Curricula Vitae in English

Name	Personal Focus	Summary
Dr. Samuel Amadon Professor		Samuel Amadon is the author of two books of poetry: Like a Sea, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Hartford Book. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He frequently writes poetry reviews for Boston Review and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.
Alexander Ames Instructor		Alexander Ames is an Instructor in the Department of English.
Barbara Anderson Instructor	Evolving document design and writing styles in business and technical writing contexts, translating data into effective, accurate graphic organizers/visuals for diverse audiences, impact of multi-cultural audiences and business etiquette on business and technical writing practic	Barbara Anderson is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
David Bajo Professor	Creative Writing, Contemporary Fiction	I am writing stories exploring possible links between the decay of paper and ink, the shapes of letters, the structure of the city, and the future of work.
Dr. James J Barilla Professor	Nature writing, Ecocriticism	Creative Nonfiction, Nature Writing, Ecocriticism I am currently working on a book about the way people restore a sense of home after movement or displacement, entitled The Nature of Homelands. The book will include chapters on the restoration of New Orleans, the re-inhabitation of toxic landscapes, the effort to restore charismatic native species and the attempt to control invasive species.
Professor Elise Blackwell Professor	Creative Writing, Contemporary Fiction	Elise Blackwell is the author of four novels: Hunger, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, Grub, and An Unfinished Score. Her work has been translated into several languages, and her books have been chosen for numerous best of the year lists, including the Los Angeles Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Kirkus. Her short stories and cultural criticism have appeared in Witness, Topic, Seed, Quick Fiction, and elsewhere.
Jennifer Blevins Instructor		Jennifer Blevins is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Kevin Brock Associate Professor	Composition and Rhetoric, Technical Communication, Software Studies	My research centers on composition and digital rhetoric, with a focus on the rhetorical nature of software programming as demonstrated in and around computer coding languages, especially in regards to the composing practices of developers (professional and hobbyist alike).
Paul T Brown Senior Instructor	Modernism and Physics, Modern British Literature, Creative Writing	Paul Tolliver Brown is a Senior Instructor in the Department of English, Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Laura Bruns Instructor		Laura Bruns is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Elaine Chun Associate Professor	Sociolinguistics, Language, race, class, and gender, Discourse analysis	My research examines the links between language, identity, and culture in multiethnic and multilingual settings. The general goals of my research are threefold: to describe culturally meaningful practices across a range of linguistic levels; to provide a theoretical analysis of how these practices are tied to social roles and identities; and to draw attention to how speakers use these practices to reproduce and contest community understandings of race, nation, gender, and class.
Federica Clementi Associate Professor	Modern Jewish Literature and Philosophy, Jewish Diaspora - Europe and America: History and Cultural Production, Shoah: Fiction, Autobiography and Film	Presently working on book about French philosopher and Shoah survivor Sarah Kofman
Shannon M Cochran Senior Instructor	English Language, Literature	Shannon Cochran is an Instructor in the Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences.
Alyssa Danielle Collins, PhD Assistant Professor	African American Literature after 1903, American Literature	Alyssa Collins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Elizabeth Countryman Assistant Professor	Creative Writing, Contemporary poetry	Elizabeth Countryman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Susan C Courtney Professor	US film and media, critical race studies, American Studies	My research investigates historical relationships between popular conceptions of identity (especially race, gender, region, and nation) and pervasive forms of film and media culture.
Dr. Holly Adryan Crocker Professor	Medieval and Reformation literatures and cultures, Gender Studies, Visual Studies	I am at work on my current book project, The Reformation of Feminine Virtue from Chaucer to Shakespeare, which examines early modern attempts to integrate the medieval tradition of the feminized virtues into a regulatory structure of gender difference. As I argue, poets' resistance to feminine virtue's disciplinary transformation challenges the stultifying gender ideals promoted by conduct instruction in England between 1375-1625.
Cynthia Davis Professor	American literature from the Civil War to World War I, medicine and literature, biography	American literature American literary realism and naturalism American women writers
Aaron Dicker Instructor	intersection of argumentation, social movement theory, and Antisemitism	Aaron Dicker is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences. His current research agenda focuses on the intersection of argumentation, social movement theory, and Antisemitism. He is interested in understanding how Antisemitism is performed in society, both by everyday people and by extremist groups.
Dr. Fred Dings Associate Professor	Poems	Fred Dings has published numerous poems in periodicals which include The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and others. He has published two books of poetry, (Eulogy for a Private Man, TriQuarterly Books, 1999; After the Solstice, Orchises Press, 1993;) two chapbooks; and various articles and reviews
Christian Dotson-Pierson Instructor		Christian Dotson-Pierson, PhD is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Erik Doxtader Professor	Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Rhetoric	Doxtader's research is addressed to the ways in which oral and written expression holds and composes the potential for ethical life, a manifold form of power that offers recognition in excess of identity and which figures reconciliation not as an abstract promise of peace but as a critique of legal violence in which political subjectivation and the possibilities of human rights are reconstituted through a confrontation with the question of language as such.
Dr. Stanley William Dubinsky Professor	Language & cognition; linguistic theory; syntex and, semantics; English, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish, Chinese, & several other languages	My primary research area is syntactic theory. That is, descriptions and explanations of syntactic structures in natural languages, coupled with attempts to derive from these an understanding of the universal properties of human language.
Jonathan J. Edwards Assistant Professor	English	My research explores the appropriation of language and symbols in public and political communication. Recently I have been focused on historical narratives of American Christian fundamentalist movements and their relationship to public speech and action, drawing links between the doctrinal and political commitments of fundamentalist communities.
Dr. Gina L. Ercolini Associate Professor	History of Rhetoric, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, Rhetoric and Philosophy	I am currently finishing and revising a book-length project examining Immanuel Kant's ostensible rejection of rhetoric as unworthy of respect. I am also working on a few articles examining some offshoots of this larger project including Kant's connections to the British rhetorical tradition and Kant's account of writing as public address in his attack against unauthorized publication.
Dr. Mindy Fenske Associate Professor	Speech Communication, popular culture and criticism, identity and embodiment, visual culture	My communication scholarship lies at the intersection between performance, cultural, and visual rhetorical studies. I employ theories of performance and visual representation to critically investigate popular and historical multi-mediated representations of the human body. My analyses focus on how identity is visually and discursively produced, performed, and constructed in order to explore possibilities for critical and social agency
Nikky Finney Professor		Finney's work has won a number of prizes and awards, most notably the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011 for "Head Off and Split." However, two of her other collections won prestigious awards: "The World is Round" was winner of the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry and "Rice" won a PEN America Open Book Award in 1995.
Erica Fischer Instructor	working on a piece for an edited collection about the role of humor in conceptual writing	Erica Fischer is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Shirley N. Fisk Senior Instructor	English	Nicole Plyler Fisk is a Senior Instructor and Associate Director of First-Year English in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Greg Forter Professor	Global Anglophone literature, Postcolonial literature and theory, Marxist approaches	I have published books on American crime fiction, U.S. modernism, and postcolonial historical fiction. My current research project is called “Time and World in Global Anglophone Literature” and asks two literary-theoretical questions: what is the concept of “world” implicit in the idea of “global Anglophone literature”? And how do works in this body of literature link “world” not just to space—to such literature’s “reach” across the globe, for example—but to particular ways of inhabiting time?
Professor Christina Marie Friend Professor	Composition and Rhetoric, Histories of rhetoric and writing instruction, Writing program administration	I'm currently collaborating with university's Office of Institutional Assessment on a large-scale quantitative study examining how first-year composition students' writing changes during the time they take English 101 and 102 at USC. I'm also hard at work on a new edition of Beyond Words: Reading and Writing in a Visual Age with colleagues John Ruszkiewicz (University of Texas at Austin) and Daniel Anderson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
Dr. Deidre Anne Evans Garriott Instructor	the way covert racism and nationalism shape public memory, ways of knowing civic identities both in 1960s South Carolina and today in the Trump era, investigating World War II memory in the South	Deidre Garriott's current book project centers the way covert racism and nationalism shape public memory and ways of knowing civic identities both in 1960s South Carolina and today in the Trump era. She is collecting data for her next book project investigating World War II memory in the South.
Professor Michael Gavin Associate Professor	Restoration and 18th-century English Literature and Culture, Book History, Digital Humanities	As a scholar, I write about eighteenth-century English literature and print culture. Broadly speaking, I'm interested in the ways that technology affects communication.
Dr. Pat J Gehrke Professor	Communication Ethics, Civic Engagement / Public Engagement, Public Communication of Science and Technology	Professor Gehrke's research develops an organic, bottom-up understanding of the principles of ethical communication, civic discourse, public understandings of science, and democratic practices. His work draws upon research in speech, communication, philosophy, anthropology, and political science along with current events and emerging sciences and technologies. He is the author of The Ethics and Politics of Speech (2009) and over a score of essays, articles, and book chapters in communication.
Dr. Edward Gieskes, PhD Professor	Early modern drama, Theatre history, Literary and cultural theory	I am writing a book-length study of generic change in early modern English drama tentatively titled: "'Not marching in fields of Trasimene'": Generic Innovation in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries." The book investigates the sources of generic changes that alter the shape of the dramatic field in the later 1580s and the early decades of the seventeenth century.
Dr. Brian Glavey Associate Professor	Twentieth-century art and literature, Modernism and the Avant-Garde, Gender Studies	I am currently at work on a book on modernist aesthetics and sexuality entitled "The Sissy Arts: Modernism and Queer Ekphrasis."
Sammantha M Graves Senior Instructor	Eighteenth & Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Gender Studies / Women Writers, Popular Culture	My research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, especially the novel. Victorian periodical publication, sensation and detective fiction are additional areas of interest. Most recently, I have been focused on the relationship between British and American writers of sensation novels and detective fiction, especially Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Anna Katherine Green.
Dr. David Greven, PhD Professor		I am at work on several book projects at the moment. "All the Devils Are Here: Literary Influence and American Romanticism" reconsiders the influence of Shakespeare and Milton on the American Romantic authors Cooper, Melville, and Hawthorne. I am co-editing the reader "Ryan Murphy's Queer America," forthcoming from Routledge. I am write the volume on the Merchant-Ivory film "Maurice" for the "Queer Film Classics" book series.
Anne Gulick Associate Professor	African and African Diaspora Literature, Post-colonial Studies, Literature and Law	I am interested in thinking about how literary works from Africa and the Caribbean challenge us to think critically and creatively about the idea of the law, of international community, and of global justice.
Dr. Scott James Gwara Professor	Old and Middle English, Medieval Manuscripts and Manuscript Culture, Arthurian literature	My research covers three areas: Anglo-Saxon learning (education, composition, reading, and manuscript production, second language acquisition), Old English literature (focusing on heroism, the poem Beowulf, and genre), and medieval manuscripts (production, history, aesthetics, connoisseurship).
Dr. Patrick Aaron Harris Research Assistant Professor		Patrick Aaron Harris is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Byron K. Hawk Professor	Histories and Historiographies of Rhetoric and Composition, Complexity Theory and Rhetorical Invention, Rhetorical Approaches to Popular Music	Byron Hawk is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His research interests are histories and theories of composition, rhetorical theory and technology, and rhetorics of popular music. He is the author of A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), which won JAC's W. Ross Winterowd Award in 2007 and received honorable mention for MLA's Mina Shaughnessy Prize in 2008.
Christopher Holcomb Professor	History of Rhetoric, Stylistics and Discourse Analysis, Humor Studies	I am currently working on a book (co-authored with Stan Dubinsky) titled Introduction to Language Through Humor (under contract with Cambridge University Press). This book uses jokes, cartoons, and snippets from sitcoms and standup to introduce readers to linguistic concepts (e.g., word formation, syntax, pragmatics, language variation, and so on).
Leon E. Jackson Associate Professor	Early National and Antebellum Literature, Eighteenth Century Atlantic Literature, The History of the Book and Authorship	Early National and Antebellum Literature; The History of the Book and Authorship
Dr. Anthony Scott Jarrells Associate Professor	Eighteenth-century British literature, European Romanticism	Romanticism; Eighteenth-Century Literature; The Enlightenment; Genre Theory
Eli B Jelly-schapiro Associate Professor	Global Contemporary Literature, Transnational American Studies, The History of the Present	I am at work on a book, Security and Terror: Contemporary Culture and the Long History of Colonial Modernity. The book embeds the paradigms of security and terror, the dominant conceptual tropes of contemporary American and global culture, within the five-hundred-year history of European empire and its afterlives—the long history of colonial modernity.
Claire Jimenez Assistant Professor		Claire Jimenez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Dianne Johnson-Feelings Professor		Dr. Johnson teaches African-American literature, children's and young adult literature, black film, and multiethnic autobiography. She also served as interim director of the African-American studies program from 1998-2000. Dr. Johnson is both an academic and an author of popular children's books. Writing as Dianne Johnson (also Dianne Johnson-Feelings), she explores her interest in black children's literature through scholarly research as a way to “recover this literature and its history."
Dr. Catherine Keyser Professor	Modern U.S. literature, Gender and race, Food studies	I write about food and ingestive imaginaries in modern U.S. literature and culture, particularly the relationship between race and the body in these narratives. I also publish on U.S. women writers and periodical studies.
Daniel Kruidenier Senior Instructor	Philosophy	Daniel Kruidenier is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Seulghee Lee Assistant Professor	African American Studies, AfroAsian Studies, Racial Misandry Studies
Dr. Nina Levine Department Chair/Professor	Early modern literature and culture, Shakespeare	I'm currently completing a book on the London stage and urban publics, entitled Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage. Also in the works is an edition of Richard III for the Evans Shakespeare Series, forthcoming from Cengage
Professor Qiandi Liu Assistant Professor	ESL writing, Grammar pedagogy, Second language acquisition	Qiandi Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Norman Edward Madden, Jr. Professor	Late 19th- and 20th-century British and Irish poetry, Irish culture and literature, Gender and sexuality	I am currently working on Quare Fellas: Marginal Masculinities in Irish Literature and Film, a study of queer and marginal masculinities in literature and film.
Rachel Mann Instructor		Rachel Mann is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Mark E Minett Associate Professor	Historical Poetics, Television, Film, and Comics Studies, Transmedia Genre	My current major research project synthesizes my scholarly interest in transmedia processes, storytelling, authorship, and genre. I also have a secondary research agenda, which relies on a series of in-depth but small scale case studies to develop a poetics of the superhero genre as it has been extended across multiple forms, institutional contexts, and platforms in comics, radio, film, television, and new media.
John Muckelbauer Associate Professor	Modern Rhetorical Theory, History of Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Science	Invention and the Future: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Forthcoming from SUNY Press) This book begins with the claim that some of the most crucial implications of postmodern theory have gone largely unnoticed, and that it may be that only now, amidst the alleged end of theory and overcoming of postmodernism that this other postmodern challenge might begin to be heard.
Michael (Zach) Mueller Instructor		Zach Mueller is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Evren Ozselcuk Assistant Professor		Evren Ozselcuk earned her Ph.D. from York University in Communication & Culture, and a M.A. from York University in Communication & Culture, and a B.A.from Boğaziçi University in History. Her current book project explores Turkey’s complicated relationship to modernity and its status within the new global order by tracing the ambivalent ways in which taşra (the provinces/the provincial) gets constituted in contemporary Turkish cinema and literature.
Marianne Pellechia Senior Instructor	professional communication for scientists and current trends in employment interviewing	Marianne Pellechia's past research focused on analyzing the communication of scientific information through the news media, including the effects those reports have on audience attitudes as well as strategies both scientists and journalists can use to improve that communication. Currently she focuses on aspects of communication in the workplace, with a particular interest in professional communication for scientists and current trends in employment interviewing.
Joy Peltier Assistant Professor	pragmatic markers in Kwéyòl Donmnik (e.g., konsa ‘so’, Bondyé ‘God’), an understudied and endangered, functions of the French pragmatic marker bon ‘well’ and written about Creole languages, examined the Kwéyòl Donmnik noun phrase	Joy Peltier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Neal Polhemus Instructor		Neal Polhemus is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Tara Powell Associate Professor	20th Century American Literature, Southern Literature, Poetry	Tara Powell is the author of Physical Science (2010), a chapbook of poems, and a book of literary scholarship called The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (2012). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in a variety of journals and newspapers. Current research projects include New South verse memoirs, Italian-Americans in Appalachia, foodways in southern literature, and portrayals of the South in popular literature and film.
Gareth Rees-White Instructor		Gareth Rees-White is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Hannah J Rule Associate Professor	Rhetoric and Composition, Composition pedagogy, Writing process theory and methodology	My current research focuses on writing processes, particularly how writing is physically enacted. I am interested in writing environments and technologies, neuroscientific conceptions of reading and writing, theories of embodiment, affect, and distributed cognition, as well as voice-to-text and other emerging writing technologies. I’m currently working on a book project that that observes and theorizes the material embodied nature of composing processes in the 21st century.
Dr. David S Shields Professor	Early American literature, History of the Book, Intellectual history of the early modern Atlantic world	Current Research Projects are: Sons of the Dragon: the literature of England's invasions of Spanish America 1570-1806 Women and Public Power in the Early Republic (with Fredrika Teute) Editing, The Material World of Tidewater, the Lowcountry, and The Caribbean for USC Press Essay on Learned Culture in antebellum America for Vol. 2 of the History of the Book in America The Genius of Ancient Britain: a revisionary portrait of the London career of Captain John Smith
Andrew Shifflett Associate Professor	Literature and the Power of Forgiveness in Early Modern England	Andrew Shifflett is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Sueanna Smith Instructor	archival projects to uncover the lives and experiences of early African American residents of Boston	Sueanna Smith is an Instructor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Rebecca Stern Associate Professor	Victorian literature and culture, Cultural studies, gender studies	My current book project, tentatively entitled Moving Through Time: Life Among the New Sciences in Nineteenth-Century England, theorizes the relationship between nineteenth-century sciences and the often-conflicting means by which Victorian authors, designers, and social commentators imagined and constructed their temporal present.
Scott Trafton Associate Professor	Nineteenth-century African-American literature, African-American studies, black cultural studies	I'm currently writing a book called Gulf Coast Blues: Space, Time, and the Early Creole Coast, about African American culture along the American Gulf Coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It looks at strategies of early black cultural adaptation along the coast in the fields of architecture, music, folklore and folklife, and literature.
Susan Vanderborg Associate Professor	Postmodern American Poetry, Artists' Books, Experimental Narrative	I have completed an article entitled "Transformations of the Poetry Book as General Economy: Darren Wershler-Henry's The Tapeworm Foundry," and am in the process of finishing another article on Fiona Templeton's Amnesty International performance art work Cells of Release
Tharini Viswanath Assistant Professor	writing book "The Discursive Material of the Sexualized Feminine Body in Young Adult Literature"	Tharini Viswanath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences.
Patricia C. Walker Senior Instructor		In her Fundamentals of Public Communication course at USC, she utilizes specific acting, voice, and movement activities and techniques to encourage ease, spontaneity, and imagination in her students. These techniques enable students to confront and overcome their anxiety through careful preparation and self-confidence. Patti is particularly interested in creating more confident, dynamic public speakers by developing exercises and exploring techniques that free the voice and body.
Dr. Qiana Whitted Professor	20th and 21st Century African American Literature and Culture, American Comics and Graphic Novels, Postmodern American Literature	My primary research interests are in contemporary African-American literary and cultural studies, postmodern narrative, and American comics and graphic novels.
Dr. Gretchen Woertendyke Associate Professor	Early American literature, Studies of the novel, Caribbean literature	In my current project, "Romance to Novel in Early America," I argue that the U.S. novel as it develops from 1789-1889 cannot be understood apart from U.S.-Cuban-Haitian exchange. Of particular concern in the hemisphere are Atlantic trade, slavery, and piracy - all of which influence the plot, themes, and formal features of the novel.