All News

Congratulations to English Professors Hyunyoung Cho and Cathy Saunders, selected by the Center for Humanities Research to receive summer funding for their projects related to the humanities.

Julija Pivo, 2020 graduate from Mason’s BFA program, has won a prestigious Fulbright English Teaching Fellowship to Lithuania, starting in Summer 2022. The award not only caps an impressive career at Mason, but also brings a family journey full circle: Pivo’s late father was a Fulbright scholar from Lithuania to America from 2000 - 2001.

Phil Goldstein hid his trauma for almost twenty years. A survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of his older brother, Phil did what most male victims do -- he locked his past away from the world. Today, Phil can celebrate the end of that long-held silence through the release of his debut volume of poetry, How to Bury a Boy at Sea published by Stillhouse Press in April of 2022. This arresting collection renders the complexities unique to male survivors of sexual abuse with clarity and bravery, a critical and too-often ignored storyline.

A team of composition faculty at Mason was awarded the CCCC Research Initiative Grant for a project focused on investigating student perceptions and experiences in hybrid courses, and as a result of that grant, the team has debuted a website with resources and evidence-based materials that support faculty who design and teach hybrid courses.

Jasmine Okidi has been awarded the Beinecke Scholarship, which supports exceptional students committed to research careers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She was only one of 16 recipients among nominees from as many as 135 institutions.

Tulane Simpson, an undergraduate English major and Honors student, has been selected to present their Honors Thesis, “Ecoandrogyny: Environmentalism Beyond the Gender Binary,” as part of Posters on the Hill, a virtual conference April 26-27.

Part Two of this series—“Literary Journals 101”—will bring together writers and editors across genres of creative writing: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They will discuss their own publishing journeys, what makes a submission a ‘yes,’ and what they’ve learned about craft, equity, and community from working with literary journals.

Drawing extensively from articles written by members of online queer communities attempting to bring attention to this issue, The Digital Closet examines, in the words of publisher MIT Press, "how heteronormative bias is deeply embedded in the internet, hidden in algorithms, keywords, content moderation, and more."

The Virginia-based Band SOJA won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album for Beauty in the Silence.

Chelsea Lebron, a first-year MFA student in Creative Writing, has been named the recipient of this year’s Robert Raymond Scholarship, encouraging students who contribute to the MFA program’s diversity.