Faculty Profiles: R to Z

Rich Rice

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. Ball State University

His research interests include contemporary composition and rhetoric, new media and professional writing, TA training, portfolio assessment, distance education, and service learning. [more]

Rebecca Rickly

Associate Professor | Ph.D. Ball State University

Her research interests include gender and communication, online and oral discourse analysis, methods and methodology, theories of rhetoric(s), and literacy issues. [more]

John Samson

Associate Professor | Ph.D. Cornell

The author of White Lies: Melville’s Narratives of Fact, Samson is concerned with historical and theoretical approaches to American novels and non-fictional prose narratives.

Mike Schoenecke

Professor | Ph.D. Oklahoma State

Schoenecke specializes in the classical Hollywood style, adaptation, and film in a cultural context.  He recently published “Bobby Jones, Golf, and His Instructional Reels” in Film & History, co-edited a book on cinematic sports narratives (University of Kentucky Press), and edited The World of Popular Culture Encyclopedia:  North America, vol. 1.  He co-edited back-to-back special issues of Film & History (34.1, 34.2[2004]) focusing on Latin America.  He is currently working on a book on that addresses battlegrounds in American popular culture.  He is the Executive Director of the National Popular Culture and American Culture Associations as well Chair of the PCA/ACA Endowment Fund.

Jen Shelton

Associate Professor | Ph.D. Vanderbilt

Shelton has published essays on incest as a narrative structure in works of Joyce, Woolf and Nabokov.

Yuan Shu

Associate Professor | Ph.D. Indiana

Shu specializes in contemporary American literature with an emphasis on postmodern American fiction, Vietnam War literature, and Asian American literature. His research interest includes nationalism and globalization theory, technology and discourse, as well as critical and comparative race studies. He is the director of the Texas Tech Comparative Literature program and has published in journals varying from Cultural Critique to MELUS.

Jennifer Snead

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. Duke

Snead specializes in eighteenth-century British and transatlantic literature and culture. Her primary research interests within the field are print culture, religion, and popular literacy. She has published and presented articles and papers on the work of Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley, and Edward Young (among others). Her current book project investigates the impact of the Evangelical Revival on popular literacy and the concept of literature during the second half of the century.

Sara Spurgeon

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. University of Arizona

Spurgeon works in literatures of the American West and Southwest as well as nature/environmental writing, gender studies, and postcolonial theory.  She is the author of Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier, co-author of Writing the Southwest, has published a monograph on Ana Castillo, and essays on Cormac McCarthy. Forthcoming publications include articles on feminist theory in the borderlands, the relationship between literature, water, and public discourse in the American West, and a co-authored essay on the film Brokeback Mountain. Her current research focuses on the works of Barry Lopez, Gretel Ehrlich, and other contemporary American nature writers. She serves on the Executive Council of the Western Literature Association, the Advisory Board of the Western Writers Series, and the Editorial Board of the journal Western American Literature.[more]

Kirk St. Amant

Associate Professor | Ph.D. University of Minnesota

St. Amant's research interests include intercultural communication, online communication, e-commerce, and rhetoric of economics.

Brian Still

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. University of South Dakota

Still's research interests include medical discourse, theories of technology, online communities, Internet activism, medical discourse, techno-pedagogy, theories of technology, and open source issues.

William Wenthe

Professor | Ph.D. Virginia

Wenthe has written two books of poems, Not Till We Are Lost and Birds of Hoboken. He has published poems in journals including Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review, and he is the librettist of Bellini's War, a full-length opera produced at Texas Tech.  In addition, he teaches 20th Century British Poetry and has written articles on Yeats, H. D., poetic form and literary theory.  His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes.[more]

James Whitlark

Professor | Ph.D. Chicago

Whitlark's field of specialization is Religions in Literature, and has won the New Professor and President’s Excellence in Teaching awards. His publications include two authored books (Illuminated Fantasy: From Blake’s Visions to Recent Graphic Fiction and Behind the Great Wall: A Post-Jungian Approach to Kafkaesque Literature), a co-edited book, and fifty-five articles in addition to the studies presented at his electronic journal (http://human-threshold-systems.whitlarks.com).

Priscilla Ybarra

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. Rice University

Ybarra specializes in Chicana/o Literature and Ecocriticism. She has published work in the 2004 collection New Perspectives on Environmental Justice and new writing is forthcoming in the MLA collection Teaching North American Environmental Writing and in a special issue of the journal Latino Studies organized around Latino environmentalisms. Her teaching interests include nineteenth and twentieth century Chicana/o literature, contemporary Latina/o literature, environmental  literature, and ecocriticism.

Sean Zdenek

Assistant Professor | Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon

Zdenek's research interests include discourse and technology, deaf studies, gender and technology, methods of rhetorical and textual criticism, and rhetoric of science.