Althought they have not been on campus since March, Writing and Communication Program Faculty have been working on their own research in addition to teaching remotely. Several WCP faculty members have essays out now or due to come available in the near future.

Alok Amatya (3rd-year Brittain Fellow) has coedited a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies (66.1) on Literature and Extraction, now available online. You can now read a digital copy of "Literature in an Age of Extraction" on Project Muse. Amatya sends many thanks to my co-editor Ashley Dawson, and to John Duvall, Robert Marzec, and the full editorial team.

Current WCP Lecturer Rachel Dean-Ruzicka has an article titled "Paranormal Maturation: Uncanny Teens and Canny Killers" in the recent collection Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Literature. The collection is edited by former Brittain Fellows Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Wilson. Rachel's article is about the surprising subgenre of paranormal teenagers who defeat serial killers and what it can tell us about growing up.

WCP Assistant Director Courtney Hoffman's essay "Exploring Data Visualization: Time, Emotion, and Epistolarity in Frances Brooke's The HIstory of Emily Montague" will be available in the collection Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture, out in Fall 2020. Using Brooke's novel as a case study, , Hoffman presents a narrative of her journey to learn how easy to use and online based data visualization programs can not only aid in her research but also in her pedagogy.

Hannah Markey (3rd-year Brittain Fellow) has a new essay forthcoming this fall in a collection on British Literature and Psychopharmacology.In “Pharmacokinetics and Opium-Eating: Metabolites, Stomach Aches and the Afterlife of De Quincey’s Addiction,” Markley relies on current psychopharmacological understandings of how drugs ‘act’ and, in turn, are acted on by the body to produce drug effects, drawing attention to the entanglement of action and effect in modern scientific discussions of drugs. By focusing on the ways opiates are metabolized by the body, Markley argues that, despite his technically flawed accounts, De Quincey’s rhetoric of ‘opium-eating’ in Confessions (1821) forecasts current psychopharmacological explanations of how bodies and drugs interact. In this way, recent psychopharmacological descriptions of drugs and their metabolization help to confirm De Quincey’s descriptions of the bilateral relationship between the opium user, or ‘eater’, and the drug itself.

Keep your eye out for more WCP faculty work, available now or coming soon!