Category: Students

Freshman Spotlight: Meet Megan Macker

by Danielle Childs Every August, the university receives students with new passions, skills, and perspectives—these students must certainly be the lifeblood of our department. Reading lists may share similarities year to year, but the discussions surrounding them never could. I have to assume that it remains a thorough joy for a professor to read a…

A New Year for Sigma Tau Delta

by Hannah Wilkes  While many students at the University of Portland might be familiar with some of its more well-known honor societies, like Alpha Lambda Delta or Delta Epsilon Sigma, many students aren’t aware that the university has its very own English honor society: Sigma Tau Delta!  While our STD chapter is fairly new, and…

Welcome to a New Semester on the English Department Blog!

   We’re back!  After an extended summer, the UP English Department blog is back on.  Our winning team of Contributing Editors this year includes Danielle Childs, Kevin Chung, Ana Fonseca, and Clare Munger, with Athena Lathos (pictured here) interning as Managing Editor for the Fall Semester.  Feel free to email me, Dr. Brassard, Dept. Chair,…

Final Goodbyes

by Dorian Pacheco The English blog closes for summer as of today…thanks to the whole community of contributors, readers, and English-lovers for making this such a great year.  Here’s a farewell post from Dorian P. whom you can thank for making sure EVERY post got onto the blog this year.  Thanks, Dorian.  Dr. Brassard will…

Dr. Larson’s Podcast: Dialectical Teaching in a Righteous Age

The English Department’s Dr. Larson gave a faculty talk this semester on the occasion of winning 2013’s campus teaching award.  The Garaventa Center made a 22-minute podcast version of the talk, “Dialectical Teaching in a Righteous Age,” which examines our era’s habit of polarized thinking, and how we can be part of a change simply…

Reading On Into the Sunset: A Post-Graduate Syllabus

by Hannah Wilkes As English majors, there is one thing we can always count on being handed at the start of each new semester: a syllabus listing all of the books, poems, and/or plays to be read for the class.  While finishing college provides a relief from all that school work, it also means the…

Farewell, Professor Asarnow

 by Kate Stringer On Friday, a classroom of students and their professor left Paradise. Sappy, but let me explain. We were reading Milton’s Paradise Lost in Renaissance Literature with professor Herman Asarnow. Many of us were melancholy because it was the last English class in our four year stint at UP. But as evidenced by…

Three Poems Published…Congrats to Aurora Meyers!

by Catherine Tangen I was a bit intimidated when I first went to meet UP junior (Environmental studies major and English minor) Aurora Meyers, on a typical rainy Portland day. She had been published, and I was interviewing someone for the first time. But when we started talking she instantly set me at ease with…

Graduate School in English: A report from Year One

A guest post by Joyce King, UP English alum from 2012.  Joyce is in her first year in an M.A. program in English at Saint Louis University.  Those of you pondering graduate school will learn a lot from Joyce’s experience… I cannot claim to understand how to be a graduate student, and talking about my…

STD Spring Induction Report

by Hannah Wilkes Last fall, University of Portland’s English honor society, Sigma Tau Delta (also known by the somewhat unfortunate acronym STD!), inducted seventeen students as its very first members.  This spring—just last Thursday—the second official induction ceremony was held, welcoming seven new students into STD.  In order to join STD, students must be English majors…