Faculty

Laila Amine, Ph.D. (Indiana University, 2011)
Assistant Professor

Dr. Laila Amine specializes in twentieth-century African American and African Diaspora literature with particular interest in comparative race and ethnic studies. Her current project, The Making of Algerian Paris: Colonial Legacies and Transnationalism, uncovers how the Algerian war (1954-1962) and its legacies shaped representations of a transnational Paris in African American, French, and Maghrebi cultural texts. Amine is also co-editing a journal special issue that explores tensions of memory, in particular conflict between public and private, official and unofficial, and national and ethnic minority memories in an array of cultural productions. Her next book project examines the interracial romance in post-World War II African American literature and investigates how authors deployed the language of intimacy to personify the vexed issues of race and nation. Amine’s work has appeared in: Culture, Theory, and Critique, Black Camera, and Postcolonial Text. For 2011-2012, she was appointed Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

UNT Faculty Profile

David Anderson, Ph.D. (University of North Texas, 2001)
Lecturer
David.Anderson@unt.edu     408A Language Bldg    940-369-8947

Dr. David Anderson specializes in American literature and is currently analyzing conflicting narratives of indigenous contact in colonial American writings.  He regularly teaches Composition, early and contemporary American literature surveys, and World literature. He has previously taught advanced courses in American Fiction, American Romanticism, and Southern American Literature, as well as Short Story and Advanced Expository Writing.  He is also an Emerald Eagle scholar mentor.
 

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Deborah Needleman Armintor, Ph.D. (Rice University, 2002)
Associate Professor
dna@unt.edu     409B Language Bldg     940-369-5018

Dr. Deborah Needleman Armintor specializes in eighteenth-century British literature, gender theory, and sexuality studies.  She is the author of The Little Everyman: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (University of Washington Press, 2011).  Dr. Armintor’s articles have appeared in SEL (Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900), ECTI (The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation), 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Literature and Psychology, and Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views/Modern Critical Interpretations series edition of Gulliver’s Travels.  She is now at work on a new project, tentatively titled “Wife and Servant Are the Same”: Domestic Servitude as Same-Sex Marriage in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, a study of homoerotically spousal master/servant relationships.  Her latest work-in-progress is a book-length study of accidental incest as class critique in literature of the 1700s.

UNT Faculty Profile

Marshall Needleman Armintor, Ph.D. (Rice University, 2002)
Lecturer  |  Graduate Advisor
marmintor@unt.edu     116 Auditorium   940-565-2116

Dr. Armintor's research interests are primarily in 20th century British literature and critical theory, especially psychoanalysis; his book Lacan and the Ghosts of Modernity: Masculinity, Tradition, and the Anxiety of Influence (Peter Lang) was published in 2004.  He has taught a wide range of courses since coming to UNT in 2003, with topics ranging from graphic novels to 20th century British women's literature and the "gateway" course, ENGL 2500 (Analysis and Interpretation).

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Diana Treviño Benet, Ph.D. (New York University, 1978)
Professor
dbenet@unt.edu     408D Language Bldg     940-565-2710

Dr. Benet specializes in Renaissance and Early-Modern literature, poetry, and John Milton. She is currently working on a book about the appropriation and rewriting of earlier poems by seventeenth-century authors. Her earlier books are Secretary of Praise: The Poetic Vocation of George Herbert and Something to Love: Barbara Pym’s Novels. She is the coeditor of Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context and the Contributing Editor of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne: Elegies. She has published essays on Jonson, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Crashaw, Defoe and others, and been a recipient of the Irene Samuel Award of the Milton Society and the SCMLA Annual Book Award. She is a former president of the John Donne Society and of the Milton Society of America.

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Bruce Bond, Ph.D. (University of Denver, 1987)
Regents Professor
bond@unt.edu     213A Auditorium     940-565-4139

Bruce Bond has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Wesleyan Writers' conference, The Swanee Writers' Conference, The Yaddo Corporation, and the MacDowell Colony. Also he received the David Kesterson Award for Graduate Teaching. His full-length collections of poetry include Independence Days (1990, winner of the R. Gross Award), The Anteroom of Paradise (1991, winner of the Colladay Award, QRL), Radiography (1997, BOA Editions, winner of the Natalie Ornish Award), The Throats of Narcissus (2001, University of Arkansas Press), Cinder (2003, Etruscan Press), Blind Rain (LSU Press, 2008), and his latest collection of poetry entitled Peal (Etruscan Press, 2009).

 

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Shari M. Childers, Ph.D. (UT-Dallas, 2007)
Lecturer
shari.childers@unt.edu     SAGE 302H     940-369-5965

Dr. Shari M. Childers explores the confluence of literature, the environment, and gender, specifically the role that language plays in shaping and reshaping human interactions with our environments, communities, and with one another. Her most recent research, article submissions, and conference presentations have investigated conceptions of sustainability in a variety of women’s literatures since 1850. While pursuing her own professional accomplishments, she has also been fortunate enough to teach. Her teaching experience in the last decade encompasses the full range of learners from tenth graders to college undergrads, from developmental learner populations to advanced placement students. Her current course offerings include World Literature, British Literature, and composition courses. She is one of the lucky few; she loves what she does.

UNT Faculty Profile

J. Robin Coffelt, Ph.D. (University of North Texas, 2001)
Lecturer
robincoffelt@gmail.com     408L Language Bldg     940-369-8951
 
Dr. Robin Coffelt specializes in twentieth-century American literature, especially fiction by women.  Other current areas of interest include animal studies, especially the animal as narrator, and music in/music as literature. She teaches a variety of courses, including survey courses in world and American literatures and the short story, and first-year composition as well as advanced writing classes.  She has helped develop a blended (online/onsite) course for World Literature II (the eighteenth century to the present), which debuted in Spring 2010.

 

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Kevin Curran, Ph.D. (University College Dublin, 2005)
Assistant Professor
kcurran@unt.edu     407F Language     940-565-2150

Dr. Curran specializes in Renaissance literature and theater with particular interests in Shakespeare, law, philosophy and critical theory, and the culture of the court. His first book, Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court (Ashgate, 2009), looks at how political, religious, and sexual understandings of “union” came to bear on the formation of a uniquely Jacobean political imagination. Curran is also preparing an edition of Samuel Daniel's play, The Tragedy of Philotas (1605), which will be published by Manchester University Press as part of the “Revels Plays” series. He is currently working on a new book called Legal Ecologies: Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare. Curran has received grants and fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Harry Ransom Research Center, among others. At UNT, he is founder and convener of the Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium.

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James Duban, Ph.D. (Cornell University, 1976)
Professor
jduban@unt.edu     The Lofts 140     940-565-2820

James Duban is the author of Melville’s Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination (1983), The Nature of True Virtue: Theology, Psychology, and Politics in the Writings of Henry James, Sr., Henry James, Jr., and William James (2001), and Be a College Achiever: The Complete Guide to Academic Stardom (2005). His articles have appeared in such journals as American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Philological Quarterly, The New England Quarterly, The Harvard Theological Review, The Harvard Library Bulletin, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy, among others. He continues his work in the area of James and Melville studies, while advancing his interests in such writers as Philip Roth and Meyer Levin. As director of the UNT Office for Nationally Competitive Scholarships, Dr. Duban has guided students through the process of applying successfully for Truman, Goldwater, Udall, Madison, Gates Millennium, P.E.O Peace, Rotary, DAAD, NSF, HSF, and many other national awards, all of which, beyond considerations of generous funding and recognition, have life-changing value.

 

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B.H. Fairchild, Ph.D. (University of Tulsa, 1975)
Professor
205 Auditorium Building     940-565-8954

Dr. B. H. Fairchild's most recent book, Usher (Norton, 2009), is his sixth collection of poetry. His previous volume, Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (Norton, 2004), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has earned numerous awards and fellowships including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress, the Arthur Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the California Book Award, the PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, and Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His poems have appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Hudson Review, Salmagundi, and The Sewanee Review. He is also the author of Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake.

 

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Ian Finseth, Ph.D. (University of North Carolina, 2001)
Associate Professor
finseth@unt.edu     407H Language Bldg     940-565-2170

Dr. Ian Finseth specializes in nineteenth-century American and African American literature, with particular research interests in race, ecocriticism, the literature of slavery and the Civil War, and the dynamics of religious, aesthetic, and scientific thought. His most recent book is Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860 (University of Georgia, 2009), which reinterprets antebellum American literature in terms of the interdependence of concepts of racial identity and the natural world. Dr. Finseth is also the editor of both The American Civil War: An Anthology of Essential Writings (Routledge, 2006) and The Underground Railroad: Authentic Narratives and First-Hand Accounts (Dover, 2007). His articles have appeared in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, American Literary Realism, and Mississippi Quarterly. Dr. Finseth is currently working on a project exploring the impact of Civil War violence and mortality on the development of American realism.

 

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Theresa Flowers, Ph.D. (Texas Woman's University, 1999)
Senior Lecturer  |  Undergraduate Advisor
tflowers@unt.edu     114 Auditorium     940-565-2107

Dr. Flowers specializes in 20th century American Literature with secondary specialties in Modern and American Drama. Dr. Flowers's scholarly interests include women in 19th and 20th century American literature and 20th century Southern literature. She has written entries on Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz and Maria Susanna Cummins for Writers of the American Renaissance: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. In September 2002, Dr. Flowers became the Undergraduate Advisor in English.  She teaches classes in American Fiction, Modern Drama, and World Drama. 


 

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Jacqueline Foertsch, Ph.D. (Tulane, 1998)
Associate Professor
foertsch@unt.edu     409D Language Bldg     940-565-2168

Dr. Foertsch specializes in the areas of post-WWII American literature, culture, and film and is the author of four books and numerous articles on these and related subjects. Most recently she has published American Culture in the 1940s, part of the American Culture series through Edinburgh UP (2008), and Bracing Accounts: The Literature and Culture of Polio in Postwar America (Associated UPs 2009). Her current project is Reckoning Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America, an excerpt of which appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature in 2007. In Reckoning Day, Foertsch examines multiple aspects of African Americans’ interface with the atomic threat in the postwar decades of 1945 to 1965, including the response of major intellectuals such as Du Bois and Robeson, civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., artists such as Lorraine Hansberry, and the diverse editorship of the African American press. In addition, Foertsch examines African American characters in the works of white-authored fiction and nonfiction (e.g., doomsday scenarios and survival guides) in this period, as well as the collaborative occasion of African American lead actors starring in atomic-survival Hollywood films. Foertsch is the editor of Studies in the Novel.

 

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Personal Website

Bonnie Friedman, M.F.A. (University of Iowa, 1984)
Assistant Professor
bonita.friedman@unt.edu     206B Auditorium     940-565‐2158

Bonnie Friedman writes both creative nonfiction—focusing on the personal essay and memoir—and fiction. She is the author of the Village Voice bestseller Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life (HarperCollins), which has been anthologized in six different writing textbooks. She is also the author of the memoir The Thief of Happiness (Beacon). Her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and magazines including O. The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, The Ladies Home Journal and Self. Her writing has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Movie Writing, The Best Writing on Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best of O., The Oprah Magazine.

 

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Marcia Gilbreath, M.A. (University of North Texas, 1986)
Lecturer
marciag@unt.edu     408L Language Bldg     940-369‐8951

Marcia Gilbreath specializes in 19th-century British Literature, with emphasis on the British Romantic poets.  She has more recently expanded her areas of interest and study to include Asian Literature (East-West Institute, University of Hawai’i at Manoa).  She teaches a variety of courses: World Literature (ENGL 2210 and 2220); British Literature from 1780 to the Present (ENGL 2323);  and Writing About Literature I and II (ENGL  1315 and 1325).

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Stephanie Hawkins, Ph.D. (SUNY Buffalo, 2003)
Associate Professor
shawkins@unt.edu     409F Language Bldg     940-369-7082

Dr. Stephanie Hawkins specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture, American modernism, visual culture, and science and literature. Her book, American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2010), examines how National Geographic’s cultural iconicity and representational practices have clashed with the ideals and critical reception of its readers. Rather than be anesthetized by the “culture industry,” the magazine’s readership embodies a lively “culture of dissent,” highlighting Americans’ complex responses to social and historical changes brought about by immigration, the Great Depression, and world war. Her current book project, Invisible Realities: American Modernism and the Science of Belief, examines modernists’ fascination with the "new physics," from the X-ray and radium to psychical research. She has published essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Arizona Quarterly,Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and The Henry James Review.

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Matthew Heard, Ph.D. (University of California, Riverside, 2007)
Assistant Professor  |  Director of Freshman Composition
mheard@unt.edu   316 Auditorium   940-565-4386

Dr. Matthew Heard specializes in composition studies, pedagogy, and rhetorical theory.  He also currently serves as the Director of Writing for the UNT freshman composition program.  His research has focused on intersections between rhetorical theory and literature (particularly the literature of transatlantic modernisms), and his current project explores the grounds of "social action" in writing studies through the dynamics of tonality.  Dr. Heard has written articles for College Literature, Pedagogy, and JAC, and is currently finishing the manuscript of a book project, which is tentatively titled Learning to Share.

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David Holdeman, Ph.D. (Michigan, 1992)
Professor |  Department Chair
holdeman@unt.edu     112 Auditorium     940-565-2050

Dr. David Holdeman specializes in twentieth-century Irish literature and culture (especially W. B. Yeats); modern British and American poetry and drama; and the theory and practice of scholarly editing. His most recent book, W. B. Yeats in Context (Cambridge, 2010), co-edited with Ben Levitas, features thirty-nine essays by distinguished Yeatsians from around the world. His previous books include The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge, 2006); “In the Seven Woods” and “The Green Helmet and Other Poems”: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats (Cornell, 2002); and Much Labouring: The Texts and Authors of Yeats’s First Modernist Books (Michigan, 1997). Dr. Holdeman is an active member of the Society for Textual Scholarship and served as program chair for its 2003 conference held at New York University.

 

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Web Portfolio

Kyle Jensen, Ph.D. (Illinois State University, 2009)
Assistant Professor
kyle.jensen@unt.edu     409F Language Bldg     940-565-2172

Dr. Kyle Jensen specializes in rhetoric and composition studies. He is the online editor of JAC, a scholarly journal that examines the theoretical intersections between rhetoric, writing, politics, and multiple literacies. His essays have appeared in JAC and Rhetoric Review. He is currently working on his first monograph, entitled Reimagining Process: Toward the Development of Online Writing Archives.

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Raina Joines, M.F.A. (University of Florida, 1997)
Lecturer
joines@unt.edu     407B Language Bldg      940-565-5019

Raina Joines specializes in American literature, Great Books / World literature, cultural studies, and creative writing in poetry.  She has been the recipient of teaching awards from two universities, the Rebecca Porter Scholarship in Creative Writing at UF, and an O. Ruth McQuown Women in Humanities Scholarship.  At UNT, she teaches American Literature II, World Literature II, Poetry Workshop, and College Writing.  She has also taught courses in Women’s Literature, Modern Science Fiction, and Studies in American Literary Form.  Other scholarly interests include critical theory, spatial theory and practice, science fiction, and utopian literature.

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Richard Joines, Ph.D. (University of Florida, 2001)
Lecturer
rickjoines@unt.edu     407B Language Bldg     940-565-5019

Dr. Richard Joines teaches Classical Literature, Intermediate Poetry Workshop, Advanced Expository Writing, World Literature, American Literature, and Shakespeare.  He has published poems, essays on the political rhetoric of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jacques Derrida, as well as short essays on the poets Thom Gunn, Timothy Steele, J. V. Cunningham, and Turner Cassity, and book reviews of works of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and classical studies in Quarterly West, Nineteenth Century Prose, Rethinking Marxism, Animus, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, A Companion to 20th Century Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace, Tusculum Review, 14 by 14: The Lean Sonnet Zine, Mississippi Encyclopedia, and the American Literary Review.  He has been an NEH fellow at the summer institute "Ralph Waldo Emerson @ 200: Literature, Philosophy, Democracy" and a DAAD fellow at the German Studies Summer Seminar "Nietzsche and Heidegger: The Question of Esoteric Political Philosophy,” and is involved with SOPHIA: The Society of Orthodox Philosophers in America.  His current research focuses on esoteric and apophatic rhetoric deployed by the philosophers of ancient Greece and the early Church Fathers, especially the Cappadocians.

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Justin T. Jones, Ph.D. (UNT, 2011)
Lecturer
justinjones3@my.unt.edu     408C Language Building     940-565-3370

Dr. Justin T. Jones specializes in British fiction, poetry, drama, and essays of the long nineteenth century, with a special emphasis on the children's literature of the period. His debut article "Manufacturing Men: Boys as Commodities in Kipling's Kim and Captains Courageous" appeared in the spring issue of Victorians (formerly Victorian Newsletter), and his article "Morality's Ugly Implications in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales" is forthcoming in the November issue of Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. His current projects include studying fear and trauma in late Victorian Gothic narratives and an exploration of nihilism and game theory in Lewis Carroll's fiction. He has taught freshman composition, world literature, and British literature classes at UNT. He enjoys drinking vast amounts of coffee while listening to the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, and he finds tandem bicycles personally distasteful.

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Marie C. Jones, Ph.D. (UNT, 1999)
Lecturer
Marie.C.Jones1@gmail.com   407C Language Bldg  940-565-2156

Dr. Marie C. Jones is a poet, nonfiction writer, translator, and visual artist.  She has two chapbooks of poems, A Natural History of the Broken World (Red Mare, 2008) and Love Song with Mass Extinction (Oil Hill Press, 2004). With Antoine Cazé, she translated Li-Young Lee’s The City In Which I Love You (BOA, 1990) into French. The resulting book, La ville oú je t’aime, was published by Le Pli (Paris) in 2003. Marie C. Jones’s poetry, nonfiction, translations, and digital work have appeared or are forthcoming in Cider Press Review, The Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Atlanta Review, and many other periodicals.  She is a member of the Ghost Town Art Gallery (Sherman, TX) and the Director and Web Designer of The Threadbare Art Collective  (http://www.threadbareart.net).

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Patrice Phelan Lyke, Ph.D. (Texas Woman's University, 1998)
Lecturer
pphelanlyke@gmail.com     408H  Language Bldg     940-565-3311

Patrice Phelan Lyke specializes in the teaching of Freshman Composition, both in the traditional classroom (English 1310, 1320) and in the computer lab (English 1313, 1323), and has taught The Principles and Practice of Rhetoric (English 4170).  She has had experience with teaching both American literature survey and British literature survey courses, as well as short fiction.

UNT Faculty Profile

Amos Magliocco, M.F.A. (Indiana, 2005)
Lecturer
amosm@unt.edu     407E  Language Bldg      940-369-4793

Amos Magliocco specializes in creative writing and has taught courses in Intermediate Fiction Writing, American Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition. A winner of the Pushcart Prize, he is currently shopping his first novel, Remedy Wheel. Set in 1934 Chicago, the book explores the cultural divide between the corporate-sponsored promises of the World's Fair and the rigid boundaries of Bronzeville, enforced by restrictive covenants and violence, where nevertheless a professional middle-class arose in the heart of the Depression. He is also assembling a collection of essays on his early-summer hobby of storm chasing, the first two chapters of which have appeared in The Missouri Review and Isotope. Other work has appeared in the anthology, The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana Fiction Workshop (Indiana 2005), and journals such as Yemassee, RE:AL, Oxford Magazine, and Poets & Writers. He is a recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship in Fiction from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Warren Wilson Fellowship from Indiana University.

 

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Corey Marks, Ph.D. (University of Houston, 2000)
Associate Professor  |  Director of Creative Writing
coreymarks@att.net     214 Auditorium     940-565-2126

Dr. Corey Marks specializes in poetry writing. His current project is a collection of poems entitled The Radio Tree. His first book, Renunciation (University of Illinois Press, 2000), was a National Poetry Series selection. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including in New England Review, The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in the anthology Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande Books, 2006). He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute for Letters, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review.

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Alice Mathews, Ph.D. (University of North Texas, 1987)
Principal Lecturer  |  Assistant Department Chair
mathews@unt.edu     112D Auditorium     940-565-2850

Dr. Alice Mathews specializes in British Renaissance literature (especially the works of John Milton), Victorian literature, and technical editing. She has published articles in collected essays on Milton and in various online and print journals. In addition to a wide range of administrative responsibilities, she teaches courses on John Milton, early British literature, literary analysis and interpretation, poetry, and technical editing. She also served four years as editor of the journal of the Conference of College Teachers of English and as the Project Director of a NEH Summer Institute for Secondary Teachers.

 

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Personal Website

Ann McCutchan, M.F.A. (University of Houston, 1998)
Assistant Professor
annmmc@earthlink.net     216 Auditorium     940-565-2188

Ann McCutchan is the author of Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute (Amadeus Press, 1994), The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process (Oxford University Press, 1999), Circular Breathing: Meditations from a Musical Life (Sunstone, 2011) and River Music: An Atchafalaya Story (TAMU Press, 2011).  Her personal essays have appeared in publications such as Boulevard, Image, Cimarron Review and The Best American Spiritual Writing.  Ann has received grants, fellowships and residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Vogelstein Foundation, the National Park Service, Lancaster Theological Seminary, and others.  Her current book project is titled Of Earth and Sky: A Personal History of Florida's Space Coast.

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Madhuparna Mitra, Ph.D. (Washington University [St. Louis], 1995)
Lecturer
madhuparnamitra@unt.edu   408B Language Bldg    940-369‐8775

Madhuparna Mitra teaches a range of courses: Writing, British Literature I, Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Literature. Her work on South Asian writers has appeared in Ariel, South Asian Review and Explicator.

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Walton Muyumba, Ph.D. (Indiana University-Bloomington, 2001)
Associate Professor
wmuyumba@yahoo.com     408H Language Bldg     940-565-3311

Dr. Walton Muyumba specializes in American and African American literature, poetry, jazz studies, pragmatism, and literary criticism and theory. He is currently working two book projects: 1) on American cultural production in the Age of Terrorism and 2) on the recent works of John Edgar Wideman. His most recent book, The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2009; Muyumba connects the writings Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, particularly its support for more freedom for individuals and more democratic societies. He examines the way the writers responded to and elaborated on that lineage, showing how they significantly broadened it by addressing the African American experience, especially its aesthetics. Ultimately, Muyumba contends, the trio enacted pragmatist principles by effectively communicating the social and political benefits of African Americans fully entering society, thereby compelling America to move closer to its democratic ideals. He has published essays in College Literature, The Electronic Book Review, Oxford American, The Washington Post Book World, The Chicago Tribune, and The Dallas Morning News.

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Miroslav Penkov, M.F.A. (University of Arkansas, 2009)
Assistant Professor
miroslav.penkov@unt.edu     213B Auditorium     940-565-2127

Miroslav Penkov was born in Bulgaria and lived there, in the capital city of Sofia, until he graduated from First English Language High school. In 2001, at the age of eighteen, Miro came to the University of Arkansas and completed a bachelor's degree in Psychology, followed by an MFA in Creative Writing. At Arkansas, he received one Baucum Fulkerson, two Lily Peter awards and a Walton Fellowship in fiction. In 2008 The Southern Review awarded his story "Buying Lenin" the 2007 Eudora Welty Prize in fiction. A month later Salman Rushdie and Heidi Pitlor chose the story to appear in the 2008 Best American Short Stories. Miro's debut collection of stories, East of the West: A Country in Stories, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011.

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John Peters, Ph. D. (The Pennsylvania State University 1996)
Professor | Associate Department Chair
jpeters@unt.edu    115 Auditorium    940-565-2679

John Peters is the author of Conrad and Impressionism (Cambridge 2001), which considers Joseph Conrad’s works in light of the epistemological underpinning of impressionism. Conrad and Impressionism was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2001 and was runner up for the Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies for the best book published from 2001 through 2004. He is also author of The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge 2006); editor of A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad (Oxford 2010), Conrad in the Public Eye (Rodopi 2008), and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (Broadview 2010); and translator of Takamura Kōtarō’s book The Chieko Poems (Green Integer 2007). His articles have appeared in such journals as Studies in Short Fiction, Studies in the Novel, English Language Notes, Victorian Review, and Conradiana. His main areas of interest are Conrad studies, British Modernism, Victorian literature, and American Modernism. He is currently working on a history of Conrad commentary.

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Alexander Pettit, Ph.D. (Washington, 1991)
Professor
alex.pettit@unt.edu     Auditorium 206C     940-565-4868

Dr. Pettit specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, textual studies, and modern and contemporary drama. His books and series include Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730-1737 (Delaware, 1997), an award-winning study of shrill, partisan pamphlets; Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists (Georgia, 2000), which he edited and introduced; The Works of Tobias Smollett (4 vols. to date; Georgia, 1988-2010), the standard edition of Smollett’s works, of which he is general editor; The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood (6 vols.; Pickering & Chatto, 2000-01), the standard edition of Haywood’s works, of which he was general and textual editor; Eighteenth-Century British Erotica (10 vols.; Pickering & Chatto, 2002-04), a series of facsimiles of which he was co-general editor; Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, by Jonathan Swift, et al. (4 vols.; Pickering & Chatto, 2002), facsimiles for which he provided critical apparatus; and a classroom edition of “Fantomina” and Other Works by Eliza Haywood (Broadview, 2004), which he co-edited. His edition of Samuel Richardson’s early works is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press; and he is currently working on an edition of Daniel Defoe’s Complete English Gentleman and a monograph about Bertolt Brecht, Luis Valdez, Nina Simone, and Bob Dylan.  Dr. Pettit has served as associate faculty of UNT’s Women’s Studies Program since 2007. In 2009, he was awarded the English department’s inaugural Thomas R. Preston Award for distinguished undergraduate teaching.

 

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Masood Ashraf Raja, Ph. D. (Florida State University, 2006)
Assistant Professor
masood.raja@unt.edu    408E Language Bldg     940-369-8948

Masood Ashraf Raja specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, and is the author of Constructing Pakistan (Oxford), published in 2010.  He is the editor of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies. His critical essays have been published in South Asian Review, Digest of Middle East Studies, Caribbean Studies, Prose Studies, and Mosaic. He is currently working on his second book, entitled Secular Fundamentalism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred.

UNT Faculty Profile

Barbara Rodman, Ph.D. (University of Denver, 1985)
Associate Professor
brodman@unt.edu     213C Auditorium     940-565‐4670

Dr. Barbara Rodman specializes in contemporary short fiction; she has published in a variety of literary journals including Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Dickinson Review and others. She is past editor of the Katherine Anne Porter series in short fiction and is currently co-editor of fiction for the American Literary Review. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in fiction as well as Form and Theory of Prose.

UNT Faculty Profile

Javier Rodríguez, Ph.D. (Harvard University, 2000)
Assistant Professor
javier.rodriguez@unt.edu     407G Language Bldg    940-565-4560

Dr. Rodríguez specializes in the literary interactions between the United States and Mexico, the literature and culture of South Texas, and the relationships of narrative, regionalism, and history. His first book, The Literatures of the U.S. Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity (University of Texas Press, 2010) examines the continuing literary and cultural legacies of the war and its literature in the United States, in Mexico, and along the U.S.-Mexican border. Dr. Rodríguez has published articles in MELUS and in Arizona Quarterly and is the author of a forthcoming essay on Stephen Crane, “Hell in Mexican Texas: Stephen Crane at the American Abyss,” in The Turn Back to Religion in American Literature and Culture, edited by Nan Goodman and Michael Kramer. His new research concentrates on the interplay of literature and migration in South Texas. Dr. Rodríguez has previously taught at Boston University and the University of Notre Dame. He is a native of the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas.

UNT Faculty Profile

Jean Roelke, Ph.D. (University of North Texas, 2003)
Lecturer
jroelke@unt.edu     407C Language Bldg     940-565‐2156

Dr. Jean Roelke specializes in creative writing, poetry, visual art and bookmaking, with an emphasis on 20th century and contemporary American literature and art. She is currently executive director for the Ghost Town Arts Collective, a non-profit, interdisciplinary artists group that maintains a gallery space, and promotes regional art exhibitions, literary readings, and dance, musical, and video performances. She is also currently involved in a collaborative book project with photographer Tim Tracz. Her visual poetry has been published in the Little Magazine. A chapbook of her poetry has been published by Oil Hill Press.

 UNT Faculty Profile Anne Schoolfield, M.A. (University of North Texas, 1999)
Lecturer
anne@unt.edu     407A Language Bldg     940-369‐8945

 

UNT Faculty Profile

Daryl Scroggins, M.A.  (UT Dallas, 1986)
Lecturer
darylscrog@yahoo.com     408A Language Bldg     940-369-8947

Daryl Scroggins teaches Creative Writing (fiction), College Writing I & II, Survey of Ethnic Literatures, American Literature 1870 to Present, and Survey of the Short Story. His special interests include the prose poem, flash fiction, and the novels of Cormac McCarthy. His most recent book is a collection of flash fictions and a flash novel: This Is Not The Way We Came In (Ravenna Press, 2009). His poems, fictions, and non-fiction works have appeared in literary journals and anthologies across the country.

 UNT Faculty Profile

Ryan Skinnell, Ph.D. (Arizona State University, 2011)
Assistant Professor
Ryan.Skinnell@unt.edu     409J Language Building    940-565-2173

Dr. Ryan Skinnell specializes in rhetoric and composition with an emphasis on histories of rhetoric and composition. His research focuses primarily on rhetorical education in post-secondary institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has additional interests in history writing and research and archive theory. He is currently working on a monograph that considers the effects of four overlooked education movements on writing instruction in higher education. His work has appeared in Rhetoric Review, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, and Enculturation, as well as in edited collections.

UNT Faculty Profile

Nicole Smith, Ph.D. (Rutgers University, 2005)
Assistant Professor
ndsmith@unt.edu     408F Language Bldg     940-369-8949

Dr. Nicole Smith specializes in late medieval literature, with special interest in Chaucer, material culture, and vernacular guides of pastoral care. Her book, Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), examines the connection that medieval vernacular texts draw among dress, romance, and moral behavior in their figurations of fashionable aristocrats. In addition to preparing a critical edition of a Middle English guide to penance, The Clensyng of Mannes Sowle, she is presently thinking about the role of pleasure in a variety of vernacular penitential manuals. She has published essays in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and Medium Ævum, and her fellowships include an NEH Summer Seminar on cultural constructions of the seven deadly sins in the Middle Ages. In 2011, she won UNT’s J.H. Excellence in Teaching Award.  She is continuously inspired by smart students and intrigued by strange texts.

UNT Faculty Profile

Sandra L. Spencer, Ph.D. (University of North Texas, 1996)
Principal Lecturer  |  Director of Women's Studies
spencer@unt.edu     GAB 467     940-565‐2532

Dr. Spencer's articles have appeared in journals such as Victorian Periodicals Review and Women's Writing. She has written bibliographic essays on Joseph Cottle and Isabella Beeton which appear in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and British Women Nineteenth-Century Writers. She has published an online article for The Dickens Project on Our Mutual Friend. In September 2002, Dr. Spencer became the Director of Women's Studies at UNT. She continues to teach English courses as well as courses in Women's Studies. Her favorite courses, "Jane Austen" and "Women and Work," can be used as credit in either English or Women's Studies.

UNT Faculty Profile

John Tait, Ph.D. (University of Missouri, 2002)
Associate Professor
tait@unt.edu     206A Auditorium     940-565-2120

John Tait specializes in creative writing (fiction writing) as well as post World War II American fiction and film.  His short stories have appeared in Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly and elsewhere and have been reprinted in New Stories from the Southwest and cited in Best American Short Stories.  He has been the recipient of Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Emerging Writers and has also received the Tobias Wolff Fiction Award as well as first prize in the H. E. Francis Literary Competition, the Dogwood Fiction Awards and the River City Fiction Awards.  He is currently at work on a novel, Poplar Crescent.

 

UNT Faculty Profile

James T.F. Tanner, Ph.D. (Texas Tech, 1965)
Professor  [Modified Service, 2008-2012]
jamest@unt.edu     408C Language Bldg       940-382-3370

James Tanner specializes in 19th century American literature, specifically American transcendentalism and Walt Whitman.  Dr. Tanner is the author of The Texas Legacy of Katherine Anne Porter (UNT Press, 1991).  His work has appeared in such journals as MELUS, Calamus, Studies in American Humor, and Dickinson Review 2.  Dr. Tanner is a founding member of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, and from 1998 to 2006 was Chair of the English Department.

UNT Faculty Profile

David Taylor, Ph.D. (Tennessee, 1989)
Lecturer
jdtaylor@unt.edu     ESSAT325B     940-369-8611

David Taylor specializes in environmental literature, natural history writing and pre-1900 American literature. He has written and edited four books: Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing (UNT Press, 2006), South Carolina Naturalists: An Anthology, 1700-1860 (University of South Carolina Press, 1998) and Lawson’s Fork: Headwaters to the Confluence (Hub City Writer’s Project, 2000) and a book of poetry Praying Up the Sun (Pecan Grove Press, 2008). Forthcoming volumes include, Restoring Home: Essays and Family and Place (Texas Tech University, 2010) and South Carolina Nature Writing, 1860-1970 (University of South Carolina Press, 2011). David serves as Editor for the Southwestern Nature Writing Series with UNT Press. He has published multiple articles, essays, columns, and poetry in such journals as Ecological Restoration, Environmental History Review, ISLE, Borderlands, Mountain Gazette, and Southern Poetry Review.

 

UNT Faculty Profile

Robert Upchurch, Ph.D. (The CUNY Graduate Center, 2001)
Associate Professor  |  Director of Graduate Studies
robertu@unt.edu     116B Auditorium     940-565-2161

Dr. Robert Upchurch specializes in early medieval literature and culture, Old English sermons (especially those of Ælfric of Eynsham), and Old and Middle English saints’ lives. He is currently working on a book on Ælfric’s program of pastoral care. His most recent book, Ælfric’s Lives of the Virgin Spouses, appeared in the Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies Series in 2007; it provides editions and translations of Ælfric’s Old English lives of Julian and Basilissa, Cecilia and Valerian, and Chrysanthus and Daria and of their Latin sources, in addition to an introduction placing them in their literary-historical contexts. He has been the recipient of an NEH Summer Seminar Fellowship, a Vatican Film Library Mellon Fellowship, and a Hill Monastic Manuscript Library Heckman Research Stipend. His publications also include Saints Lives in Middle English Collections (TEAMS, 2005) and essays in A Companion to Ælfric (Brill, 2009), The Old English Homily (Brepols, 2007), Speculum, Anglo-Saxon England, Traditio, Studies in Philology, and JEGP.

UNT Faculty Profile

Jacqueline Vanhoutte, Ph.D. (University of Washington, 1996)
Associate Professor  |  Director of Undergraduate Studies
jacqueline.vanhoutte@unt.edu     203 Auditorium     940-565-2131

Dr. Jacqueline Vanhoutte specializes in Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare, as well as in literature associated with the Tudor monarchs. Currently she is working on a book about Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. Dr. Vanhoutte published her first book, Strange Communion: Motherland and Masculinity in Tudor Plays, Pamphlets, and Politics with the University of Delaware Press in 2003. Her other publications include a book co-authored with Laurel Amtower, entitled A Companion to Chaucer and his Contemporaries (Broadview, 2009), and essays in collections and journals like ELR: English Literary Renaissance, Philological Quarterly, Comparative Drama, and SEL.

UNT Faculty Profile

Kelly Wisecup, Ph.D. (University of Maryland, 2009)
Assistant Professor
kelly.wisecup@unt.edu     409E Language Bldg     940-565-2635

Dr. Kelly Wisecup specializes in the literatures of colonial America and the Atlantic world, science and empire, and race in the early Americas. Her first book project, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures, examines how British American colonists, Native Americans, and Africans exchanged medical knowledge in colonial encounters as well the representations of such exchanges in early American literatures.  In addition, she is preparing a scholarly edition of Edward Winslow’s Good News from New England and is working on a second book project, on lists as a cross-cultural form of communication used by Native Americans and European colonists.  Her articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Atlantic Studies, The Southern Literary Journal, and Literature Compass. She was awarded the Society of Early Americanists’ Best Essay Award for 2009-2010, and she has received grants and fellowships from the John Brown Library, the Newberry Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Cosmos Club Foundation, and the University of North Texas.

UNT Faculty Profile

Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Ph.D. (Rice University, 2006)
Assistant Professor
Priscilla.Ybarra@unt.edu     407E Language Bldg    940-565-4793

Dr. Ybarra specializes in contemporary Chicana/o Literature and Ecocriticism.   Dr. Ybarra's most recently published article, "Erasure by U.S. Legislation: Ruiz de Burton's Nineteenth-Century Novels and the Lost Archive of Mexican American Environmental Knowledge," is in the essay collection Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century.  In June 2009, she published an article in the journal MELUS titled "Borderlands as Bioregion: Jovita González, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the Twentieth Century Ecological Revolution in the Rio Grande Valley."  Her book chapter “Lo que quiero es tierra: Longing and Belonging in Cherríe Moraga’s Ecological Vision” was published in the 2004 collection New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, and a co-authored article about Mexican and Mexican American environmental writing was published in the 2008 Modern Language Association collection Teaching North American Environmental Writing.  Her current book-in-progress, Brown and Green: Mexican American Environmental Writing, is the first study to engage a long-range environmental literary history of Chicana/o writing.  Recent speaking engagements have taken her to Reno, Nevada; Bloomington, Indiana; and around Japan.  She has taught courses for the Departments of English at Texas Tech University, Rice University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and for American Studies at Yale University.

 

UNT Faculty Profile

Karen Rachel Yeatts, Ph.D. (UNT, 2003)
Lecturer  |  Assistant Director of Introductory Writing
Karen.Yeatts@unt.edu    409A Language Bldg.     940-565-8952

Dr. Rachel Yeatts specializes in creative nonfiction, poetry, trauma narrative, and writing as healing. She is interested in the relationship between writing, aesthetic distance, and identity. Her work as co-translator of Hélène, or the Vegetable Kingdom, a translation of René Guy Cadou's Hélène, ou le règne végétal, (Seghers: Paris, 1952), is currently in circulation, as are her essays and poems. She teaches writing and literature courses and she helps direct the department’s Introductory Writing Program.