Points of Pride:
Alumni:
Rebecca Dye, D.A. ’93, received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching from Missouri Gov. Bob Holden at the 2001 Governor’s Conference on Higher Education. Dye is a professor at Culver-Stockton College.
T. Louise Freeman-Toole M.S. ’98, authored Standing Up to the Rock, which was named 2002 Book of the Year by the Idaho Library Association. The award is presented annually to a book that has made an outstanding contribution to the Literature of Idaho. She is also the recipient of the 2002 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.
Richard Godfrey ’55, English, M.S. ’90, Educational Administration, is a volunteer public relations consultant for the National Park Service and is actively involved in fund-raising for the expansion of the U.S.S. Arizona visitors center at Pearl Harbor and the restoration of the Manzanar War Relocation Camp for Japanese-Americans in World War II.
Samuel Zaffiri ’68, English, is an author who wrote Hamburger Hill, which later became a movie on the war in Vietnam. He also authored Westmoreland, a biography of General William C. Westmoreland.
Faculty and Staff:
Douglas Hesse was elected in 2002 as the Conference of College Composition and Communication representative to the National Council of Teachers of English College Forum Committee.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Rodger Tarr’s book Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus: A Critical Edition has been awarded the prestigious Modern Language Association Seal for exceptional editing. The seal is given to books that meet the highest standards of scholarship as judged by a seven-member committee. Tarr is also the author of Max and Marjorie: The Correspondence of MaxwellPerkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, which has been praised by the New York Times Book Review and London Times Literary Supplement.
Roberta Trites was awarded the Children’s Literature Association Book Award in 2002 for her book Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature.
Curtis White is the author of eight books and has been recognized as one of the foremost writers of experimental fiction in the country. He is codirector of Fiction Collective Two, which Publishers Weekly identified as a “haven for experimental writing.”
Departmental Excellence:
The English doctoral program has gained national attention for its unique emphasis on teaching and scholarship targeted strictly at undergraduate education. The placement of graduates from the doctoral program into tenure-line positions in colleges and universities around the country is roughly 90 percent, which exceeds the national average by a considerable margin.
The Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE) — the main professional organization in Illinois for teachers of English and the language arts from kindergarten through college — is headquartered at the English Department. The IATE is the state affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English and sponsors two professional publications distributed to all members, the Illinois English Bulletin and the IATE Newsletter, both produced in the English Department’s Publication Unit.
The department hosted in 2002 the Computers and Writing Conference, an international conference focusing on the use of computers in writing instruction. Between 350 and 400 individuals participated in the “Teaching and Learning in Virtual Space” conference, discussing a variety of topics ranging from the effective uses of various computer technologies in writing instruction to problems of accessibility in computer-based learning.
English has a graduate concentration and undergraduate sequence in nonprofit literary publishing. The programs are unique in their emphasis on a specialty in nonprofit literary publishing within the context of a broader course of study in English studies.
The University is home to the nation’s first and only doctoral program in English Studies.
English offers all writing courses in networked, state-of-the-art computer classrooms, which makes Illinois State one of the few universities of its size or larger in the country so committed to computer-supported writing instruction.
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