The graduate English faculty at Sam Houston State University are teachers, scholars, and creative writers with a broad range of accomplishments, interests, and training in literature, language, and writing disciplines:

Robert Adams (PhD University of Virginia), Professor, teaches graduate classes in research and bibliography, early and middle English languages and literatures, and the Renaissance. An accomplished textual scholar and editor, Professor Adams has produced electronic variorum editions of William Langland’s Piers Plowman and a translation of Raymond Lull’s The Book of the Order of Chivalry. His publications include work on Langland, Chaucer, medieval drama, and Browning. Dr. Adams is Director of the International Piers Plowman Society. eng_ira@shsu.edu

Lee Bebout (PhD Purdue University), Assistant Professor, teaches graduate classes in multicultural and 20th-/21st-century American literature and in literary theory. His research interests include Chicano/a literature and history, identity politics, nationalist discourses, and the work of public intellectuals. His essay “Hero Making in El Movimiento” was published in the Fall 2007 issue of Aztlán: a Journal of Chicano Studies. He is currently working on a book that examines how myth and history are deployed to construct communities and articulate citizenship in the Chicano movement and the post-movement era. lxb006@shsu.edu

Kimberly Bell (PhD Georgia State University), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in early and middle English languages and literatures, history of the English language, and the classical tradition. She has published articles and book chapters on the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chaucer, and Homer, and on the anonymous Havelok the Dane and King Horn romances. She has also co-edited a collection of essays, Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and is currently co-editing a collection of essays on a late 13th-century manuscript (Text and Context in Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108 [Brill, forthcoming]). Professor Bell is at work on a book-length study of the generic and philological features of six 13th- and 14th-century Middle English romances. Much of the research, particularly for these last two projects, has been made possible by a generous Sam Houston State University Enhancement Grant for Professional Development that she received in 2003, which allowed her to study medieval vernacular manuscripts in England. eng_kkb@shsu.edu

Tracy Bilsing (PhD Texas A & M University), Associate Professor, teaches graduate courses in 20th-century British literature and the modern novel. Professor Bilsing, whose scholarly and pedagogical interests include Kipling, Woolf, Bowen, Lawrence, and other World War I-era British authors, is currently researching Katherine Mansfield’s work during the War. She has published on a wide range of topics (literary and visual) with war as a backdrop: the use of WWII airplane nose art as propaganda; the break in the masculine community because of WWI in Lawrence’s short fiction; and Kipling’s deeply fractured sentiments about the Great War, the impassable divide between his jingoistic public propaganda and the private guilt and grief he felt at the loss of his only son in the war. eng_teb@shsu.edu

Bill Bridges (PhD Florida State University), Professor, is Freshman English Program Director; he was formerly a member of the faculty at New Mexico State University, where he served as Department Head and as Graduate Studies Director. Professor Bridges teaches the practicum required of all graduate assistants and classes in rhetoric and composition. With his colleague Ronald F. Lunsford (UNC-Charlotte), he is co-author of The Longwood Guide to Writing, which has just reached a fourth edition. Dr. Bridges co-directs the Sam Houston Writing Project, an affiliate site of the National Writing Project, which brings teachers together each summer in an intensive workshop on writing and teaching language arts. Not least among his achievements, he is also a continuing member of the Humor Night panel at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication. eng_cwb@shsu.edu

Paul Child (PhD University of Notre Dame), Professor, teaches graduate classes in Restoration and 18th-century British literature, the early English novel, and research and bibliography. He has published on Swift, the Scots physician George Cheyne, and the teaching of medical literature and has presented numerous conference papers on 18th-century literature and the social history of medicine. In the summer of 2007, Professor Child was an NEH Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. He is Director of Graduate Studies in English at Sam Houston State University and chairs the Graduate Studies Committee. eng_pwc@shsu.edu

Linda Byrd Cook (PhD Texas A & M University), Associate Professor, teaches graduate courses in women’s, multicultural, and 20th-/21st-century American literatures. A specialist in modern Southern women writers, with particular interests in goddess mythology, Professor Cook has published extensively and presented numerous scholarly papers on the contemporary novelist Lee Smith, with whom she is closely acquainted; her book on Smith will be published by McFarland Press in 2009. She has also published articles on Kate Chopin and Mark Twain and has presented conference papers on such writers as Steinbeck, Woolf, and Zora Neale Hurston. Professor Cook is a member of the Graduate Studies Committee. eng_ljb@shsu.edu

Lee Courtney (PhD Emory University), Professor, specializes in fiction of the 1880s and 1890s and teaches graduate classes in Victorian and early 20th-century British literature. An authority on the late Victorian/Edwardian novelist and essayist George Gissing, he holds, privately, that all of the past one hundred years were “Post-Edwardian.” Professor Courtney provides a valuable service to the English Graduate Program as the administrator of the written comprehensive examinations. eng_lfc@shsu.edu

Robert Donahoo (PhD Duke University), Professor, teaches fiction and poetry of the 20th- century American South, the novel, and research and bibliography. A specialist in the works of Flannery O’Connor, Professor Donahoo formerly edited Cheers! The Newsletter of the Flannery O’Connor Society, and in the summer of 2007 was a Fellow in the NEH Seminar, “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor.” He has published scholarly articles on O’Connor, Tolstoy, Horton Foote, postmodern American science fiction, and Cyberpunk and has several creative works in print. Professor Donahoo has contributed some two dozen reviews to academic journals ranging from American Literature to The South Central Review, and he has an enviable record of service in professional academic organizations, including terms as President of the South Central College English Association and President of the Texas College English Association. He also served for three years as Director of Graduate Studies in English at Sam Houston State University. Professor Donahoo is a member of the Graduate Studies Committee. eng_rxd@shsu.edu 

Diane Dowdey (PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in multicultural literature, 20th-/21st-century British literature, and composition and rhetoric and has a wide array of research interests, including writing center theory and administration, composition pedagogy, American literature about the Civil War, and gender issues. Professor Dowdey has published two freshman composition textbooks and articles about writing across the curriculum and the rhetoric of science in such scholarly publications as the Journal of Technical Writing and has presented dozens of academic papers. She has also published creative work and translation. Dr. Dowdey formerly directed the Freshman English Program at the University and the Sam Houston State University Writing Center. dowdey@shsu.edu

Julie Hall (PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in 19th- and early 20th-century American literature, women’s literature, and the novel. Her continuing fields of teaching and research interest are the American Renaissance, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, American women writers, transatlantic Romanticism, and travel writing. An authority on Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Professor Hall co-edited Reinventing the Peabody Sisters, which appeared in 2006 (University of Iowa Press). She serves on the editorial board of Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and has published articles in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and other scholarly journals. eng_jeh@shsu.edu

Helena Halmari (PhD University of Southern California), Professor and Interim Chair of the English Department, teaches graduate courses in English linguistics and the history and development of the English language. Professor Halmari, whose research interests include language contact phenomena, discourse analysis, and syntax, is the author of Government and Codeswitching: Explaining American Finnish (1997) and the co-editor (with Tuija Virtanen) of Persuasion across Genres: A Linguistic Approach (2005). She has published some thirty articles in journals like Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, and Issues in Applied Linguistics and in edited volumes. In addition to her PhD, Professor Halmari holds an MA in linguistics, an MA in English composition, a Master’s of Philosophy, and a Master’s of Social Science. She has taught in the linguistics departments at the University of California-San Diego, Rice University, and the University of Florida. eng_shh@shsu.edu

Darci Hill (PhD Texas Women’s University), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in the Renaissance, the classical tradition, and rhetoric. Her research interests include Tolkien; the Inklings; and George Herbert and C.S. Lewis, on both of whom she has published and given a number of scholarly presentations. Professor Hill has led student and faculty groups on pilgrimages to England to visit sites associated with Lewis, about whom she is currently working on a book-length study. eng_dnh@shsu.edu

Scott Kaukonen (PhD University of Missouri-Columbia), Assistant Professor, teaches graduate courses in fiction writing and the novel and the graduate editing and publishing practicum. His debut collection of short stories, Ordination, received the 2004 Ohio State University Prize for Short Fiction, and was published by OSU Press in 2005. A short story from that collection, “Punnett’s Squares,” won the 2004 Nelson Algren Prize from the Chicago Tribune. Dr. Kaukonen is currently completing his first novel, The Martyrdom of Katie Deeds. He is a former AWP/Prague Summer Fellow in Fiction and, most notably, a recipient of a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts 2008 Literature Fellowship in Prose, one of forty-writers from across the nation selected from a field of close to eight hundred. kaukonen@shsu.edu

Douglas Krienke (PhD University of Toledo), Professor, is Associate Chair of the Department of English. A specialist in Tudor/Stuart drama and Shakespeare, he teaches graduate courses in the Renaissance and the classical tradition. Professor Krienke, who is compiling an anthology of Tudor/Stuart drama, is a past recipient of the Sam Houston State University Excellence in Teaching Award. eng_mdk@shsu.edu

Drew Lopenzina (PhD University of New Hampshire), Assistant Professor, teaches graduate classes in early American, 19th-century American, and multicultural literatures. Professor Lopenzina is interested in the politics of contact, colonization and multicultural discourse in Early American literature. He also has scholarly interest in Native American literature from its origins up to the present; his published articles and presentations have focused on the careers of early Native American writers such as Samson Occom, William Apess, and Charles Eastman. Scheduled for publication with SUNY Press, his book, Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period, concerns the strategies of Native Americans using European forms of literacy for their own purposes in the early periods of contact and colonization on the American continent. Professor Lopenzina is a member of the Graduate Studies Committee and the Sam Houston Faculty Senate. He is also mentor to the Phi Beta Kappa Society and serves on the Committee for Under-Represented Minorities. ajl011@shsu.edu 

Melissa Morphew (PhD University of Georgia), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in poetry writing and 20th-/21st-century British and American literatures. An accomplished poet, Professor Morphew has won numerous awards for her work, including the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, The W.B. Yeats Society Award for Poetry, a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist’s Grant in Poetry, and a South Carolina Academy of Authors Fellowship in Poetry. Her chapbook Hunger and Heat (The Missionary Letters) was published in 1995 by Anabiois Press. She has also published two full-length collections, The Garden Where All Loves End (La Jolla Poets Press, 1997) and Fathom (Turning Point, 2006).  A third collection, Weeding Borges’ Garden, will be published by Turning Point in 2010. Dr. Morphew’s poems appear regularly in such nationally recognized journals as Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and The Crab Orchard Review. Among her other projects, she is currently writing a children’s novel, provisionally titled The Celestial Omnibus Salvage Yard. eng_smm@shsu.edu 

Carroll Nardone (PhD New Mexico State University), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in technical/professional communication and rhetoric. Professor Nardone, whose research interests center on professional writing practices, the inherent transmission of culture, and the acquisition of specialized knowledge, is currently studying corporate blogging and the pedagogical implications of this now ubiquitous writing practice. She has published on ideology in consumer marketing texts, hybrid writing practices in e-mail communication, gender biases within broadcast newsrooms, and writing assessment across disciplinary boundaries. She is also vitally interested in analyzing historical documents as cultural artifacts to understand the creation and transmission of specific disciplinary knowledge. To this end, she is researching the archives of Benjamin Smith Barton, a central figure in the American colonial scientific establishment. Professor Nardone directs the Writing in the Disciplines initiative at Sam Houston State University. cfnardone@shsu.edu   

Ralph Pease (PhD Texas A & M University), Professor, teaches graduate classes in the Renaissance, early American literature, and American and foreign film. An able generalist with a broad range of interests beyond his teaching fields, Professor Pease has published work on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the Mark Twain Journal, and he introduced film and literature classes to Sam Houston State University. For nine years, he also taught professional writing for Houston police officers and produced a writing manual still in use by the police department. Professor Pease is a past recipient of the University’s Excellence in Teaching Award and the prestigious Piper Award, presented annually to the state’s outstanding college and university teachers. eng_rwp@shsu.edu

Deborah Phelps (PhD University of Delaware), Professor, teaches graduate classes in 19th-century British literature. Her eclectic research interests have produced publications on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Victorian writer Anna Jameson, issues of pedagogy and gender in technical writing, hiring and curriculum shifts in the profession, and women in academe. Professor Phelps is also the author of Deep East, a collection of poems that won the Small Poetry Press 2001 Select Poets Series chapbook award. Her creative work has appeared in numerous journals and reviews, including Southern Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Plainsongs, and Louisiana Literature. Professor Phelps has presented both scholarly papers and creative work at some twenty conferences. eng_dlp@shsu.edu

Paul Ruffin (PhD Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi), a Texas State University System Regents Professor and Distinguished Professor of English, directs graduate creative writing at Sam Houston State University and teaches fiction writing and the editing and publishing practicum. Professor Ruffin, who founded and edits The Texas Review and directs The Texas Review Press, has published over eighty pieces of fiction and over seven hundred poems. He is the author of two novels; two collections of non-fiction essays, including the recent Here’s to Noah, Bless His Ark (2005); five collections of poetry; and three collections of short fiction, the latest of which, Jesus in the Mist, was published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2007. A sixth book of poems, Cleaning the Well, will appear this year and a third collection of essays, Travels with George in Search of Ben Hur, in 2009. Professor Ruffin has also edited several anthologies and co-edited scholarly books on John Steinbeck and William Goyen. He writes a weekly column, “Ruffin-It,” which appears in several newspapers in the South and West, and he has done numerous feature stories, such as pieces on Katrina’s impact on the Mississippi Coast and New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, drug trafficking along the Rio Grande, and high-profile executions. His work has been featured on National Public Radio, and he has read or conducted workshops on nearly a hundred university and college campuses in this country and in England. A past recipient of the Sam Houston State University Excellence in Research Award, Professor Ruffin was named Regents Distinguished Professor of English in 2003 and a Texas State University System Regents Professor in 2008. eng_pdr@shsu.edu

April Shemak (PhD University of Maryland), Assistant Professor, teaches graduate courses in postcolonial literature. In addition to postcolonial literature and theory, her teaching and research interests include Caribbean literature, U.S. ethnic literatures, women’s literature, and feminist theory. She has published articles on such writers as Edwidge Danticat, Pauline Melville, and Cristina Garcia in Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Postcolonial Text. Professor Shemak was a recipient of a Faculty Research Grant in 2006 and two Enhancement Grants for Professional Development, in 2007 and 2008. She is currently working on a book examining the relationship between refugees and testimonial narratives in Caribbean literature and U.S. public discourse. In addition to her PhD, she holds a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. Dr. Shemak is a member of the Graduate Studies Committee. aas004@shsu.edu

Kandi Tayebi (PhD University of Denver), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in literary theory and 19th-century British literature. An authority on the Romantic poet Charlotte Smith, Professor Tayebi has written and published articles on an eclectic array of literary and pedagogical topics, including not only Smith but also Margaret Atwood, Flannery O’Connor, public school curricular reforms, and assessment methods for students with disabilities; she has also published creative non-fiction in The Georgia Review. Her textbook, A Student’s Guide to First-Year English, appeared in 1995. And she has presented some thirty papers at regional, national, and international scholarly conferences. Professor Tayebi, whose research interests include not only her teaching fields but also women’s and ecological literature, was the feature editor for a recent volume of the Academic Exchange Quarterly on teaching environmental literature. She served formerly as Director of Graduate Studies in English and was Chair of the Sam Houston State University Faculty Senate. Dr. Tayebi is currently Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. eng_kat@shsu.edu