Faculty Bookshelf

In Julie Babcock’s first poetry collection, the state of Ohio appears as an astronaut, a cowgirl, and a waitress at Big Boy. Cultural and personal histories collide on worn-out stages, back roads, and gravel pits in order to explore the paradoxes of home– how it holds shovelfuls of experiences we want to simultaneously bury, unearth, and transform.

“The Octopus caught my attention and imagination immediately. I could not stop reading. Every poem unleashes a new understanding and way of seeing what it is to live in a world with others, and perhaps, most strikingly, the process of understanding your individual self apart from “the other.” Beal uses language that is vibrant and calculating, while at the same time never taking itself too seriously. While the idea of an octopus living a human life (eating oatmeal, being Monday Snack Parent, getting a divorce) is inherently surreal and comedic, it is this humor that makes Beal’s work so...

Wait ’Til You Have Real Problems, the fiercely imaginative debut collection from Scott Beal, tackles gender and childhood, passion and loss, in a series of thematically linked poems that will leave readers breathless. Beal finds inspiration in everything from fairytale to fatherhood, from a girl with barbed-wire hair to the origin of chicken noodle soup—but always, ultimately, from the core of the human.

In this article, we argue that writing instructors might support students in messy problem-exploring through multimodal composition assignments like video composition, and in particular, through careful attention to assessment practices. Through reflective analysis of one teacher's experiences with video composition in first-year writing, we suggest that ongoing formative reflection might be useful for prompting and extending problem-exploring within digital composition. We reflect specifically on Angie's interpretations of her students’ experiences with problem-exploring through video, we narrate...

In this article, I argue that James’s What Maisie Knew investigates the consequences of a distinctly modern mode of observation that both depends on and subverts literary naturalism’s trope of the sensually vulnerable but inarticulate brute—a mode of observation much like the kind of snapshot photography that was widely practiced at the turn of the century. With her innate and curiously modern perceptual sensibilities, James’s Maisie gestures toward an anxiety about the potential of naturalism’s brutes to tell their own stories—an anxiety that I argue was also evinced by the rise of...

A series of dream visions, Piers Plowman is a moral reckoning of the whole of medieval England, in which every part of society—from church and king to every sort of “folk”—is considered in the light of the narrator’s interpretation of Christian revelation. The Middle English poem, rich and beautiful, is a particular challenge to teach: it exists in three versions, lacks a continuous narrative, is written in a West Midlands dialect, weaves a complex allegory, and treats complicated social and political issues, such as labor, Lollardy, and popular uprising.

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Innocent III's 1215 decree requiring an annual confession of all Christians spurred the development of religious instructional works, some of the first texts written for nonnoble audiences and arguably the ancestors of working-class literature. This article explains the historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to these texts and the rich pedagogical opportunities they provide.

This article offers an analysis of the complex and contradictory nature of lay religious texts produced in England at the turn of the fifteenth century. These works are interesting because they include statements of both encouragement to and anxiety about lay Christians who pursue more singular forms of devotion. I focus on one text in particular, A Ladder of Foure Ronges by the Which Men Mowe Wele Clyme to Heven, a monastic treatise on contemplation translated into Middle English and adapted for a lay audience in the late fourteenth century, as a touchstone to consider these conflicting...

Smallmouth bass swim in more streams, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs than any other gamefish, and exceptional, world-class fishing opportunities for them are found across the country, from the John Day River in Oregon to the Great Lakes, to Maine’s Penobscot. While numerous books have been written on smallmouth, this is the first book to cover the cutting-edge techniques and fly patterns being used by some of the country’s top fly fishing guides. Though most of these flies and techniques have been developed and refined in the rivers and lakes of the Midwest (a hotbed of smallmouth fly fishing...

Plastic litter is an environmental problem of great concern. Despite the magnitude of the plastic pollution in our water bodies, only limited scientific understanding is available about the risk to the environment, particularly for microplastics. The apparent magnitude of the problem calls for quickly developing sound scientific guidance on the ecological risks of microplastics. The authors suggest that future research into microplastics risks should be guided by lessons learned from the more advanced and better understood areas of (eco) toxicology of engineered nanoparticles and mixture toxicity...

The Detroit River is an international water body that has several fish consumption advisories for contaminants that affect human health and economic revenue for the USA and Canada. Despite the importance of these advisories, little progress has been made in developing effective management strategies or coordinating monitoring, research, and policy efforts between the 2 nations. We engaged 44 stakeholder organizations to increase community capacity on these issues for the Detroit River. We assessed capacity with key informant interviews and a network survey. Our analysis identified weak ties ...

About Syllabus: A good syllabus is a piece of original scholarship; a great one is also an art form. A research or theory paper go through peer review process to be recognized and validated; the same process should be available to course materials. This is a small step towards taking teaching as seriousely as we take research.The journal publishes original syllabi, assessment instruments, assignments and activities, and articles related to college teaching.

About JUMP: The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects is an electronic journal dedicated to providing an outlet for the excellent digital/multimedia projects occurring in undergraduate courses around the globe, and to providing a pedagogical resource for teachers working with (or wanting to work with) "new media."
 The journal is designed to be not only a repository for quality multimedia scholarship—bringing together some of the most rhetorically creative and rhetorically impactful works produced/composed by our undergraduates—but also, unlike its digital...

Special Powers and Abilities is a futuristic, stunningly imaginative poetic exploration of superheroes, religion, and myth.Inspired by The Legion of Super-Heroes, a comic series about a group of teenage superheroes in the future, McDaniel’s poems morph superheroes into religious and mythological narratives. Using a range traditional forms—versets, kennings, and sonnets, his poems consider the history of how we look at the future and takes on an almost Talmudic complexity.

“These poems are like their comic book sources in many ways, all of them smart and most of them touching...

A multivoiced saga of devastation and rebirth in the Caribbean and Gulf Coast. Conceived in the years before Hurricane Katrina and deeply influenced by its aftermath, Saltwater Empire is a brilliant assemblage of geographical metaphor expressed in original lyrics, text from The Tempest, and the voices of ravaged New Orleans residents. As McDaniel’s poems enter the ecological, political, and religious miasma of the Gulf Coast, they offer an uncommonly perceptive look at cataclysmic disaster, human cruelty, and cultural resilience.

“[McDaniel] has made not rhetoric, but stunning, ...

A National Poetry Series Winner, this collection follows an enigmatic assassin seeking refuge from her sordid past.“Mysterious and enticing, Murder (a violet) is a brilliant narrative constructed out of ‘fragments’ that “describe by accretion.’ The author asks us to ‘Imagine an epic from which a minor character walks away.  Epic-adjacent.’ There are ‘instructions for reading’ and ‘possible entrances,’ but this serial poem also provides room for the reader to enter and participate in the game played by its textual agents—the assassin, the abbess, the janissaries, the vines, the...

“McDaniel renders each poem’s discoveries with a worthwhile particularity.” —Publishers Weekly

“The Cataracts is a book of blurred vision, a theme imbued into the spaces between the lines, into the memories of the narrator—memories that feel like a game.” —The Millions

“A registering, a remembering, a naming, a seeing behind and beyond seeing: The Cataracts is a book of blindness and insight, offering a tenderly, sometimes painfully, scrutinized world.  With gorgeous catalogs, reticulated narratives, and...