2024-25 Faculty Promotions
September 26, 2024
Congratulations to our professional track faculty on their promotions!
Promoted to Senior Lecturer
Tom Hatcher received his MFA in Creative Writing from American University, and joined UMD’s Department of English after having taught as a Lecturer at American and Marymount Universities. He also worked as a Writing Mentor in American University’s Learning Service Program, where he tutored students with learning differences. In 2019, Mr. Hatcher received American University’s Jane Stanhope Award for Outstanding Adjunct Faculty. Mr. Hatcher has taught an impressive variety of courses in our department, including Academic Writing and AdvancedComposition, Creative Writing courses, and Business Writing. One of his most popular courses, which he designed and taught for ARHU158C: Explorations inArts and Humanities is entitled “Critical Conversations in Music.” This interdisciplinary scholarship-in-practice course that connects topics in popular music with scholarly debates has been ahit with first-year students across the College.A performing musician (Mr. Hatcher plays lead guitar in a rock band), poet, and translator, Mr.Hatcher has had several of his poems published in well-known journals. Recently, Mr. Hatcher published an edition of Fabrizio Pacitti’s The Library of God.
Sabrina Islam is a graduate of our department's MFA Program. In addition to teaching at Maryland, Ms. Islam has taught at American University and the Global Studio, embedded in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Richmond. At UMD, Ms. Islam offers a wide range of Academic, Professional, and Creative Writing courses. She has also taught in the Jimenez-Porter Writers House and uTerp Summer Bridge Program. Ms. Islam is also an accomplished poet whose creative work appears in a number of prestigious literary journals and magazines such as Prairie Schooner, Minnesota Review, and Flock among other publications. In addition, Ms. Islam serves as a reader for the award-winning literary journal, New England Review, where she has published seven interviews with poets, novelists, and artists, including UMD authors Maud Casey and Lindsay Bernal. Ms. Islam is the recipient of the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award in Fiction, University of Maryland, May 2017, and was a semi-finalist in Fineline Competition, Mid-American Review, Bowling Green State University, Fall 2017.
Laura Williams earned her PhD in English Literature at the University of Maryland, before joining the Department as Lecturer. Since 2017, she has offered an impressive range of courses in Academic Writing, Advanced Composition, African American Literature, and Black Diaspora Literature and Culture. Dr. Williams is also known for her innovative teaching, exemplified by her the Special Topics course she developed for English, “Haunted Histories: The African American Gothic.” An active scholar, Dr. Williams has presented her research on race and twenty-first century American fiction at the Northeast Modern Language Association and DePaul University. Also deeply invested in inclusive pedagogy, Dr. Williams completed the Teaching and Learning Transformation Center’s Inclusive Pedagogy and Practice Certificate Program. Dr. Williams has for many years served on the English Department’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) Committee and the Committee for Antiracism, Accessibility, Respect, Equity, and Social Justice (CAARES). She regularly attends training seminars at UMD’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center on cultural humility, intersectional pedagogies, anti-racist pedagogy, and community building. Dr. Williams has demonstrated leadership by spearheading professional development sessions within the Academic Writing Program on inclusive pedagogy.
Anna Szczepaniec-Bialas received her M.A. in English Studies from the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland in 1989, and since 2015, Ms. Szczepaniec-Bialas has taught for UMD’s Professional Writing Program with a focus on Business Writing. In addition to her work as an instructor of Business Writing, Ms. Szczepaniec-Bialas was an instructor of Polish as a Foreign Language at the Polish School under the auspices of the Polish Embassy of Washington DC. She has presented on teaching ESL students and teaching with intercultural understanding at Howard Community College. More recently, she has been involved with the Professional Writing Program’s learning outcomes assessment efforts.
Promoted to Principal Lecturer
Christopher Crane received his PhD in Medieval Literature from Catholic University in 2004, and after teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy for several years, joined the Department as a Lecturer. Since earning promotion to the rank of Senior Lecturer in 2016, Dr. Crane has continued to distinguish himself as an exemplary instructor of a remarkable range of courses in Advanced Composition, Honors Technical Writing, Chaucer, Tolkien, Arthurian Myth and Legend, and Shakespeare. A scholar of Tolkien Studies, Dr. Crane’s undergraduate course on Tolkien is one of the most popular in the major. He has also led an impressive number of independent studies and served on several thesis committees. Dr. Crane is perhaps best known for his extraordinary popular Education Abroad course, Tolkien in Oxford, which he has co-led for many years. An exceptional department citizen during the pandemic, Dr. Crane was among a core group of faculty leaders in the Department’s Reimagine 2020 Working Group that crafted policies and guidelines allowing us to continue to provide high quality instruction and innovative classes for the thousands of students studying writing and literature online that year. In fall 2020, Dr. Crane served as the Mentor-in-Teaching for English faculty teaching 400-level courses, and provided pedagogical support for those more accustomed to the traditional seminar classroom. He also has served in the Department’s PTK Mentoring Program. From 2016-2018, Dr. Crane was one of the Department’s representatives to the ARHU Collegiate Council. He currently serves on English’s Undergraduate Studies Committee. Outside higher education, Dr. Crane has been on the board of The Center for Plain Language, serving on the Executive Board as Corporate Secretary from 2017-2020. In addition to his accomplishments as a teacher and university citizen, Dr. Crane maintains an active research agenda. His Guide to Naval Writing, 4th ed, is forthcoming from the Naval Institute Press. In addition, Dr. Crane has published four refereed journal articles, most recently “Early Drafts and Carbon Copies: Composing and Editing Smith of Wootton Major” in Tolkien Studies in 2022 and contributed a chapter to the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works (2015). He has given a number of invited talks on Tolkien and Beowulf, Dante’s Purgatorio, and C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. He is a frequent presenter at the Mythopoetic Society’s annual conference. Dr. Crane is an active member of the UMD Center for Literary and Comparative Studies’ Faculty Research & Writing Group in Fantasy Studies.
John Kim earned a J.D. from University of California Berkeley and M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine. He joined the Department as a Lecturer in 2013, and since earning promotion to the rank of Senior Lecturer in 2017, Mr. Kim has taught Legal Writing, Advanced Composition, and Business Writing for the Professional Writing Program. He also regularly teaches in the Academic Writing Program. Mr. Kim has distinguished himself by the innovations he introduced to the Legal Writing curriculum, notably the development of a "Legal Writing Master Class," which draws on his professional background at the Law Firm of Holguin, Garfield, Martinez, & Quinonez in Los Angeles, California. Not surprisingly, during his tenure as a Senior Lecturer Kim was recognized by the English Department’s Professional Track Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (2018), and in 2019-2020 the UMD Women’s Basketball Team recognized him as the Most Valuable Professor. In 2017, College Magazine identified him as one of the “10 Best UMD Professors that Keep You on Your Toes.” Mr. Kim has served on the English Department’s Committee for Antiracism, Accessibility, Respect, Equity, and Social Justice (CAARES) (2022-2024), and he previously served for one year (2018-2019) on the English Department Writing Program’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee (IDEA). At the 2019 Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference, Kim delivered a presentation that showcased his work on the IDEA Committee, which included the drafting of the Best Practices Guides for our Academic Writing and Professional Writing Programs. He also contributed to two professional development workshops in the Writing Programs, serving as a co-leader for an Academic Writing Program workshop in Fall 2020 and contributing as a panelist to a Professional Writing Program workshop in Fall 2023. Additionally, Kim served as an advisor to the Library Steering Committee for the Academic Writing Program’s “Transition to Online Literacy” program for English 101 courses. During the Fall 2023 semester, Kim also served as a mentor to five Lecturers under the auspices of the English Department’s Professional Track Faculty Mentoring Program. Mr. Kim is a widely published fiction writer and essayist. Since 2017, he has published six stories in well-regarded literary journals, including “Not Punk Enough; Ska Punk Enough,” which appeared in the May 2023 issue of Fourteen Hills; “Master Kim” which appeared in the October 2021 issue of Atticus Review; and “The Child” which appeared in the Winter 2022 volume of the Southern Humanities Review. Two of these stories are drawn from Kim's current non-fiction book project that explores Asian American identity, immigration, and intergenerational trauma.