Department of English

Mark Amos, Associate Professor (PhD, Duke University)

Office: Faner 2386

Phone: 618/453-6848, 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.

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

Office: Faner 2270

Phone: 618/453-6840, davidant@siu.edu

David Anthony is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at SIUC, specializing in the rise of mass culture (especially gothic literature and sensationalism) during the antebellum period. He has published essays 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 received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society (1997; 2000; 2005), the Library Company of Philadelphia (2000), and SIUC. He is currently revising a book manuscript entitled “Paper Money Men: Commerce, Gender and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America.” This book shows how a long trajectory of sensational-gothic narratives, both literary and tabloid-factual, 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. Focusing on sensational extremes of masculine affect as staged in a variety of sensational media (from penny press papers and pulpy dime novels to more canonical literature by Irving, Hawthorne and Melville), he argues that the link between financial “panic” and male “panic” so common to the early American gothic--and the sensational public sphere of which it is a part--provides the outline of a new and largely compensatory form of professional masculinity, one based upon postures of submission and humiliation, rather than traditionally labor-based notions of “self-reliance” and “self-possession” said to have prevailed during this period.

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 (2008) for the University of South Carolina Press. She is also the faculty advisor for the English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta.

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.

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

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 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 and 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 of English and Distinguished Teacher (PhD, Vanderbilt University)

Office: Faner 2274

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

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

Office: Faner 2276

Phone: 618/453-6817, kdettmar@siu.edu

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 as 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; he will serve as President of the M/MLA for 2005–06. 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 (1996), and Is Rock Dead? (2005), and editor of Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism (1992); Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading (1996); Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics (1999); and the Blackwell Companion to British Literature and Culture (2005). Professor Dettmar served as twentieth-century editor for the new Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (2005); he is also a member of the editorial team for the Longman Anthology of British Literature, now in its third edition, and has recently taken 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 at work on a book-length project, Irony in the Public Sphere: History and Theory, that 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.

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

Office: Faner 2386

Phone: 618/453-6811, rdively@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

Phone: 618/453-1111, 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.

Charles Fanning, Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar, Director of Irish Studies (PhD, University of Pennsylvania)

Office: Faner 2044

Phone: 618/453-6851, celtic42@siu.edu

Professor Fanning has written primarily about the Irish in American literature and history. His latest books are New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora (2001); The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction, (Second Edition, 2000); The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction (Second Edition, 1997); and Chicago Stories of James T. Farrell (1998). Current teaching interests include Irish history since 1600, Irish culture in the early Christian era (400-800 AD), contemporary Irish poetry, comparative perspectives on Irish-American and Jewish-American writing, and ethnicity in American, Australian, and New Zealand literature. Current research interests include the image of Irish patriot Robert Emmet in America, Irish-American culture in the 1930s, and the O'Neill-O'Flaherty novels of James T. Farrell. Fanning received the SIUC Outstanding Scholar Award in 2004.

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 and Chair (PhD, Claremont Graduate University)

Office: Faner 2368

Phone: 618/453-6854, 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 and 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 2221

Phone: 618/453-6813, 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.com), and practices kundalini yoga.

Allison Joseph, Associate Professor (MFA, Indiana University)

Office: Faner 2264

Phone: 618/453-6824, 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.

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

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. A collection of her stories, And Both Shall Row, was published by Picador USA in the summer of 1998. But Come Ye Back, a novel in stories, was published by William Morrow in 2004. 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.

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

Office: Faner 2226

Phone: 618/453-6829, magnusmj@siu.edu

Mike Magnuson, Associate Professor, is the author of two novels, The Right Man for the Job and The Fire Gospels, and two books of nonfiction, Lummox:  The Evolution of a Man and Heft on Wheels:  A Field Guide to Doing a 180.  His stories and occasional pieces have appeared in Bicycling, Men’s Health, Esquire, GQ, and other publications.  He holds degrees from University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire (B.A.), Minnesota State University at Mankato (M.A.), and University of Florida (M.F.A.).  At SIU, he is the faculty advisor for Grassroots, the undergraduate literary organization, and for the SIU Cycling Club.  More information about him is available at www.lummox.org.

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

Office: Faner 2229

Phone: 618/453-6837, 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 (PhD, Duke University)

Office: Faner 2239

Phone: 618/453-6842, 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 and Director of Graduate Studies (PhD, Marquette University)

Office: Faner 2382

Phone: 618/453-6894, 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 and Director of Undergraduate Studies (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