The University of Kentucky English department is a powerhouse of literary success and scholarly achievement, featuring award-winning and world-renowned authors. Their celebrated novels, award-winning monographs, thought-provoking essays, and inspiring poetry have captivated audiences and set new standards in the literary world. In addition, our graduate students are also making significant strides in the field as they undertake exciting research, explore new frontiers, and make valuable contributions to the field and push the boundaries of scholarship and the literary canon.

FACULTY HIGHLIGHTS

Emily Shortslef’s first book, The Drama of Complaint: Ethical Provocations in Shakespeare’s Tragedy (2023), explores Shakespeare’s use of poetic forms of complaint, arguing that “these conventional forms were vehicles for unconventional philosophical thought in the early modern stage.” The book has been recognized as a finalist for the 2024 Shakespeare Association of America First Book Award. The Wellness Plot: Comedy and the Care of the Self in Early Modern England is Dr. Shortslef’s second monograph, which explores the relationship between early modern theatrical comedy and medical literature, focusing on how the emerging ideal of “wellness” shaped comic forms in the seventeenth century. This innovative project examines the medical motifs central to major playwrights, such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher, and Shirley, to show how comic theory and practice were deeply rooted in medicalized concepts of human wellbeing. Emily’s research also draws connections between these early modern ideas and contemporary wellness discourse, demonstrating the enduring relevance of comedy in both literature and medicine.

Frank X Walker completed his book project about 100 years of Black golf, tentatively titled Lions Before Tiger, and during his work, he discovered “how closely the history of golf resembles the history of racism in America.” This month, he also released his book of poems, Load in Nine Times. Frank shares that the author photo from his book was taken with an original Civil War era camera, by University of Kentucky photographer, Mark Cornelius. Looking ahead, Frank is in conversations with Norton about the third book in his Lewis & Clark & York series, and the possibility of publishing all three books together as a set.

Andrew Milward’s most recent book, a collection of novellas called You Are Loved, came out this past spring. You Are Loved tells the story of a man, Dixon Still, through two interconnected novellas, “first when he is a young, aspiring photographer who has an affair with a married woman that brings about a coming of age both in terms of his art and his sexuality, and then thirty years later when he is a happily married museum curator whose life grows increasingly complicated through a web of open sexual relationships and professional expectations.” He is working on his fifth book and his first novel, called The Fabricator, which is set in the art world.

Regina Hamilton-Townsend's book project, Speculative Aesthetics: Afrofuturism, Black Radical Thought, and the American Nation, explores the intersections of Black speculative fiction, black radical thought, and Afrofuturism. She highlights how speculative elements have been wielded to critique and dismantle the structures of the American nation. Through detailed analysis of works like Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series and Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, Hamilton-Townsend reveals how these texts evoke radical visions of liberation and challenge persistent slave ontologies. By examining themes from futuristic slave narratives to Afropessimism’s influence on literary frameworks, her scholarship foregrounds the power of speculative literature to reshape discourses on race, identity, and freedom in America.