The Faculty and Areas of Specialization

Hannah M. Ashley, Assitant Professor, Ph.D., Temple University
First generation and working-class university students; basic writing; Bakhtinian voicing theory; critical discourse analysis; critical pedagogy; service learning; community- and academic literacies.

Christian K. Awuyah, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Alberta
African and African-American Literatures

Jen S. Bacon, Associate Professor, Assistant Chair, Ph.D., Rensselear Polytechnic Institute
Composition and Rhetoric

Charles Bauerlein, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University
Discourse on fields of eschatology; baseball history; popular music; the history of jazz; ethical issues in journalism.

Michael W. Brooks, Professor, Graduate Coordinator, Ph.D., University of Toronto Portrayals of the Victorian age in modern literature; representations of city and suburb in modern literature.

Mary Buckelew, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of New Mexico
Pennsylvania Writing Project

Juanita Rodgers Comfort, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Ohio State University
Composition theory & pedagogy, rhetorical criticism, and black feminist essayists. I am developing a book project on personal disclosure, ethos, and subjectivity in essays by black feminist writers. My work appears, among other places, in WPA Journal (Spring 2003), The Relevance of English: Teaching that Matters in Students’ Lives (2002), Beyond English, Inc. (2002), Contrastive Rhetoric Revisited and Redefined (2001), and College Composition and Communication (June 2000).

T. Obinkaram Echewa, Professor, Novelist in Residence, Ph.D., Syracuse University
Novel Writing

Margaret (Cortie) Ervin, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., State University of New York, Albany
Composition and Rhetoric, English Education

Andrea Fishman, Professor, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project

Karen Fitts, Associate Professor, Ph.D., Texas Christian University
Composition and Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory

Robert P. Fletcher, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Victorian Literature; Cyberculture and Cyberliterature. I have published essays on W. M. Thackeray in ELH, JEGP, Studies in the Novel, Clio, and PMLA, on Augusta Webster in Victorian Literature and Culture, on Mathilde Blind in Victorian Poetry, and on "Michael Field" (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) in Women's Poetry 1830-1900, Gender and Genre, eds. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Macmillan, 1999).

Dennis Godfrey, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Michigan,
Second language acquisition, discourse analysis, classroom research, teacher development, second language assessment, English syntax.

Paul D. Green, Professor, Ph.D., Harvard University
16th/17th-Century British Literature, Jewish Literature

Gabrielle Halko, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Western Michigan University
Children's literature, Young Adult literature, literature of the 1930s, literature of the American West especially related to children and young adults, immigrant literature, collective memory and cultural identity, 19th and 20th century American poetry.

John H. Hanson, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Florida State University
Journalism

Anne F. Herzog, Associate Professor, Ph.D., Rutgers University
Modern American Poetry, politics and poetry, feminist theory, Working-class Studies, Composition Studies, and critical pedagogy.

Jane E. Jeffrey, Professor, Ph.D., University of Iowa
Medieval Literature, Structure of English, Women's Literature

Deidre A. Johnson, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Children's literature; 19th- and early 20th- century popular fiction (especially juvenile series). My recent publications include Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America (with Lydia C., Schurman; Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002).

Seth Kahn, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Syracuse University
Teaching and scholarship as activism; qualitative research methodologies, particularly postmodern ethnography; ethnography as composition pedagogy; cultural studies theory and pedagogy; popular culture studies; history of punk.

William Lalicker, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Washington
Composition and Rhetoric

Elizabeth Larsen, Professor, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Composition and Rhetoric, Women's Literature

Graham MacPhee, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Sussex (England)
20th-century British literature and culture, postcolonial studies, visual theory and technology, philosophy and culture after Kant.  Recent publications include The Architecture of the Visible ( London & New York : Continuum, 2002) and Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (co-edited with Prem Poddar, Oxford & New York : Berghahn, forthcoming).

Rodney Mader, Associate Professor, Ph.D., Temple University
Colonial and Revolutionary American Literature, Cultural Studies, Queer Theory, Film

Paul Maltby, Professor, Ph.D., Sussex University
Postmodern fiction; postmodern critique; and postmodern film. My recent publications include The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002).

Cheryl L. Micheau, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Sociolinguistics, Bilingual Education

Garrett Molholt, Professor, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Acoustic Analysis of Speech, Structure of English, Teaching English as a Second Language

Kostas Myrsiades, Professor; Editor, College Literature and JHD, Ph.D., Indiana University
Comparative and Greek Literature

Linda Myrsiades, Professor, Ph.D., Indiana University
Law and Literature, Medicine and Literature, Cultural Studies, Organizational Studies. My recent publications include Splitting the Baby: The Culture of Abortion in Literature and Law, Rhetoric and Cartoons (Frankfort, Germany: Peter Lang, 2002).

Katherine Northrop, Associate Professor, Poet in Residence, M.F.A., University of Iowa
Poetry Writing

Michael A. Peich, Professor; Director, Aralia Press, M.A., University of Pennsylvania
Publishing and Fine Printing

Merry G. Perry, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of South Florida
Feminist theory and pedagogy; cultural studies in rhetoric & composition and literature; the study and teaching of popular culture, especially advertising and contemporary films; cultural representations of women, especially in beauty culture; masculinity and men's studies; and early modern drama, especially Christopher Marlowe.

Pat Pflieger, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Children's Literature, 19th-Century American Culture

Cherise Pollard, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh
African-American Literature

Geetha Ramanathan, Professor, Ph.D., University of Illinois
Women's Studies, Multicultural and Comparative Literature

Timothy Ray, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Bowling Green State University
Theory and practice in rhetoric and composition; computers and writing; technology and society, the rhetoric of technology, and digital culture/cyberculture; the rhetoric of counterculture, subculture, psychedelic culture, and the Grateful Dead; critical pedagogy.

Judith Scheffler, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania,
Prison literature, working class studies, business in literature, women's life writing

Eleanor F. Shevlin, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Maryland
British literature and culture in the long 18th century; textual studies, history of the book; genre theory; the "Novel"; postcolonial fiction; fiction and law; technology; and the institutional history of English as a discipline. I have published essays in various journals including Book History, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Modern Fiction Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and, most recently, "The Titular Claims of Female Surnames in Eighteenth-Century Fiction" in Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England (U of Toronto Press, 2004).

Luanne Smith, Associate Professor, Short Fiction Writer in Residence, M.F.A., Pennsylvania State University
Fiction Writing

Carolyn Sorisio, Associate Professor, Ph.D., Temple University
I specialize in nineteenth-century American literature. My recent publications include Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), a study of reform writers' response to scientific classifications of race, gender and sexuality. Currently, I am writing a critical study of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, the first Native American woman to publish an autobiography. I am focusing, in particular, on Winnemucca's 1883-1884 lecture series in the Northeastern United States.

Christopher J. Teutsch, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Composition and Rhetoric

Victoria Tischio, Associate Professor, Ph.D., State University of New York at Albany
Composition and Rhetoric

C. James Trotman, Professor, Ed.D., Columbia University
I am interested in all aspects of African American culture & history. My publications have reflected this interest in a little more than two decades of teaching at WCU. Sometimes using interdisciplinary approaches and in others forms of new historicism, I have written about several major African American figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Dr. King, the poets Owen Dodson & Langston Hughes, as well as on the novelist and activist Richard Wright. Because of my concern with American life & culture generally, I have also thought and written about the ways our communities connect with one another. One result has been Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), a book that also represents my continuing work on Frederick Douglass and American culture & history. Finally, I have a continuing interest in American religious practices, a development that has led me into writing a biography of Matthew Anderson, the Presbyterian pastor who founded the Berean Church[1879], the Berean Bank[1884], and the Berean Institute[1899] in Philadelphia and which continue to serve their communities.

Carla Verderame, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Michigan
Pedagogy, Native American Writing

Cheryl L. Wanko, Associate Professor and Chair, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University
History of theatre, theatrical culture, and drama, especially that of the Restoration and 18th century; early modern novel and poetry; 18th-century popular culture; technology and teaching/research; business and organizational writing. My recent publications include Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in 18th-Century Britain (Texas Tech University Press, 2003).

John W. Ward, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Delaware
Shakespeare

K. Hyoejin Yoon, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., State University of New York, Albany
Composition and Rhetoric