English honor society inducts new members, honors seniors
Junior Miranda Guthrie of Suwanee, Ga., and two sophomores, Autumn Horne of Ware Shoals and Blake Little of Winnsboro, were inducted into the English honor society Sigma Tau Delta Tuesday evening during a dinner in the Bell Conference Room.
Professor of English Dr. Joan Little said six of the seven English majors graduating this month are members of the society.
Little, who began teaching at Erskine in 1976, is proud of the number of majors in Sigma Tau Delta. Four of the seniors—Rebekah Bowen of Columbia, Kyle Ritland of Honea Path, Rachel Talbot of Rock Hill, and Caroline Thomas of Raleigh, N.C.—presented papers at the national conference of Sigma Tau Delta last year. One of the seniors, Trevor Ritland of Honea Path, attended this year’s national conference in Albuquerque, N.M., and presented a work of fiction, “Closing Time.” The five seniors who made presentations at the national conference are graduating with honors in English.
“Our seniors have had various accomplishments recently and are looking ahead to exciting new ventures,” Little said. She outlined a few of the students’ plans and achievements.
Kyle Ritland has accepted a full scholarship to attend the University of California-Riverside, where he will enter an MFA program focused on creative writing. His twin brother Trevor “plans to teach for a year in Costa Rica and then join Kyle in California, where they will begin their writing careers,” Little said.
“Rebekah Bowen, with a 4.0 GPA, is likely to be valedictorian of the 2015 senior class,” Little said. She has been offered a teaching position and plans to interview for a communications job with a state agency.
Rachel Talbot of Rock Hill will be an intern with Reformed University Fellowship at Davidson College in North Carolina, where she plans to serve for two years.
Caroline Thomas of Raleigh, N.C., who is doing her student teaching at Belton-Honea Path High School, plans to teach next year, Little said.
Caitlin LeJeune of White Stone, S.C., who graduated early, is working for The State newspaper in Columbia. She was one of five English majors who took the Major Field Assessment Test. “Our students have done exceedingly well on this national test for English majors,” Little said.
Taking pride in the achievements of her colleagues in the English department as well, Little said Dr. Christine Schott and Dr. Amanda Sigler “have participated in conferences this year and have some exciting plans involving travel and scholarly conferences this summer.”
In September, Schott presented a paper on medieval Icelandic poetry manuscripts at the Medieval-Renaissance Conference at the University of Virginia at Wise. “I will be giving another paper—on medieval Icelandic proverbial wisdom—at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in England,” she said.
Sigler, who was recently asked to write a chapter for The Cambridge History of Modernism, reports she is working on a reader’s guide for the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses Seen, which is a comics adaptation of Joyce’s novel Ulysses. She will be traveling to Zurich, Switzerland, this August to attend a workshop on James Joyce.
