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<div id="gmail-content-head" class="gmail-content-head"><h1 class="gmail-title" id="gmail-page-title"> New assistant English professor at MSU receives professional accolade </h1>
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<span>February 2, 2018</span>
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<div class="gmail-field-item even"><p>Contact: <a href="mailto:snicholas@deanas.msstate.edu">Sarah Nicholas</a></p>
<p></p><figure class="gmail-figure gmail-media-element gmail-file-default gmail-pull-right"><a href="https://www.msstate.edu/sites/www.msstate.edu/files/KatherineFlowersHALF.jpg"><img alt="Katherine Flowers (Submitted photo)" title="Katherine Flowers" class="gmail-" src="https://www.msstate.edu/sites/www.msstate.edu/files/KatherineFlowersHALF.jpg" width="500" height="572"></a><figcaption><span>Katherine Flowers (Submitted photo)</span></figcaption></figure><p></p>
<p>STARKVILLE, Miss.—A Mississippi State faculty member is beginning her
academic career with a significant research award in writing studies.</p>
<p>Katherine Flowers of the university’s English department is receiving
the James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award, an
international recognition of the Conference on College Composition and
Communication.</p>
<p>Founded in 1949, the 7,000-member body is the world’s largest
professional association for composition researchers and teachers. Based
in Illinois—and sometimes called the Four Cs—it works to support
academic investigations on communication and rhetoric and advocate for
language and literacy education, among other missions.</p>
<p>Flowers joined MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2017. She
teaches English department courses in academic, digital, public and
professional writing, with language policy, literacy studies, social
movements and related areas among her research specializations.</p>
<p>“Local Language Policy: Shifting Scales in the English-Only Movement”
is the title of her award-winning 2017 doctoral dissertation at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the same institution at
which she earned a master’s degree. A Port Angeles, Washington, native,
she also holds two bachelor’s from the University of Washington.</p>
<p>Dan Punday, MSU English department head, said CCCC is “the” academic
organization for the career Flowers is pursuing. “This award is a
recognition of the importance of her work in professional writing theory
and a sign of the bright scholarly future ahead of her,” he emphasized.</p>
<p>Flowers said her research developed from a desire to “find out how
and why people write language policies in the first place.” To find
answers, she interviewed “politicians, activists and lobbyists who have
first-hand experience in this area.”</p>
<p>The dissertation explains how “English-only language policies have
long been a way to promote the English language while marginalizing
other ways of communicating, often at the expense of indigenous people,
immigrants and people of color.”</p>
<p>She said English-only policies currently are thriving because policy
writers have become adept at sharing successful templates and talking
points with each other. As a result, these local framings can make a
policy “seem more authentic than one perceived as coming from the
outside.”</p>
<p>Concurrently with classroom responsibilities, Flowers is completing a
book about the English-only movement in the United States over the past
four decades.</p>
<p>To formally accept the Berlin Award, she travels in early March to
Kansas City, Missouri, for the 2018 CCCC convention. The occasion will
mark her second significant scholarly recognition in three years.</p>
<p>As a doctoral student in 2015, she was selected for the Bordin
Gillette Research Fellowship with the University of Michigan’s Bentley
Historical Library. Other biographical information is found at <a href="http://www.english.msstate.edu/faculty/flowers.html">www.english.msstate.edu/faculty/flowers.html</a>.</p>
<p>To learn more about the Four Cs’ work and missions, visit <a href="http://www.ncte.org/cccc">www.ncte.org/cccc</a>. It is part of the larger National Council of Teachers of English, with a website at <a href="http://www2.ncte.org/about">http://www2.ncte.org/about</a>.</p>
<p>Links to MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and its English department are, respectively, <a href="http://www.cas.msstate.edu">www.cas.msstate.edu</a> and <a href="http://www.english.msstate.edu">www.english.msstate.edu</a>.</p>
<p>MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at <a href="https://www.msstate.edu">www.msstate.edu</a></p>
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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