Department of English Announces Graduate Teaching Awards

The Department of English and Philosophy is pleased to announce the winners of its annual Graduate Student Teaching Awards, which recognize English graduate students’ excellence in the ISU classroom. This year the department has selected two winners, one at the Ph.D. level and one at the M.A. level.

The Ph.D. recipient of the award is Jaclyn Sedlacek. A B.A. and M.A. graduate of Northwest Nazarene University who taught briefly in Washington, DC before coming to ISU. Sedlacek recently defended her dissertation, “‘Humans, Aliens, and Environment: An Ecofeminist Approach to Feminist Science Fiction Literature (1969-1994)” as part of her Ph.D. in English and the Teaching of English. She has taught numerous courses at ISU during her time in the graduate program, and has also served as an Adjunct Professor at Northwest Nazarene. She notes that her favorite teaching experience at ISU was her Independent Internship in ENGL 1102. “The class was tiny but mighty,” she says, “and led to some amazing experiences in teaching rhetoric and using science fiction and fantasy literatures to do so.”

The M.A. recipient of the award is Luke Fredette. Fredette earned a B.A. in English and Philosophy at Fresno Pacific University as well as an M.A. at Edinburgh Napier University before beginning the M.A. program in English at ISU. He has recently completed his M.A. thesis, “Examining the ‘India’ in ‘India’s Tolkien’: Amish Tripathi's Postcolonial Mythopoeia,” and this fall he will take up a faculty position at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Fredette taught ENGL 1101 and 1102 courses at ISU, making a strong impact on students’ experiences of those Gen Ed requirements.

The Department of English and Philosophy has four graduate programs: a Ph.D. in English and the Teaching of English, an M.A. in English, an accelerated B.A./M.A. in English, and a graduate certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. More information about these programs is available on the English website: isu.edu/english.