Faculty News Fall 2025

Rebecca Hallman Martini published an invited book chapter, presented twice at the Modern Language Association Conference in New Orleans, and delivered an invited talk at Syracuse University. She also presented to President Moorehead's Cabinet about the success of the Willis Center for Writing and received two grants to support the Center-- one from the Parent's Leadership Council to continue support for the Wellness Hub and another from the OVPI  for Information Technology to support assistive technology. Dr. Hallman Martini is wrapping up the semester with a visit to Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany, where she will deliver three talks and work to establish a partnership between the writing center at LMU and the Willis Center for Writing. LMU is the first of three international partnerships the writing center is actively working on.

J. R. Mattison published a collection of edited essays on "Big Data and Manuscript Studies" in the journal Digital Philology. She won a Willson Center Fellowship and the Virgina Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research, as well as a Huntington Library Exchange Fellowship to spend a month in Oxford in Fall '25. She was invited to participate in the Marco Manuscript Workshop at the University of Tennessee in January. Along with Drs. Camp and Sargan, she organized a two-day symposium in April: "Medieval on My Mind: The Past, Present, and Future of Medieval Manuscripts in the Deep South."

Barbara McCaskill has been named a Distinguished Research Professor. She has accepted an invitation to join the editorial advisory board of a new international book series at the University of Georgia Press titled Feminisms, Gender, and Space, edited by Drs. Jennifer Rice (UGA), Amy Trauger (UGA), and Jennifer Fluri (Colorado).

Esra Mirze Santesso's recent book, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing received an honorable mention in the competition for the Modern Language Association’s 2024 Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies. As the founding member of the Postcolonial Collective, she helped host three distingusihed speakers (Brett Sterling, Joseph Slaughter, Mark Minett) in the spring.

As judge of the Georgia Poetry Prize, Andrew Zawacki selected Michael James Walsh’s A Season for publication by UGA Press. This spring, Dr. Zawacki spent a week in upstate New York as the Sandra Nelson Visiting Poet at St. Lawrence University. His newest chapbook, Noise for A Landscape, was just published by Sixth Finch, while his sixth full-length poetry volume, These Late Eclipses, is due any day now from Verge.

Magdalena Zurawski will be a fellow this summer at the MacDowell Artist Residency Program in Petersborough, NH. She will be working on her latest book project, a creative nonfiction book about her family's Polish history during World War II.