Department of English

Mark Amos, Associate Professor (PhD, Duke University)

Office: Faner 2264

Phone: 618/453-6824, 618/453-1828 maamos@siu.edu

Professor Amos's scholarship and publications focus on the relationship between late medieval cultures and their literatures. He has written on medieval reading practices and early book production, representations of class relations, and the viability of applying modern theoretical approaches to medieval texts. His current project examines representations of women in secular and sacred texts of the later Middle Ages in England and France. He is editing a collection of articles on the representations of Jews on the medieval and early modern stages, and is planning to edit a collection of primary texts of Middle English courtesy literature. The working title of his monograph is William Caxton's Corpus and the Forging of London's Urban Self, which explores the interplay between printing technology and the promulgation and construction of identity-producing institutions and paradigms in the fifteenth century.
 
Currently Prof. Amos is serving as Director of the First Year Experience.

David Anthony, Associate Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies (PhD, University of Michigan)

Office: Faner 2376

Phone: 618/453-6845, davidant@siu.edu

David Anthony is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at SIUC. His research for the past ten years or so has revolved around the related representations of manhood and money in antebellum mass culture. He has published essays on this issue in journals such as American Literature (Dec 2004 and Sept 1997), The Yale Journal of Criticism (Fall 1999) and Early American Literature (Mar 2005), and has received research fellowships for this work from the American Antiquarian Society (1997; 2000; 2005), the Library Company of Philadelphia (2000), and SIUC (2000). His book, Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America will be published by Ohio State University Press in the Fall of 2009. This book shows how a long trajectory of sensational-gothic narratives, from the literary (Irving, Hawthorne, Melville) to the pulpy (penny press newspapers and dime novels), reflects and helps shape the intricate relationship between masculine sensibility and commerce in early America at the very moment when the economic market was becoming increasingly unstable and panic-prone.

A new project, tentatively entitled “The Sensational Jew in Early America,” is emerging from the above book. Here Anthony examines the many ways in which the Jew acted as the figure through which the white middle-class Gentile culture of the antebellum period sought to imagine its relationship to money, property, race, and sexuality. Chapters include studies of narratives about the “Jessica” character in American sensationalism (i.e. stories that reinvent Shylock’s daughter from Merchant of Venice); narratives about Jews and abducted or orphaned children (i.e. reinventions of Oliver Twist); and narratives about Jews, slavery, and the American South.

Anthony’s recent undergraduate courses include the following: Emily Dickinson; the American gothic (fiction and film); the rise mass and popular culture in America; and the role of capitalism in American fiction. In the Fall of 2009 he will be teaching a course tentatively entitled “Nobody in Antebellum American Fiction.” The texts will be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and a range of Dickinson poems (including “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?,” after which the course is entitled).

Anthony’s recent graduate courses include seminars on American manhood in American fiction and film, the fiction of the 1790s in America, and capitalism and property in American nineteenth-century American fiction.

Pinckney Benedict, Professor (MFA, University of Iowa)

Office: Faner, 2244

Phone: 618/453-6826, pinckney@siu.edu

Pinckney Benedict has published two collections of stories — Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard — and Dogs of God, a novel. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Esquire, StoryQuarterly, Zoetrope: All-Story, Best New Stories from South, The O. Henry Award Collection, the Pushcart Prize series, and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. His honors and awards include a Literature Fellowship in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts, Britain’s Steinbeck Prize, a PEN/Syndicated Fiction Award, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa. He has taught on the creative writing faculties at Princeton University, Oberlin College, and in the low-residency MFA programs at Warren Wilson College and Queens University.

Mary Bogumil, Associate Professor (PhD, University of South Florida)

Office: Faner 2243

Phone: 618/453-6861, mbogumil@siu.edu

Professor Bogumil teaches modern British and American literature, with a particular interest in British, Irish and American drama and multicultural American writing, and works with student playwrights in the Theater Department. She is author of Understanding August Wilson (1999). Her articles have appeared in College English, American Journal of Semiotics, Theatre Journal, Massachusetts Studies in English, and the New Hibernia Review on writers such as: Harold Pinter, August Wilson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Jack Dunphy. She is the co-author of A Biography of Florida Union Organizer Frank E'Dalgo, has written essays on Clare Boylan and Magnus Mills for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-first Century British and Irish Novelists, and on Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac for a volume on Booker Prize winners. Her current publications include an essay on August Wilson’s relationship to Black Theater for Cambridge University Press's Companion Series (2007) and the forthcoming revised edition of Understanding August Wilson (2009) for the University of South Carolina Press. She is also the faculty advisor for the English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta.

George Boulukos, Assistant Professor (PhD, University of Texas at Austin)

Office: Faner 2233

Phone: 618/453-6810, boulukos@siu.edu

Professor Boulukos’ primary research interests are in eighteenth-century British literature, race, sentimentality, and the history of the novel. His book, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Articles from this project have been published in ELH, Eighteenth-Century Life, and Eighteenth-Century Novel. His next book project, Eighteenth-Century Incoherence, examines the distortions entailed by applying 19th and 20th century critical concepts—such as “the novel,” “imperialism,” and “the middle class”—to eighteenth-century texts. He is also editing the previously undiscovered Memoirs of the Life and Travels of Thomas Hammond, the riotous and revealing autobiography of the one-time stableboy who traveled throughout Europe supporting himself by performing horse riding tricks. His latest articles are “Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Africa,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (2007); “The Horror of Hybridity: Enlightenment, Anti-slavery and Disgust in Charlotte Smith’s ‘Story of Henrietta,’” in Essays and Studies (2007) in special volume on abolition and Romanticism; and “The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery,” in Novel: a Forum on Fiction (Summer 2006).

Edward J. Brunner, Professor (PhD, University of Iowa)

Office: Faner 2278

Phone: 618/453-6850, ebrunner@siu.edu

Edward Brunner teaches twentieth century American poetry, modernism, and popular culture. For several years he worked outside the university, first on the Rock Island Lines and then as a Deputy Auditor. He has published three book-length studies: Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of “The Bridge” (1985), The Writings of W. S. Merwin: The Labor and Privilege of Poetry (1991) and Cold War Poetry (2001, paperback 2004). His first book was awarded the MLA Independent Scholar prize, and his second book was finished with the aid of a year-long NEH fellowship. Recent essays on graphic novels, the history of the newspaper comic strip, and hoax-poetry have appeared in American Periodicals, MELUS, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. He has contributed articles on R. Crumb and on popular poetry to the MLA Approaches to Teaching series; his nonfiction has appeared in Trains magazine. He serves on the editorial board of Oxford’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry and organized several websites for the Modern American Poetry Site (MAPS). He offers courses in American literature, in modern and postmodern poetry, in the graphic novel and the comic strip, and in the contemporary long poem.

Anne Chandler, Associate Professor (PhD, Duke University)

Office: Faner 2231

Phone: 618/453-6853, chandleran@aol.com

Professor Chandler studies late eighteenth-century British popular fiction, theories of gender, and experimental pedagogy.  Her graduate seminars have dealt with Gothic fiction and with the relation of the sentimental movement to trends in philosophy and the natural sciences.  Landscape aesthetics and the physiology of “Feeling” have been recurrent themes in these seminars.  A new seminar focuses on the politics and fiction of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley.  Professor Chandler has published an essay on the teaching of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and her other teaching interests at the 300 and 400 levels include the varieties of satire available in the works of Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Burney, as well as the sorts of mystic lyricism to be seen in Blake, Coleridge, and Christina Rossetti.  Her six published and forthcoming articles concern Wollstonecraft, Godwin, the children’s writer Thomas Day, and the Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe.  Her book in progress considers these and other figures, including Maria Edgeworth, as influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and as carrying out careful revisions of his ideas in their own influential theories of gender and pedagogy.

Jane N. Cogie, Associate Professor, Director of the Writing Center (PhD, University of Iowa)

Office: Faner 2283

Phone: 618/453-6846, jcogie@siu.edu

Jane Cogie, Associate Professor of English, directs the SIUC Writing Center, which offers one-to-one tutoring at three locations on the campus and in-class facilitation of peer group discussions of student writing for a variety of courses in composition as well as across the curriculum. The courses she teaches that relate to writing center work include English 493, One-to-One Teaching: Practice and Theory, and English 581, Problems in Teaching: The Intersection of Pedagogy, Administration, and Politics in Directing a Writing Center. Her articles on issues in writing center pedagogy and administration have appeared in The Writing Center Journal, WPA: Writing Program Administrator, and Writing Lab Newsletter as well as in essay anthologies. One of her more recent chapters in an anthology, “Peer Tutoring: Keeping the Contradictions Productive,” involves a discourse analysis of a specific writing center session and a subsequent discussion of the pedagogical and power issues at work within the tutor-student dynamic; it appears in Heineman: Boyton/Cook’s 2001 volume, The Politics of Writing Centers. Another book chapter, co-authored with a lecturer and two graduate assistants from the SIUC Writing Center and scheduled to be published in Summer 2007, focuses on a range of pedagogical and administrative issues related to carrying writing center collaboration beyond the walls of the Center. Her most recent article on English as a Second Language tutoring, “ESL Student Participation in Writing Center Sessions,” is forthcoming in the Writing Center Journal 26.2 (Fall 2006): 48-66. Also forthcoming, in the November issue of Writing Lab Newsletter, is a review of the 2005 volume, Centers of Learning: Centers and Libraries in Collaboration, edited by James K. Elmborg and Sheril Hook.

Since 1994, she has pursued these and other topics in over 20 conference papers, 16 of which were presented at national conferences, including the CCCC, the International Writing Center Association Conference, and the National Conference of Peer Tutors of Writing. She has also participated in projects and organizations aimed at fostering collaborations among individuals who work in writing centers. Having served on the Midwest Writing Center Association (MWCA) Board from 2001 to 2006, she is currently a member of the 2006 MWCA Conference Planning Committee and of the International Writing Center Association Membership Committee in addition to having served as the Coordinator for the Illinois Consortium of Writing Centers since 2001.

K. K. Collins, Associate Professor, Distinguished Teacher (PhD, Vanderbilt University)

Office: Faner 2274

Phone: 618/453-6839, kkcoll@siu.edu

Ronda L. Dively, Associate Professor, Director of Writing Studies (DA, Illinois State University)

Office: Faner 2390

Phone: 618/453-6811, rldively@siu.edu

Professor Ronda Leathers Dively received her B.A. in English (with teacher certification) and her M.A. in English (literature) from Eastern Illinois University . After gaining a few years of teaching experience in the secondary English classroom, she pursued her D.A. in English (Rhetoric and Composition) at Illinois State University , completing her degree in 1994 and accepting an assistant professorship in the English Department at SIUC that same year. Currently an associate professor, Dr. Dively serves as the Director of Writing Studies for the Department of English and teaches in the Rhetoric and Composition and English Education programs. Her areas of teaching specialization include intermediate and advanced composition, composition theory and pedagogy, empirical research methods in composition, secondary English methods, and adolescent literature. She has also enjoyed teaching special topics courses that explore intersections between creativity theory and compostion theory—upper level seminars growing from her primary research interest in the role of invention and incubation in a diversity of writing situations. More specifically, Professor Dively's scholarship investigates how intersections of creativity and composition theory may illuminate how individuals negotiate transitions between various academic composing contexts—from high school to college classrooms, from general education to discipline-specific writing courses, from status as undergraduate student to graduate student, from status as graduate student to professional. Such interests have recently generated a book length empirical study entitled Preludes to Insight: Creativity, Incubation and Expository Writing (Hampton Press, 2005), as well as various articles and conference presentations. Professor Dively has also published several articles on the nature of religious rhetoric and students' rights to religious expression in the secular academy.

Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, Assistant Professor (PhD, Tufts University)

Office: Faner 2262

Phone: 618/453-5296, dohugany@siu.edu

Professor Dougherty is currently working on a book-length study of the discursive implications of the Anglo-Irish union, and on articles and conference presentations preliminary to a monograph on the Irish literary childhood.  Her most recent publication is “An Angel in the House: The Act of Union and Anthony Trollope’s Irish Hero,” which appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture.  Professor Dougherty has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Keough-Notre Dame Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and her work has earned honors from the American Conference on Irish Studies and Bentley College.  Prior to her appointment at SIU, she taught composition and rhetoric for twelve years, and also volunteered as a voting precinct captain, adult literacy tutor, and diversity workshop trainer.

Robert Elliot Fox, Professor (PhD, SUNY at Buffalo)

Office: Faner 2223

Phone: 618/453-6864, bfox@siu.edu

Professor Fox received his BA from Cornell University, did graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley in its countercultural heyday, and earned his PhD at the State University of New York at Buffalo, after a hiatus that included some troubadouring and working for the alternative press in San Francisco. Before joining the SIUC faculty in 1991, he taught at the University of Ife in Nigeria and at Suffolk University in Boston. In the Spring of 1992, Fox was a resident scholar at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. Courses he has taught at SIUC include Black American Writers, Afrocentrism and Black Aesthetics, The African Novel, The Beat Generation, Science Fiction, and graduate seminars on contemporary American fiction. His current research primarily involves issues of postcoloniality, multiculturalism, black aesthetics, and "race." Fox is the author of two books: Conscientious Sorcerers (1987), a study of African American postmodernist fiction, and Masters of the Drum (1995), a collection of essays and interviews dealing with black writing. Among his more pertinent recent essays are "Afrocentrism and the X Factor" in Transition (issue 57), "Becoming Post-White" in Multi America, edited by Ishmael Reed, "Diasporacentrism and Black Aural Texts" in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, edited by Isidore Okpewho, et al., and two chapters in James Sallis's Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany. He also has articles in The Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Fox's fiction and poetry have appeared in Yardbird Reader, Okike, West Africa, and elsewhere. Works in progress include another collection of essays on black expressive cultures entitled Archaeologies of Soul and a personal memoir. He recently completed a volume of experimental writings called Mutation Word Box.

Michael L. Humphries, Associate Professor (PhD, Claremont Graduate University)

Office: Faner 2241

Phone: 618/453-6858, mhumphri@siu.edu

Professor Humphries received his Ph.D. in Early Christian Literature from the Claremont Graduate University (1990). He taught Jewish and Christian Origins for two years at Mount St. Mary's College and the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and three years in the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Illinois University. He transferred to the Department of English at SIUC in 1993 where he is now Associate Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature. His courses include: ENGL 332: Folklore and Mythology, ENGL 445: Cultural Backgrounds of Western Literature, ENGL 495: Literary Theory, and graduate seminars on Michel Foucault and Literature. Dr. Humphries' primary field of research is Cultural Studies and Literary Theory with a focus on mythology and early Christian literature. He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar and member of the International Q Project, whose work on the reconstruction of the early Christian Gospel designated "Q" ("Quelle"=Source) is being published in a series of several volumes by Peeters Press of the University of Leuven. His published works include articles in journals such as Forum and Arethusa, and a book entitled Christian Origins and the Language of the Kingdom of God published by Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Professor Humphries is currently engaged in a book length study on the theme of Memento Mori in texts from late antiquity and the early modern period.

Rodney Jones, Professor of English, Distinguished Scholar (MFA, University of North Carolina at Greensboro)

Office: Faner 2225

Phone: 618/453-6841, rodjones@siu.edu

Professor Jones is the author of six books of poetry: The Story They Told Us of Light (Alabama, 1980), The Unborn (Atlantic Monthly, 1985), Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), Apocalyptic Narrative (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), Things That Happen Once (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), and Elegy for the Southern Drawl (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lavan Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jean Stein Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award.  You can hear him read Two Poems at the Atlantic Monthly.

Judy Jordan, Assistant Professor (MFA in Poetry, University of Virginia; MFA in Fiction, University of Utah)

Office: Faner 3202A

Phone: 618/453-6835, puglove@siu.edu

Professor Jordan’s first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the 1999 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the Utah Book of the Year Award, the OAY Award from the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award. Her second book of poetry, Sixty Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance, was recently published by LSU press. This past year she has completed two full-length plays and is currently working on a memoir and a third book of poetry. Professor Jordan is building her own environmentally friendly house out of cob and cordwood, is the founder of SIPRAW, which rescues dogs out of the puppy mills, (www.sipraw.org), and practices kundalini yoga.

Allison Joseph, Associate Professor (MFA, Indiana University)

Office: Faner 2221

Phone: 618/453-6813, aljoseph@siu.edu

Professor Joseph is the author of What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon, 1997), In Every Seam (Pittsburgh, 1997), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2003) and Worldly Pleasures (Word Press, 2004). Her honors include the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize, fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is editor and poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review and director of the Young Writers Workshop, an annual summer residential creative writing workshop for high school writers. She holds the Judge Williams Holmes Cook Endowed Professorship. As Director of the SIUC MFA Program in Creative Writing, Professor Joseph maintains a blog about the graduate creative writing program at http://mfacarbondale.blogspot.com.

Elizabeth Klaver, Professor (PhD, University of California at Riverside)

Office: Faner 2280

Phone: 618/453-6866, etklaver@siu.edu

Professor Klaver has published two books, Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture (SUNY Press 2005) and Performing Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture (University of Wisconsin, Popular Press (2000) as well as edited the book Images of the Corpse from the Renaissance to Cyberspace (University of Wisconsin Press 2004). She has published widely in drama, television and cultural studies. Her current project is a study of serial killer narratives. Apart from her regularly offered courses in Modern Drama, she teaches graduate seminars in cultural studies, postmodernism, and literary theory.

Mary Lamb, Professor (PhD, Columbia University)

Office: Faner 2237

Phone: 618/453-6862, marylamb@siu.edu

Mary Ellen Lamb received her Ph.D from Columbia University. Her primary interests include Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare and women writers. Her book Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Wisconsin, 1990) analyses representations of women writers in Sidney’s Arcadia and then representations of themselves as writers by Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, and an anonymous female poet of holograph poems in a Sidney manuscript. Mary Ellen Lamb has published widely, in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, English Literary Renaissance, Review of English Studies, Spenser Studies, Criticism, Critical Survey. Her recently completed book, Productions of Popular Culture by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, under contract with Routledge, explores Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, episodes from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Jonson’s Oberon and Sad Shepherd as they present figures of the popular—fairies, old wives (who tell tales), and hobbyhorses—as forwarding and resisting the self-narratives of early modern elite and middling sorts in a period of economic and social fragmentation. In the academic year 2005-6, she was a fellow at the Renaissance Center of the University of Massaschusetts in Amherst. She is currently editor of the Sidney Circle Journal.

Beth Lordan, Professor (MFA, Cornell University)

Office: Faner 2284

Phone: 618/453-6849, lordan@siu.edu

Lordan received her BA and MFA from Cornell University, and has been at SIUC since 1991. She teaches fiction workshops and forms courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and currently directs Irish and Irish Immigration Studies. She is the author of three books: August Heat, a novel (Harper & Row 1987); And Both Shall Row, stories (Picador, 1998); and But Come Ye Back, a novel in stories (William Morrow, 2004). Her literary heroes are Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, James Agee; she admires the work of contemporary fiction writers like James Kelman, Joanna Scott, Alice McDermott, David Long, and Toni Morrison. Her short fiction has appeared in Farmers Market, Gettysburg Review, The Atlantic Monthly, O.Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories, and has won prizes from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. She's currently working on more stories, and thinking about writing a book on form.

Lisa McClure, Associate Professor (DA, University of Michigan)

Office: Faner 2390

Phone: 618/453-6811, lisam@siu.edu

Professor McClure came to SIUC from the University of Michigan via Ohio State University. Having completed her coursework at UM in 1984, she taught four years in the basic writing program at OSU, serving for three years as Assistant Director of the program. She completed her doctoral degree in 1988, three days before the start of her tenure as an Assistant Professor at SIUC in August of 1988. Since coming to SIUC, Dr. McClure has been instrumental in developing and directing the first-year composition program, and is now completing her six-year stint as Director of First-Year Composition. She also serves as Area Head for Rhetoric & Composition, a program which she and Dr. Bruce C. Appleby (Professor Emeritus) expanded to include a Ph.D. concentration in 1988. As Director of First-Year Composition, Dr. McClure initiated changes in the curriculum to bring SIUC's program in line with current research, theory, and practice in the teaching of writing. She also developed, directed, and conducted the annual Pre-Semester Workshop for New and Returning Graduate Assistants. Much of the work she has done with the FYC program has been to upgrade the training of graduate assistants who teach in the program and to provide them with a professional atmosphere in which to work. Dr. McClure has been recognized by the Women's Studies Program and the Graduate and Professional Student Council for her contributions to the education and professional experiences of graduate students at SIUC. Dr. McClure teaches a variety of courses dealing with both theory and praxis of composition studies. Among her favorite theory courses are Composition Theory (ENGL 597), a course which she developed, and Reader Response Theory. In the Fall of 1997, she will introduce a new course: Intersections of Theory, an exploration of the intersections between composition theory and literary theory. She also teaches practical courses such as Teaching College Composition (ENGL 502), Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Teaching Basic Writing, and The Politics of Teaching Composition. She has taught both of the English Education courses (ENGL 485 and 481) in the department; she has also taught all levels of writing courses, including ENGL 101, 290, 390, and 490. Dr. McClure's research represents a variety of interests and concerns. Most of those interests fall under three headings: feminism, composition theory and practice, and reading theory. Her current focus is the creation of an innovative first-year composition textbook entitled The Subject of Writing is Writing: A Rhetoric for Teaching and Learning Writing for the National Textbook Company. Other projects include a theory book on the teaching of writing, a research project on the interaction of readers and writers about texts in different contexts, and a longitudinal study of how new instructors are taught to evaluate writing. Dr. McClure has published chapters or articles in several books and journals. She has presented her work at national and international conferences. In addition to serving as Director of First-Year Composition and Area Head of Rhetoric & Composition, Dr. McClure chairs the First-Year Composition Committee and serves on the Department's Policy Committee. At the university-level, she serves as a Core Curriculum Advisory Representative for the University's Core Curriculum program, and on the College of Liberal Art's Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Committee. She is the Rhetoric & Composition program's representative on the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition for whom she has developed the program's website. She is a member of the CCCC's Committee on Assessment for whom she has also designed a website.

Scott J. McEathron, Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies (PhD, Duke University)

Office: Faner 2390

Phone: 618/453-6894, mceath@aol.com

Professor McEathron specializes in British Romanticism. His interests include the canonical Romantic poets and essayists, especially Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Lamb, and Hazlitt, as well as several non-canonical figures associated with the labouring-class poetic tradition. His edition English Labouring-Class Poetry, 1800-1830 (Pickering & Chatto, 2006) includes discussions of Robert Bloomfield, John Clare, James Hogg, and about twenty others.  A recent essay on Bloomfield appeared in Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon (Bucknell University Press, 2006). His other publications include the book Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2005) and articles in Keats-Shelley Journal, Victorians Institute Journal, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, and Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Michael Molino, Associate Professor, Chair (PhD, Marquette University)

Office: Faner 2370

Phone: 618/453-6854, mmolino@siu.edu

Professor Molino is a specialist in Modern British literature, with interests in Irish literature, contemporary British literature, Anglophone postcolonial literature, and political fiction of the Third World . The author of Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1994), Professor Molino has also chaired and delivered papers at several conferences, and guest edited a section on Postcolonial Criticism and Irish literature in The Comparatist , a comparative literature journal.  His articles have appeared in The Journal of Irish Literature , College English , Modern Philology , The American Journal of Semiotics , The Comparatist , Semiotics '91, the American Journal of Semiotics , and the New Hibernia Review .   He is the editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-first Century British and Irish Novelists and has written DLB essays on Barnard MacLaverty, Hilary Mantel, James Hamilton-Paterson, Kent Haruf, and Ian McEwan's Booker Prize winning novel, Amsterdam .

R. Gerald Nelms, Associate Professor (PhD, Ohio State University)

Office: Faner 2235

Phone: 618/453-6848, gnelms@siu.edu;gnelms@verizon.net

Professor Nelms has a BA in English (1973) and MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (1981) as well as a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Ohio State (1990).  Professor Nelms began his career in Rhetoric and Composition as an historian, focusing on the use of oral history methods to study developments in 20th-Century Composition theory and pedagogy.  His early publications include, among others, “The Rise of Classical Rhetoric in Modern Composition Studies,” which won the Edward P. J. Corbett Award for the best article in Focuses; “Reassessing Janet Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders: An Historical Perspective” in Rhetoric Review, “The Revival of Classical Rhetoric for Modern Composition Studies: A Survey” (with Maureen Daly Goggin) in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and “Linda Flower” (with Ronda Leathers Dively) in Twentieth-Century Rhetorics and Rhetoricians.  He has also reported on a longitudinal study of Janet Emig’s famous case study subject “Lynn” and research on the University of Chicago composition program of the 1940s and 1950s.  Professor Nelms also has presented research on historiography, promoting oral history methods and exploring the nature of objectivity; writing assessment; and writing across the curriculum.  More recently, Professor Nelms has conducted research into the transfer of composition knowledge from first-year composition courses to major courses.  He is at work on a book presenting a unified curriculum for teaching writing at every level of higher education.  He has regularly conducted workshops on writing across the curriculum and active learning.  Professor Nelms’ primary academic interests at present include Communication Across the Curriculum, cognitive and rhetorical aspects of writing, and active learning.  Professor Nelms has held various administrative posts, including Director of SIUC’s Communication Across the Curriculum program; Acting Chair of the English Department; Writing Studies Director; and Undergraduate Studies Director in English.

Ryan Netzley, Assistant Professor (PhD, The Pennsylvania State University)

Office: Faner 2227

Phone: 618/453-6830, rnetzley@siu.edu

Professor Netzley’s research interests include Renaissance literature, particularly seventeenth-century poetry, literature of the English Reformation, especially martyrologies and apocalypse commentaries, and queer and poststructuralist theory, particularly the work of Deleuze and Guattari. He also, of course, dabbles in Shakespeare. Professor Netzley is currently at work on a manuscript, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry, that examines the impact of sacramental presence on our understanding of desire and reading in seventeenth-century devotional lyrics: namely, how do we desire a god that we do not lack and how do we read poems when they no longer lack their meaning? Professor Netzley has also co-edited a collection of essays on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press. He has published articles in ELH, Criticism, and Milton Studies, and on Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, John Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, and Taylor Hackford’s film, The Devil’s Advocate.

Jacinda Townsend, Assistant Professor (MFA, University of Iowa)

Office: Faner 2272

Phone: 618/453-6814

Jacinda Townsend, the 2003-04 Carol Houck Smith fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing and a 2002 Hurston Wright Award finalist, has published in numerous literary magazines such as African Voices, Carve Magazine, The Maryland Review, Moon City Review, Obsidian II, Passages North, Phoebe, Struggle and Xavier Review. Her work has been anthologized in O.Henry Festival Stories 2000 and Telling Stories: Fiction by Kentucky Feminists. A former Fulbright fellow to Cote d'Ivoire and graduate of both Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Jon Tribble, Managing Editor of Crab Orchard Review (MFA)

Office: Faner 2222

Phone: 618/453-6833, jtribble@siu.edu

Jon Tribble is the managing editor of Crab Orchard Review and the series editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry published by Southern Illinois University Press. He is the recipient of a 2003 Artist Fellowship Award in Poetry from the Illinois Arts Council and his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares. Poetry, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology. His work was selected as the 2001 winner of the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize from Sarah Lawrence College. He teaches creative writing and literature, and directs undergraduate and graduate students in internships and independent study in editing and literary publishing for the Department of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Jeremy Wells, Assistant Professor (PhD, University of Michigan)

Office: Faner 2282

Phone: 618/453-6844, jerwells@siu.edu

Professor Wells specializes in post-Civil War American literature and culture. His research and teaching interests include southern literature, African-American literature, literature and empire, and cultural studies. His current book project, White Men's Burdens: Empire and the Culture of the Plantation Romance , examines the relationship between stories about plantations and discourses surrounding U.S. imperialism from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. He has also published on such figures as Booker T. Washington and Jimi Hendrix. Before coming to SIU, Dr. Wells taught at Indiana University, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. He has also received fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation.

Dan M. Wiley, Assistant Professor (PhD, Harvard University)

Office: Faner 2044

Phone: 618/453-6851, danwiley@siu.edu

Dan M. Wiley is assistant professor of Irish and Irish immigration studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University with a specialization in the medieval languages and literatures of the British Isles. His primary research interests include early Irish saga literature, Gaelic paleography, and textual criticism. He is the editor of Essays on the Early Irish King Tales (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008) and the author of articles on various aspects of medieval Irish literature, including ‘Níall Frossach’s True Judgment’ (Eriu 2005) and ‘The Maledictory Psalms’ (Peritia 2001). Currently, he is working on an edition and translation of both recensions of the Middle Irish saga Aided Díarmata meic Cerbaill ‘The Violent Death of Díarmait mac Cerbaill’, which he hopes to complete in 2009.

Tony Williams, Professor (PhD, University of Manchester)

Office: Faner 2266

Phone: 618/453-6836, tonyw@siu.edu

Professor Williams's research interests include: Representations of Viet Nam in Literature and Cinema, Film and Literature, Classical Hollywood Cinema, The Writings of Jack London and James Jones, Hong Kong Cinema, Film Genres, and Naturalism and Cinema.

Clarisse Zimra, Associate Professor (PhD, University of Washington)

Office: Faner 4344

Phone: 618/453-5837, czimra@siu.edu

Professor Zimra holds comparative degrees from France, Great-Britain; and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the United States. She has taught in Europe (France and England) and Asia (Laos, Vietnam, Thailand). Her research interests include literary theory, deconstructive semiotics and gendered discourse theory. She is an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Communicology. Her published research has focused on the variables of race, gender, and culture as they define canonical and oppositional national literatures in emergent writers; in particular, Caribbean and African Francophone texts. A founding member of the informal Student-Faculty Friends of Theory reading group (from Aristotle to Zizek), she teaches beginning and advanced classes on literary criticism, on occasion. She is currently the 2006 Taft Fellow at the University of Cincinnati, where she is completing a book length study of Islam and women writers: Writing Woman: Assia Djebar and The Architectonics of Space.