The Department and International Engagement

Witnessing Worlds Within and Beyond . . .

Every aspect of what we do—our teaching, our research, and our service—underscores a growing participation in and efforts to facilitate conversations and experiences that impact and transform lives here and afar. This department has an established record of vibrant engagement with international communities through our teaching mission. Our graduate programs draw students from more than 30 countries, among them Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey, Vietnam, Canada, Kuwait, and Japan. In addition, our faculty maintain active intellectual and pedagogical ties abroad. This department if making an impact on the world, and the world is making its mark on this department in the best possible ways.

Recent International Engagement

Africa

• Professor Emerita Thelma Richard, a former Fulbright scholar in Grenada, Spain, and a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa in 2000, maintains active intellectual and pedagogical ties with the university. Richard's online course, “Postcolonial Mirrors,” which she team-taught with a literature colleague at the university, led an undergraduate student to conduct her honors project on female voices and presentations of women in Zimbabwean literature (see photo below).
   

Thelma Richards and Sam Raditlhalo Presenting via Laptop in South Africa
 

• Neal Lester was an invited speaker at the 2nd Annual Rhyme-and-Reason Conference and Concert Series in Ghana during the summer of 2008.  (Please see photograph below.)
   

Neal Lester in Ghana Market

Asia

• Beginning in January of 2006, MFA students, under the tutelage of creative writer Melissa Pritchard, have established important partnerships with the Daywalka Foundation and Kalam:MarginsWrite in Calcutta, India. They have created a writing project that involves adolescents from marginalized areas of Calcutta, mainly brothel districts and railway stations, actively writing poetry, giving readings at local bookstores, tea stalls and other venues, and publishing their first literary magazine (see photo below). Pritchard is an executive board member for the Foundation.

   

Melissa Pritchard in India

• Paul Kei Matsuda organized the Symposium on Second Language Writing (an international conference he has been organizing since 1998) at Nagoya Gakuin University, Nagoya, Japan, in September 2007.

  • Matsuda has also delivered plenary addresses at international symposiums and conferences in Asia, including the Symposium in Second Language Writing at Tokyo International University, Japan, in March of 2008, the Asia TEFL Annual Convention in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in July of 2007, the Tamkang International Conference on Second Language Writing at Tamkang University, Taiwan, in December of 2006, and the International Association for World Englishes conference in Nagoya, Japan, in October of 2006.

  • Matsuda is also an Honorary Member of the Japan Association for College English Teachers (JACET). Furthermore, he has been and international visiting researcher at Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan, and at the University of Hong Kong, in 2007.

• Neal Lester presented a three-week lectureship in China in 2007 at Sichuan University; Jewell Parker Rhodes and Jay Boyer taught and presented at the university as well (see photo below).

Neal Lester in China

• Roy Major and the Department hosted Visiting Scholar Li Lin, a faculty member from Sichuan University, from 2008 to 2009, during which time Lin interacted with American graduate students and teachers in Major's second language acquisition course and Paul Kei Matsuda's course in second language writing. 

• During the fall of 2006 and 2007, Karen Adams taught ENG 414: Studies in Linguistics in World Englishes and LIN 656: Studies in Cross-Cultural Discourse Analysis.  Her research has included work on Southeast Asian languages and she mentors students who have interests in these areas.  She is a member of the Center for Asian Research and participates in the Asian Pacific American Studies Program.

  • In May of 2007, Adams chaired the committee that hosted the Second International Conference on Lao Studies at Arizona State University. She is currently co-editing a collection of papers on Lao Studies with a colleague from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

  • Adams was also awarded an Arizona Humanities Council grant in 2006 that helped to fund "A Proud Journey Home," a museum exhibit at the Tempe Historical Museum that discussed the journey of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese communities from Southeast Asia to their new homes here in Arizona.
• In 2008, Bob Bjork was appointed to the Advisory Board of The Medieval Centre at Taiwan's National Chung Cheng University. 
  • Bjork was also an invited guest of honor and speaker at the Seoul National University in Korea during the fall of 2008, during which time he also delivered a plenary address for the Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea at Korea University.
     
  • Also in the fall of 2008, Bjork delivered a talk at the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Taiwan Branch, and at the annual meeting of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. 

Australia

• Mark Lussier lectured and taught in Australia in the spring of 2006, both at the University of Melbourne and Monash University.

Europe

• Mark Lussier was an invited lecturer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in May of 2009.
   

• In 2008, Bob Bjork was appointed to the editorial boards of the journals Anglo-Saxon England, published by Cambridge University Press, and Mediaevistik: Internationale Zeitschrift fur Interdisziplinare Mittelalterforschung, Peter Lang Publishing Group, Bern.

  • In November of 2006,  Bjork delivered the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Viking Society for Northern Research, University of London, United Kingdom, and he delivered the Biannual Fell-Benedikz Lecture at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.

  • Bjork held a Visiting Scholar appointment at St. Catherine's College at the University of Cambridge, England, during the Lent and Easter terms of the 1997 academic year, and in the spring of 2008, he served as a Visiting Professor at the Institut für Anglistik at the Universität Innsbruck, Austria.

  • Since 1996, Bjork has been the General Editor of the journal Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Brepols Publishers, Belgium.   

• Melissa Pritchard was elected as a Hawthornden Fellow at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, in the summer of 2008.
   
• In May of 2005, Neal Lester and Maureen Goggin shared with students at Moscow (Russia) State Linguistics University their scholarly expertise respectively on the race and gender politics of hair and on the rhetoric of needlepoint.

• During the summer of 2008, Master of Fine Arts graduate students in creative writing Fernando Perez and Bojan Louis traveled to Prague as participants in a writing program sponsored and administed by Western Michigan University, in partnership with Charles University, Czech Republic. Perez and Louis studied with poets Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten in workshop for one month while attending lectures, faculty readings, and walking tours of the beautiful city.  (See photo below.)

  • Cynthia Hogue and Melissa Pritchard are participating in the Prague program during the summer of 2009.
     

Fernando Perez in Prague

• Beth Tobin received a joint fellowship from British Academy and the Huntington Library in June of 2007 to conduct research on eighteenth-century British shell collectors. This short-term award helped to defray the cost of conducting archival research in Britain.

• Since January of 2007, Johanna Wagner has been completing a doctorate degree in this department as she is simultaneously enrolled in the doctorate program at Ghent University (Belgium).

• Cynthia Hogue’s 2006 visit to the Terezín concentration camp, while leading an intensive poetry workshop in Prague, Czech Republic, inspired her poem “An Hour from Town,” which appears in Counterpath, an online special issue on borders and restraints published in 2006.

• Elly van Gelderen was an invited researcher at the Center for Advanced Study of Arts and Letters, Oslo, Norway, during the fall of 2004, and she taught Chomskyan linguistics in Naples, Italy, in May 2007 (see photo below).
   

Elly van Gelderen

• Karen Adams mentored a scholar in the spring of 2008, Marija Janeva-Mihajlovska, here on an exchange from the University of Ss. Kiril and Metodij (UKIM) in Skopje, Macedonia. Her visit was hosted by the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. She has regularly worked with exchange scholars in linguistics through the Center.

• In 2002, Gregory Castle presented a lecture at the James Joyce Summer School at the Unversity College in Dublin. 

• Other activities in Europe that engage our faculty instruction include directing Summer Study Abroad Programs in Cambridge, England and in Florence, Italy.  Participating faculty in these ongoing programs have been Mark Lussier, Cajsa Baldini, Heather Hoyt, Christine Helfers, Robert Sturges and Rosalynn Voaden.

North America

• In March of 2009, Gregory Castle was the O'Neil Fund for Irish Literature Visiting Speaker at the University of Victoria Department of English in British Columbia.
   
• Bob Bjork is a member of the editorial board for Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Studies (TONIS), University of Toronto Press. He is also a member of the executive board for Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a University of Toronto project.

• In February of 2006, Paul Kei Matsuda led workshops on academic writing and writing programs at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.

• The Department of English co-hosted two Canadian Fulbright Scholars with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Tom Wayman in 2007 and Ross Leckie in 2008.

South America

• In November of 2007, Elizabeth Horan delivered a presentation on her book, co-edited with Doris Meyer, titled This America of Ours: The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Silvina Ocampo (University of Texas Press, 2003), at the Villa Ocampo in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
  • Horan also delivered a presentation at the Universidad de Catolica in Santiago, Chile, and she co-presented and participated in a panel discussion at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, during November of 2007. The presentations and discussion were related to the Ocampo book.

Multicontinental

•  Paul Kei Matsuda was the chair of the Committee to Internationalize TESOL Quarterly from 2003 to 2005 and is currently a member of the Internationalization Committee at the Council of Writing Program Administrators, a position held since 2006.

• Not only have two major international conferences of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism been hosted by Mark Lussier and this department (2000 and 2006), but the conference brought to ASU scholars of Romanticism from four continents and thirteen countries. The 2006 conference looked at the intersection of Romantic literary and philosophical practices with pedagogical practices (see photo below).

  • Lussier and Bruce Matsunaga co-edited a collection of essays which emerged from the conference and was published in 2008, titled Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press).

Participants in the 2006 International Romanticism Conference hike South Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona with host Mark Lussier

• Heather Maring is a member of the editorial team at the Intangible Heritage Section of UNESCO, Paris. In the summer of 2006, Heather worked in Paris, compiling A Manual on Oral Traditions and Expressions, in line with the stipulations of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage. In addition, while in Paris, Heather became a temporary member of the UNESCO Secretariat while assisting at the first session of the General Assembly of the States Parties to the 2003 Convention.
   
• Joe Lockard’s Antislavery Literature Project, a highly successful research and pedagogical tool online since 2002 featuring contributions from affiliates from international locales such as Ireland, Israel and Hong Kong, receives visits from over 100 countries, mostly from China, the United Kingdom, South Africa, France, Singapore, Canada, the Russian Federation, and Germany.
  • Lockard is also spending several weeks at Sichuan University in China while he aids in the development of a digital humanities and public scholarship project on Chinese translations of American literature.  
• Claudia Sadowski-Smith's research has focused on on multi-ethnic and transnational representations of globalization, immigration, and national borders in the Americas and in Europe. Besides several essays, she has published Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 2008), Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002).
   
• Jay Boyer's plays and short fiction appear in many international venues, such as the 2005 reading of Empty Stages at London's Jermyn Street Theatre, United Kingdom, and the 2001 production of Heartbeats at Belleville's Pinnacle Playhouse, Canada, and the production of A History of the Last Millenium at the Robert Gill Theatre in Toronto, Canada, in 2003.

• Alleen Nilsen and Don Nilsen serve on the Executive Board of the International Society for Humor Studies. Furthermore, as presidents of the American Name Society, (an organization which has actually expanded into being international), the Nilsens edited a special issue of the Names journal in March of 2008 focusing on "Names and Ethnicity." Authors include Livingstone Makondo from Midlands State University in Zimbabwe, Africa; Karen Kow Yip Cheng from the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Bertie Neethling from the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa.  They have served on the board since the inception of the ISHS in the late 1980's. 

• Bob Bjork is a guest editor for the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, forthcoming in 2010, with about 700 international contributors. He is also a member of the Standing Committee for CARMEN (Cooperative for the Advancement of Research through a Medieval European Network), 2005 - present.  

• Rosalynn Voaden is co-editor of the Yale Companion to Medieval Holy Women, forthcoming in 2009, a volume with contributions from scholars in England, Holland, Germany, Canada, and the United States.

• Dawn Penich-Thacker served as a volunteer working to develop English language curriculum for the Center for Outreach and Advocacy for Refugees (COAR) from August of 2006 to October of 2007. And since September of 2005, Dawn has also been teaching English to Somali Bantu refugees as a volunteer for the International Rescue Committee, the leading refugee aid organization in the world.

• Heather Hoyt provides excellent cyber mentoring of graduate students and professors from Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Iran, and Kuwait seeking her advice and feedback on their research and teaching of Arab American literature and contemporary Arab literature in English. Since Heather first offered this original special topics class, “Arab Women Writers” in spring 2004, she has received a steady stream of cyber inquires about this relatively new but timely area of scholarly and pedagogical inquiry.