Articles: Tag: English

How Shakespeare and Starlings Led to a Flight of Misinformation

North America’s common starling has received a bad rap as a destructive invasive species, and an Allegheny College professor and student researcher have set out to clear the bird’s reputation and show how untruths can influence people’s perceptions in nature and beyond. The research project by John MacNeill Miller, assistant professor of English, and then-student

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Allegheny College English Professor Mari Christmas Receives Prestigious Writing Award

Allegheny College Assistant Professor of English Mari Christmas is a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award winner for her skill in fiction writing. The foundation writes that “her fierce, darkly humorous, emotionally riveting work explores and embodies today’s world reflecting our deepest anxieties and the complexities of current-day feminism, motherhood, and modern love.” This award

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City of Pittsburgh Honors Allegheny Graduate and Author Posthumously

It’s not every day that a city names a day after a children’s book author. But Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto declared December 8, 2019, Kate Dopirak Day as her fellow writers came together to hold a children’s book festival in her honor. Kate’s Kid Book Bash, held inside the Ace Hotel in Pittsburgh, was a

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Meet Doctor Sparks, an Allegheny Graduate Who Uses Stories to Teach Science to Kids

Karl Smith has a doctorate in biophysics from the University of Rochester. He also worked at Amazon as a software engineer trying to make the Alexa voice assistant smarter. But now Smith is putting his talents to better use, he says, as a children’s science storyteller. He describes his new calling as “Mister Rogers meets

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Allegheny Alumna From Pittsburgh Area Receives Fulbright Award

Allegheny College’s faculty helped Lauren Ottaviani ’18 nurture her knack for learning languages, for Shakespearean studies and for singing. Now they are celebrating Ottaviani’s Fulbright award to teach English in Belgium starting in the spring of 2020. “Lauren will make an ideal Fulbright Scholar. Prodigiously bright, mature and responsible, she graduated summa cum laude from

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Recent Allegheny College Graduate Awarded Fulbright to Study Medieval Literature in England

If you think of the Middle Ages as little more than dirt, blood and Bubonic Plague, recent Allegheny College graduate Madeline Hernstrom-Hill can enlighten you. “Sure, all that is there, but there is also so much more — complicated medical manuals, treatises about forms of government, astrological thought, trade across incredible distances, I could go

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Hart, Reed Present at International Writing Centers Association Conference

Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart and Senior Writing Consultant Jessica Reed ’18 presented their talk titled “De(ux)coding: (1) Collaborative Faculty-Undergraduate Research and (2) Questioning in ‘Matched’ Consultations” at the International Writing Centers Association Conference in Chicago on November 11.

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Single Voice Reading Series Welcomes Authors James Davis May, Chelsea Rathburn

Allegheny alumnus James Davis May and Chelsea Rathburn will read from their work as part of the College’s Single Voice Reading Series at 7 p.m. November 30 in the Tillotson Room of the Tippie Alumni Center. The event is free and open to the public. May’s first book, “Unquiet Things,” was published in 2016. Other

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MacNeill Miller Essay Published

Assistant Professor of English John MacNeill Miller published an essay, “Composing Decomposition: ‘In Memoriam’ and the Ecocritical Undertaking” in a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts comprising select papers presented at this year’s meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies association. The essay uses ‘In Memoriam,’ Alfred Tennyson’s poem about his best friend’s death, to examine how representations of

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