Welcome to our Faculty Page

All offices are located in Faner hall.

Mark Addison Amos, Associate Professor (PhD, Duke University)

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.

David Anthony, Associate Professor (PhD, University of Michigan)

Professor Anthony is currently putting his dissertation into book form. "White-Collar Gothic: Masculinity, Submission, and Urban Sensation in Antebellum America" is a study of the affective rhetoric accompanying the emergence of a new class of young professional men in antebellum America. Its chapters range from discussions of the "literary" Gothic in Hawthorne and Melville to the sensationalized Gothic found in "dime" novels and urban newspaper stories of the period. Professor Anthony has received fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and from the American Antiquarian Society to pursue his research. A related article of his, "The Helen Jewett Panic: Tabloids, Men, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum New York," appeared recently in American Literature (70)

 

 

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

Professor Bogumil teaches modern British and American literature, with a particular interest in drama and multicultural American writing. 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 . She is the co-author of A Biography of Florida Union Organizer Frank E'Dalgo . She has written essays on Clare Boylan and Magnus Mills for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-first Century British and Irish Novelist as well as an essay on Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac for a volume on Booker Prize winners. Her current research efforts include a study of the Morris Dance in John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger . She is also the faculty advisor for the English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta.

 

 

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

Professor Boulukos’ primary research interests are in eighteenth-century British literature, theories of race, and the history of the novel. He is working on a book entitled The Grateful Slave: Race and Plantation Slavery in the British Novel, 1720-1805, a study of the centrality of gratitude to eighteenth-century understandings of slavery and race. Articles from this project have been published in ELH, Eighteenth-Century Life, and Eighteenth-Century Novel. He has begun laying the groundwork for a second critical project, The Origin and Progress of the History of the Novel, 1780-1957, a study of the development of the “rise of the novel” thesis, examining when, how, and for what purposes the novel became associated with the middle class. He is also editing the previously undiscovered Memoirs of the Life and Travels of Thomas Hammond, the riotous and revealing autobiography of a one-time stableboy who traveled throughout Europe supporting himself by performing horse riding tricks.

 

 

Ed Brunner, Professor (PhD, University of Iowa)

Professor Brunner joined the SIUC faculty in 1991 after nearly two decades as an independent scholar, when he was employed first by the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad as an operator in control towers at various locations between Joliet, Illinois, and Des Moines, Iowa (1973-1980) and then as a clerk in the Johnson County Auditor's Office in Iowa City, Iowa, where he was promoted to Deputy Auditor (1981-1991). During these periods of employment he completed two book-length studies, Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of "The Bridge" (University of Illinois Press, 1985) and Poetry as Labor and Privilege: The Writings of W. S. Merwin (University of Illinois Press, 1991). He also served for seven years (1969-1976) as an American editor for the British journal Stand: A Quarterly of the Arts, published by Jon Silkin in Newcastle, England. His first book was awarded the MLA (Modern Language Association) Independent Scholar Prize for Distinguished Writing and Research (1986); his second book was completed with the aid of a year-long Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1989-90). He was elected as an MLA delegate to represent Independent Scholars (1988-1990), and he served on the MLA Selection Committee for the Independent Scholar Award (1986-1988). For the last several years, he has served as a panelist for NEH grants, both for year-long writing fellowships (1989-1991) and for summer stipends (1994, 1996, 1997, 2001). His most recent book, Cold War Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 2001), reconsiders in detail the mainstream poetry of the 1950s. It is an examination of such period phenomena as the "popular" academic poet, the power of the classroom anthology to establish criteria for reading, the one-sided authority of the (male-dominated) book review process, the ostracizing of female and minority poets, poetic fads such as the wildly-popular sestina, and the covert poetics needed for writing poetry opposed to the A-bomb. Along with revisiting figures long recognized as important in their time such as Richard Wilbur and John Berryman, the study offers lengthy reconsiderations of work by a number of neglected writers, including Rosalie Moore, V. R. Lang, Katherine Hoskins, Melvin B. Tolson, and Hyam Plutzik. He is one of the Advisory Editors to the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry (2000) which features his extensive annotations of Tolson's long poem, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953). He is a member of the Advisory Board for MAPS (Modern American Poetry Site) for which he has organized and compiled material for several of the poets who appear in the Oxford Anthology, including the sites for John Ashbery, Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, Weldon Kees, Melvin B. Tolson, and James Wright, along with about a dozen others. He has produced specific essays for the sites on Crane, Crosby, and Kees. The Crosby site is an especially extensive introduction to the work habits of this much-neglected expatriate experimental writer, and it features a large number of unpublished manuscripts as well as a selection of Crosby's photographs. (See these compilations, along with the work of others involved in the Oxford anthology project, on the "Modern American Poetry Site" at www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/htm.) As part of the University of Illinois Press's American Poetry Recovery Series, he is preparing with Cary Nelson an extensive annotated edition of selected writings and photography by Crosby entitled The Black Sun Poems. At the same time as he continues research on poetry in the twentieth century, he is gathering material for a book-length study on syndicated newspaper cartoon strips from 1935 to 1955. The book will blend a cultural study overview with a focus on the visual poetics of the daily strip. It will center on representations of women, of the African American and of political authority in sequences by Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Male Call, and Steve Canyon), African American artist/writers Jackie Ormes (Torchy Brown) and O. L. Harrington (Jive Gray), and Chester Gould (Dick Tracy). Its tentative title is Funny Papers: The Cultural Work of the Graphic Serial. Among his other writing are three articles for Trains: The Magazine of Railroading (1981, 1982, 1986); essays on the young British poets of the 1970s and on the poetry of Robert Dana, both in The Iowa Review (1976, 1992); and a review-essay on ephemeral "documentary" films from 1935 to 1960 in the e-journal Postmodern Culture (1998). At SIU/C he teaches twentieth century literature and culture in the Core program; he regularly teaches both sections of the American Literary History survey; and once a year teaches a course in twentieth century American poetry, which also serves as an introduction to prosody. As often as possible he offers courses with a special focus - in the past these have included a course analyzing the impact of vernacular writing and the African American voice on the origins of American modernist poetics (Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the "Spectrists" and Hart Crane); a course that compares works of poetry with works of non-poetry (plays, novels, essays, memoirs) by various American poets (Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Mary Karr, Stephen Dobyns and Mary Swander), and most recently, a course on the 1930s as a unified cultural period, drawing on examples from writers and poets Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, B. Traven, Frank Marshall Davis, and Dawn Powell; photographers Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White; composers Duke Ellington and Aaron Copland; and painters Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. In the fall semester 2001, he will offer a course on Dante's Inferno in translation and contemporary American writing, featuring works by Galway Kinnell, Gloria Naylor, Tony Kurchner, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as excerpts from works by Ezra Pound, Peter Greenaway, Neil Gaiman and Mira Friedmann.

 

 

Anne K. Chandler, Associate Professor (PhD, Duke University)

Professor Chandler specializes in late eighteenth-century fiction, especially as related to prevalent ideas of education, gender and sexuality, and psychology in the period. Her areas of interest include sentimental, gothic, and children's fiction; literary appropriations of Locke and Rousseau; and intersections of eighteenth-century fiction, natural history, and medicine. Her essay "Defying 'Development': Thomas Day's Queer Curriculum in Sandford and Merton" appears in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Duke UP, 1997). A recent article focuses on animals and narrative forms in Original Stories, a children's book by the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Other, ongoing research includes a study of the gothic novelists Ann Radcliffe and William Godwin, in terms of their usage of the philosopher Rousseau; and examinations of popular-science writing in eighteenth-century magazines.

 

 

Jane Cogie, Associate Professor (PhD, University of Iowa)

Professor Cogie has recently completed the study, "Low Risk Practice in Risk Taking: the Effects of Writing Center Conferencing on Classroom Teaching," and is currently at work on a study of the role of teacher-centered one-to-one strategies in student learning. Her article, "Resisting the Editorial Urge in Writing Center Conferences: An Essential Focus in Tutor Training," appears in the 1995 Writing Center Perspectives. Her other research interests include teaching basic writing and English as a second language.

 

 

K. K. Collins, Assoicate Professor (PhD, Vanderbilt University)

Professor Collins has twice been recognized as Outstanding Teacher in the College of Liberal Arts and has been named Outstanding Teacher in the University. Professor Collins's primary field is nineteenth-century English literature. He teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Recent undergraduate courses include English 301, "Introduction to Literary Analysis"; English 302A-B, the departmental Core surveys of English literature; English 422, "Victorian Poetry"; and English 452, "Nineteenth-Century English Fiction." Over the past few years he has offered graduate seminars in Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, the Brontës, and in the treatment of books and reading in nineteenth-century prose and fiction. He also regularly teaches an undergraduate Honors Seminar on the interrelations of literature, science, and painting in the English Romantic era. Professor Collins has received research grants from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as two NEH Summer Seminar awards, a Mellon Seminar award, and an NEH Summer Institute award at the Yale Center for British Art. He has also held a scholarship at The School of Criticism and Theory. The co-author of The Cumulated Dickens Checklist (1982), Professor Collins has published on nineteenth-century English literature in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Dickens Studies Newsletter, Victorian Studies, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Modern Philology, and Modern Language Review. A contributor to the new Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot, he is now at work on a book entitled George Eliot's Life and Death in the American Press, and is preparing the volume on George Eliot in Palgrave's Interviews and Recollections series. He has also written a book-length memoir of Isaac Singer.

 

 

Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Professor (PhD, UCLA)

Professor Dettmar received his BA in English and Psychology from the University of California, Davis (1981), a post-graduate diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College, Dublin (1982), and a PhD in British Literature from UCLA (1990). Before coming to SIUC, he taught for eight years at Clemson University (South Carolina), where he also served terms as Associate Chair of the Department of English and Associate Dean of the College of Architecture, Arts & Humanities. He came to SIUC as Professor and Chair of the Department of English in August 1999, and has served as President of the Modernist Studies Association, and as a member of the Executive Boards of the Midwest Modern Language Association and the International Association for the Study of Popular music, since his arrival here.

Professor Dettmar’s scholarly area is twentieth-century British and American literature and culture—especially the intersections of literary and cultural texts. He is the author of The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1996), and editor of Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1992); Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996); and Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics (Columbia Univ. Press, 1999). He is also a member of the editorial team that assembled the Longman Anthology of British Literature, and was recently named to take over the position of General Editor. Professor Dettmar has published a wide range of essays on literary and popular culture topics, and is an occasional essayist for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Currently, Professor Dettmar is actively at work on two book-length projects. The first book, Irony in the Public Sphere: History and Theory, examines the fates and fortunes of ironic discourse since the 1840s in Britain and the U.S., exploring how the modernist “poetics of impersonality” run sidelong into the movement of irony from a coterie to a very broadly public discourse. Focusing on some celebrated contemporary cases of the “failure of irony,” the book attempts to shift our understanding of irony from a “producer” model to a model that recognizes more fully the constitutive role of active and intelligent consumers. The second book, currently in press at Routledge, examines the strange cultural logic of the repeated declarations of the death of rock: rock & roll is an art-form that was declared dead almost before it had been properly born, and we’ve been insisting that it’s dead ever since.

 

 

Ronda Dively, Associate Professor (DA, Illinois State University)

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 Undergraduate 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.

Charles Fanning, Professor (PhD, University of Pennsylvania)

Professor Fanning directs SIUC's Irish Studies Program. Among Professor Fanning's scholarly interests are Irish and Irish-American literature and the History and Literature of Immigration. The author of numerous critical essays, he has also written, among other books, Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years (1978); The Irish in Chicago (1987); Mr. Dooley and the Chicago Irish: The Autobiography of a Nineteenth-Century Ethnic Group (1987); The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction (first ed. 1987; second ed. 1997); The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction from the 1760's to the 1980's (first ed. 1990; second ed. 1999); and Chicago Stories of James T. Farrell (1998). Professor Fanning is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians for Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, three National Endowment of the Humanities grants, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for TheExiles of Erin, and the Book Prize for Literary Criticism and Related Fields from the American Conference for Irish Studies for The Irish Voice in America.

 

 

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

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)

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 that have appeared in such journals as Forum and Arethusa, and his book on Christian Origins and the Language of the Kingdom of God was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1999. Dr. Humphries is currently engaged in two projects. The first is an article that addresses the practice of physiognomy in the writings of Lavater and Lessing, and which seeks to demonstrate how this particular practice is frequently and strategically deployed to advance discrimination as, for example, in the defamation of Jewish character portrayed and attacked by Lessing in his plays Nathan the Wise and The Jews. The second project is a book length study on the theme of Memento Mori in the literature of the early modern period, with a focus upon medical texts (especially anatomical illustrations and autopsy records) produced by Andreas Vasalius, Ambroise Parre, Xavier Bichat, and others. The study will demonstrate how in the very presentation of human mortality, whether through literary expression, anatomical illustration, or medical discourse, the reality of death's finality is simultaneously delayed through the imposition of human subjectivity upon the Memento Mori.

 

Anna Jackson, MA

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

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, MFA

Allison Joseph, Associate Professor (MFA, Indiana University)

Professor Joseph is the author of What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), as well as Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon, 1997) and In Every Seam (Pittsburgh, 1997). Her honors include the 1992 Women Poets Series Competition Award, the 1992 John C. Zacharis First Book Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry for 1996, and a 1997 Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council.. Her interests include contemporary American poetry, especially the work of women and minorities, popular culture, and literary magazine publishing, and the teaching of creative writing. Professor Joseph also runs a web page of creative writing ideas called "Inspiration Corner."

 

 

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

Professor Klaver graduated from the University of California, Riverside, with a Ph.D. in English in 1990. Her dissertation advisor was Steven Gould Axelrod. Her dissertation is entitled "Postmodernism and Metatextual Space in the Plays of Beckett, Ionesco, Albee, and Mamet." In 1991 she joined the faculty at SIU as a Modern Americanist with speciality in drama and literary theory. Professor Klaver teaches advanced courses in modern drama, drama theory, media studies, literary theory, and postmodernism. Apart from her regularly offered courses in Modern Drama, she has taught four graduate seminars entitled Theater and the Performance of Theory, Theorizing Postmodernism, Drama and the Media Culture, and The Postmodern Body. She will teach a new graduate seminar, Cultural Studies and the Serial Killer Narrative, in Spring 2003. While the emphasis is on contemporary literary theory, these courses provide the opportunity to read theory against a range of plays, novels, and media.  In 1997 she won the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in English. Professor Klaver has published a book entitled Performing Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture, The Popular Press (2000). This project studies the role of drama with respect to other more popular forms of media. She is editor of a volume of collected essays, Representations of the Dead: The Corpse in Western Culture and the author of a book-in-progress, Authorized Personnel Only: Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Literature.

 

 

Mary Ellen Lamb, Professor (PhD, Columbia University)

Professor Lamb received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1976.  She has taught at Southern Illinois University since then, moving from Assistant to Associate Professor in 1982 and to Full Professor in 1992. She earned the Outstanding Teacher Award for the College of Liberal Arts in 1992. Professor Lamb's primary field is early modern literature. She teaches Shakespeare and Spenser on the graduate and undergraduate level. Her graduate courses in recent years include: "A New Historicist Perspective on Renaissance Texts," "Early Modern Women Writers," "Shakespeare and Post-Modernism," "Women's Autobiographical Writings from 1400 to 1700," and "Foucault and the Body." Her fields of research include canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Spenser, as well as early modern women writers such as Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, and Aemilia Lanyer. She has published in such journals as Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, English Literary Renaissance, Studies in English Literature, Review of English Studies, and Criticism. Her book, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle, was published by the University of Wisconsin in 1990. Her current book project, Old Wives' Tales in Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, explores traces of fairy tales and other fictions circulated in an oral culture shared among women and children, as they shaped the narrative act of such canonical works as Sidney's Apology for Poetry, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Mary Ellen Lamb is currently serving as Secretary of the national Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, as well as on the editorial board of the Sidney Newsletter.

 

 

Beth Lordan, Professor (MFA, Cornell University)

Professor Lordan's office window is filled with the top of a flowering dogwood tree. The tree blooms in the spring, green flowers becoming white; in the summer birds nest where she can watch them from her desk; in the fall, the green leaves streak dark winey colors; in early winter the cardinals return to harvest the red berries. It's a good tree, and a good office, and she's in it a lot. She finds it odd to write about herself in third person, but she will persevere. She 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 sometimes teaches a course in literature for the adolescent or a course in contemporary fiction. 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 first novel, August Heat, was published by Harper & Row in l987, and an excerpt from a second novel earned her an NEA Fellowship. Her short fiction has appeared in Farmers Market, Gettysburg Review, The Atlantic Monthly and has won prizes from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. A collection of her stories, And Both Shall Row, was published by Picador USA in the summer of 1998. She's currently working on more stories, and on another novel.

 

 

Mike Magnuson, Associate Professor (MFA, University of Florida)

Professor Magnuson is the author of The Right Man for the Job (HarperCollins, 1997) and The Fire Gospels (HarperFlamingo, 1998) and a forthcoming autobiography entitled Lummox (HarperCollins, 2001). He received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Florida, where he studied with Padgett Powell. Mike's academic interests include English grammar, form in modern fiction, and the contemporary grotesque novel. In his non-university life, he rides bicycles, smokes cigarettes, and raises children.

 

 

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

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 McEathron, Associate Professor (PhD, Duke University)

Professor McEathron has published articles on Shelley and Coleridge in The Keats-Shelley Journal, on Clare and Lamb in The Charles Lamb Bulletin, and on Lyrical Ballads in The Blackwell Companion to Romanticism. An essay on romantic portraiture will soon appear in Victorians Institute Journal. He is currently at work on Hazlitt and Wordsworth.

 

 

Michael Molino, Associate Professor (PhD, Marquette University)

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 University (PhD, Ohio State University)

Professor Nelms has a BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (1973, 1981) and a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition (1990) from The Ohio State University. At Ohio State, Dr. Nelms studied with the late Edward P. J. Corbett, Andrea Lunsford, Frank O'Hare, and Louis Ulman. Dr. Nelms' scholarly interests include composition history, oral history and other qualitative methods and methodologies, researched writing and how to teach it, the use of writing in the transfer of knowledge within the academy and from the academy to the workplace, other issues in writing-across-the-curriculum, technical communication, the pre-professional training of undergraduate English majors, and issues relating to the English Department administration. Dr. Nelms' publications include, among others, "The Rise of Classical Rhetoric in Modern Composition Studies" in Focuses, for which he won the Edward P. J. Corbett Award; "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; "The Use of Double-Entry Journals in a Required Dietetic Course: Encouraging Critical Thinking Skills" (with Marcia Nahikian-Nelms) in Journal of Nutrition Education; and "The Case for Oral Evidence in Composition Historiography" in Written Communication. Dr. Nelms has also conducted interviews with Janet Emig's famous case study subject "Lynn" (now a law professor at the University of Michigan and living in Chicago), and he has conducted research on the University of Chicago composition program of the 1940s and 1950s, whose faculty included Richard Weaver, Wilma Ebbitts, James Sledd, P. Albert Duhamel, Richard Hughes, and Wayne Booth. Dr. Nelms is at work on two books. The Movement for Meaning: An Historical Introduction to Modern Composition Theory will describe four major theoretical perspectives on composition that have deep historical roots in the field: Classical Rhetoric, Cognitive Constructivist Rhetoric, Tagmemic Rhetoric, and the so-called Expressivist Rhetoric. Each perspective is examined through the analyses of works by and interviews with four major figures in Composition Studies: Edward P.J. Corbett, Janet Emig, Richard Young, and Peter Elbow. Rhetoric: Inquiry and Communication will be a textbook in writing that focuses on research as an integral part of rhetorical communication. Dr. Nelms classifies research as internal (that is, invention strategies that reveal and organize what a writer already "knows") or external (that is, research methods by which the writer gathers information and learns). A novel feature of the textbook will be its "reversed" presentation of the researched writing process: moving from integration of research back to data collection. Other important features of the book will include its taxonomy of research methods and methodologies and its discussion of a variety of research methods available to undergraduates, including fieldwork and even experimentation. At present, Dr. Nelms has not submitted a proposal for his textbook to a publisher. In addition to the two books he is writing, Dr. Nelms is revising a talk that he has given for different audiences over the past several years. In "Experientialist Objectivity and Composition Historiography," he argues that the experientialist philosophy of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff provides a grounding for belief in "human" objectivity, an objectivity that both accords with our recognition of the rhetoricity, the situatedness, of historiography and with the requirement that histories not be radically relativistic. Nelms argues that the subjective/objective dichotomy is bogus. Objectivity can never be absolute and transcendental; subjectivity can never be entirely private and thoroughly subjective. The process of writing effective histories, Nelms states, requires reflexivity (the ability to recognize one's situatedness, self-reflection) and transperspecitivity (the imaginative ability to bracket one's own perceptions and imagine the thoughts and feelings of another person). Nelms concludes that "detachment" is not a movement above or beyond human perception but simply the ability to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous convictions. Nelms, thus, embraces the call for a plurality of histories--since the notion of a definitive history cannot be supported--but rejects the inherent assumption that the quality of any histories is entirely relative. Dr. Nelms, in collaboration with his wife, Marcia Nahikian-Nelms, also has been involved in a five-year study of the use of double-entry journals by students in an internship-like course offered annually as part of a growing clinical dietetics program at a medium-sized Midwestern university. Students intern at a medium-sized public hospital. Elements of their rotations include observations of invasive medicine, such as insertion of feeding tubes; interviews with patients, some in great pain or even dying; and the establishing of professional relationships with doctors, nurses, other dietitians, and the entire array of other hospital personnel. What the researchers have found is that the double-entry journal allows these students to keep complete notes on their observations and to vent their emotions during their transition from classroom to workplace. It provides them with a bridging mechanism that helps build professionalism as they work through problems and new feelings. Dr. Nelms also regularly conducts workshops in teaching research, writing-across-the-curriculum, and technical communication, and he has coordinated several assessments of courses in writing and literature. He has served as the Director for Undergraduate Studies in English and is currently Acting Chair of the Department. Dr. Nelms also is committed to undergraduate instruction and regularly teaches technical and advanced expository writing courses for undergraduates. He has also taught graduate-level courses in linguistics, composition history, rhetorical theory, research methods, and collaboration and writing groups. Finally, Dr. Nelms co-produces and alternately hosts (with Namdar Mogharreban) a local new age music radio show, Music from Beyond the Lakes, on WDBX, Carbondale's community radio station. The show is thematically programmed and has been featured in the new age music trade magazine, New Age Voice. Nelms is increasingly familiar to the new age music community. He began the show in 1996. The first program was aired on Easter Sunday evening. Namdar Mogharreban was brought on to co-produce the show in June of that year. The show has been praised by listeners for its professional production. Nelms defines new age music as music that provides a space for the imagination--in contrast with jazz and classical music that draw attention to the music per se and rock, folk, and country that draw attention to the lyrics and their explicit message. This definition and Nelms's and Mogharreban's playlists have garnered the show a great deal of attention from new age composers, musicians, and music labels.

 

 

Lucia Perillo, Associate Professor (MFA, Syracuse University)

Professor Perillo has published two books of poems, Dangerous Life (Northeastern, 1989) and The Body Mutinies (Purdue, 1996). Her poems have appeared in such magazines as The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Ploughshares and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She also writes reviews and essays, for which she received an Illinois Arts Council grant in creative nonfiction.

 

 

Anita Riedinger, Associate University (PhD, New York University)

Professor Riedinger is the author of articles on the Old English poetic formula, women in Old English literature, Apollonius of Tyre, Beowulf, and Andreas in journals such as Speculum, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, and Studia Neophilologica, as well as in several essay collections. She is now at work on "The Formulaic Style in the Old English Riddles," a part of her continuing work on Old English oral poetics.

 

 

Jon Tribble, MFA

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)

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.

 

Tony Williams, Professor (PhD, University of Manchester)

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)

Professor Zimra is Associate Professor of English in Modern Literary Theory and Criticism as well as Comparative Literature.  She has a joint appointment with the Department of Foreign Languages and is a member of the Faculty Seminar on Irish and Irish Immigration Studies.   Her areas of interest include Discourse Theory and Colonial and Post-colonial writers (Africa and the Caribbean).  Dr. Zimra is also founding member and discussion leader of the THEORY GROUP, an informal bi-monthly gathering of students and faculty, across disciplines and colleges, dedicated to exploring authors less often integrated into regular courses: for example, Kristeva (Fall 1997) and Certeau (Spring 1998). Under consideration for Fall 98: Kojeve. Dr. Zimra has taught as well as published in Europe, South-East Asia and the United States. A member of the CARAF editorial team for the Press of the University of Virginia, she has edited and coordinated the American translations of Maximin's Lone Sun and Djebar's Women of Algiers. She is currently the North African editor for the projected Norton Anthology of African Literatures, headed by Henry Louis Gates and Abiola Irele. She is also working on a book manuscript that considers the way in which (post)colonial writer, Assia Djebar, engages simultaneously Islam's Orient and the non-Islamic West. In 1994, Dr. Zimra was the Outstanding Teacher for the Department of English, as well as for the College of Liberal Arts. That same year, she was the runner-up for Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher campus wide, as well as the runner-up for best graduate teacher-mentor award from the Professional and Graduate Students Association. In 1996, she received the Rafiki wa Africa Award from the African Students Council at SIU. She has served on both the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee of the Faculty Senate and the Program Review Committee of the Graduate Council, and is interested in the way good undergraduate education depends upon good graduate education and vice-versa.

 

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Undergraduate Studies

Writing Studies

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