College of Arts and Sciences Department of English Landrum Academic Center 500 Highland Heights, KY 41099 Tel 859.572.5416 | Fax 859.572.6093 www.nku.edu | english.nku.edu

16 October 2016

Dear Colleagues,

It is my great pleasure to provide my highest recommendation of Dr. Joe Moffett to be awarded early tenure. I have known Dr. Moffett since the Fall 2010 semester, when he began teaching at Northern Kentucky University. He began working with us in a temporary, one-year, full-time teaching position. We then promoted him to the position of Professional Advisor to English majors.

I want to state at the outset that I wish we could have retained him at our university. Unfortunately, we did not have an open tenure-track position available in his area of expertise. Dr. Moffett was most definitely well qualified for a tenure-track position. In fact, his accomplishments in scholarship, teaching, and service were already at a level one sees in tenured and promoted faculty here at my university. Moreover, I feel confident that Dr. Moffett could have met all of the criteria for early tenure at our institution.

I was impressed with his superb faculty, credentials and record of publication before I met him, and I have been all the more impressed as I have worked with him and evaluated his superb performance as a teacher and academic advisor. He was much respected by students, other faculty, and administrators here at Northern Kentucky University. Below I will describe his work as a classroom teacher and academic advisor. However, I must begin by saying that his most impressive accomplishment was that, while being an excellent teacher and university citizen, he was also working very actively and productively as a scholar.

During his time at NKU he completed and published two books, The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective and a popular work, The Ultimate: An Illustrated History of Hamer Guitars. He published articles in The Explicator and The Southern Literary Journal. He began work on his book, Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems: Contemplation of the Divine and an essay for inclusion in an edited collection, The New American Poetry at 50. He even stepped in as editor of the Kentucky Philological Review for publication of five volumes. These publications, some with major university presses and prestigious journals, are impressive achievements, especially with a full time advising load. This productivity attests to his ability to balance research with teaching and advising, and to complete research projects in a timely manner.

His teaching was most successful. He taught ENG 101, College Writing, and ENG 208, a survey course in early American literature. He quickly became popular among the students. In my role as chair I met with several of his students and heard glowing reports from them.