Associate Professor of Composition Ben Miller will succeed Annette Vee as director of Composition in the coming fall.
Amanda Sevilla, teaching associate professor in Composition, is the incoming pedagogy editor for the journal Explorations in Media Ecology.
Teaching Assistant Professor of Composition Jialei Jiang presented the paper, "Situating Community-Engaged Pedagogy at the Intersection of Critical Emotional Awareness and Antiracist Action," at this past year's Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).
Maureen Gallagher, teaching associate professor in Composition, presented "Professionalization and Play: Digital Portfolio Design on Substack" at the 2024 Keystone Digital Humanities conference; and "Funny Story: Resisting the Trauma Essay through Humor in First-Year Writing" at the 2024 Pennsylvania College English Association conference.
Dietrich School academic advisor and instructor of English Eryka Wilson will this summer present "AI for Acclimation:Assisting Displaced Students in Refugee Facilities through Activity-Driven Lessors" at the fifth international conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education Technology (AIET) in Barcelona, Spain.
Khushboo Bhutani, a PhD student in Film and Media Studies, was part of a team whose presentation was named a runner-up in the Dietrich School's graduate TC2 seed program. Bhutani, along with Beth Ann Eberle and Juwon Adenuga, presented "Traversing the social media terrain as 'produsers'," in the competition, which awards cash prizes to the winning and runner-up teams.
MFA student Abdelrahman ElGendy was on the panel, "Egypt Unveiled: History, Human Rights, and Future Horizons," this past spring at the Arab Conference at Harvard. In June, he received an EU Samir Kassir Award for Freedom of the Press in Opinion Writing for his article entitled “Is There Life Before Death?” published in January 2024 in Al Manassa. He is also a 2024 Steinbeck fellow.
In a spring 2024 independent study, Teaching Professor Marylou Gramm mentored rising senior Camille Scordis, a History and Philosophy of Science major, in composing a self-published book of Canadian nature poems entitled, Keep Close the Wilds, which will be featured in the undergraduate creative-works display case on the fifth floor.
Adjunct Lecturer Keely Bowers' short story, "True Romance, Or Last Rites at the Rite Aid," was published in the May 2024 issue of Blue Lake Review.
"A Widening Apron of Color and Sky," by Teaching Professor Ellen McGrath Smith, was published in Forecast: Analog Predictions in fall of 2023. Her poem, "Woman Standing for an Hour in Target Reading Greeting Cards to Herself," appeared in Vox Populi this past fall as well.
Christopher Maverick, assistant teaching professor of Digital Narrative and Interactive Design, presented "On the Riverdale: Archie Andrews and the Duluoz Legend” as part of the the Digital Cultural Studies Cooperative "Into the Archieverse" virtual conference this past May. He also presented "The Gifted . . . But Not TOO Gifted: Whiteness as Other in the IP Era" at the Popular Culture Association/American Cultural Association (PCA/ACA) Conference.
PhD (Film and Media Studies) candidate Rahul Kumar presented the paper, “Cinema Beyond the Screen: Print and Pleasure in Bombay Cinema’s Mofussil Landscape," at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference this past March in Boston, Mass; he also presented “The Hindi Public Sphere and Bombay Cinema’s Reading Public” at the Pitt-Lyon Spring School in Film and Media Studies in the Département des Arts du Spectacle, Université Lumière Lyon 2.
The fall of the past year saw the publication of The Ferris Wheel (Crocodile Books, 2023) by Turkish children's author Tülin Kozikoglu; Adjunct Lecturer Julie Albright translated the book into English.
Eli Boonin-Vail, a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies, presented papers at the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference at Tulane University in February, and at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference (Boston) in March, of this year. He recently accepted a lecturer position at SUNY Albany in Film Studies, where he will be the director of their minor in film studies.
Jake Maynard, a visiting lecturer in Writing, is the author of the novel Slime Line, which was published by West Virginia University Press this past June. 
Instructor Jonathan Callard recently published an excerpt from his nonfiction book-in-progress in PublicSource. Entitled “‘Family together’: What Clairton’s Football Coach and His City Taught Me about Love,” the piece chronicles how three of Callard's Pitt composition students inspired a longform story he is writing about family and football.