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 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 (Ph.D. Oklahoma State, 2001) 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.
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), 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 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 (as co-editor) From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. His Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems is forthcoming. His current book project examines the cultural discourse of systems since the 1960s.
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 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.
Ann Daghistany Ransdell (Ph.D. Southern California, 1971) 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 (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.
Colleen Fitzgerald (Ph.D. Arizona, 1997) Director of Linguistics, specializes in linguistics, with a focus on phonology (sound systems), field linguistics (especially Native American languages), and multicultural issues of language. She often collaborates with underrepresented communities in her research, teaching and service, as in the ESL/Literacy Service-Learning Initiative and in her documentation and revitalization work with the Tohono O’odham tribe. Her publications include nearly twenty articles, book chapters, and reviews, as well as a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press on Language in a Multicultural America. She is currently serving as the Past President of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO).
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 articles on Victorian poetry and prose have appeared in Nineteenth-century Literature, JEGP, Dickens Studies Annual, and other venues. In 2003 he published The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner. His current project is called "Portable Property": Commodity and Identity in Victorian Narrative.
Ann R. Hawkins (Ph.D. Kentucky, 1997) specializes in Bibliography, Book History, and Textual Studies. She has published scholarly editions of Disraeli's Henrietta Temple and Venetia and Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington's Victims of Society. She has also published articles on Disraeli, nineteenth-century women poets, and Lord Byron, and edited a collection of essays on teaching book history and textual criticism. She is currently writing “Byron and the Shakespeare Trade,” part of the research for which will be featured in an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in fall 2007.
Mary Jane Hurst (Ph.D. Maryland, 1986) Faculty Assistant to the President and Professor of English, is a past Executive Director of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest. 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.
Stephen Jones (Ph.D. Florida State, 1998) specializes in Creative Writing/Fiction. His areas of interest are American Indian fiction, the thriller, science fiction, and horror, both on the page and the screen. His four novels are: The Fast Red Road, All the Beautiful Sinners, The Bird is Gone, and Demon Theory. He also has a collection of short stories, Bleed Into Me. His next novel (2008) is Ledfeather.
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’s (Ph.D. New York University, 1996) book of poetry is Vago (Lewis-Clark Press 2007). Modigliani’s Muse is forthcoming from WordTech in 2009. She has also published 4 chapbooks of poetry: Fabergé, Why Plant Bougainvillea, Danish Ocean, and Modigliani's Muse. Her books of prose includes a young adult novel, The Red Queen’s Daughter (Hyperion, 2007) and a middle grade novel, Grace from China. A second young adult novel is scheduled for publication with Hyperion in 2009. 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, is forthcoming from Lewis-Clark Press in 2008. Her poetry and prose appear in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Western Humanities Review, The Southern Review, PRISM International, 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).
Brian McFadden (Ph.D. Notre Dame, 1999) studies marvels and miracle stories in Old English and Anglo-Latin prose, especially the concept of the monstrous. He has edited a special issue of Religion and Literature on visions 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, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of Anglo-Saxon monster lore in his fiction; he also has an article forthcoming on the Exeter Book riddles in their tenth-century context. His book project discusses the compilation of the Beowulf manuscript in the context of tenth-century English social changes.
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 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.
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 a 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), the author of White Lies: Melville’s Narratives of Fact, is concerned with historical and theoretical approaches to American novels and non-fictional prose narratives.
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 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.
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 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 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 Texas Commission on the Arts, and 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 fifty-five articles in addition to the studies presented at his electronic journal (http://human-threshold-systems.whitlarks.com).
Priscilla Solis Ybarra (Ph.D. Rice University, 2007) 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.