New assistant English professor at Ļć½¶Ö±²„receives professional accolade
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.āA Mississippi State faculty member is beginning her academic career with a significant research award in writing studies.
Katherine Flowers of the universityās English department is receiving the James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award, an international recognition of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Founded in 1949, the 7,000-member body is the worldās largest professional association for composition researchers and teachers. Based in Illinoisāand sometimes called the Four Csāit works to support academic investigations on communication and rhetoric and advocate for language and literacy education, among other missions.
Flowers joined MSUās 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.
āLocal Language Policy: Shifting Scales in the English-Only Movementā 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 masterās degree. A Port Angeles, Washington, native, she also holds two bachelorās from the University of Washington.
Dan Punday, Ļć½¶Ö±²„English department head, said CCCC is ātheā academic organization for the career Flowers is pursuing. āThis 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,ā he emphasized.
Flowers said her research developed from a desire to āfind out how and why people write language policies in the first place.ā To find answers, she interviewed āpoliticians, activists and lobbyists who have first-hand experience in this area.ā
The dissertation explains how āEnglish-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.ā
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 āseem more authentic than one perceived as coming from the outside.ā
Concurrently with classroom responsibilities, Flowers is completing a book about the English-only movement in the United States over the past four decades.
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.
As a doctoral student in 2015, she was selected for the Bordin Gillette Research Fellowship with the University of Michiganās Bentley Historical Library. Other biographical information is found at .
To learn more about the Four Csā work and missions, visit . It is part of the larger National Council of Teachers of English, with a website at .
Links to MSUās College of Arts and Sciences and its English department are, respectively, and .
Ļć½¶Ö±²„is Mississippiās leading university, available online at