English: Faculty

Faculty

Professor Abbate teaches courses in creative writing, poetry, and Fran Abbate 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. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications and literary journals, including Elm, Field, The Iowa Review, The Journal, Poetry, and NEO. Her recently completed book of poetry, Troy, Unincorporated, will be forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Troy, Unincorporated is a retelling of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde set in Southeastern Wisconsin. It was also a semifinalist for the 2010 Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the Four Way Books Intro Prize. On leave for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Professor Christi Clancy specializes in suburban literature, eco-criticism, and creative writing pedagogy. Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and ha Christina Clancy s appeared in Glimmer Train Stories and many other publications, including, most recently, the New York Times. Clancy’s novel and creative dissertation addresses issues of spatial proximity, identity, and sense of place. She has also taught courses of her own design in creative writing, animated writing, composition, literature, and literary theory, including a class on creative adaptation titled “From the Short Story to the Big Screen” and a number of expository writing courses, on multidisciplinary topics such as climate change, suburban sprawl, and the American consumer. Clancy has served as Associate Producer of the Poetry Everywhere Project at UW Milwaukee and, before graduate school, worked as a communications manager and marketing specialist.

Professor Fink specializes in fiction writing and teaches courses in creative writing, literature and journalism. He serves as editor for the Beloit Fiction Journal and coordinates the Mackey Chair in Creative Writing. His book of stories Farmer and Farmer’s Radio is forthcoming in 2012 from Emergency Press. Since 2000, he has published more than twenty five stories and essays at various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Malahat Review North Dakota Quarterly, Other Voices, The Pinch, South Dakota Review and others.

He was a founding faculty member of the MFA program at San Jose State University, where he taught for five years and edited Reed Magazine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Silicon Valley Artist’s Grant, and founder of the John Steinbeck Award for the Short Story.

Professor Gillen teaches courses in creative writing, American Literature, critic Shawn Gillen al theory, and journalism. He chairs Beloit's journalism minor. Professor Gillen served as a visiting professor and research fellow at the University of Glasgow and is a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago. 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 essays on Captain America, J. M. Synge, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. 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. His other interests include popular music and its relation to literature, travel writing, and cyberculture.

Dennis Hanlon Professor Hanlon teaches courses on film analysis, film theory, and various world cinemas. His articles have appeared in the journals Film and History and Mosaic and in a recently published collection, Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford, 2010). His research interests include transnational cinema and politics and cinema, with a particular focus on the cinemas of Latin America, Germany and South Asia. Besides revising his dissertation on Bolivian filmmaker-theorist Jorge Sanjinés, he is also working on a reception study of New Latin American Cinema in Cold War Germany and a genre study of economic liberalization and the contemporary international gangster film.

Professor Ketabgian teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, critical theory, science fiction, the Enlightenment, the history of technology, and "steampunk" as a cultural movement. She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Tamara Ketabgian Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (declined), and has published articles in Victorian Studies, Women's Writing, and various collections. In 2005, the North American Victorian Studies Association awarded her the Donald Gray Prize (honorable mention) for the best essay in Victorian studies. Her book, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (2011) was published by the University of Michigan Press and shortlisted for the annual book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. Her new research concentrates on natural theology, science fiction, and fantasies of technological design and spiritual intelligence from Charles Babbage to the present.

For a profile of Professor Ketabgian's course on "Victorian Garbage," see the Beloit Magazine. For more information on her book, listen to a recent interview with Wisconsin Public Radio.

Professor 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.

Professor Lewis's essay "Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthesis" was published in Literature After 9/11 (Routledge Press, 2009). His essay, "Babbled Slander Where the Paler Shades Dwell: Reading Race in The Great Gatsby and Passing," appeared in in a recent issue of LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory. His articles and fiction have also 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.

Professor Lichtenstein teaches courses on U. S. literature (personal narratives, African-American fiction, Jewish American fiction, nineteenth and twentieth-century novels by women), in Women’s and Gender Studies (Introduction to Diane Lichtenstein Women’s Studies, Queering Narratives), and in interdisciplinary studies (Pursuing Happiness, Crossing Borders). She has published articles on U. S. women writers as well as a book, Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers (Indiana University Press). She has co-edited a special issue of Women's Studies Quarterly devoted to the relationships between women's studies and feminist activism, a cluster of essays for NWSA Journal on women’s studies’ locations. Lichtenstein also recently co-edited and co-authored a book with Professors Catherine Orr (Beloit College) and Ann Braithwaite: Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies (Routledge, 2011). She is currently working on a study of domestic efficiency in U.S. novels of the 1920s.

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 Tom McBride an extensive project on Darwinian approaches to the study of literature. 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. He is co-author, with Ron Nief, of a book, The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think is Normal, published by Wiley Press in June 2011.

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 twentieth-century American literature and post-colonial theatre and drama. She is a chair of the American studies program at Beloit. On leave for the spring of 2012.

Professor McGovern is currently finishing her dissertation, “The Captive Press: Captivity Narratives, Print Networks, and Regional Prospects, 1838-1895” at the University of Iowa. Her BA is from the University of Chicago, and she has taught as a visiting professor at Whitman College (in Walla Walla, WA) and also at Cornell College. Her research specialties include ethnic and Native American literature, book history and print culture, and, more recently, Aboriginal writing. McGovern has received awards and fellowships for her archival work from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing; the Newberry Library; and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She has taught Native American literature, African American literature, American literary history, courses on storytelling and captivity narratives, and Introduction to Literature courses on dystopian literature and environmental literature.

Professor Muthupandiyan teaches writing seminars and literature. Her research foci include modern poetics in the cosmopolitan novel and community engagement in the higher education curriculum. Her creative work has been published in a number of journals, including most recently The Innisfree Poetry Journal. Her teaching interests explore topographies of space within literature, the history of literary consumption, literatures of protest, and the theory and practice of integrating writing into community engagement programming.

In addition to revising her dissertation on the cosmopolitan Bildungsroman, Professor Muthupandiyan is currently working with several other Beloit faculty members on a community engagement handbook for students in higher education.

Professor Hazelton Stafford has taught introduction to creative writing, intermediate poetry workshops, courses on poetic technique and creative nonfiction, and various literature courses on the short story. In addition to her Ph.D in English and Creative Rebecca Hazelton Stafford Writing from Florida State University, she has a master of fine arts in poetry from Notre Dame University, and a BA from Davidson College. Last year she was a Jay C. and Ruth Hall Poetry Fellow at the Creative Writing Institute at UW Madison. Her dissertation, Fair Copy, is a collection of acrostic poems that directly engage with lines from Emily Dickinson. It has been a finalist and semi-finalist for several awards, including the Walt Whitman Prize, the FIELD prize, and the Cleveland State Poetry Center First Book prize. Stafford’s current work is inspired by the genre of the pillow book. She has published widely in journals such as FIELD, Pleiades, The Sycamore Review, Conjunctions, and Nimrod.

Lisa Haines Wright teaches medieval studies, eighteenth-century studies, the Gothic mode, and narrative in general, as well as critical theory, the history of English, and gender 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.

Professor Wright teaches academic writing, expository writing, and various courses on the British literary tradition, including Detective Fiction and Sunset on the British Empire. He has published on the work of Chaucer and Chaucer's French contemporaries. Wright has also twice won Beloit College's James S. Underkofler Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.

EMERITI FACULTY

JOHN ROSENWALD | Emeritus Professor of English | Ph.D., Duke

Professor Rosenwald has offered 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 an active member of Robert Bly's annual conference on the Great Mother and the New Father.