FRAN ABBATE | Assistant Professor of English | Ph.D., Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Fran Abbate teaches courses in creative writing, poetry, and college writing. A graduate of Beloit College, with a major in creative writing, Professor Abbate completed a master of fine arts in poetry at the University of Montana and completed her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

PAUL H. BARICKMAN | Visiting Assistant Professor | Ph.D., Yale University
Professor Barickman teaches American and British Literature, as well as courses in the  and Writing program.  Previously, he has taught at Yale, University of Georgia, Eckerd College and University of South Florida. His current research interests focus on the African American influence on Southern writers like William Faulkner and on the political imagination in Thomas Pynchon.

CHRIS FINK | Associate Professor of English | Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Professor Fink joined the Beloit College faculty in August 2005. He has published fiction in various literary journals and has taught at San Jose State University. He teaches creative writing, fiction writing, and journalism.

LYNN FRANKEN | Dean of the College and Professor of English | Ph.D., Texas (Austin)
An active scholar, Lynn Franken is Beloit's new vice president of academic affairs and the dean of the college effective July 1, 2005.

Prior to her appointment at Beloit, Franken served as dean of the Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C. A graduate of Texas Tech University, she earned her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a diplomate of the Management Development Program at Harvard University. She has taught in and chaired the English Department at Butler University.

Franken has maintained an active scholarly life, regularly publishing articles and delivering conference papers, most recently on curricular and community outreach issues within higher education. She is currently at work for Opera America on a guide for bringing opera into the secondary-school curriculum, and she is reading a proof for a graphic magazine version of Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale."

SHAWN GILLEN | Professor of English | Ph.D., Minnesota
Professor Gillen teaches courses in creative writing, American Literature, critical theory, and journalism. He is co-founder, with Tom McBride, of the department's program in Rhetoric and Discourse, and he chairs Beloit's journalism minor. Professor Gillen served as a visiting professor and research fellow at the University of Glasgow and has taught at the Newberry Library. He has written a collection of personal essays and autobiographical fiction, excerpts of which appeared in the Colorado Review and the North Atlantic Review. He has recently published scholarly reviews and essays on Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Irish-American memoirs. His fiction, music criticism, and journalism have appeared in a variety of publications, and he has worked for several literary journals and newspapers, such as City Pages in Minneapolis-St. Paul and the Isthmus, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. He is also a founder and editor of Highbeams, Beloit College's online literary journal. Professor Gillen was also the managing editor for Retake the Falling Snow, a historical anthology of creative writing by students at Beloit College. His other interests include popular music and its relation to literature, travel writing, and cyberculture.

Professor Gillen is on sabbatical leave 2007 through fall 2008.

JAYSON IWEN | Visiting Assistant Professor of English | Ph.D., UW - Milwaukee
In 2006 Jayson Iwen returned from four years teaching at the American University of Beirut. He then worked in the medical software industry for over a year before joining the English Department at Beloit College. Jayson teaches writing courses in a variety of forms and genres, as well as English literature survey courses. His book-length poem, Six Trips in Two Directions, won the Emergency Press book contest in 2005, and his experimental novella, A Momentary Jokebook, won the Cleveland State University novella contest in 2007. 

TAMARA KETABGIAN | Associate Professor of English | Ph.D., Princeton
Tamara Ketabgian teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, writing, critical theory, science fiction, children's literature, the Enlightenment period, and the history of technology.

She was recently awarded the Donald Gray Prize for the best essay in Victorian studies in 2004 by the North American Victorian Studies Association. In late September of 2005, she was one of three essayists to receive the prize at NAVSA's annual convention at the University of Virginia.

For more information on Professor Ketabgian, see her home page.

CHARLES LEWIS | Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program | Ph.D., Minnesota
Chuck Lewis teaches writing seminars, creative writing and literature. He directs Beloit College's writing program. His teaching and research background also includes literary studies, journalism, and media studies. He likes to focus on interdisciplinary connections among these and other areas, as is reflected in his book on literature and economics, A Coincidence of Wants: The Novel and Neoclassical Economics (Garland, 2000). Other current interests include historiographic metafiction, racial passing in the American novel, and the theory and practice of writing across the curriculum in the context of the liberal arts college.

His articles and fiction have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Salmagundi, Computers and Composition, Dreiser Studies, Minnesota Daily, City Pages, and Mpls./ St. Paul Magazine. Professor Lewis has also taught at Westminster College and the University of Minnesota.

DIANE LICHTENSTEIN | Professor of English | Ph.D., Pennsylvania
Professor Lichtenstein teaches U. S. literature, literary theory, and post-colonial studies. She also teaches courses in the Women's Studies program. She has published articles on U. S. women writers as well as Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers (Indiana University Press, 1992). Recently, she co-edited a special issue of Women's Studies Quarterly devoted to the relationships between women's studies and feminist activism. She is working on two projects: 1. interdisciplinary studies in theory and practice; 2. U.S. women novelists of the 1920s and domestic science.

Professor Lichtenstein is on sabbatical leave 2006-07

TOM McBRIDE | Keefer Professor of Humanities | Ph.D., Illinois
Professor McBride teaches Milton, Shakespeare, and critical theory. He has team-taught a variety of interdisciplinary courses with both classicists and anthropologists. His interests in comparative discourse have most recently led him to an extensive project on Darwinian approaches to the study of literature. With Professor Shawn Gillen, he is co-founder of the department's new program in Rhetoric and Discourse. He has published both critical essays and creative non-fiction in journals as diverse as Texas Studies in Language and Literature, Two Cities and The Common Review . For four years, he was a popular commentator on language for Wisconsin Public Radio. On campus he is known for the twice-yearly Keefer Lectures on a variety of subjects. Recently he has authored essays for britannica.com on Raymond Carver and Allan Bloom and at opendemocracy.net on Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal.

CYNTHIA McCOWN | Chair & Associate Professor of English & Theatre Arts | Ph.D., Indiana
Professor McCown teaches literary studies, American studies, and world drama. She has published in The Eugene O'Neill Review, on the arts in America 1900-1909 in American Decades, a research encyclopedia, and on pre-depression era American drama. Her specific interests are in 20th century American literature and post-colonial theatre and drama. She is a chair of the American studies program at Beloit.

JOHN ROSENWALD | Professor of English | Ph.D., Duke
Professor Rosenwald offers courses on a wide range of poets: African-American, contemporary Chinese, and Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as an advanced class on poetic technique. During four stays in China, he founded the Beloit/Fudan University Translation Workshop, a leader in providing access to contemporary Chinese poets. An editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal, he has published his own poems in numerous magazines. He has been active member of Robert Bly's annual conference on the Great Mother and the New Father.

LISA HAINES WRIGHT | Associate Professor of English | Ph.D., Indiana
Professor Haines Wright teaches medieval literature, narrative of all periods, critical theory, the history of the English language, and women's studies. Her current work locates Thomas Malory's Arthurian tales in a patriarchal tradition extending from Aristotle's Politics to the works of Freud and contemporary Freudians. Her special interest is the relation between individual consciousness and the social world as that relation is mediated by language.

STEVEN WRIGHT | Adjunct Associate Professor of English | Ph.D., Indiana
Professor Wright teaches academic writing, expository writing, and various courses in British literary tradition. He has published on the work of Chaucer and Chaucer's French contemporaries.