Teaching Assistants

John Butwell
Graduate Teaching Assistant, English Department, MTSU

Office: PH 105; Phone/Voice Mail: 904-8262

John Butwell is a second-year doctoral student in English at MTSU, where his emphasis is American literature. Butwell is planning to write his dissertation on Mark Twain, although he also is interested in Appalachian, British, Anglophone and especially world literature - which he taught at Eastern Kentucky University, where he received his master's degree in English in 2005. Butwell's interest in world literature partly stems from traveling with his family as a child to Europe and Asia, and living in Southeast Asia - which was the special focus of his father's career as political scientist. Butwell also presented papers on Huckleberry Finn and a film-based pedagogy for teaching the Odyssey at Kentucky Philological Association conferences in 2005 and 2007, respectively. His emphasis at EKU was creative writing, and his master's thesis was a collection of Appalachian poetry and mystery fiction. Butwell's interest in teaching at the college level also represents a second career for him. He began writing and taking pictures for pay and to "help change the world" at age 13, giving him almost four decades of experience as a writer. He attended the Indiana University School of Journalism in the late 1970s but delayed graduating, much to the dismay of his mother, until 1988. (Instead, he moved "back to the land," split his own firewood, drew his drinking water from a well and raised goats and chickens on a remote farm in the middle of the Daniel Boone National Forest while also primarily working as an investigative reporter for weekly newspapers in southeastern Kentucky.) As a journalist, Butwell won numerous first-place and lesser awards from the Kentucky Press Association, as well as the Red Tie Award from the mayor of Berea, Ky., and the School Bell Award for education reporting from the Kentucky Education Association. He served as editor or managing editor of four Kentucky newspapers and published his own weekly paper for two years in the 1990s, which won the press association's first-place award for General Excellence both years. Beginning in 1986-88, and again from 2001-2007, Butwell also gained teaching experience as a frequent substitute in three neighboring Kentucky school districts, accepting assignments for all grades, K-12. Butwell's experience as a writing teacher includes one semester as a tutor in EKU's Writing Center; one year teaching freshman composition as a teaching assistant at EKU; two years as an adjunct professor for both Kentucky's Midway College and EKU, where his course load ranged from remedial to advanced composition as well as world literature; and one year as an adjunct professor at MTSU, where he taught ENG 1010 (Expository Writing) and ENG 2030 (The Experience of Literature). This fall he is teaching two sections of ENG 1010 as a graduate teaching assistant at MTSU. Butwell's hobbies and interests include politics and history; music of all sorts, but especially Irish and Scottish ballads, folk, bluegrass, and classic rock; science fiction, especially that of Robert A. Heinlein; and activities such as acting in community theater, cooking, swimming, vegetable gardening, folk dancing, photography and videography. He is continuing his journalistic career as a contributing photographer for the Wilson Post in Lebanon, Tenn., and as a freelance writer. His wife of 24 years, Connie Esh, is employed as a reporter for the Wilson Post. Butwell and his wife have four grown children, 14 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.