Park Hall Monitor: Fall 2025

Head's Note, Fall 2025

Dr. Roland Végső

Dear Colleagues, Students, Alumni, and Friends of English,

Welcome back to the new semester! As we are preparing for the new academic year, it might be worth mentioning that a lot has happened over the summer. From May 15-18, UGA hosted the 2025 Computers and Writing conference, the primary professional forum for scholars and instructors who use computers to teach or analyze writing and communication. A team of English Department faculty, graduate students, and staff lead by Elizabeth Davis organized this successful event that brought 331 registered attendees to campus from all over the country who participated in 78 concurrent session, 6 workshops, and 5 different guided local experiences here in Athens. Congratulations to Dr. Davis and her team!

We would also like to extend a warm welcome to all the new members of our community. Taylore Woodhouse has joined the department as our first ever Assistant Professor of Game Studies. Dr. Woodhouse received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, this summer at the Communication Arts Department. She specializes in the study of video games, esports, and Black gaming cultures. In addition, we also hired Nowell Marshall as a Lecturer to teach in our First-Year Writing Program. Dr. Marshall taught at Georgia Gwinnett College before joining UGA. His primary teaching interests are professional writing, business writing, and strategic communication. While he is not new to Park Hall, Michael Ford is also entering his first year as a Lecturer at our department. Dr. Ford is a graduate of our own doctoral program and a scholar of twentieth-century poetry and the catastrophic imagination.

We would like to congratulate David Diamond for having received tenure and for being promoted to Associate Professor at the end of the previous academic year. This fall, Professor Diamond, who specializes in 18-th century transatlantic literature, is also starting his appointment as our new Director of Graduate Studies. We are also proud to announce that Professor Barbara McCaskill received a Distinguished Research Professorship. The title of Distinguished Research Professor is awarded to faculty who are internationally recognized for their original contributions to knowledge and whose work promises to foster continued creativity in their discipline.

Our faculty and students continue to do exciting work that further enhances UGA’s international reputation. Professor Chigozie Obioma’s new novel, The Road to the Country, was named as a best fiction book of the year by The Economist and The Kirkus Review. It was also named one of the books on the longlist for the Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize for 2025 and longlisted for the 2025 Nigeria Prize for Literature, the most prestigious literary prize of the country. Professor Andrew Zawacki is also having a banner year. 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. Dr. Zawacki's ENDSCAPE was selected for an inaugural series mixing poetry and photography.

This fall several of our faculty members will embark on important projects. Professor Susan Rosenbaum received a major research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for her collaborative work with Dr. Jonathan Ellis (University of Sheffield) to study the works of the poet Elizabeth Bishop in relation to visual culture. Ed Pavlić has been awarded a 2025-26 Schomburg Short-Term Fellowship Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. Julie Mattison 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 2025.

Finally, I would like to mention that a committee led by Nancee Reeves started to update the decorations in our building. They created an undergraduate study lounge in the new wing of our building and began to hang some new pictures and images in our corridors. If you are ever in Park Hall, hopefully you will notice some positive changes.