In the fall of 1998 I joined the faculty at Keene State College where I now serve as professor of English. I teach courses in expository and creative writing, poetry and poetics, American literature and culture, American Studies, Critical Theory, environmental literature, and the digital humanities. In addition to my courses in English and American Studies, I teach Thinking and Writing (including a section for students in the Honors Program), a course in the Environmental Studies program, as well as Interdisciplinary and Perspectives courses in the College’s Integrative Studies Program.
My work as a faculty member also involves advising English and American Studies majors, and writing minors. Beyond planning course selection and the academic program, I assist students seeking to transfer courses from other institutions, choosing suitable courses for a semester of study abroad, and making consequential decisions about whether to continue on to graduate school. I consult and write letters of recommendation for non-matriculated students applying for admission to the college, for students seeking financial aid, for students applying to study abroad, for teachers seeking employment after graduation, and for other English majors applying to graduate programs.
In two consecutive terms as chair of the English department (2003-2007) I was a member and/or the chair of the hiring committees that brought seven new tenure-track members to the department. My administrative work focused on strengthening our curriculum and enhancing the intellectual life of the College. I facilitated the department’s transition from three to four-credit courses and led the department in designing a new major that we began implementing in the Fall of the 2006-07 academic year. One of my goals as chair was to make the work of English faculty and students more visible. To this end, I designed, and continue to maintain, an English Department Web Site that features recent faculty work, new courses, student profiles, and an alumni page with notes from graduates of our program. I collaborated with colleagues in creating department and campus events such as the Janet Grayson Lecture in Literary Studies, the Summer Reading and Keene Reads programs, poetry readings, and the department’s monthly Third Tuesday series. I also worked with alumni and friends of the college to establish two awards that recognize Keene State College students: The Fred Fosher Award for Excellence in Writing and the Eder Award for Creative Writing.
From 2010-2013 I completed an additional three-year term as department. During my third term as chair we have completed a self-study; revised the English major to include a writing option, and an additional course to bring the major to forty credits; created comprehensive articulation agreements with two-year colleges in New Hampshire for English and English and Secondary Education majors; completed an advising plan for the department; articulated a mission statement, program objectives and revised student learning outcomes; improved the process of enrollment management (revising the scheduling guidelines for the department; advocating for adjunct faculty and monitoring the use of adjunct faculty in response to lower enrollments and in relation to tenure-track faculty schedules; canceling under-enrolled sections; reducing the number of course sections in the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012; monitoring and working to understand enrollments in English, IH English and IA English courses; and increasing tenure-track faulty participation in teaching sections of our first-year writing course); collaborated on various initiatives with other department chairs and administrators in the school of Arts of Humanities; and continued to assess the English program using both indirect and direct measures.
Below I list selected professional activities between 2008-2013 that were included in Keene State College’s Campus News.
June 20th 2013
In December Dr. Mark C. Long was elected president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). In his current term as vice president, Mark has served on the selection committee for a new two-year ASLE membership grant program for international students and was a judge for the ASLE Ecocriticism Award Committee that chose Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard 2012). From May 27-June 1 Mark spent the week in Lawrence Kansas at ASLE’s biennial conference where he participated in an all-day executive council planning retreat; led the business meeting for members of the organization; arranged mentoring sessions to match graduate students with experienced faculty; spoke on the poems of Maxine Kumin and Mary Oliver in the concurrent session “Geezer Poets”; and co-facilitated an in-conference workshop for academic professionals, “Staying Alive.” During an evening reception for international members and graduate students Mark was honored with the first ASLE award for dedication and excellence in mentoring.
December 12th 2013
Dr. Mark C. Long, professor and chair of English, has been elected President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Since 1992, ASLE has brought together teachers, writers, students, artists and environmentalists interested in the natural world and its meanings and representations in language and culture. ASLE is an interdisciplinary and international organization with over a thousand members and affiliated organizations in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, India, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Mark will serve as Vice President in 2013, President in 2014, and Immediate Past President in 2015.
January 28 2012
Dr. Mark C. Long, professor of English, attended the annual convention of the Modern Language Association convention in Seattle January 6-9. Mark presented a paper at the session he organized for the MLA’s Office of Research, “Academically Adrift? Language, Literature, and Learning in the Small College English Department.” The session, a response to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift? Limited Learning on College Campuses, also featured presentations by Suzanne Parker Keen, from Washington and Lee University, and Paul Hanstedt, from Roanoke College. Mark also served as a Job Counselor for the MLA during the convention.
July 7th 2011
Dr. Mark C. Long, professor of English and American Studies, chaired the session he organized, “American Literature and the Ecological Thought,” at the 22nd annual American Literature Association Conference, May 26-29, in Boston. The session was sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and featured presentations on the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Cheever, and David Foster Wallace in relation to Timothy Morton’s book of literary theory, The Ecological Thought.
February 10 2011
Dr. Mark C. Long, Professor and Chair of English, attended the annual Modern Language Association Conference (MLA) in Los Angeles, California, January 6-9, where he organized and chaired a session on curricular transformation in small college English departments. Mark also attended a workshop for department chairs, and served the Association for Departments of English (ADE) as a Job Counselor for graduate students and faculty members seeking guidance in professional preparation and the job market.
September 30 2010
Dr. Mark C. Long, professor of English and American Studies, visited Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where he conducted two workshops for teachers of writing: “Thinking, Writing and Research in the Undergraduate Writing Classroom: A Case for Sustained Writing Projects,” for faculty teaching the Global Research and Writing Seminar, and “Thinking about the Ways we Value Writing,” for faculty and students from across the college. Mark also presented “John Muir and the Mountains of California: Prospects for Environmental Thinking and Writing,” in the 2010-11 Sophie Kerr Lecture Series, and co-sponsored by the Washington College Center for Environment & Society.
August 19 2010
Dr. Mark C. Long, professor of English and American Studies, was an invited speaker at a conference at the University of Washington, Seattle, focused on reading and textual traditions. His presentation, “The Problem of Reading, the Practice of Writing,” has been published in the conference proceedings, The Natural History of Reading. In addition, Mark’s review of Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story and Encounters with the Land, by Rinda West, appears in the Summer 2010 issue of Western American Literature.
April 27 2010
What are the opportunities and challenges of teaching and learning in small college English departments? Dr. Mark C. Long, professor of English and American Studies, explores this question in his recently published essay, “Centers and Peripheries,” in the spring 2010 issue of the journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture. As the guest editor for the special issue, Mark brings together six essays that explore the small college English department to investigate the possibilities for teaching and learning in these institutional settings and to suggest how these local practices might inspire comparable intellectual work in other professional and intellectual contexts. In addition, the Reviews section of the special issue includes writing by Kate Tirabassi, assistant professor of English, and professor of English emerita Robin Dizard.
April 15 2010
Dr. Mark C. Long, professor of English and American Studies, has received a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant is designed to support the development of humanities courses organized around questions to which no discipline or field or profession can lay an exclusive claim—questions that predate the formation of the academic disciplines themselves. Mark’s proposed course, “What is Nature?” will trace the history of experiences and concepts of nature from the ancient world to the age of Darwin. Students will read a sequence of major texts from the Western tradition alongside supplemental treatises and excerpts from religious and scientific documents to help students understand the broad contours of thinking about the natural world in the Western cultures of Europe as well as the Eastern cultures of China and India, and the Arab-World and Africa.
January 14 2010
Dr. Mark C. Long (English and American Studies) traveled to the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to chair a panel sponsored by the Association of the Departments of English (ADE), “Scholarship, Tenure, and Promotion in the Small College Department,” and to introduce a session he helped organize sponsored by the MLA Office of Research, “Reading as a Teacher: a Workshop for Teachers of Literature.” Mark also served as job counselor for the MLA.
June 11 2009
Dr. Mark C. Long (English and American Studies) was a keynote speaker at the conference, “Conversations on Moving to Four-Credit-Hour Courses” at Lynchburg College, and he presented a paper, “American Literature, Disciplinarity, and the Environmental Humanities,” at the annual American Literature Association in Boston. Mark also traveled to the Eighth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in Victoria, British Columbia, where he was a contributor to a half-day workshop, “Approaching the Academic Job Search,” and a panelist in the session, “Finding Your Niche: Thoughts on Negotiating the Job Market.” As the coordinator of the ASLE Mentoring Program, Mark also designed and conducted a half-day workshop (with John Tallmadge) titled “Staying Alive: A Workshop for Academic Professionals.
January 29 2009
Dr. Mark C. Long (English and American Studies) attended the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco where he chaired a special session he organized sponsored by the Association of the Departments of English, “Teaching in the Small College Department.” He was a speaker on a special session arranged by the MLA Publications Committee, “The Profession and the Liberal Arts: A Discussion of the MLA’s Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life.” During the convention, Mark also attended a workshop for department chairs and served as a job counselor.
September 18 2008
A collection of essays, Teaching North American Environmental Literature, edited by Dr. Mark C. Long (English and American Studies), Fred Waage, and former Keene State College English major Dr. Laird Christensen (professor of environmental studies at Green Mountain College) has been released by the Modern Language Association of America. An interview with Mark, “Ecocriticism: A Model for the Interdisciplinary Humanities,” was published in the Newsletter of the Organization for the Study of Literature and the Environment (OSLE) India; and Mark’s most recent essay, “Shifting Ground: The Emergence of the Bioregion and the Watershed in the Teaching of North American Environmental Literature,” appeared in the Indian Journal of Ecocriticism.
September 4 2008
Dr. Mark C. Long, (English) has recently published “Reading, Writing and Teaching in Context,” an essay examining the value of intellectual work in local institutional contexts, in the book Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life. Mark’s most recent contribution to the Dictionary of Literary Biography was also just released, an extended essay on the life and work of A.R. Ammons that appeared in the volume Twentieth-Century American Nature Poets.
July 24 2008
Dr. Mark Long’s (English) new book, Teaching North American Environmental Literature, will be published this fall. The book is co-edited with Laird Christensen (former KSC English major, now a professor at Green Mountain College) and Fred Waage.