enured/Tenure-track Faculty
2002-2003

[A]-[B] -[C]-[D] -[E]-[F] -[G]-[H] -[I]-[J] -[K]-[L] -[M]-[N] -[O]-[P] -[Q]-[R] -[S]-[T] -[U]-[V] -[W]-[X] -[Y]-[Z]



Bonnie Barthold (1980), Ph.D., University of Arizona, Professor. A specialist in African and African American literature, she also teaches courses in post-colonial and comparative literatures, the novel, literary theory, and film studies. She is the author of Black Time as well as several essays on minority literature and has served as co-editor of a recent issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures. She has read papers at conferences throughout the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean and held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation.

Bruce Beasley (1992), MFA, Columbia University; Ph.D., University of Virginia, Professor. He is a poetry advisor for the Bellingham Review, which is located in the English Department. A National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellow, he is the author of four collections of poems: Spirituals (Wesleyan University Press); The Creation (winner of Ohio State University Press Award); Summer Mystagogia, winner of the Colorado Prize (selected by Charles Wright), from University Press of Colorado; and Signs and Abominations (Wesleyan University Press). His poems have also appeared in such journals as Paris Review, Poetry, Yale Review, and in The Pushcart Prizes: Best of the Small Presses. He teaches courses in creative writing and American literature.

Nicole Brown (2002). Ph.D., Purdue University, Assistant Professor. Her areas of specialization and interests include rhetoric and composition, technical writing, service learning, and cybercultural studies. She has presented papers and published articles on professional and technical writing, digital theory, and computers and writing.

Meredith Cary (1964), Ph.D., University of Washington, Professor. Her specializations include Victorian literature, women's literature, the novel, and Irish literature. Author of Different Drummers: A Study of Cultural Alternatives in Fiction, she is completing a study of Irish women authors. She is one of the founders of women's studies at Western Washington University.

Kristin Denham (2000), Ph.D., University of Washington, Assistant Professor. Her specialties include grammatical structure; dialect studies, including the use of dialect in literature; Native American languages and literatures; linguistic typology; and language and society. She has presented numerous papers and published articles on linguistic theory, especially the structure of questions.

Dawn Dietrich (1992), Ph.D., University of Michigan, Associate Professor. A specialist in literature and technology, performance studies, and critical theory, she has published articles in journals such as Word & Image: A Journal of Visual/Verbal Enquiry, Contemporary Literature, Interfaces: Image/Text/Language, and Arena Journal. Currently, she is at work on a book about postmodern performance and technology, where she hopes to link her interests in drama and cultural studies. Dawn teaches courses in twentieth century literature, contemporary drama, film, and critical theory.

Moira Fitzgibbons (2000), Ph.D., Rutgers University, Assistant Professor. A specialist in medieval literature, her research focuses on the connection between religious instruction and social dissent in the later Middle Ages. Her teaching interests include the history of the English language, medieval romance, Chaucer, theories of translation and literacy, feminist criticism, and early modern literature. She has developed grant-funded colloquia for literature teachers at the university, secondary, and elementary school levels.

Marc Geisler (1992), Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, Associate Professor. As a specialist in British Renaissance literature and critical theory, he has published articles on John Milton, William Shakespeare, and early modern English culture. He is currently completing a book on the interplay between nationalism, popular protest, and seventeenth-century English literature. He teaches courses in contemporary critical and cultural theory, Milton and nonconformist literature, early modern feminism, early modern patronage and popular culture, Shakespeare, Spenser, politics and literature, and cultural studies.

Allison Giffen (2001), Ph.D., Columbia University, Assistant Professor. A specialist in Early and nineteenth-century American literature, her research focuses on women writers, particularly American women poets. She has published articles in such journals as American Transcendental Quarterly, Early American Literature, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. She has edited a collection Jewish First Wife, Divorced: The Selected Letters and Papers of Ethel Gross and Harry Hopkins, forthcoming in 2002, and is currently at work on ÒTill Grief melodious growÓ: Early American Women Poets and the Discursive Formation of Poetic Identity

Bruce Goebel (1996), Ph.D., University of Iowa, Associate Professor. A specialist in English education and American cultural studies, he is an editor of Teaching a New Canon and author of articles appearing in English Journal, Primary Voices, Philological Quarterly, Journal of American Culture, and others.

Carol Guess (1998), MA Indiana University 1993, MFA Poetry Indiana University 1994, Assistant Professor. Carol Guess has published two novels, Switch (1998) and Seeing Dell (1996), as well as a memoir, Gaslight (2001). Her poetry, short fiction, and critical theory have appeared in such publications as The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Poetry Northwest, and Third Wave Agenda. She teaches creative writing, womenÕs literature, and gay and lesbian literature.

Kathleen Halme (1998), MFA, University of Michigan, Associate Professor. Her first poetry collection, Every Substance Clothed, was winner of University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Competition in 1995 and The Balcones Poetry Prize in 1996. Her new collection of poetry, Equipoise, was published in 1998 by Sarabande Books. She is a recipient of a 1997-98 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals such as TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Anthropological Quarterly. She teaches creative writing, including forms of poetry and contemporary poetry.

Nancy J. Johnson (1994), Ph.D., Michigan State University, Professor. A specialist in childrenÕs literature and English/language arts education, she has taught in both elementary and high school. She is co-editor of Literature Circles and Response, and co-author of Getting Started With Literature Circles. She is also an elected member of the Children's Literature Assembly board and is the co-author of the "Children's Books" column, published monthly in The Reading Teacher. Her current research interest is in diverse forms of reader response. She is also the advisor for English majors concentrating in elementary education.

Ronald W. Johnson (1980), MA, Colorado State University; Ph.D., University of Oregon, Affiliated Faculty. He has directed Academic Advising Services at Western. He is a specialist in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature and satire, and has accomplished publications and presentations on Rochester and writing.

Rosanne Kanhai (1990), Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, Associate Professor and Director of Women Studies. A comparativist and modernist, her areas of specialization include post-colonial literatures, women's literature, the literature of fantasy, and feminist criticism and theory, with particular regard to women of color. She has published poetry as well as essays on Caribbean literature, and is presently editing a collection of essays on Indo-Caribbean women.

Laura Laffrado (1993), PhD, SUNY/Buffalo, Professor. A specialist in early United States literatures and culture, she is the author of Hawthorne's Literature for Children. Her essays on constructions of gender and genre have appeared in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, ESQ, and other journals and collections.

Anne Lobeck (1990) Ph.D. University of Washington, Professor. A linguist, her area of expertise is syntactic theory, in particular the syntax of ÒellipsisÓ across languages. At Western Professor Lobeck teaches courses in introductory linguistics, English grammar, syntactic theory, language and gender, linguistic and literary theory, and the history of the English language. Her publications include journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings, as well as two books: Ellipsis: Functional Categories, Licensing and Identification, Oxford University Press, 1995, on syntactic theory, and Discovering Grammar: An Introduction to English Sentence Structure, Oxford University Press, 2000, a college grammar textbook.

Kathleen Lundeen (1991), Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, Associate Professor. A specialist in British Romantic literature, she has published on Blake, Keats, Austen, Hemans, film, and intermedia art. She is the author of Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology (Susquehanna, 2000). Her teaching interests include British Romanticism, interart studies, critical theory, and prophetic poetry.

William Lyne (1995), Ph.D., University of Virginia, Associate Professor. A specialist in American and African American Literature, he has published in PMLA and is completing a book on twentieth-century African American politics and culture. He is the editor of Walking the Talk: An Anthology of African-American Studies (Prentice Hall 2002). He teaches courses in American literature, African American literature, and cultural studies.

Mary Janell Metzger (1995), Ph.D., University of Iowa, Associate Professor. A specialist in early modern drama and critical theory, she has published articles on sixteenth-century drama, twentieth-century women writers, and the politics of teaching. She teaches courses in critical and feminist theory as well as early modern and womenÕs literature.

Brenda Miller (1999), Ph.D., University of Utah; MFA, University of Montana, Assistant Professor. She teaches creative nonfiction and fiction writing, as well as literature classes in autobiography, memoir, and the personal essay. She received two Pushcart Prizes for her work in creative nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in such periodicals as The Bellingham Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Northern Lights, and Willow Springs. She has held creative writing fellowships from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Steffensen-Cannon Foundation. Her book of essays, Season of the Body, was published in 2002 by Sarabande Books.

Suzanne Paola (1994), MFA, University of Virginia, Associate Professor. She teaches creative writing, Women Studies, and literature courses. Her third book of poetry, Bardo, was published in 1998 by the University of Wisconsin Press, winner of the Brittingham Prize; her second book came out in 1995 with the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Award Series at Princeton University. She is a regular contributor to the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Partisan Review and other journals with both poetry and essays, and has received numerous writing grants and awards, including an Artists Trust grant for 1994. Her prose work, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, was published in 2001 by Counterpoint/Perseus.

Douglas Park (1979), Ph.D., Cornell University, Professor. A specialist in prose fiction, theory of rhetoric, and audience theory, his current teaching interests are eighteenth-century literature, particularly womenÕs writing of the period, the novel, film, and cultural studies. He has published essays in PMLA, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, College English, as well as other journals.

John Purdy (1991), Ph.D., Arizona State, Professor. A specialist in Native American Literatures, he is the author of Word Ways: The Novels of DÕArcy McNickle and of several articles and works of fiction and poetry. He edited the collection of essays The Legacy of DÕArcy McNickle and Nothing But the Truth: an Anthology of Native American Literature. He developed the universityÕs Native American Studies minor. He served as a Fulbright Lecturer at UniverstŠt Mannheim in 1989, and again in 2000, and was on a Fulbright for Fall 1993 in New Zealand. During the summers of 1993 and 1995 he directed summer seminars for school teachers funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which studied Native American novels

Donna Qualley (1994), Ph.D., University of New Hampshire, Associate Professor. Areas of interest include composition theory and pedagogy, literacy, and class. She is the author of Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry, and a co-editor of Pedagogy in the Age of Politics, a collection of essays about the politics of reading and writing in the academy. She is also the author of essays on collaborative writing, critical reading, writing program administration, and feminist theory. She was the Director of Composition from 1995-2000, and again in 2001.

William Smith (1990), Ph.D., University of Utah, Professor. A specialist in Shakespeare, basic writing, and composition theory, he is former editor of WPA: Writing Program Administration and co-author of two composition textbooks, The Act of Writing and The Art of Reading. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between new writing teachers and writing programs.

Scott Stevens (2002), Ph.D., University of Rochester, Associate Professor. He is a specialist in Rhetoric and Composition with particular emphasis on writing pedagogy, literacy studies, and cultural rhetoric. His publications and presentations address the teaching of writing, collaborative learning, the politics of basic writing, and qualitative methods in the study of literacy.

Kathryn Trueblood (2002), MFA, University of Washington, Assistant Professor. Her first book of fiction, The Sperm DonorÕs Daughter, was published by The Permanent Press in 1998. She has co-edited two anthologies of contemporary multicultural literature, The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards (W.W. Norton 1992); and Home Ground, which won the Jurors' Choice Award at Bumbershoot, the Seattle City Arts Festival. A graduate of the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Program, she has worked in editorial for both mainstream and small press publishers. She teaches creative writing, American literature, and also editing and publishing.

Steven L. VanderStaay (1996), Ph.D., University of Iowa, Associate Professor. An English Education specialist, he teaches courses in English methods, creative nonfiction, and linguistics. His publications include Street Lives: An Oral History of Homeless Americans and a broad range of articles and essays on English methods, teacher education, writing, narrative analysis, and urban affairs.

Christopher Wise (1996), Ph.D., University of California, Riverside, Associate Professor. Wise teaches global literary studies, including African, Middle Eastern, and European literatures. Special interests include the African Sahel, Magreb, and Sahara regions; Islam and literature; third cinema; critical theory, especially Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theory; and comparative literature.

Ning Yu (1993), Ph.D., University of Connecticut, Associate Professor. He is a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature with a focus on Thoreau, American nature writing, and ecocriticism. He is also interested in the study of the transformation of Asian myths in the works of Asian American authors.