English

Professor of English

 

Education:
Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 1981
M.A., Marywood College, 1975
B.A.,  Marywood College, 1973

Courses Frequently Taught:
Gateway: What Is Poetry For?
English 110: The Short Story
English 120: Women and Literature
English 220: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
English 220: Contemporary Irish Literature
English 232: British Drama: 1950 -- Present
English 233: American Drama: 1940 – Present
English 280: Understanding Literature
English 344: Romanticism
English 356: Modernism
English 370: Avant-Garde Fiction
English 398: James Joyce
English 480: Senior Seminar (Modern/Postmodern)

Special Projects:

Ulysses: The Exam (in Earrings)

Honors and Awards:
Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars, 2009.
IES Grant to attend “Developments in Contemporary Theatre” seminar, Dublin and London, 2008.
Ping Foundation Fellowship to attend Council on International Educational Exchange Seminar:      “Economic Reform, Regional Integration and Democratization in Chile and Argentina,”
Santiago, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2007.  
U. S. Department of Education Grant, Course Development, 1998, 1990.     
Illinois Wesleyan University Award for Teaching Excellence (DuPont Award,1996).
United Methodist Exemplary Teacher Award, 1995–96
Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, 1988
National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Seminar, 1984.
American Council of Learned Societies, Travel Grant, 1984.

Selected Publications:
—“’The music that is silence’: Carole Maso’s Ava and Samuel Beckett’s Voice.” English Studies Forum  3.1 (Fall – Winter, 2007). 
—“Strategies for Teaching Carole Maso’s AVA.”  In Carole Maso: A Casebook, ed. Monica Berlin. Dalkey Archive Press, 2002.  http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/ava-by-carole-maso/.
—“Space, Time, and Ritual in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson.”  Selected as a model essay of literary criticism for inclusion in Poetry Criticism, Gale Research, Vol. 17 (Summer, 1997).   Originally published in Sagetrieb, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1983): 85–98. 
—Charles Tomlinson: Man and Artist.  Editor.  University of Missouri Press, 1988.
—“Semiotics and the Poetry of David Jones and Geoffrey Hill.” In Black and Gold: Contiguous Traditions in Post–War British and Irish Poetry, edited by Cedric Barfoot. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994: 67–77.
—“The Textual Body in Cortázar’s ‘Carta a una señorita en París.’“   Romance Languages Annual 1993: V (May, 1994): 491–95.
—"The Performativity of Utterance in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."  The James Joyce Quarterly:  30.3 (Spring, 1993), 419–26.
—“‘So that people would stare’:  The Gaze and the Glance in Beckett’s Not I.”  Modern Language Studies: XXIII.3 (Summer, 1993), 32–44.
—“‘But this other awful thought’:  Aspects of the Female in Beckett’s Not I.”   The Journal of Beckett Studies:  New Series, Vol. 1, Nos. 1 & 2 (Spring 1992).  77 – 94.

Faculty Status:
Tenured; on the faculty at IWU since 1986; next sabbatical 2021.

Research Interests:
Most recently, I’ve been writing a series of short stories that are ancillary narratives to a novel published as an I-Phone/I-Pad app called The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, and Matthew Derby.  That work has taken me all over the globe and continues to do so.  Other interests: Experimental fiction, Modernism and Post-Modernism, 20^th- and 21^st-century British and Irish literature (especially Joyce, Beckett, poetry of World War I), and works of David Foster Wallace (notably Infinite Jest).

What the rest of this site doesn’t tell you about me (professional/personal): 
I am occasionally invited to Washington, D.C. by the National Endowment for the Humanities to serve as a panelist reviewing grant proposals for the Division of Fellowships and Seminars and have been a specialist reviewer for the NEH Division of Research Programs. Once a year, with a few friends, I make an elaborate gingerbread house to be auctioned off (with others) to raise money for a local facility that supports children in need.  Roofing materials always seem to be an issue.  I have been known to bring “Jello jiggler” eggs to class and a Jello trout.  While those were very rare occasions (and groups of students!), I always try to coordinate my earrings with what I’m teaching. I am passionate about travel and about study abroad!