Congratulations University Scholars, 2010

The Faculty Senate selects 50 of the top academic students from across the campus and recognizes them in an award ceremony in April.  This year, the Faculty Senate selected 4 English majors for this prestigious award.

Joshua Alkire

Josh is a double major in English and Biblical text with an outstanding record of scholarship that is evidenced by his 4.0 GPA asw ell as a remarkable record of research and conference presentations.  In the Spring semester of 2010, Joshua represented ACU at two separate conferences, both of which have rigorous selection criteria.  One of his papers was accepted for the national conference of Sigma Tau Delta, the English Majors’ Honor Society.

Erin Halstead

Erin is active in the honors program and has completed two honors contracts: her first work was entitled “Gender Discourse in the ACU classroom” and the second “The Longer We Learn English, the More English We Forget: Demotivation in the ESL Classroom.”  She is now conducting research among college-aged women for her honors capstone project called “The Authoritarian Voice in the Talk of College-aged Women.”

Megan Faver Hartline

Megan’s Honors Capstone project explores the shift in the construction of feminine gender in popular children’s literature from the late 19th century to those constructed in contemporary children’s texts.  Her work demonstrates a burden for justice as she discsses how our stories define roles for our girls that often cage rather than free them.  One of her professors says: “I admire Megan’s scholarship.  Its strength distinguishes it from the work of her peers.”

Lydia Melby

According to her professors, Lydia Melby is “one of the most academically distinguished of the current English majors; and with her awards and publications she has become the English Department’s most successful creative writing student of the past ten years.”  She won awards for her short story “And We Were Gone,” at the Christianity and Literature Contest and at the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers Contest.  She was accepted into the prestigious CCCU program, Best Semester, and studied in Oxford.