My Ph.D. is from Kent State. Victorian poetics, British Romanticism, and Critical Theory are my areas of specialization. However, in the fifteen years I have been teaching in the English Department and Honors College, my focus has been on generalized English Language studies. In my composition courses, I use Native American literature and history as a way of exploring linguistic strategies (both oral and written) that help writers describe individual and collective identities. In my literature courses, I incorporate new-historicist theories. For instance, in Literature in English I courses, I call attention to the ways that European writers define themselves against a background of cultural "others": the poor, natives of the newly "discovered" Americas, and minority groups such as women, Jews, and unorthodox religious thinkers. In this course as well as Introduction to Shakespeare and Great Books I (other courses I teach on a regular basis), I also emphasize oppositional movements in the assigned readings, that is, creative attempts of certain writers to challenge, undermine, or even deconstruct the dominant ideologies and social practices of their specific historical moments.

Areas of Interest

Victorian Poetics, British Romanticism, and Critical Theory