’re looking for!

English 2267: Introduction to Creative Writing is going to be taught by Professor Tidwell, and students will learn how to master character development and how to handle all the elements of fiction writing. Classes will meet Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1-3:30 PM.

As Spring Break comes to a close, The English Department is hoping to encourage a little friendly competition in our last few weeks of school! The Annual Essay Contest is in full swing, and here is everything you need to know!

The competition is open to all English majors and minors, and the submission must be a scholarly essay written for a 2000-level class or higher from Spring 2018 to Spring 2019. First and second place will win a cash prize, a certificate, public recognition, and your work will be published here on the website!

All submissions must be emailed to Dr. Weiser (weiser.23) by April 1, 2019. Good luck!!

As always, OSU Newark is bustling with numerous opportunities to expand your skillsets and share your passions. This week, there are two very special things we are highlighting: The 2019 Research Forum ar. Dr. D.B. Ruderman’s Arts and Sciences 1100: Publishing a Literary Journal!

The Student Research Forum (housed here at OSU Newark) is a wonderful opportunity for students across the curriculum to share their work and their passions. Opportunities to give oral presentations or poster presentations are both a possibility, and there is a cash prize for first and second place! Now is the time to start thinking of potential research possibilities because abstracts are due February 8! Contact Dr. Nathanial Swigger (swigger.1@osu.edu) for any additional questions, or Dr. Weiser (weiser.23@osu.edu) is more than willing to assist students as well.

Beginning in the second half of this semester (February 27th, to be exact) Dr. Ruderman is offering a 1-credit hour course (Arts and Sciences 1100) focused on the ins and outs of publishing a literary journal. Students in the class will study online journals, write and submit a call for submissions, edit and collect those submissions, and put them together as a literary journal. Starting February 27th, the class will meet on Wednesday from 5:30 PM to 7:20 PM.

Welcome back English Majors, new and old! Spring Semester is in full swing, and there are plenty of literary adventures to be had!

Before your “To Be Read” list gets too long, you might be interested in checking out the latest article from our very own Dr. Robert Hughes. His article “Irigaray’s figures of home and the malformation of male subjectivity” focuses on a contemporary French feminist philosopher named Luce Irigaray and why (in her view) it’s so complicated being a boy.

If you’d like, here is a more in-depth description of the essay:

This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her key trope of home. Thus, it elaborates her critique of a certain closed “homely” formation of man’s subjectivity and it advances her thesis that woman might function as the salutary advent of the other sex, unhousing man, exposing his subjectivity as not-whole and sheltering him in a more open and unhomely existential home. The first section outlines man’s efforts to carve form and thought from primordial flux and to establish a world and home defined by discrete objects. However, as the second section shows, man goes too far, enveloping himself in fantasies that maladaptively deny the incompletion of human existence. Man would do better, Irigaray argues, to grant the universe its living sense of becoming. The final section reads Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion in Homer’s Odyssey to elaborate upon Irigaray’s privileging of woman as home.

So, if you see Dr. Hughes around campus, be sure to congratulate him on his most recent publication!

Dr. Amrita Dhar is the newest addition to the wonderful English faculty at OSU Newark, and she will begin teaching classes this fall. Welcome, Dr. Dhar!!

Below is a short hello and introduction from the professor herself:

A very warm hello! My name is Amrita Dhar, and I am delighted to call OSU Newark my new intellectual home. I grew up in Kolkata, India, and was educated at Jadavpur and Cambridge Universities before traveling to the American Midwest for my doctoral studies. Now, I am coming to the Ohio State University from the University of Michigan, where I completed my PhD in 2018.

My research focuses on early modern English literature, Shakespeare, Milton, disability studies, and world mountaineering literatures. As a scholar of literature and a climber and mountaineer, I am deeply invested in understanding embodiment, difference, and even as I use it, the tool that enables me to think about these and much else: language.

In the autumn, I am teaching the first half of the British Literature survey. I always deeply enjoy this course for the way in which the central texts of the expanding canon allow us to see an entire history and culture in movement and formation! I am also teaching a course on The Disability Experience in the Contemporary World (think of the many ways in which bodily and cognitive difference surround us and, indeed, enrich the world we live in), and a course on college-level writing (for the future really does belong to those who can think clearly and communicate persuasively).

Future courses I plan to offer will be on topics such as Shakespeare and Film, Literature of the Outdoors, Lyric Poetry, and Early Women Writers.

Finally: I am always, always interested in talking about poetry and about photography. If you have a poem you’d like to talk about, or a frame you’d like to discuss, do please come by.

I can’t wait to meet all of you in person before long.