Welcome

The English Department is committed to excellence in teaching, research, and service in the following disciplines: British, American, and global literature in English; business writing and technical communication; writing pedagogy and composition theory; teacher education; and creative writing. The department serves non-majors, majors, and graduate students by providing a wide array of courses that foster sound research; intellectual curiosity; critical thinking and reading; and clear, graceful, and persuasive writing and speaking. Through its programs, graduates, and faculty, the department contributes significantly to the cultural and academic enrichment and the quality of life of the campus, community, state, and region.

Department News

NEW CLASSES! SPRING 2014

English 680: Talking Treason: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Origins of the First Amendment

Instructor: Anna Foy

Course Time and Location:  Mondays and Wednesdays, 3:55-5:15 pm in Morton Hall 203

The idea that citizens should have a right to free speech was widely contested, often violently, in Britain and America—not only in courts and legislature, but also in the world of culture: in novels, pamphlets, plays, and bold poetic experiments.  This class explores a selection of classic literary texts from the long eighteenth century (roughly 1660-1800) as a way of asking where the First Amendment came from.  Reading rebels and jokesters alongside advocates of restraint, we will ask how British and North American writers gradually subverted the longstanding assumption that the ideal citizen was “obedient” in favor of the paradoxical idea that a system of government that permitted free speech was safer and more secure than a government that did not.  We will examine not only revolutionary articulations of the benefits of a free press—John Milton’s Areopagitica, for instance—but also fiction and poetry from the period that tested the limits of law and good taste.  How did satirists such as Alexander Pope exploit loopholes in libel law to ridicule their contemporaries mercilessly in published verse?  What should we make of the raciness of John Cleland’s amatory fiction?  To what extent did the authors of the Bill of Rights intend to protect the right to disseminate sexy and obscene materials?  Authors examined in the course may include Locke, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Montesquieu, Haywood, Richardson, Wilkes, Barbauld, Paine, J. Madison, Wollstonecraft.  We will also be working with UAH’s exciting new seventeenth- and eighteenth-century databases, EEBO and ECCO.  Requirements include weekly responses, a midterm paper, and a final research paper. Prerequisites: Course is open to students who have completed the general education requirement in literature.  (Credit hrs: 3.0.  Grading system: A, B, C, D, F.)

 

EH 440.02/540.02: Studies in Drama, Gender, and Sexuality
“Degenerates, Deviants, Dissidents: 20th Century Queer Plays”

Instructor: Dr. Chad Thomas (chad.thomas@uah.edu)
Time/Location: T/R 2:20-3:40pm, 316 Morton Hall

In this class, students will become acquainted with the history of the lesbian, gay, and queer characters as presented in 20th century plays. Through reading queer theorists, dramatic scripts, and performance analysis, students will better understand the manner in which the gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered experience has been portrayed to audiences and how the development of that portrayal has reflected and affected changes in cultural, historical, political, religious, sexual, and social discourse. Students should come away with an understanding of what it means to read, to perform, to present, and/or to embody a queer character and how to analyze the multi-layered social implications of that presentation. In addition, students will tune their artistic and aesthetic sense while becoming familiar with canonical lesbian, gay, and “queer” plays.

Questions under consideration include: What is queer drama? What does it mean to queer dramatic literature? What are the conventions of drama that make it conducive to being queered, and to what end? What is queer performance and how does it differ from queer drama? What are the relationships between politics, sexual identity, and performance in the context of queer theory, queer studies, queer drama, and queer theatre? Who are the readers for queer drama and the audience for queer performances (both imagined and realized)?

Assignments include two argumentative papers, a midterm and final exam, a group performance project, reading quizzes, and active, sustained participation.

Readings will include: 
Sholom Ash, The God of Vengeance (1918)
Edouard Bourdet, The Captive (1926)
Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1933)
Leslie and Sewell Stokes, Oscar Wilde (1938)
Ruth and Augustus Goetz, The Immoralist (1954)
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
Frank Marcus, The Killing of Sister George (1967)
Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band (1968)
Martin Sherman, Bent (1978)
William Hoffman, As Is (1985)
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
Part I: Millennium Approaches (1991)
Part II: Perestroika (1992) 
Terrence McNally, Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994)
Moises Kaufman, The Laramie Project (2000)

Prerequisites: Course is open to students who have completed the general education requirement in literature.  (Credit hrs: 3.0.  Grading system: A, B, C, D, F.)

 

NEWS OF FACULTY

Dr. Eric Smith publishes book Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope. This new book explores the aesthetic and historical conditions that inform the recent convergence of the seemingly incommensurable domains of the postcolonial Third World and the genre of SF, particularly as expressed in the recent phenomenon of visionary SF narratives originating from postcolonial national cultures. Read more

Dr. David Neff received the CLA Outstanding Faculty Award (2013). “’Invisible Hands’: Paltock, Milton, and the Critique of Providence in Frankenstein” was published in ANQ 25.2 (2012): 103-08.

Dr. Eric Smith's essay "'Fictions Where a Man Could Live': Worldlessness, Utopia, and the Void in Rushdie's Grimus" is published in the current issue of Twentieth-Century Literature 58.2 (2012): 267-295.

Dr. Joseph Taylor's article "Centralization, Resistance, and the Bare Life of the Greenwood in A Gest of Robyn Hode" appeared in the Spring issue of Modern Philology 110.3 (2013): 313-339. Also, Dr. Taylor's article "Sovereignty, Oath, and the Profane Life in the Avowing of Arthur" was published in the Spring issue of the medieval and early modern studies journal Exemplaria 25.1 (2013): 37-58.

Dr. Chad Thomas gave a lecture to the Gay/Straight Alliance titled "Queering Cleopatra; or Queer Shakespeare at the Citz' circa 1972" in March. He also presented a paper at the Shakespeare Association of America titled "The Comedy of (Qu)errors: A Study in Queering Campus Shakespeare" in April.

Dr. Angela Balla received a Humanities Center Faculty Research Grant for her project "Awakening to Tolerance: The Revelation of Mystical Community in Thomas Traherne's Verse." Dr. Balla will conduct research this summer at Lambeth Palace Library, London (the archive for the Church of England) and at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Dr. Laurel Bollinger’s essay “Narrating Racial Identity and Transgression in Faulkner’s ‘That Evening Sun’” appeared in College Literature. 39.2 [Spring 2012]: 53-72. Dr. Bollinger includes in the essay a note of gratitude to former students and a current colleague: "I would like to thank my Spring 2009 EH 631 students, who asked the right questions; the students in my 2009 Faulkner course, for letting me try out this interpretation on them; and D. S. Neff, who has been invaluable as a first reader."

Andrea Word and Department of Education Professor Jason O'Brien have been awarded a $1.1 million grant by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of English Language Acquisition.  The grant will support second language instruction training for Huntsville City School teachers and administrators over the next five years.