Department Welcomes Interim Chair
Geoffrey Sirc (PhD 1985) is now serving as the interim chair of the Department of English. Professor Sirc is the author of English Composition as a Happening (Utah State University Press, 2002) and, with Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, and Cynthia L. Selfe, Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (Utah State UP, 2004). He joined the Department in 2006 from the University of Minnesota General College. Former chair Paula Rabinowitz wrapped up her three-year term at the end of June. The Department offers our thanks for her dedicated service! . . .Thank you also to Professors Lois Cucullu and Julie Schumacher, who finished their terms as Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Creative Writing Program, respectively. Professor Ray Gonzalez takes over as the Director of the Creative Writing Program. Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether is Director of Graduate Studies.
The Department of English's continuing website feature 5 Questions + spotlights New Yorker Amy Shearn (MFA 2005), who publishes her debut novel How Far Is the Ocean From Here? in August 2008 with Shaye Areheart/Random House. 
A new volume of LUNA: a journal of poetry and translation has just been released. Edited by professor 
The Esther Freier Endowment 
English graduate students have organized a 
The Department of English announces a new website feature, 5 Questions +, in which we offer up the requisite number of queries to an alumnus or alumna of our B.A., M.A., or Ph.D. programs. Our 
Julie Gard (MFA 2000) has published her first book with 
Eric Dregni (MFA '07) will be 
Medievalist George Shuffleton visits the Department of English this fall semester from Carlton College, where he is assistant professor of English. Shuffleton will teach ENGL 8110-001 Popular Literature of Late Medieval England. He has a particular interest in Chaucer, Langland, and Gower, and his current research focuses on the relationship between miscellany manuscripts and Middle English poetry. 
Professor Matar, hired under the Presidential Initiative on Arts and Humanities, will call the Department of English home starting next fall. Matar's research and writing focus on 16th- and 17th-century interactions between Europe, especially England, and the world of Islam. He will be teaching the English graduate level course Britain & Islamic Mediterranean: 1588-1713, which will trace the intellectual and historical contacts between early modern England and the Muslim Mediterranean through drama, travel literature, captivity accounts and theological polemic. Among his numerous publications are Britain and Barbary: 1589-1689 (University Press of Florida, 2005) and Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 1999). Matar received his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He was Professor of English at the Florida Institute of Technology.