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 Sue Weinstein
Chair, Department of English
Interested in an English Major or Minor? Click to email for information.
Congratulations to Our Recent Award Winners
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
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.
Zack Godshall (Associate Professor) has received a Fulbright U. S. Scholar award for Spring 2026. Zack will serve as a filmmaker-in-residence in the Department of Architecture at Delft University of Technology, where he will teach courses in documentary filmmaking. He will spend the majority of his time researching and documenting stories about the region's river-based and coastal communities and ecosystems.
Mari Kornhauser's (Professor) play "Seeking Asylum" premiered March 20, 2025, at the 2025 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. The play is a climate change exploration that takes place in a speculative world of 2040 in what was once the United States. Based on the original 29 questions immigrants filled out in ships' manifests in the early 20th century that were then used in interviews at Points of Entry, the play explores how citizenship is not guaranteed. It was directed as an immersive one-act, two-character play starring Sallay Shameka Gray and Kathy Randels.
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) was awarded a Big Ideas in Arts and Humanities Grant from the 2025 Provost's Fund for Innovation in Research (Phase 1) for her book project, Urban Removal: Post-war U. S. Multi-Ethnic Literatures and Geographies of Struggle. Alex's article, "Tucson, City of Thieves": Biocapitalism and Land Dispossession in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, was published in MELUS in January 2025. She also gave a paper titled "Toward an Indigenous Critique of Colonial Racial Capitalism: Marx(ism) on Trial in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead" at the 26th Annual American Indian Studies Association Conference in February.
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.
Andy Trevathan's (Senior Instructor) research project was accepted for presentation at the 2025 Ezra Pound International Conference (EPIC) in Brunnenburg, Italy this July. The project, "The Ghost in the Machine: Implications of Pound's Poetry in AI and ChatGPT Technology," will show the results of implementing AI/ChatGPT in the classroom. Furthermore, Andy was selected to participate in a poetry reading honoring Pound's daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, on the occasion of her 100th birthday at the EPIC conference.
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) book, The High Heaven, is at the proofs stage and will be published by the prestigious Graywolf Press in Fall 2025.
Ashlynn Wittchow (Assistant Professor) presented a paper as a member of the competitive Emerging Scholars Program at the annual meeting of the Association of Teacher Educators in New Orleans. She presented another paper at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association in Denver. Her article, the Creative and the Critical: Probing for Practices In-Between Reading and Writing in Secondary English, was published in March in Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education.
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 Ann Martin on being named a CxC Teaching Fellow. Ann directs our English Dual Enrollment Program and is an invaluable member of LSU English.
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.
Ariel Francisco's (Assistant Professor) forthcoming fourth collection of poems, All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins, mourns a Miami already ruined by climate change and development, and meditates on the future ruins of a city reclaimed by the sea. The collection will be available this October with Burrow Press. Ariel also has four translations available now: Dominican poet Mateo Morrison's Hard Equilibrium with Spuyten Duyvil; Dominican poet Francisco Henriquez's Moonless Night with Spuyten Duyvil; Haitian-Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud's Poet of One Island with Get Fresh Books; and Chilean poet Cristian Gomez Olivares' Burning of the Reichstag with Editorial Ultramarina (Spain).
Henry Goldkamp has multiple poems in Yalobusha Review, Prompt Press, NOIR SAUNA, Rougarou, Coma, Chicage Review, Poetry Northwest, Not My Style, peel lit, and mercury firs. He also has new experimental pieces of criticism in Annulet and Blue Bag Press. Last summer (2023) he had the opportunity to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and was recently named Communications Director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
Michael Bibler (Associate Professor) signed a contract with Oxford University Press to co-edit (with Sheri-Marie Harrison of University of Missouri) the Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic. The book is expected to be ready for publication in 2026.
Graduate Student Accomplishments
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!"
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.
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.
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).
Md Jalal Uddin (PhD candidate) has presented a paper, "Disability Subjects: Poetic Contemplation and Southern Sensibility in Paul Guest's Poetry," at WGS South 50th Anniversary Conference in Atlanta on March 7, 2025. In the paper, Guest's book of poems was examined through the lends of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's existential and embodied phenomenology. This work has been recognized by a WGS South Student Travel Grant.
Azharuddin (PhD) was the recipient of the 2024 Sarah Liggett Teaching Award. He attended Harvard University's 14th Institute of World Literature 2024 Summer program, hosted by University of Cyprus.
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 (MFA) was named one of Gambit's 40 Under 40 people doing good in New Orleans for her project Legados de Luisiana, an oral history series of Louisiana's Latin American elders, made in her capacity as a death doula. Legados was funded by a Rebirth grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. This September, her first published poem came out in Harper Collins' Here to Stay, an anthology of poets from the undocumented diaspora, edited by the Undocupoets collective. Lastly, Carolina’s production company Pizza Shark was nominated for the Podcast Academy's Ambie Award (akin to the Grammys of podcasting) in the Politics/Opinion category for their show National Emergency, a public health podcast hosted by two ER nurses who look at mass violence, disaster(mis)management, carceral health systems and more through a public health lens.
Ibrahim Nureni (PhD) has published a haiku in Acorn: A Journal of Contemporary Haiku, one of the most prestigious haiku journals in the United States. He was selected as a Fellow of the Bill Anderson Fund, a fellowship program for doctoral students engaged in disaster or medical hazard-related research across various disciplines.
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.
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.
Sunny Rosen (MFA candidate) received a Best of the Net nomination for a poem published with Taco Bell Quarterly. She published a book review with Current Magazine on Alba de Céspedes’s 1952 novel Forbidden Notebook. Sunny was also received a scholarship in the summer to attend the Convivio Writer’s Conference in Umbria, Italy.
Alumni
Tyler Sheldon ( PhD, May 2024) has published poems in Slant, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Pop Culture and Pedagogy, and in Comparative Woman. In March 2025, Tyler held two writing workshops at The Festival of Words in Grand Coteau, Louiaian. He participated in poetry readings in December 2024 and March 2025 at Highland Coffees and in Grand Coteau.
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."