English

Faculty Accomplishments

Dr. Julie Brannon, associate professor of English, has forthcoming entries in the Encyclopedia of Popular Culture—a biography of J. K. Rowling; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; and an entry on Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons.  These entries were accepted and will be published this year. This spring, Dr. Brannon served as a jurist for the Rollins College McKean Grant, which awards $15,000 to Rollins faculty for significant research in a field of study.  Rollins alumni who have achieved academic distinction are chosen to serve on the jury each year.

As Interclub Projects Chair for District 5 of Kiwanis International, Dr. Brannon headed up a district-wide fundraiser, Kiwanis Peanut Day, in January.  Five clubs in the Jacksonville and St. Augustine areas gave out peanuts at Publix locations around the First Coast in exchange for donations. More than $2,500 was raised to help children in the community. 

English professor Dr. Julie Brannon was one of three JU faculty selected as a Seminar Leader for the inaugural First Coast Scholars Program, which provides intensive, content-rich seminars for Duval County public school teachers through the Schultz Center for Teaching and Leadership. Dr. Brannon’s seminar was on Romanticism. Each seminar was attended by 10-12 teachers who also wrote curriculum units for classroom use on a related topic. The seminars were held at JU from March 27 to May 17, 2007. The First Coast Scholar program is partnered with Princeton University and all three faculty members had visited Princeton University to observe their seminars prior to beginning the Jacksonville project.

In 2006 Dr. Julie Brannon presented a paper titled “If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother: Hamlet on Film” at the Popular Culture Association of the South’s annual conference in Savannah, Ga., and presented a paper titled “It’s about Power: Buffy, Foucault, and the Quest for Self” at the Jacksonville University Faculty Symposium. This paper has been submitted for publication in the refereed, online journal Slayage, The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies.  Dr. Brannon also presented a revised Hamlet paper at the Conference of the National Association of Humanities Educators in San Francisco, Calif.

Dr. Ray Clines, professor of English and coordinator of composition, published an article, “Transforming Modern Education through Writing,” in the spring issue of the Florida English Journal. A version of this article was presented at the National Association for Humanities Education in San Francisco in February 2007.