Welcome! UMD English | Fall 2024

New Faculty

Angela Glotfelter joins us this fall as Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Glotfelter’s impressive profile as a scholar, teacher, and administrator will enhance our strong faculty cohort in composition, rhetoric, and media studies. The dynamism of her scholarship and pedagogy in the field of cultural digital rhetorics will guide us in approaching new forms of media and emergent technologies with sensitivity to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Her commitments also promise to generate rich collaborations across the Department and the College, including ADD-HUM, MITH, and Arts for All. Her book, Political Economies of Equity, Technology, and Writing, which is currently under review at Utah State University Press, uses political economy to analyze educational policy in the United States. She is particularly interested in the relationship of equity to large language models and AI.

Toyin Adeyemi (she/her) joins us this fall as Lecturer. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She is the CEO and Founder of ALCG Books, a publishing startup that supports writers whose voices are underrepresented in American publishing. The daughter of immigrants from Nigeria, Toyin was born and raised in Seattle, WA. She has taught creative writing, technical writing, and composition at American University, through Columbia University's C/AT program, and at Bellevue College. Her academic interests include comparative literature with an emphasis on postcoloniality and literature of the global South. Toyin is excited and honored to join the academic community at UMD College Park. Fear the turtle!

Lizzy Solovey (she/her) is joining the AWP faculty as Lecturer in addition to her position as a career advisor and program manager in the Clark School of Engineering. She has previously worked as a writing coach and teacher, and has her M.A. in teaching from Columbia University.

Leigha McReynolds joins us this fall as Lecturer. She holds a Ph.D. in English from The George Washington University and is currently a lecturer for both University Honors and the Professional Writing Program at Maryland. She has published work in Disability in Science Fiction and Discovering Dune, the first edited collections of scholarly work on their respective subjects, and is a regular panelist at the World Science Fiction Convention. She practices and advocates for ungrading and using science fiction to teach the humanities in interdisciplinary contexts. She has received both the Impact and Innovation Award (2023) and the UH Mission Award (2024) recognizing her teaching and contributions to the University Honors community. In her free time, she snuggles with her English bulldog and ballroom dances.

Edward Daschle (he/him) joins us this fall as Lecturer. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where he taught rock climbing, hiked mountains, and never once encountered Sasquatch. He moved from Washington to just outside Washington, D.C. to teach and study fiction at the University of Maryland where he earned his MFA in creative writing. In the summer after his graduation, he attended Clarion Workshop. His stories appear or are forthcoming in Apex Magazine’s Robotic Ambitions anthology, After Dinner Conversation - “Best of 2023” anthology, and Stoneboat Literary Journal among other venues.

Ingrid Satelmajer returns to the English Department as a Lecturer after earning her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Maryland in 2004. She is also affiliated with the Honors College at UMD, where she has taught a wide range of courses on major authors, contemporary arts, and city spaces and cultures, and where she has served as the faculty mentor for numerous Honors College awardees. Ingrid has published her research in Book History, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures, as well as in several academic collections, and she has also published review articles and interviews in The Believer, MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as short stories in The Massachusetts Review and The Bellingham Review, among other places.

Aaron Bartlett completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Maryland in May and joins us as Lecturer this fall. His academic work uses generative AI as a lens to rethink the history of mediation and poetics in the nineteenth century. He has taught academic writing, poetry, and LGBTQ literature and media previously at UMD. He brings his professional experience as a user experience writer to the Professional Writing Program.

Annemarie Mott Ewing is excited to continue teaching in the English Department as a Lecturer after completing her Ph.D. this past May at the University of Maryland. Her scholarship focuses on American literature, specifically how the counterfactual depicts citizenship, race, and national belonging in the literature of the long 19th century. Her work has been published in American Literary Realism, Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgee, and for Commemorative Cultures: The American Civil War Monuments Project.

New Staff

David Turner joins us this fall as our new Director of Operations. David has a B.S. in biological sciences with a minor in sociology and an M.A. in higher education administration from SUNY Buffalo. He has over 10 years of progressive administrative experience in higher education settings, including navigating leadership roles as Assistant Director of Admissions at West Chester University, working as the Recruitment and Planning Coordinator for University Honors at the University of Maryland, and as Assistant Director of Undergraduate studies of UMD’s Computer Science Department, where he oversaw the day-to-day operations for the largest undergraduate major on campus. Most recently, he has occupied the position of Assistant Director of UMD’s University Senate, where he serves as the Chief of Staff for the university Senate Director. David brings to the position extensive experience fostering teamwork and a track record of creating equitable and inclusive workplaces.

New Graduate Students

Comparative Literature Ph.D.

Shakiba Sharifpour is a millennial feminist activist from Iran who lives her resistance. Sharifpour works as an editor, translator, teacher, and researcher. She holds a master’s degree from York University in translation studies, where she examined the ideologies and standpoints in two Farsi translations of a chapter from The Second Sex. In the UMD English Department, she aims to learn and thrive more, and focus on investigating the translations of feminist theories and philosophies into Farsi.

English Ph.D.

Abhinav Bhardwaj is an Indian scholar invested in rethinking queerness through the possibilities offered by care as a lived and queer experience in a study of the twenty-first century literary and cinematic texts from South Asia. He has taught in the Department of English at St. Stephen’s College and trained in literary studies at Hindu College, both at the University of Delhi, and received the Junior Research Fellowship by the University Grants Commission of India, University of Hong Kong’s Postgraduate Scholarship, the University of Chicago’s Division of the Humanities scholarship and supplemental grant, and the Wingword Poetry Prize.

Alice Bi studies language and difference through a digital humanities lens. She is interested in questions of post/decoloniality, textual strategies that foster intersubjective recognition, and creative coding. She has experience working in experimental humanities labs and translation.

Tunahan Çakmakçı is a Turkish scholar interested in researching the intersections of affect and prosody and tracing the history of emotions through 18th- and 19th-century historical poetics. His undergraduate thesis inquired into the nature of lyric intimacy through an examination of Victorian lyric theories by noticing metaphor’s role in adjusting the mode of intimacy as rather sensual or intellectual. Tunahan’s graduate project expands on the historicization of affect and investigations of poetic form as an interpersonal outlet.

Funmilola Fadairo: With half a decade as a professional writer for software companies, Funmilola has authored content for diverse audiences across the blockchain, B2B, eCommerce, and AI industry. She has mentored over 800 high school students in Nigeria on digital literacy and participated in outreach programs in partnership with Meta, Google, and the Central Bank of Nigeria. Funmilola graduated top of her class with a bachelor's degree in English and completed a mini-MBA from Lagos Business School. She aims to research the intersection between language, business, and technology.

Brielle Gorrell is a Ph.D. student in the English program interested in Black Studies, particularly Black poetic epistemologies and critical theory, as well as Black ecologies found within the works of late 20th-century Black women writers. Beyond these interests, I spend much of my time writing poetry, listening to music, and finding green spaces/bodies of water to learn from.

Shannon Neal researches modernist and twentieth-century literature through the lenses of materiality, affect, and gender. They received an M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland in 2023 and worked as a communications professional after graduating. Prior to their M.A. they worked in the public humanities in archives, libraries, and museums and as a poetry screener for the literary journal Cherry Tree.

English M.A.

Emilee Denslow is a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Air Force pursuing her master’s through a scholarship with the United States Air Force Academy. She is most interested in gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, and the intersectionality of queer experiences. She hopes to continue her project of recovering lesbian poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries while exploring gender outside the binary from within these works, and to pursue her interest in the rise of bisexuals in literature and cinema from the 21st century.

Joe Huskey is a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy working toward teaching full time at the U.S. Naval Academy. Huskey has been in the Navy for eighteen years working in a number of capacities ranging from Military Police Officer to Chief Engineer on a ship. He recently moved to Arnold, MD, with his wife, two kids, and their big dog. Being a husband and father takes up most of his free time, but he likes to read a number of different books from various genres, write his own fiction, play video games, music, and work out pretty regularly (it's a condition of employment). He looks forward to what he can learn and experience at UMD over the next year!

Matthew Herskovitz is a Jewish writer interested in studying how images in post-modern and contemporary poetry can communicate relationships to land, particularly in how they describe destruction. He is also interested in the prose and scholarship of W. G. Sebald and his innovations in long-form narrative.

Chase Redd’s primary research interests are in the history and theory of rhetoric and religious rhetorics—specifically latter day saint rhetorics. He also studied economics as an undergraduate and still finds that field fascinating. Chase is excited to learn from and work alongside all of the wonderful folks here at UMD!

Creative Writing MFA

Kivel Erin Carson (she/her) is a storyteller, daydreamer, and organizer whose fiction centers the experiences of Black working class people across time and realities. She uses speculative elements to interrogate ugly truths, conjure possibility, and challenge people to dream and fight in new ways. When she’s not doing that, she can be found cheating on her to-be-read pile with new books that caught her eye, curating top notch Spotify playlists, spending time outside with her dogs, and trading new restaurant recs with friends.

Victoria Chan (she/they) recently received their bachelor's degree in Literature, Media, and Communications from the Georgia Institute of Technology. When not reading or writing, they can be found cooking, playing Pokemon Go, and tending to their shrimp tank.

Somtochukwu (Somto) Ihezue (he/him) is Igbo. His favorite book is Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and he knew he wanted to—needed to—write after reading Akwaeke Emezi’s short story, "Who Is Like God." Somto loves breadfruit, the word “untethered,” his many siblings, and his dog, River.

Sara Lieto (they/them) is an incoming poetry MFA candidate who is originally from a shoreline town in Connecticut and lived in Boston for many years working as a software developer. In 2022, Sara relocated to D.C., where they continued to write code while also studying poetry virtually through the Brooklyn Poets writing center. They spend their time rock climbing and hanging out with their two cats, Goose and Freya.

Kayla Lightner (she/her): Originally hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, Kayla Lightner is a writer and publishing professional based out of Falls Church, Virginia. After graduating with a B.A. in English from Vassar College, she worked for several years as a literary agent. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Indiana Review, Pithead Chapel, and Phoebe; and her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf’s Top 50, and Best of the Net.

Imani West (she/her) is a recent graduate of Hampton University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English, with a creative writing emphasis. She is currently a first-year student at the University of Maryland pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing to further develop her craft and explore new aspects of the art of creative expression. With her passion for storytelling, and her love of all things poetry, she strives to create work that inspires and connects.