Welcome
LSU English is home to world-renowned faculty, innovative course offerings, and talented students. At the heart of our work is an attention to verbal communication in spoken and written form – what humans do with language, how we do it, why we do it, and to what effects. Through the study of literature, linguistics, rhetoric, film, theory, and the craft of writing in a variety of genres and forms, we challenge students to ask questions of texts, to read beyond literal meanings, to understand how context and text interact, and to create compelling texts of their own. The value of an English degree is that the person who can write with elegance and precision, and who has the skills to interpret and analyze texts, is needed – and valued - in every area of work and life.
Go to Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions to see examples of what our Department has to offer and browse “About Us” to learn about our faculty, graduate students, publications, events, and more.
Professor Brannon Costello
Chair, Department of English
Interested in an English Major or Minor? Click to email for information.
Congratulations to Our Recent Award Winners
Zachary Godshall has won the 2025 Prestigious Pathway Award and the Fulbright Scholar Award. This program is a prestigious international exchange sponsored by the U.S. government that allows professionals the opportunity to teach and conduct research abroad. The program fosters cultural exchange, builds global connection, and creates long-term partnerships between countries. Godshalls main goal during his time in the Netherlands is to "establish a mode for sharing stories and images between Louisiana and the Netherlands, so that we might better understand our shared hopes and fears about the changes in our environments and boldly face the future."
Chris Rovee has won the 2025 LSU Distinguished Faculty Award. He is a path-breaking and influential scholar in the field of British Romanticism, published by top academic presses. His creative and pedagogically rigorous approach to teaching is both intensive in supporting our students and campus community, and extensive in connecting them with various professional opportunities in the field such as The Dickens Project. Dr Rovee has for years epitomized the record of outstanding teaching, research, and service that this award recognizes.
Nolde Alexius has been awarded the 2025 Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award. This award recognizes a faculty member who has made significant contributions in service to LSU students and faculty via the Communication Across the Curriculum (CxC) program. The award letter reads, in part:
This year’s applicant pool was highly competitive, yet your impact on the scholarship of communication-intensive teaching and learning and the CxC program itself is unparalleled. The testimony of our LSU community members who wrote to document and uplift your extensive and continuing work in this area was genuinely inspiring to read, and it is clear that you have shaped CxC and communication-intensive discovery in landmark and enduring ways.
These faculty will be recognized at the university’s annual faculty awards ceremony at Juban’s in April.
Chris Barrett has won the 2025 Mid-Career Rainmaker Award. LSU's Rainmakers are researachers who have built strong track records in securing external research funding, publishing in high-impact journals, and gaining national as well as international recognition for their work. This is Chris's second Rainmaker, as she won the Emerging Scholar version of the award in 2017. Read more at LSU Celebrates Six Rainmakers.
Faculty Accomplishments
Nolde Alexius (Distinguished Instructor) joined the LSU Special Collections Faculty Fellowship program in Fall 2025. Her research in the archives developed curricula for English 2025 and English 2005 regarding LSU's literary history.
Jordi Alonso (Instructor) was elected a member of the Society for Classical Studies' Translation Committee and presented papers at six national and international meetings: Society for Classical Studies (San Francisco, Jan 2026); Society For Neo-Latin Studies (Cambridge, England, Nov 2025); Mid Western Conference for British Studies (Elmhurst, IL, Oct 2025); Classical Association (St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, July 2025); International Society for Neo-Platonic Studies (Athens, June 2025); Warburg Institute at the School for Advanced Study (London June 2025).
Chris Barrett (Associate Professor) published essays on “Selenography” (for The Renaissance World, general ed. Kristen Poole, 2025) and "Vegetal Improprieties: Plants and the Undoing of Seasons” (with Lara Farina, for Medieval Ecocriticisms, eds. Anke Bernau and Mike Bintley, 2025). She delivered an invited talk on “The Bird Made World: Science, Song, and the Early Modern Avian Imaginary” at the Keats-Shelley Association of America 2025 Stuart Curran Symposium in New York City in October, and she undertook archival research in December as an Everett Helm Visiting Fellow at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. In her capacity as Director of the HSS Humanities Center, she celebrated the launch of the HSSHC's new space at W151 Howe Russell. Finally, she reached the likely acme of her scholarly fame when she was interviewed for and quoted in “Ophelia Explained: Taylor Swift Reimagines Shakespeare in ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ Music Video” for Teen Vogue (https://www.teenvogue.com/story/ophelia-explained-taylor-swift-reimagines-shakespeare-life-of-a-showgirl).
Michael Bibler (Associate Professor) edited and wrote the introduction to the first-ever reprint edition of Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt, by Myra Page, originally published in 1932 and printed in the USSR. This novel is one of three published in the new reprint series he co-edits with Jaime Harker (University of Mississippi) at UNC Press, Radical Souths. The other two novels republished in 2025 are Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses, by Cris South (1984) and The Bitterweed Path, by Thomas Hal Phillips (1950). In June, he presented a paper about these novels at the Southern Studies Forum conference in Santiago, Spain. In December, with the help of a grant from the Provost's Funds for Innovation in Research, Bibler also organized the online symposium Futures of the Southern Gothic, which hosted four speakers from the in-progress essay collection he is co-editing with Sheri-Marie Harrison (University of Missouri), Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic.
Adam Clay's (Associate Professor) poems were recently published in A Public Space and Waxwing. He has poems forthcoming in Bennington Review, South Dakota Review, Spring Formal, Louisiana Literature, Southern Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Postcard Literary Journal and The Laurel Review. His poem "Some Mood" was featured at Poetry Daily in March 2025.
Brannon Costello (Professor) published Conversations with Rick Veitch (University Press of Mississippi), a career-spanning collection of interviews with the iconic and iconoclastic writer and cartoonist. He also contributed an introduction to the Marvel Comics/ Fantagraphics volume Lost Marvels: Howard Chaykin, Volume 1.
Jesse DeLong's (Instructor) poetry book, The Vinegar in Our Hearts: Triolets, was published in January from Cornerstone Press as part of the University of Wisconsin--Stevens Point's Portage Poetry Series.
William Demastes (Professor) published Western Drama Confronts Selfish Humanity: Dramatic Altruisms (Routledge, 2026).
Ariel Francisco (Assistant Professor) published a chapbook of poems, My Sleep Paralysis Demon Kisses Me Goodnight from Lunette Press, a book of translations of the Bolivian poet Melissa Sauma, Luminescence, from Spuyten Duyvil, five of translations of Melissa Sauma in Big Other, and three translations of Haitian poet Marckenson Jean-Baptiste in Acentos Review. He was additionally part of a digital roundtable on translation for Miracle Monocle.
Zach Godshall’s (Associate Professor) film, The Boatman played at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of the series When the World Broke Open: Katrina and Its Afterlives, a cinematic look at New Orleans before, during, and after the 2005 storm. He received a 2025-2026 Big Ideas in Arts & Humanities Grant from LSU Provost's Fund for Innovation in Research to support his project “What the River Said: A Storytelling Bridge for Coastal Deltas,” which aims to bring together stories and films from the watery lowlands of The Netherlands and Louisiana.
Henry Goldkamp (Instructor) released a new poetry collection in September, JOY BUZZER: A Clown Show (Ricochet Editions). You can read a review of it in Coma and an interview on his conception of “clown poetics” in Air/Light. He also has new poems in GROTTO, Seventh Wave, Cobra Milk, and Amenia Free Review, with poems forthcoming in The Spectacle, Puerto del Sol, Passages North, and Hot Pink later this year. His next poetry collection, Balloon Animal, will be out April of this year with Cloak, a small press publishing formally innovative works about visibility and concealment.
Emily M Goldsmith (Instructor) joined "Wi ap ishākat (I was born here): Voices & Stories from Indigenous/Afro-Indigenous Louisiana" In November as an invited presenter, hosted by The Center for Louisiana Studies. Additionally, Goldsmith recently published poems in Pithead Chapel, Moist Poetry Journal, Porcupine Literary, Midway Journal, Radical Catalyst Art & Literary Journal, and The Book of Jobs Anthology from ONE ART. Their work is forthcoming in iō Literary Journal and Testament: A Rural Anthology with Backwoods Literary Press. Their book review of Libre, Skye Jackson’s debut poetry collection, is available with CALYX Press
Katherine Henninger (Associate Professor) presented “Knowing/Desire in Southern Gothic Photography by Sally Mann and RaMell Ross” at SAMLA (Atlanta, Nov 2025). Henniger also published the article “The Real Thing: Wise-Cracker Childhood in Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster” in the 2025 annual North Carolina Literary Review. It was awarded the John Ehle Prize for best essay in the volume treating a critically under-examined author. She additionally co-edited, a special cluster of essays on Welty and childhood for the Eudora Welty Review—the introductory essay, "Welty's Children," and the essay cluster were published in August. Finally, she was elected to the Executive Committee of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and was recently invited by the Faculty Senate to serve on the LSU Press Committee.
Benjamin Kahan (Professor) published two book chapters: “The Translucent Closet” in Contemporary Queer Modernism edited by Melanie Micir (New York: Routledge, 2025), and “Literariness, or Sexology Otherwise” in The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies edited by Melissa Sanchez (Routledge, 2025). An essay, “Sex Under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment,” that he co-authored with Madoka Kishi was reprinted in Cane: A Norton Critical Edition ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Jesse McCarthy (Norton, 2025).
Jerry Kennedy (Boyd Professor) published an essay in Poe Spaces, a collection of essays from Palgrave Macmillan, titled "The Menace of the Mob: Poe and Jacksonian Populism.” His essay, "Poe's Prescience" is forthcoming in John Gruesser's Routledge Handbook to Poe. Tulane has invited him to give the annual Josephine Gessner Harrison lecture on April 16. That talk will be called "Why Poe Still Matters." In May at ALA, he will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Poe Studies Association.
Madoka Kishi (Gratis Professional in Residence) and Benjamin Kahan's essay "Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment" was reprinted in The Norton Critical Edition of Cane eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Jessy McCarthy (Norton, 2025). Madoka Kishi also co-translated Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism into Japanese (Kaden-sha, 2025). She also gave an invited talk at University of Tokyo in September.
Joseph Kronick (Professor) published "The Rhizome and Différance: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Question of Literature," in CR: The New Centennial Reviews (vol. 24, no.1, 2024, published Fall 2025) and "'The Kafka Business': J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Parable," in MLN: Comparative Literature Issue (no. 140, Dec. 2025).
Saumya Lal (Assistant Professor) was awarded a Big Ideas in Arts and Humanities Grant from the 2025 Provost's Fund for Innovation in Research (Phase 2) to complete her book The Ambiguities of Empathy: Violence, Trauma, and Reconciliation in Postcolonial Conflict Fiction (2001-2020).
Alex Meany (Assistant Professor) presented “Reproduction, Kinship, and the ‘Urban Indian’ in Tommy Orange’s Novels,” at the January 2026 MLA in Toronto and “An Indigenous Critique of Colonial Racial Capitalism: Marx(ism) on Trial” at the American Studies Association meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico in November 2025. She was a Strategic Excellence Fund Awardee from HSS and was awarded a Graduate Course-Based Mini-Residency from the LSU Humanities Center to host Prof. Alys Weinbaum from the University of Washington in connection with her graduate seminar, ENGL 7974: Abolition Geographies.
David Nee (Assistant Professor) was awarded a Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago for the Spring of 2026.
Pallavi Rastogi (Professor) published “Forms of Covid: Fiction after March 2020” in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature as part of a special issue on pandemic writing in Fall 2025. She also published “Mini Worldlit: A Dataset of Contemporary Fiction from 13 Countries, 9 Languages, and 5 Continents,” with Andrew Piper et al., in the Journal of Open Humanities Data earlier in the year. Along with Madoka Kishi, she presented two invited talks on their edited collection Asians on the Third Coast (under advance contract with LSU Press) at Capital University (Ohio) and LSU’s Science Café. She will be the guest speaker for the College English Association’s “Conversations on Culture” series in Charlotte in March 2026. Her talk there is titled "Disaster After Disaster: Fiction Post 2020."
Chris Rovee (Professor) and Casey Patterson (Assistant Professor) organized a very successful full-day symposium, "The Stories We Tell: Rethinking the Disciplinary Past," that offered an array of talks on rethinking the past and projecting the future of literery studies' bedrock techniques (e.g., 'close reading'); comparing the computational methods and digital humanities of the early 20th and 21st centuries; examining the long history of "the Global Anglophone" as a literary field; and revisiting the particular pasts of two anchors of the contemporary humanities, Black Studies and Queer Theory. English Department participants included Benjamin Kahan, David Nee, Christopher Rovee, Casey Patterson, and Jessica Valdez. The symposium took place on April 25th at Hill Memorial Library.
Maurice Ruffin (Associate Professor) was featured in the February 24th issue of the LSU Reveille. The paperback of his best-selling novel, The American Daughters, was published in March 2025.
Tyler Sheldon’s (Post-doctoral Instructor) book, Words for Coffee, was published with Spartan Press (October 2025). He had three poems published: “True Happiness Must Also Mean This” in Millennial Pulp; “How We Talk About the Bear” in SLANT; “Photographs and Hurricane Francine” in I-70 Review; and wrote cover blurbs for books by C.E. O’Banion and Denise Rogers. He read from his poetry at his book release at Don Fullmer’s ContinuumArt Studio in Hutchinson, KS, and at The Festival of Words at the Lafayette, LA, Public Library.
Zach Shultz (Post-doctoral Instructor) spent two weeks at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA) as a summer Writing Fellow. Additionally, in August, Zach was accepted into the 2025 cohort of the Service-Learning Faculty Scholars Program. As part of the program, he will be designing and teaching a service-learning composition course in Spring 2026 titled ENGL 2000: Storytelling for Non-Profits.
Andy Trevathan (Senior Instructor) traveled to the South Tyrol (in Northern Italy) for the 31st Ezra Pound International Conference (EPIC) and presented a paper on Ezra Pound and AI, titled “The Ghost in the Machine: Implications of Pound’s poetry in A.I. and ChatGPT technology.” In addition to this paper presentation, Trevathan also worked on behalf of the conference organizers to help with technology and facilitated a new scholar's roundtable with a "meet-and-greet." This is in addition to being responsible for helping to develop LSUs first LSUOnline ENGL 2027 "Intro to Poetry" course. That course debuted on August 26th (this semester) and is currently underway.
Jessica Valdez (Assistant Professor) received the 2025 Linda H. Peterson Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. The followship provides a semester-long teaching release to focus on research.
M J Weerts (Instructor) has had poems published in the Eunoia Review and Punk Monk Magazine.
Josh Wheeler’s (Associate Professor) novel The High Heaven was published by Graywolf Press in October 2025. He did readings/talks in thirteen cities, including events at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, the Vegas Book Fest and the Texas Book Fest in Austin. In the spring, he’ll be a visiting writer at Bennington College, Webster University in St. Louis, and University of New Mexico. The paperback will be released in Fall 2026.
Ashlyn Wittchow (Assistant Professor) published the article “More-than-human Literacies: Reading and Writing in the Anthropocene” in English Journal. She additionally presented Shifting the Gaze: Erasure Poetry as Archival Methodology at the ELATE Summer Conference in Charleston, SC. Wittchow also participated in multiple panel presentations at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual conference in Denver, where she presented her ongoing research in the field of literacy studies. Finally, she published a book review of Literacy's Democratic Roots with Teachers College Record.
Ashlynn Wittchow and Paige Watts (Instructor) were awarded an ELATE Research Initiative grant to support their ongoing work researching the professional development of preservice English teachers through NCTE @ LSU.
Suraj Alva, Jesse DeLong, Henry Goldkamp, Saiward Hromadka, Jennie Lightweis-Goff, Saalihah Muhammad, Anna Priddy, Meghan Sullivan, and Geoffrey Trumbo (Instructors) have been selected for the English Department's 2025 Instructor professional Development Awards. Their projects include teaching- and research-related travel (interviews, archives, professional residencies); professional memberships, and conference presentations. Note: Funding for the Instructor Professional Development Awards is made possible by income from the department's Dual Enrollment Program staffed by instructors Christina Armistead, Theresa Daniels, Megan Eddy, and Saiward Hromadka under the leadership of Ann Martin.
Congratulations to Distinguished Instructor Nolde Alexius, who has been awarded the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society of Louisiana State University 2024 Outstanding Instructor Award! Nolde has been a valued member of the English Department for many years and we are thrilled that her many contributions to students and to English have been recognized with this prestigious award.
Graduate Student Accomplishments
Azharuddin (PhD Candidate) organized a special-topic panel, Weaponized Genre: Tactical Use of Conventions in Narratives of Violence and Memory, for the MLA 2026 Annual Convention in Toronto. He also presented a portion of his dissertation chapter on this panel in a paper titled "Zones of Ambivalence: Small Feelings and Disidentification in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs (2016).”
Margarita Cepele and Tatiana Servin De Maio (PhD candidates) organized the 35th Mardi Gras Conference "Spectral Landscapes: Hauntology in Place and Space." The conference took place at Louisiana State University, February 26-28, 2025. The conference included 41 talks in eight panels and a virtual keynote address by Dr. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University), "Every Father is a Tyrant: Gothic Inversion in Contemporary Speculative Fiction."
The Conference was a big success and earned high praise from Weinstock, who wrote that the co-chairs "coordinated a conference that was organized, welcoming, and intellectually stimulating. The care and effort they put into it is obvious, I'm impressed by the attention to detail, the thoughtfulness of it all, and the overall quality of the presentations. You've got a very talented bunch!"
Tatiana Servin De Maio’s (PhD Student) poems “Venus Ties,” “The Wanderer & the Wind,” and “Idée Fixe,” from her MFA Thesis, "Burdens and Babel," were published by tba: Journal of Art, Media and Visual Culture.
Christopher Flakus (Graduate Assistant for the EIS program) had a short story from a novel-in-stories accepted for publication by The Brussels Review. The story has also been named as a finalist for the journal's annual Science Fiction Award.
Brett Hymel’s (MFA Student) short story "Four Teachers Stapled Together" was published in the Black Warrior Review, and was a finalist for the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Short Story Award. Additionally, Hymel published “Self-Care” in The Cincinnati Review, published a story in Subtropics, and an interview with the magazine ran on their website in May. He also attended the Indiana University Writers' Conference in June.
Zahid Islam's (PhD candidate) article (co-authored with Ibrahim Nureni), "Environment and Precarity: The Geopolitics of Migration in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island," was accepted for publicationin the the inaugural issue of Oxford Intersections. Zahid has presented two different papers, "Machine in the Garden Mining Lives: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Study of How Beautiful We Were" and "Navigating Changing Landscape: A Study of Climate Migration in Padma River Boatman" at the Global Souths Conference and the USM English Graduate conference in Spring 2025.
Seohye Kwon (Ph.D. candidate) was selected as one of the LSU representatives of the 2023 SEC Emerging Scholars program. She will receive an increase in her graduate assistantship stipend for one year and join students from across the SEC at the University of Arkansas this October for the multi-day 2023 SEC Emerging Scholars Program and Career Preparation Workshop. Seohye also published a book review of Judgment and Mercy by Martin J. Siegel titled "Irving Robert Kaufman's American Dream.” She has received a Korean Honor Scholarship from the Korean government, an award given to outstanding students of Korean heritage to encourage high achievement of academic performance and the development of leadership qualities for their future professional careers.
Dahlia Li’s (MFA) short story, "The Last Sticky Thing", was published in The Writing Disorder last summer, and it was selected for the journal's “Best in Fiction" collection.
Carolina Murriel’s (MFA Student) essay "Driving my tías through Miami" was published in Prairie Schooner, and it won their annual Jane Geske award. Her production company, Pizza Shark, will present a panel at On Air Fest (headliners Roxane Gay, Wyclef Jean, Chani Nicholas) in collaboration with fellow Latina podcast powerhouses Locatora Radio. The panel, "HEREDERXS IN SPACE: An Audiophonic Time Capsule From 2016 to 2036," honors the power of witnessing and imagining stories and will include an art installation of oral histories and future-stories, housed in the festival's gallery space.
Ibrahim Nureni (PhD candidate) was one of five candidates selected to join Harrison Middleton University's Fellowship in Ideas. His work has been recognized in three different haiku contests: the Foreign Poet Award at the Snowmen Haiku Contest, Bulgarian Haiku Union; a 2nd place prize in the 2025 Atlanta Haiku Festival Competition; and the selection of his haiku to be displayed on one of the 44 blocks in the Golden Triangle neighborhood of Washington, DC (5,000 submissions from 60 different countries).
Shima Partovian (PhD Student) received the Humanities & Social Sciences Endowed Deanship scholarship for the Fall.
Hayley Phillips (PhD Student) has a book deal to publish her debut novel River of Stone with Melville House Publishing in Spring 2027. She also has an article forthcoming in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics titled "Monstrous Maternity: The Archaic Mother in Frankenstein."
Sunny Rosen’s (MFA) short story, “The Birthday Party,” received an honorable mention from this year’s AWP Intro Journals Project.
Taylor Thompson (M.A. 2023) started this Fall as a Visiting Lecturer of English with Specialization in Rhetoric, Writing, and Digital Media Studies at Northern Arizona University while completing her PhD at LSU.
Md Jalal Uddin (PhD Student) received the Bangladeshi Graduate Student Fellowship 2025 from The American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS). After a month-long field trip in Bangladesh, on May 27, 2025 a Research Findings Sharing Session was held at the Institute of Modern Languages (IML), University of Chittagong – an AIBS member institution.
Alumni
Benjamin Bergholtz (Ph.D. 2018) received an Honorable Mention for the 2025 MLA Matei Călinescu Prize for the best book in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and thought. The monograph, Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel, was based on his award-winning doctoral dissertation of the same title and was directed by Pallavi Rastogi and Joseph Kronick.
Erin Little (MFA, May 2024) had her first short story, "Airplane Mode," published by Maudlin House in April 2024, when she also read poetry at the State Library with Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin. In June 2024, Erin gave a reading from her chapbook, Personal Injury, with Sebastián H. Páramo hosted in Dallas, Texas by Deep Vellum bookstore and press.
Ian Lockaby (MFA, May 2021) had an excerpt from his forthcoming chapbook, A Seam of Electricity, published in FENCE. He also has poetry in Fall 2024 issue of The Kenyon Review, and his essay on the work of Palestinian-American poet Edward Salem was recently published in Poetry Daily. During Summer of 2024, Ian spent 3 weeks as writer in residence at Art Farm in Nebraska.
Undergraduate Accomplishments
Rei Zimmerman (undergraduate major) presented a paper at their first academic conference, WGS South, as part of the ASPIRE program here at LSU. The theme of the conference was "Legacies: 50 Years of Feminist Scholarship, Creative Activity, and Activism in the South," and the paper was entitled "Visibility, Activism, and Identity in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues."