Faculty Profiles: A to D

Wendell Aycock

Professor | Ph.D. South Carolina

Associate Dean for the Graduate School, Aycock has published five volumes of Twentieth-Century Short Story Explication.  In addition to his work on short fiction and publications dealing with U.S. and English writers, he has published articles on Mexican and Spanish writers and has taught organized classes in Panama, Argentina (on Fulbright Grants), Turkey, and Spain.  Before a term as Chair of the Department of English at Texas Tech, he served as editor and co-editor of 18 volumes of Studies in Comparative Literature.

Ken Baake

Associate Professor | Ph.D. New Mexico State University

Author of the book, Metaphor and Knowledge: The Challenges of Writing Science (SUNY Press 2003), he specializes in the rhetoric of scientific literature.

Craig Baehr

Associate Professor | Ph.D. University of New Mexico

Research interests include hypertext theory, online publishing, online instructional design, report writing, and visual rhetoric. He is the author of Web Development: A Visual-Spatial Approach (2007).

Thomas Barker

Professor | Ph.D. University of Texas

Research interests include computer documentation, online technologies and communication, distance education, technical communication pedagogy, and service-learning.

Kanika Batra

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. Loyola University Chicago

Batra specializes in Postcolonial literatures and has special interests in Postcolonial Feminism and Postcolonial Queer Studies. Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. In 2001 she published a monograph on Caribbean poetry for the Indira Gandhi National Open University, India. She is working on a book manuscript titled  "Political Acts: Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship in Postcolonial Drama."

Scott Baugh

Associate Professor | Ph.D. Oklahoma State

Baugh specializes in film studies with special emphases in Chicana/o and Latin American cultural studies. He has published Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular and currently is at work on "Born of Resistance: Cara a Cara Encounters with Chicana/o Visual Culture" with Víctor Sorell and "Screening Mestizaje," a study of multicultural aesthetics in contemporary American cinema. In addition, his articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Film & Video, and the Columbia Companion to Film and History. [more]

Michael Borshuk

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. Alberta

Specializing in African American literature and cultural studies, Borshuk is the author of Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006), and various essays and encyclopedia entries on African American literature, music, and American modernism.  His current book project focuses on jazz, performance studies, and visual culture.  As well, he writes on jazz regularly for Coda magazine. [more]

Joyce Locke Carter

Associate Professor | Ph.D. University of Texas, Austin

Director of Graduate Studies in Technical Communication and Rhetoric. As a techno-rhetorician, Dr. Carter studies the ways technology (mostly computers and software) affect, enable, and/or modify rhetorical acts. Current research has examined how rhetorical messages compete with each other; Dr. Carter's book Market Matters: Applied Rhetoric Studies and Free Market Competition contains some of these findings. 

Bruce Clarke

Professor | Ph.D. SUNY Buffalo

Clarke specializes in the coevolution of literary and technoscientific developments in the 19th and 20th centuries. His most recent books are Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science; Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics; and Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. He is the co-editor of From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, and Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory.

Bryce Conrad

Associate Professor | Ph.D. Iowa

Conrad works in the area of American modernism, with special interest in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of American culture in the 1920s and 1930s. He has published on the work of Williams Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, and he edits the William Carlos Williams Review.

Julie Nelson Couch

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. Brown

Nelson Couch specializes in Middle English literature and the modern reception of medieval literature. She has published on Malory, miracle tales, and retellings of medieval narrative in children's literature. Two recent articles, "Misbehaving God: The Case of the Christ Child in MS Laud Misc. 108 'Infancy of Jesus Christ'," in Mindful Spirits in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kirk (Palgrave Macmillan 2006) and "The Vulnerable Hero: Havelok and the Revision of Romance” (Chaucer Review, forthcoming) indicate her current interests in the Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 and the cultural category of childhood in Middle English narrative.

Dennis Covington

Professor | M.F.A Iowa

Covington is author of two novels and three nonfiction books, including Salvation on Sand Mountain, a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award.  His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, Georgia Review, Redbook, the Oxford American, and other periodicals, and his work has been widely anthologized in the U.S. and translated into eight languages abroad.  His most recent book is Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream. He has won the Rea Non-Fiction Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Doug Crowell

Associate Professor |

Ann Daghistany Ransdell

Professor | Ph.D. Southern California

Ransdell has published articles on myth criticism and women's studies, and co-edited a book of essays, Spatial Form in Narrative. She won the President's Excellence in Teaching Award. She teaches multi-cultural contemporary literature with emphases in madness, trauma and healing, and graduate classes in Comparative and Victorian Literature.

Marliss Desens

Associate Professor | Ph.D. UCLA

Author of The Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama:  Explorations in Gender, Sexuality, and Power. She has published articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama and serves as the Director of Literary Studies in the Department of English

Sam Dragga

Professor | Ph.D. Ohio

Publishes books and articles on ethics in technical communication, technical editing, visual communication, international communication, and first-year composition. Dragga serves as series editor of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication. [more]