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 literature, and the Renaissance. An accomplished textual scholar and editor, Professor Adams has produced electronic editions of several manuscripts 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

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 Middle English romances (including Havelok the Dane, King Horn, and Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas”), Homeric and Virgilian epic, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. She has also co-edited two collections of essays, Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative (Brill, 2010). Professor Bell is at work on a book-length study focused on interpreting early Middle English romances in their manuscript contexts, and she is finishing a new transcription of the Havelok fragments. She is Assistant Director of the Elliott T. Bowers Honors College at Sam Houston State University and is the 2010 recipient of the University’s Excellence in Teaching Award. 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

Brian Blackburne (PhD University of Central Florida), Assistant Professor, teaches graduate courses in college composition theory and pedagogy as well as in technical and professional writing. As both instructor and professional writer, Dr. Blackburne has worked simultaneously in academia and industry since 2000. His experiences as a professional writer have involved web design, usability studies, process documentation, product development, marketing, and digital-media production. Similarly, Blackburne’s research interests span a broad range that currently includes pedagogy in traditional and online writing courses, rhetorical situation in professional writing, and the cultural implications of texts and technologies. He presented scholarly work at the 2010 Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, where he discussed shifts in the roles of teachers of technical communication. Most recently, he received an Online Instructional Innovation Grant from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sam Houston State University. bdb026@shsu.edu

Bill Bridges (PhD Florida State University), Professor. Former English Department Head at New Mexico State University, Dr. Bridges served as Chair of English at Sam Houston State University for ten years before returning to full-time teaching in Fall 2009. He teaches the practicum required of all graduate assistants and classes in rhetoric and composition and 19th-century American literature. 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. 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 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. 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 feminist spirituality, 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, Dancing in the Flames: Spiritual Journey in the Novels of Lee Smith, was published by McFarland in 2009. Professor Cook has also published articles on Kate Chopin and Mark Twain and has presented conference papers on such writers as Steinbeck, Woolf, and Hurston. Her recent interview with Lee Smith appears in the Fall 2009 issue of The Southern Quarterly. LindaCook@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

Michael Demson (PhD The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York), Assistant Professor, teaches British, European, and transatlantic Romanticism, literary theory and criticism, and world literature. He is particularly interested in the writings and legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and currently his principal area of research is in radical agrarian politics. Professor Demson, who has published essays on Percy Shelley and William Godwin, has forthcoming articles in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, and in a volume of collected essays titled The Work of Romanticism. When not teaching or researching, he likes to walk his Newfoundland dog. mtd007@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. He is co-editor, with Avis Hewitt, of a collection of essays, Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace (University of Tennessee Press, 2010). Professor Donahoo has contributed some two dozen reviews to academic journals ranging from American Literature to The South Central Review, and he has a long 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. 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), Professor, teaches graduate classes in American literature, women’s literature, and the novel. Her continuing fields of teaching and research interest 19th-century American literature, transatlantic Romanticism, and Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She currently serves as Assistant Editor of Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. An authority on Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Professor Hall co-edited Reinventing the Peabody Sisters, which appeared in 2006 (University of Iowa Press). She has published articles in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations; Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers; Nathaniel Hawthorne Review; and other books and collectionss. eng_jeh@shsu.edu

Helena Halmari (PhD University of Southern California), Professor and 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 forty 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 Masters of Philosophy, and a Masters of Social Science. She has taught in the linguistics departments at the University of California-San Diego, Rice University, the University of Florida and Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Starting from 2011, she is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Finnish Studies. eng_shh@shsu.edu

Darci Hill (PhD Texas Women’s University), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in the Renaissance, the Classical tradition, and rhetoric. A specialist in the philosophy and history of rhetoric and in 17th-century British literature, with an emphasis in the metaphysical poets, Dr. Hill also has research and teaching interests in medieval literature, the Oxford Inklings, intersections of faith and reason in literature, and the hero in literature. Her new book, All Homer’s Children: Ten Authors in the Heroic Tradition, is under contract with Edwin Mellon Press. Aside from presentations at professional academic conferences, Dr. Hill frequently gives invited lectures on her various research interests for community cultural groups and weekend seminars. She has also directed literary tours for students and community members to England and, in the summer of 2009, led a group to Italy to study Dante. Not least among her accomplishments, Dr. Hill has been a finalist for the University Excellence in Teaching Award eight times in her twenty years at Sam Houston State. 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 has recently completed 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, has also edited Man and the State, a text used by the Ethics in Western Civilization & American Traditions (EWCAT) cohort at the University. Recipient of the Sam Houston State Excellence in Teaching Award in 1990, he was honored with the College of Humanities and Social Sciences College-Wide Teaching Achievement Award in the fall of 2009; the following year, he received the CHSS College-Wide Service Achievement 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 discourses 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 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), 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 Anabiosis Press. She has also published three full-length collections, The Garden Where All Loves End (La Jolla Poets Press, 1997), Fathom (Turning Point, 2006), and Weeding Borges’ Garden (Turning Point, 2010). Her most recent book of poems, Bluster, won the Sacramento Poetry Center Press Book Award and will be published in 2011. Professor Morphew is currently at work on a collection of lyrics, tentatively titled Summer, and Blue. Her 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 writing a children’s novel, provisionally titled The Celestial Omnibus Salvage Yard. eng_smm@shsu.edu

Carroll Ferguson Nardone (PhD New Mexico State University), Associate Professor, teaches graduate classes in technical/professional writing and rhetoric. Professor Nardone analyzes documents as cultural artifacts in order to determine the ways that written texts develop and transmit specific disciplinary knowledge. She has presented scholarly work at numerous national conferences and has publications in critical thinking, pedagogy, and writing assessment across the disciplines; visual rhetoric; hybrid writing practices in professional communities; and gender bias within broadcast newsroom practices. Her scholarly interest in the rhetoric of science has led her to the archives of Benjamin Smith Barton, a central yet often overlooked figure in the American colonial scientific establishment and the topic of her ongoing research. Professor Nardone is a recipient of a Woods Fellowship from the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. She directs the Writing in the Disciplines program at Sam Houston State University.. cfnardone@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 and poetry writing and the editing and publishing practicum. Professor Ruffin, who founded and edits The Texas Review and directs Texas Review Press, has published over eighty pieces of fiction, seventy essays, and eight hundred poems. He is the author of two novels; three collections of familiar essays, with a fourth book, Travels with George in Search of Ben Hur, due out from the University of South Carolina Press in early 2011; six 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 seventh book of poems, Paul Ruffin: New and Selected Poems, was published in early 2010 by TCU Press, and a fourth collection of stories, Living in a Christ-Haunted Land, will be published by 13E Note Editions in French translation in France in 2012. 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 over 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 Distinguished Professor of English in 2003 and a Texas State University System Regents' Professor in 2008. He was appointed by the State Legislature as Texas State Poet Laureate from 2009-2010. His web site is pauldruffin.com. eng_pdr@shsu.edu

April Shemak (PhD University of Maryland), Assistant Professor, teaches graduate courses in postcolonial literature and women’s literature. In addition to these areas, her teaching and research interests include Caribbean literature, U.S. ethnic literatures, feminist theory, and refugee discourses. 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. Her book, Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse, was published in December 2010 by Fordham University Press. This work examines the relationship between refugees and testimonial narratives in Caribbean literature and U.S. public discourse. Dr. Shemak's essay “Re-membering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones,” originally published in Modern Fiction Studies, was selected for inclusion in the volume Postcolonial Literary Studies: the First Thirty Years (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press, Spring 2011). In Fall 2010, she presented a paper at a symposium on refugees at New York University. She has also recently presented papers on Caribbean literature at the University of Miami and Louisiana State University. In addition to her PhD, Dr. Shemak holds a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. aas004@shsu.edu

Kandi Tayebi (PhD University of Denver), Professor, teaches graduate classes in literary theory and 19th-century British literature. An authority on the Romantic poet Charlotte Smith, Professor Tayebi has published articles on an array of literary and pedagogical topics, including Smith, Margaret Atwood, environmental literature, computers in the classroom, and assessment methods for students with disabilities; she has also published creative non-fiction in The Georgia Review. She has presented some thirty papers at regional, national, and international scholarly conferences and has received over $4,000,000 in federal grants. 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 formerly directed the Graduate Studies Program in English and was Chair of the Sam Houston State University Faculty Senate. After serving as Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences for five years, Dr. Tayebi was appointed in Fall 2009 as Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. eng_kat@shsu.edu

Gene Young (PhD University of Tennessee), Professor, teaches graduate courses in early, 19th-century, and 20th-century American literature. He has specific scholarly and pedagogical interests in literature of the American Southwest. A past editor of the CEA Critic and the CEA Forum, Professor Young has published scholarly articles on William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, technical writing, and rhetoric and composition and has presented numerous papers at national, state, and regional academic conferences. Formerly Chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Sam Houston State University and before that the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Philosophy at Morehead State University, Dr. Young has also served as President of the American Studies Association of Texas, President of the Texas Association of Departments of English, and a member of the Board of Directors of the College English Association. For the past several years, he has served on various national and statewide committees and task forces examining testing and curriculum standards in secondary and post-secondary education. In addition to his teaching in the Department of English, Professor Young is Director of the Elliott T. Bowers Honors College at Sam Houston State University. eng_eoy@shsu.edu