San Francisco State University

2025 CEETL teaching Excellence Award: Joan Wong and Esther Chan

Congratulations, Joan and Esther!

AY 2025-2026 sabbatical awards: bridget Gelms and Sara Hackenberg

Congratulations, Bridget and Sara!

Jenny Lederer's SF Standard Interview 

Over the winter break, Jenny was approached by an SF Standard reporter investigating the Chatham House Rule - not a topic she was familiar with! While she provided a bunch of balanced content, the reporter seemed to only select the critical quotes to include in the article. Nonetheless, there's a lot of food for thought here! Thank you for sharing this with us Jenny! 

Jennifer Trainor's Article with Inside Higher ED

The website Inside Higher Ed published an article written by our very own Jennifer Trainor, along with CEETL Director Anoshua Chaudhuri. You can read their article, “3 Laws for Curriculum Design in an AI Age” now on their website. Congratulations to Jennifer and Anoshua for the publication! 

Daniel Curtis-Cummins awarded Experimental College 2025 Call to Service Grant 

This Spring marks the 16th semester of the Experimental College since its revival in 2017! As it offers a plethora of unique classes this semester (which can still be registered for), we’re happy to share that EXCO was awarded a 2025 Call to Service Grant from ICCE, allowing them to offer paid positions for three pilot teachers! Congratulations to Dan for receiving this grant! 

New courses!

We have two exciting new courses in the English Department!

• ENG 256: Queer Crip Lit with Julie Paulson

  • ​What does it mean to be “normal”? And who gets to decide? This course draws on queer and disability studies to explore how literature shapes—and unravels—our ideas about what counts as a “normal” or “abnormal” body or mind. We’ll read texts that don’t just represent disability and queerness, but that unsettle dominant assumptions about ability, identity, desire, intelligence, neurodivergence, and embodiment. Along the way, we’ll consider how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and sexuality, and how literature can both reinforce and resist the stories we tell about difference. Readings will be drawn from works by Audre Lorde, Eli Clare, Alice Wong, Julia Bascom, Susan Nussbaum, and others.

• ENG 125: Language, Gender, and Sexuality with Teresa Pratt

  • "​Examine the relationship between language, gender, and sexuality. Ask how language is a site for both (re)producing the gendered social order and for rupturing normative ideas about gender and sexuality through creative linguistic practice. Discuss queer linguistic practices, and the ways that gender and sexuality (and their linguistic expression) are always already intersected with race, class, and other identity formations. Focus on the everyday use of language in interaction. Topics include embodiment and performance; identity and desire; and queer linguistics."

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Kat DeGuzman's Fall 2024 Sabbatical  

I was awarded a sabbatical for Fall 2024! I dedicated the semester to revising my book manuscript, "Archipelagic Aesthetics: Reading Caribbean and Filipinx Affinities." This project brings archipelagic thinking—an interpretive framework typically used to examine how the geographical unit of the archipelago informs political formations—to the practice of closely reading postcolonial literature and film from the Caribbean and the Philippines. I submitted the manuscript for a second round of peer review in January 2025. During the last week of classes this May, I learned that my manuscript reached an important milestone in the book-publishing process: it was approved by the editorial board of the University of Hawai‘i Press! 

During my sabbatical, I also conducted research for a new project about the literary histories of gentrification. This work emerges from several years of teaching my Global Cities course. With support from the LCA Faculty Mini-Grant, I traveled to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in September 2024. The Harry Ransom Center holds the Samuel Selvon Papers, a collection of notebooks and correspondence by the Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon. My time with the Selvon Papers taught me that the writer was even more preoccupied with the issue of affordable housing in London than I expected. I knew that three of Selvon's novels foreground racist practices around housing (as students who have taken my Global Cities course or Caribbean Literature graduate seminar also know). Selvon is most well-known for his novels, but he also wrote numerous radio plays, including one called "A House for Teena." Therefore, the next step in my research is to read more of Selvon's writing for the radio. Alas, this would require a trip to the Alma Jordan Library at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad–which holds the largest collection of Selvon's unpublished writing. It stands out to me that Selvon turned to a seemingly ephemeral form–the radio play–to tell stories about the struggle against displacement. 

Literacy in Composition Studies Issue 11.2

Tara Lockhart and the team at her journal Literacy in Composition Studies is delighted to announce that issue 11.2 is now live at www.licsjournal.org. This issue features the following pieces: 

• Teaching Dispositions: Cultivating Critical Hope in Community Literacy by Rachael Shah 

• Mothering Through Barbed Wire and Literacy Barriers: The Role of Literacy in Incarcerated Motherhood by JWells 

• The Decolonial Imperative in Basic Writing by Walter Lucken IV 

• Symposium – GenAI: The Impetus for Linguistic Justice Once and For All by Faith Thompson and Lauren Hatch Pokhrel 

• Book Review – Eli Goldblatt’s Alone with Each Other: Literature and Literacy Intertwined by Elizabeth Kimball 

Scaffolding Student Writing in the Age of AI

Jennifer Trainor wrote about the effects of A.I. on student writing with Todd Walker from Clark Community College and Portland College. Read more here. 

Brian Strang's poetry Publications

• Two poems: "the western end" and "if lands" in BlazeVOX Magazine

• "the bridge" mulitmedia poem in Word For/Word #44 (Spring 2025) 

• "origins" mulitmedia poem in Word For/Word: A Journal of New Writing Issue 43 (Autumn, 2024) 

Renovations to Careers in English Webpage 

In the fall, we launched the updated Careers in English webpage on our website! It features  new visuals, a new layout, and easy access to career center and job opportunities! A special thank you to Chris Conroy for editing, Heather Sawyer for her insight on layout and visual design, and Anastasia for providing our photos and creating the word Cloud! 

Priya Abeywickrama: ASOCOPI & 4th LAALTA Conference Speaker 

The Colombian Association of Teachers of English, which joined forces with LAALTA, Latin American Language Testing Association, organized the 59th National and 5th International ASOCOPI & 4th LAALTA Conference in Barranquilla- Colombia October 3-5, 2024. Priya was invited as a plenary speaker where she gave her talk “To grade or not to grade, that is the question”. 

New department videos!

Throughout 2024 and 2025, we worked with John Fields and Zora Kreisher to create two promotional video for our Department. A big thank you to the following people: 

• John Fields, who handled the entirety of the filming and editing behind the longer video project. None of this would’ve been possible without him! ​

• Zora Kreisher, who filmed and produced our shorter promotional video. Thank you for all of the work you completed to create this engaging video! 

• Jim Gilligan, Briget Gelms, and Teresa Pratt as well as every student in their classes, for letting us film them in action! ​ 

• Roselie Roman, Timothy Torres, and Mayra Torres for speaking about their experiences as English majors! 

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You can see the videos on our website, YouTube channel, and here:

1. John's Video: A video to highlight student voices, experiences, interests in our programs.

2. Zora's Video: A shorter promotional video about the English Department degree programs to share with high schools and community colleges. 

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Message from Staff

Thank you to everyone who shared content for the Spring newsletter. Your contributions help keep us connected. As the semester wraps up, it’s nice to look back on all the events, accomplishments, and celebrations that kept the English department busy. This past year brought its share of challenges, but we’ve supported each other through it all, and we’ll keep that same momentum going into next year. Wishing you a relaxing summer. See you in the fall!​

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- Cynthia, Heather, Perry, & Chris