New assistant English professor at 汤头条 receives professional accolade
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.鈥擜 Mississippi State faculty member is beginning her academic career with a significant research award in writing studies.
Katherine Flowers of the university鈥檚 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 world鈥檚 largest professional association for composition researchers and teachers. Based in Illinois鈥攁nd sometimes called the Four Cs鈥攊t works to support academic investigations on communication and rhetoric and advocate for language and literacy education, among other missions.
Flowers joined 汤头条鈥檚 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.
鈥淟ocal Language Policy: Shifting Scales in the English-Only Movement鈥 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鈥檚 degree. A Port Angeles, Washington, native, she also holds two bachelor鈥檚 from the University of Washington.
Dan Punday, 汤头条 English department head, said CCCC is 鈥渢he鈥 academic organization for the career Flowers is pursuing. 鈥淭his 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,鈥 he emphasized.
Flowers said her research developed from a desire to 鈥渇ind out how and why people write language policies in the first place.鈥 To find answers, she interviewed 鈥減oliticians, activists and lobbyists who have first-hand experience in this area.鈥
The dissertation explains how 鈥淓nglish-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.鈥
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 鈥渟eem more authentic than one perceived as coming from the outside.鈥
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 Michigan鈥檚 Bentley Historical Library. Other biographical information is found at .
To learn more about the Four Cs鈥 work and missions, visit . It is part of the larger National Council of Teachers of English, with a website at .
Links to 汤头条鈥檚 College of Arts and Sciences and its English department are, respectively, and .
汤头条 is Mississippi鈥檚 leading university, available online at