English, Department of
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
The National Council of Teachers of English at Louisiana State University (NCTE LSU), advised by Ashlynn Wittchow and Paige Watts and led by President Sarai Barmore, has received a 2026 NCTE Student Affiliate Excellence Award. NCTE LSU will be honored with a certificate at the 2026 NCTE Annual Convention in Philadelphia in November. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the recipent of the 2026 Carruth McGhee Award for Excellent Research by a Junior Faculty Member and the 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship. His work reaches well beyond the classroom, shaping contemporary literature conversations while inspiring the next generation of writers.
Michael P. Bibler is the recipient of the 2026 LSU Foundation Distinguished Graduate Faculty Teaching Award. This award recognizes a faculty member with superior graduate-level teaching and related activities. Dr. Biblers dedication to graduate education continues to inspire and shape the next generation of scholars.
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."
Faculty Accomplishments
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)
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.
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.
William Demastes (Professor) published Western Drama Confronts Selfish Humanity: Dramatic Altruisms (Routledge, 2026).
Ariel Francisco (Associate 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).
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.
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.
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.
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).”
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.
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.
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).
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."
Alumni
Undergraduate Accomplishments