Graduate Faculty in English
Wendell Aycock (Ph.D. South Carolina, 1969), Associate Dean for the Graduate School, 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.
Kanika Batra (Ph.D. Loyola University Chicago, 2006) specializes in Postcolonial literatures and has interests in Feminism and Queer Studies. Her articles have appeared in the journals African and Black Diaspora, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. In 2001 she published a book-length study of Caribbean poetry for the Indira Gandhi National Open University, India. Her book Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama will be published by Routledge in 2010.
Curtis Bauer (Ph.D. Texas Tech, 2009) specializes in Creative Writing/Poetry and Translation. His areas of interest are American and World Poetry, Poetry and Fiction in translation and chapbook publishing. His collection of poems, Fence Line, won the 2003 John Ciardi Poetry Prize. His poems, prose and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Rivendell, and Ninth Letter, among others. He has been a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center & a Lannan Writer in Residence at IAIA in Santa Fe. He is the publisher of Q Ave Press Chapbooks.
Scott Baugh (Ph.D. Oklahoma State, 2001) specializes in film/media studies with emphases in Chicana/o and Latin American cultural studies. A second edition of Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular came out in 2008. His current books projects are Born of Resistance: Cara a Cara Encounters with Chicana/o Visual Culture with Víctor Sorell; Latina/o Cinemas, a handbook on Latina/o cinemas; and Screening Mestizaje, a study of multicultural aesthetics in American cinema. His articles have appeared in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Film & Video, Film & History, and the Columbia Companion to Film and History.
Michael Borshuk (Ph.D., Alberta, 2002) specializes in African American literature and cultural studies. He is the author of Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006), for which he won the President's Book Prize in 2009, 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.
Bruce Clarke (Ph.D. SUNY Buffalo, 1980) specializes in literature and science from the 19th century to the present, with special interests in systems theory and narrative theory. His book publications include Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis; Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science; Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics; Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems; co-edited with Linda Dalrymple Henderson, the essay collection From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature; and, co-edited with Mark Hansen, the collection Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory. His current book project, Systems Countercultures, examines American systems discourses since the Whole Earth Catalog. With Manuela Rossini, he is currently preparing the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science for release in 2010.
Bryce Conrad (Ph.D. Iowa, 1988) 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 (Ph.D. Brown, 2000) 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 (M.F.A. Iowa, 1972)is the author of five books, including the novel Lizard and the memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain, which was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, 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 Boston Book Review's Rea Non-Fiction Prize, the Delacorte Press Prize for a First Young Adult Novel, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. He was a judge for the 2005 National Book Award in Nonfiction.
Lara Crowley (Ph.D. Maryland, 2007) specializes in British Renaissance literature and Textual Studies. With special interests in attribution and canon formation, she analyzes and edits the verse of John Donne and other poets whose works circulated in seventeenth-century manuscripts. She has worked at the Folger Shakespeare Library and other archives in North America and the United Kingdom. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Philology, John Donne Journal, English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700, and The Oxford Handbook for Donne Studies, and her current book project investigates early modern poems within their original manuscript contexts in order to illuminate contemporary literary interpretations.
Ann Daghistany Ransdell (Ph.D. Southern California, 1971) has published articles on myth criticism, women's studies, the picara, Louisa May Alcott, and Guenevere. She co-edited a book of essays, Spatial Form in Narrative, and she has 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 American Gothic Short Fiction, Comparative Literature Methodology, Victorian Literature, and Gender, Fame and Glory.
Marliss Desens (Ph.D. UCLA, 1989) is the 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.
Sean Grass (Ph.D. Penn State, 1999) specializes in Victorian literature and has particular interests in Victorian fiction and the Victorian literary market. He is Director of Graduate Studies in English, and his essays on Victorian poetry and prose have appeared in Nineteenth-century Literature, JEGP, Dickens Studies Annual and in collections from the University of Toronto Press and Ashgate Press. In 2003 he published The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner. He is now working on two book projects, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History (forthcoming from Ashgate in 2012) and An Uneasy Trade: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative, which has twice been supported by research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ann R. Hawkins (Ph.D. Kentucky, 1997) specializes in Bibliography, Book History, and Textual Studies. In addition to articles on Disraeli, nineteenth-century women poets, and Lord Byron, she has published scholarly editions of three nineteenth-century novels and edited two essay collections: Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism and Book History (2006) and Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity (Ashgate, 2011). She is working on two projects: a book manuscript, “Byron and the Shakespeare Trade”; and Romantic Women Writers Reviewed, 1789-1818, to be published by Pickering & Chatto, London.
Mary Jane Hurst (Ph.D. Maryland, 1986), Fellow of the American Council on Education and Professor of English, has previously served as Executive Director of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences, and, most recently, Faculty Assistant to the President. A founding member of the Teaching Academy and recipient of the President's Excellence in Teaching Award and the Faculty Distinguished Leadership Award, she teaches linguistics and American literature. Most of her research is concerned with language in literature, although her two books and more than three dozen articles, essays and reviews also cover other topics in linguistics, literature, and various professional issues.
Min-Joo Kim (Ph.D. Massachusetts-Amherst, 2004) specializes in theoretical syntax and semantics, with secondary specialty in language acquisition and pragmatics. Her research aims to deepen our understanding of how linguistic systems work together with context to derive sentence meanings. She has worked on various linguistic phenomena including wh-movement, relativization, polarity, and Case in English, Korean, Japanese, and Russian, among others.
Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe (Ph.D. New York University, 1996) has written two books of poetry, Modigliani's Muse (Word Tech 2009) and Vago (Lewis-Clark Press 2007). She has also published five chapbooks of poetry, most recently Quickening (White Eagle Coffee House Press 2008). She was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in fiction in 2008. Her books of prose include the young adult novels A Sweet Disorder (Hyperion, 2009), The Red Queen’s Daughter (Hyperion, 2007) and a middle grade novel, Grace from China. She co-edited Writing on the Wind, an anthology of West Texas women's writing. A second anthology, The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Women Writers on Forerunners in Fiction, co-edited with Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, was published by Lewis-Clark Press in 2008. Her poetry and prose appear in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Western Humanities Review, The Southern Review, PRISM International, Orion, and other journals.
Constance Kuriyama (Ph.D. Berkeley, 1973) is a specialist in English Renaissance drama whose current research interest includes film comedy, comic tradition, and theories of authorship. A former president and current advisor of the Marlowe Society of America, she has published four books and numerous articles on Marlowe, Shakespeare, and film. Her most recent books are The Intimate Charlie Chaplin (2001) and Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002).
Marta Kvande (Ph.D. Delaware, 2002) specializes in eighteenth-century British literature, with particular interests in women writers, the history of the novel, narrative, the Gothic, and the history of the book. She has published articles on Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker, and Delarivière Manley in SEL and The Eighteenth-Century Novel and has co-edited the collection Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth Century Women Transforming Public and Private. Her article on eighteenth-century theories of reading in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote is forthcoming in the collection Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s. Her current projects include a book manuscript titled "Narrating Power: Politics and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Novels."
Brian McFadden (Ph.D. Notre Dame, 1999) studies marvels and miracle stories in Anglo-Saxon literature, especially the social and historical importance of texts on monsters and marvels, as well as medievalism in modern literature. He has edited a special issue of Religion and Literature on medieval depictions of the other world and has published articles on Beowulf, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the Liber Monstrorum, the Exeter Book Physiologus and Phoenix, the Old English lives of St. Margaret, J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of Anglo-Saxon monster lore in his fiction, and the Exeter Book riddles in their tenth-century context.
Michele Currie Navakas (Ph.D. UC-Irvine, 2009) specializes in American literature and culture to 1865 with particular interests in American intellectual history, African-American literature, captivity narratives, and discourses of geography, property law, and agriculture. Her current book project examines how imaginative responses to the exceptional landscape of Florida provided alternative models for the ways that nations, states, and citizens were made.
Jill Patterson (Ph.D. Oklahoma State, 1993) has recently published short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her prose has appeared most recently in Image, Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, The Fourth River, The Rambler, Carolina Quarterly, and other journals. She currently serves as Editor of Iron Horse Literary Review, Director of the San Juan Writers Workshops, and Production Manager for Creative Nonfiction.
John Poch (Ph.D. North Texas, 2000) was the Colgate University Creative Writing Fellow from 2000-2001. He is the author of Dolls, Two Men Fighting with a Knife, Poems, Ghost Towns of the Enchanted Circle, and co-author of Hockey Haiku: The Essential Collection. He won The Nation/Discovery Prize in 1998 and has published poems in Paris Review, The New Republic, Yale Review, New England Review, Southwest Review, Colorado Review, Agni, and many other literary magazines. He is the editor of 32 Poems Magazine and the current Director of Creative Writing in the Department of English.
Marjean D. Purinton (Ph.D. Texas A&M, 1991) is author of Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie, and the forthcoming Staging Grotesques and Ghosts: British Romantic Techno-gothic Drama, as well as articles on Romantic drama, early 19th-century women writers, feminist theory and pedagogy. A member of the Teaching Academy and a recipient of the President's Excellence in Teaching Award, she teaches in the Women's Studies Program and is the Teaching Section Editor for the online project British Women Playwrights Around 1800. She is also President of the International Conference on Romanticism.
John Samson (Ph.D. Cornell, 1980) is concerned with historical and theoretical approaches to American novels and non-fictional prose narratives. He is the author of White Lies: Melville's Narratives of Facts and of many articles and book chapters on 19th- and 20th-century American literature. He has also authored for 9 years the Melville chapter in American Literary Scholarship.
Michael K. Schoenecke (Ph.D., Oklahoma State 1979) 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 as Chair of the PCA/ACA Endowment Fund.
Jen Shelton (Ph.D. Vanderbilt, 1995) has published essays on incest as a narrative structure in works of Joyce, Woolf and Nabokov and, in 2006 published her first book, Joyce and the Narrative Structure of Incest (U of Florida Press).
Yuan Shu (Ph.D., Indiana, 1999) 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 (Ph.D. Duke, 2001) 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 L. Spurgeon (Ph.D. University of Arizona, 2000) works in literatures of the American West/Southwest as well as nature/environmental writing, gender studies, and ecocritical and postcolonial theory. She is the author of Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier, co-author of Writing the Southwest, and editor of the forthcoming anthology Cormac McCarthy. She has published a monograph on Ana Castillo and essays on Cormac McCarthy, Martin Cruz Smith, feminist theory in the borderlands, the relationship between literature, water policy, and public discourse in the American West, and a co-authored essay on the film Brokeback Mountain. 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.
William Wenthe (Ph.D. Virginia 1992) 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 the Texas Commission on the Arts as well as two Pushcart Prizes.
James Whitlark (Ph.D. Chicago, 1976) whose field is Religions in Literature, 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 more than sixty articles.
Allison Whitney (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2005) specializes in studies of film technology, genre cinema, and the relationship between technological history and film form. She has published on race and class in American maternal melodrama, contemporary horror films, religion and cinema, sonic literacy, and dance in Weimar film culture. She is currently working on a book on the history of IMAX film, and is engaged in research on the representation of space exploration in cinema. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Film & Video and Music, Sound and the Moving Image.
Priscilla Solis Ybarra (Ph.D. Rice University, 2007) specializes in Chicana/o Literature and Ecocriticism. She has most recently published work in a special issue of the journal MELUS on the theme of Ethnicity and Ecocriticism. She has also published the entry on Chicana/o Environmental Ethics in the 2009 Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy and an article on Mexican American environmental writing in the 2008 MLA collection Teaching North American Environmental Writing, as well as an article in the 2004 collection New Perspectives on Environmental Justice. Her teaching interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chicana/o literature, contemporary Latina/o literature, environmental literature, and ecocriticism.