Congratulations to this year's recipients of the Stephen Arkin Fund for Distinguished Students. Established in honor of Professor Emeritus Stephen Arkin, who taught in the English Department for more than 40 years, this scholarship supports English majors who demonstrate a deep commitment to literary study, have overcome barriers to academic success, and aspire to use their education in service of the public good.

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We are proud to recognize this year's recipients, Skye McMullen and Japneet Khanuja, and celebrate their academic achievements, resilience, and dedication to making a positive impact in their communities.

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Professor Stephen Arkin’s family is working to expand the Stephen Arkin Scholarship Fund with two goals: to increase the number of scholarships and create a new source of support for students presenting at academic conferences.

You can read Maricel’s email about this donation campaign here.
Click here to make a donation.  Thank you very much for your generosity. 

You can check out the full list of Emeritus/Emerita awardees here: Summer 2025 and Spring 2026

Priya was invited to the annual Latin American Language Testing Association (LAALTA) in Londrina, Brazil Sept. 11-13, 2025, where her talk “To grade or not to grade, that is the question” was the Pearson Plenary. She also conducted a pre-conference workshop on contract grading. While in Brazil she gave two talks on classroom-based assessment to school teachers and language assessment professionals in Sao Paulo. 

Meg Schoerke had a busy year!

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In November 2025, she organized a special session, “Reclaiming 20th Century Women Poets: Reversing the Rush to Oblivion,” for the annual PAMLA conference, which convened in San Francisco.

She also published, “Never Stop Writing:  Sylvia Plath’s Prose,” a review-essay of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, ed. Peter K. Steinberg, in the Autumn 2025 issue of The Hudson Review.  Hudson featured the review on its website.

During the fall, Meg also delivered a paper, “Efforts of Attention:  Re-evaluating Marianne Moore’s Poetics of Looking in the Attention Economy,” at the Marianne Moore Generations Conference, Stanford Humanities Center.

Finally, she was an invited participant for “Robert Lowell’s Memoirs (2022):  A Roundtable Discussion,” at the American Literature Association's  Annual Conference in Boston in May 2025.

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Congratulations, Meg!

The Spring 2025  Literacy in Composition Studies journal featured the following pieces: 

• “‘Kids Don’t Come with Instruction Manuals’: A Mother Writing to Learn across Her Lifespan” by Anna D’Orazio 

• “Suppression on Paper, Suffering in Real Life: How Language Ideology in Nationalistic Policies Shaped the Literacy Experiences of Thai Chinese in Thailand” by Nattaporn Luangpipat 

• “Modernity and Rhetorics of Reform: The State Language Debate in Bangladesh (the East Pakistan) and the Proposal for Shahaj Bangla” by Shakil Rabbi 

• Book Review – “Revisiting Multiliteracy: Contemporary (Re)Forms of Multiliteracy Pedagogy” by Dani English 

• Book Review – “Mentorship/Methodology: Reflections, Praxis, Futures edited by Leigh Gruwell and Charles N. Lesh” by Jessi Thomsen 

• Book Review – “Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer edited by Kara Poe Alexander, Matthew Davis, Lillian W. Mina, and Ryan P. Shepherd” by Tiffany Kinney 

• Book Review – “What it Means to Be Literate: A Disability Materiality Approach to Literacy After Aphasia by Elisabeth L. Miller” by Esther M. Gabay 

Breaking news! Just this week, Priya learned she has earned placement on the Fulbright Specialist Roster for a tenure of three years. As a candidate on the Fulbright Specialist Roster, she is now eligible to be matched with projects designed by institutions in over 150 countries. Priya’s expertise in curriculum and assessment development has already been requested by the Sri Lankan government that is currently in the process of a national educational reform project. She will be in Sri Lanka over the summer to work on curriculum and assessment reform. 

Julie Paulson has been named the new Paul K. Longmore Faculty Director of Disability Studies. This role honors Longmore’s legacy at SF State while supporting the continued growth of Disability Studies on our campus.

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Julie was also recently awarded a federal Department of Education Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Disabilities (TPSID) grant (in partnership with CSUN) and a grant from the California Center for Inclusive College (CCIC) to help support the SF State Inclusion Pilot Project (IPP). SF State’s IPP will receive $190K for 5 years from the TPSID grant (for a total of 950K). The CCIC grant is a one-year grant for 75K.

Congratulations Julie! 

Kat DeGuzman (Literature) participated in two conferences this month: the 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference at the University of Miami and the Urban Humanities (Un)conference 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.

Kat received valuable feedback on her current research project, which examines how the historical development of the term "gentrification" was informed by the London-set fictions of the Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon. More broadly, both conferences enabled Kat to learn about new approaches in Caribbean literary studies and urban humanities.

She looks forward to incorporating some of these approaches in her upcoming spring semester classes, including the Caribbean Literature graduate seminar (ENG 776) and Global Cities (ENG 640). 

Congrats to our newest tenured and promoted faculty — Dr. Gin Schwarz, Dr. Teresa Pratt, and Dr. Jenny Lederer — who were honored at a Faculty Affairs-hosted reception in the Library. 

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• Spring 2025

  • Awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor: Gin Schwarz, Teresa Pratt

  • Promoted to Full Professor: Jenny Lederer 

  • Photo: Reception hosted by Faculty Affairs, October 2025. Left to right: Savi Malik, Gin Schwarz, Maricel Santos, Dean Ifeoma Nwankwo

• Spring 2026

  • Awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor: Will Clark

  • Promoted to Full Professor: Anastasia Smirnova

Kat published "West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Counterprogramming" which appeared in a January issue of the Oakland Review of Books - a great article that will inspire new thinking about Filipino-American history in San Francisco, and why SF might be better called the "west bay..."

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Read the article here! 

We were thrilled to have Christoph Nostitz join us as a visiting scholar from Leipzig, Germany. 

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More about Christoph:

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Hello, my name is Christoph Nostitz and I am a PhD researcher from Leipzig, Germany. I hold two bachelor’s degrees—in British Studies and American Studies—and a master’s degree in American Studies, with a focus on literary and cultural analysis. My doctoral research project, “Dangerous Spaces – Narratives of Securitization in 21st-Century U.S. Literature and Culture,” offers a cultural analysis of U.S. security imaginaries by placing contemporary literary texts in dialogue with grassroots print culture. Combining narrative analysis, affect theory, and spatial approaches, the project explores how security operates not only as a political strategy but as a cultural narrative that shapes experiences of belonging, fear, and protection. Focusing on Californian novels, memoirs, and Bay Area grassroots print culture, the study examines how dominant security discourses are reinforced, negotiated, and resisted, and how alternative imaginaries of care, solidarity, and community emerge at their margins.

During my two-month research stay at San Francisco State University, I conducted archival research in the San Francisco Public Library’s Zine Collection and the SFSU Labor Archives, while also engaging with local zine communities and underground print collectives. I am particularly interested in learning from SF State’s long tradition of community-engaged scholarship and grassroots knowledge production.  Outside of academia, I enjoy street photography and music, which allow me to explore cities, everyday encounters, and creative expression beyond the written word.

Brian Strang and Amy Latham are two of the awardees of the CEETL 2026 Exemplary Teaching Awards for this year. 

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Congratulations, Brian and Amy!

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Read about the awardees: 2026 CEETL Teaching Awards | Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CEETL)

Robert Kohls, Esther Chan and a team of multilingual translators brought us the Pronunciation Awareness Project. This new resource supports SF State faculty and tutors in their engagement with multilingual students by highlighting the diversity of names and languages on campus. This series of videos explores name pronunciation and associated gender identity across Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese. The project offers practical tools to foster more inclusive and respectful learning environments. ​

Publication: "AI is Manna for Writing Studies" Trainor, Jennifer. "AI is Manna for Writing Studies or, How to Stay Calm in Troubled Times." Literacy in Composition Studies 12.2 (2026): 58-71. 

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Check out the journal here! 

The Linguistics Program has a new promotional video (click here to view). Jenny Lederer, supported by an LCA Futures Initiative Grant, interviewed linguists currently working in the tech industry and drew on their insights to create this video.  Thanks to John Fields (MA International Relations) for help with the video production.

Congratulations to Brian Strang on the publication of his multimedia poem, “Songbirds,” in Another Chicago Magazine.

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We are delighted to celebrate this creative achievement!

Congratulations to Jennifer Trainor on her recent publication with John Holland, “Seeking Literacy Justice: Insights from a Six-Year Assessment Project,” published in the Journal of Composition Studies (Spring 2026).

Congratulations to Will Clark on the publication of his article, “Bad Feelings, White Feelings: Miscegenation Law, Sentiment, and the Violence of Custom in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition,” in Law, Culture and the Humanities.

Our department continues to feel the profound loss of our dear colleague, David Olsher, who passed away last summer. David's contributions as a teacher, scholar, mentor, and friend left a lasting impact on our students, colleagues, and the broader university community. His absence is deeply felt within the English Department and across campus.

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We invite community members to learn more about David's life and legacy through his memorial page and the university's In Memoriam tribute in the campus memo.

John Holland serves on the national Eli Review Advisory Board. He has provided feedback from the field to the development team as the peer learning application has upgraded to a modern user experience and adding a reflection component to the feedback cycle the app has relied upon since 2010.

As the Eli team out of Michigan State University writes, "the new Eli doubles down on human judgment as the foundation of effective learning. For over ten years, John Holland has been using Eli Review and peer learning as the rails upon which he runs his writing courses with a pedagogy in which student thinking develops over time, sans robotic help."

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Meet the New Eli Review.

Composition faculty member Jennifer Trainor hosted a webinar on rhetorical load-sharing and students’ approaches to AI and writing, titled "Students' Changing Writing Processes in the Age of AI." The webinar is part of a CSU Innovation Grant, a project that both Composition faculty members Tara Lockhart and Jennifer have been working on.

The webinar was a part of the series "CSU Presents: Teaching with GenAI: What CSU Faculty Are Learning," a "...teacher-research project investigates how AI is changing students’ writing processes. How are students sharing the rhetorical load with AI during writing? How do students make rhetorical decisions about AI? And how can we teach writing in ways that account for AI? The session shares preliminary insights and key takeaways."

We’re proud to highlight TESOL faculty members Robert Kohls and Maricel Santos, who presented at the 2026 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference in Chicago, held March 21–24.

Robert’s presentation, “Mentorship as a Catalyst for Success: Overcoming Challenges in English-Medium Scholarly Publishing,” explored how mentorship supports multilingual scholars navigating academic publishing in English.

Maricel contributed to a collaborative presentation titled “Language, Literacy, and Health: A Scoping Review of Health Literacy Interventions for Migrant Populations.”

Congratulations to Robert and Maricel for representing the TESOL program and contributing to important conversations in applied linguistics, health literacy, and scholarly publishing!

WIll Clark represented our department at a SFSU Science, Technology, and Society Hub event, “Teaching Against Extractivism,” an evening of lightning talks from interdisciplinary faculty exploring extractivism as a framework across fields, from technology and migration to labor, environment, and culture.

Staff member Cynthia Losinsky took on a new role this semester:

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As part of a reassignment and LCA reorganization, I was assigned a 0.5 appointment in Philosophy effective March 9, where I oversee the Philosophy graduate program. While I will continue to support the English graduate programs to the best of my ability, my expanded responsibilities may occasionally result in delays in responding to emails or completing tasks.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as I transition into this new role.

In June, the English Department staff gathered at the Boulevard Cafe to celebrate the end of the academic year.  Cynthia now works in both English and Philosophy Departments, so staff Jennifer Waller and chair Carlos Montemayor of Philosophy joined us too. Together, we toasted our hard work keeping the departments running smoothly and supporting the success of our students, faculty, and programs. 

We would also like to express their sincere gratitude to the department faculty for another year of collaboration and shared commitment to our students and community. As changes to the staff team approach in the coming year, we want to acknowledge how much we value being part of such a supportive, friendly department. Thank you for making the English Department such a rewarding place to work and learn.
 

Staff member Heather Sawyer graduated with an MA in Design as a DAA nominee, got married, and brought home a new puppy this year!

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Heather completed her MA in Design with a Creative Work Project titled, “The Monster Archive: Co-Designing a Visual Record of Contemporary Folklore.” This project included a written document outlining her research and an illustrated book of folklore tales. Heather was selected for the Graduate Award for Distinguished Achievement for the School of Design.

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Heather and her husband, Alex, tied the knot this February at San Francisco City Hall.

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They also welcomed their new puppy, Robin Goodfellow (but usually just Robin), in May!