Awards & Appointments

Congratulations to Margaret Bauer for receiving the 2004 VCAA Scholar/Teacher Award. The purpose of the annual Vice Chancellor for Academic Affair's Scholar-Teacher Award is "to recognize faculty members who effectively integrate research/creative activity in classroom teaching. ... The recognition will provide additional opportunities for these outstanding faculty members to mentor others."  She will be recognized at the annual ceremony on April 14th in Wright auditorium.

Pat Bizzaro's poem, "Violence," published on the poetsagainstthewar website, was nominated by William Heyen for a 2004 Pushcart Prize.

Ahmar Mahboob has been invited to join the editorial board of Pakistan Journal of Language published by the Linguistics Association of Pakistan.

Gregg A. Hecimovich has received a 2004 NEH Summer Stipend Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The award of $5,000 helps fund two consecutive months of full-time research and writing. Hecimovich's research project titled, "Searching for Hannah Crafts: Kate Wheeler Cooper and the First Novel by an African-American Woman," is part of a book-project, Hannah Crafts and North Carolina. According to Hecimovich, "The Kate Wheeler Cooper collection at East Carolina University may hold the key to the most intriguing mystery in contemporary literary study: 'Who is Hannah Crafts?'  My project links the recently discovered manuscript, 'The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts' to the Kate Wheeler Cooper collection housed at East Carolina University.  Published in April 2002, Crafts's fictional autobiography has garnered international attention as the first novel by an African-American woman and fugitive slave.  To authenticate the identity of its author, scholars have focused on the links between the slave-owning 'Wheeler family' in the novel and the family of the historical John Hill Wheeler, a prominent North Carolinian.  Preliminary research suggests that the Wheeler family correspondence included in the Kate Wheeler Cooper papers provides definitive evidence identifying 'Hannah Crafts' as an escaped slave from North Carolina; the papers also point to a new direction in the search for the historical 'Hannah Crafts.'"

Don Palumbo has been appointed to the editorial board of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.  "JFA, now in its 10th. year of publication, is an interdisciplinary quarterly devoted to the study of the fantastic in Literature, Art, Drama, Film, and Popular Media. It is published by the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, where production offices are located."  Palumbo also currently serves on the editorial board for The Journal of Popular Culture.