English Research

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Department of English

Wichita State’s Department of English incorporates four specialty areas: Literature, Creative Writing, Linguistics, and Writing. We write poetry, novels, literary criticism, articles on composition and pedagogy, cultural studies, data-driven linguistic analyses. We study the content and materiality of books to recover voices from the past, and engage in digital projects to preserve these voices for the future. We investigate the essence of language. In all, our research and creative activity is a crucial part of WSU’s mission: we are the cultural ambassadors to everyone invested in The Written Word.

Composition / Intensive English

In addition to their essential instructional responsibilities of running our University’s Composition curriculum and Writing Center, our Writing faculty maintains an active research and creative profile, publishing 20 articles and offering 20 presentations over the past decade.

Writing Program director Darren DeFrain had led the development of the Vizling App, which helps the visually impaired read multimodal texts in an equitable, accessible way. This his project has attracted $400,000 in grants the last several years including the John A. See Award, an NEH, and the university’s first Sloan Foundation Award.

Assistant Writing Program director Carrie Dickison published “Reducing Cognitive Load: Applying the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework to LMS Discussion Boards.” Teaching to Transgress, special edition of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2021.

Creative Writing

One of the oldest Creative Programs in the United States, and since 1958 home to our student-run literary journal Microcosmos, our faculty continues to make substantial contributions to American letters, publishing several books and dozens of poems and short stories over the past decade.

Creative Writing Director Sam Taylor has, in recent years, published two books and more than 50 poems in over 25 journals; he is a prize-winning, Pushcart-nominated nationally recognized poet who has held the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. Recent publications include:

“American Mystic,” Lubavitch International 12:1, 2023.

“Signs and Visions,” EcoTheo Review, Spring 2023.

The Book of Fools, Negative Capability Press, 2021.

Recent fiction publications include:

Jason Allen, “A Mile High In Cowboy Country,” Cutleaf Journal, forthcoming 2024.

Margaret Dawe, “Custody,” J Journal, 2023.

Kerry Jones, The Last Innocent Year, SE Missouri U. Press, 2023. (Winner of the the 2022 Nilsen Prize for fiction.)

Darren DeFrain, “Juneau,” Variant Literature, 2021 (nominated for.a Pushcart Prize).

Literature

Over the past ten years our faculty specializing in English and American history have published over 100 articles, chapters, reviews, editions, and books, and have presented their work at 40 scholarly conferences. Recent publication highlights include:

Rebeccah Bechtold, “‘Opera of the Street’: City Noise and the Street Musician in the Northeastern United States,” Nineteenth Century Studies, 2019

T.J. Boynton, Against The Despotism Of Fact, SUNY Press, 2021

Francis X. Connor, "Francis Kirkman, Theatrical Historian," HLQ, 2023.

Francis X. Connor, “The Last Attempt At Paradise: Industrial Culture In Kansas,” in Bodies, Noise, and Power in Industrial Music, Eds Jason Whittaker and Elizabeth Potter (WSU English alum!), Palgrave, 2023.

Jean Griffith, “Welty’s Not Quite White Orphans and ‘The Other Way To Live’” in New Essays on Welty, Class, and Race, U. Press of Mississippi, 2019.

Katie Lanning, “Reading Rottennness: Swift and Textual Error”, forthcoming in Huntington Library Quarterly, 2024.

Katie Lanning, “Ali Baba in the News: Systems of Seriality in George Parker’s Newspapers.” Forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, 2024.

Our faculty also contributes to ongoing Digital Humanities projects: The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Oxford Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe (Connor), and The Poetess Archive (Mary Waters).

Linguistics

The faculty of our innovative Linguistics program–which houses our new Applied Linguistics Major–has published over 20 articles and books and offered over 60 presentations in the past decade. Recent highlights include:

Mythili Menon and JaeHwan Byun, “Developing a Digital Game Teaching Refugee Students English with Science Topic.” Proceedings of the 8th IAFOR International Conference on Education, 2023.

Andrew Hippisley, “Network Morphology, ” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Morphology, 2021; and Morphological Perspectives, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 2021.

In addition, Mythili Menon has applied for sixteen grants, yielding over $600,000 in awards.