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Master of Arts English Faculty

Sarah Arroyo
Elyse Blankley
Susan Carlile
Stephen Cooper
Gene Dinielli
Brian Finney
Paul Gilmore
Lisa Glatt
Suzanne Greenberg
Gary Griswold

George Hart
Mimi Hotchkiss
Helen Chau Hu
Neil Hultgren
Lloyd Kermode

Eileen Klink
Beth Lau
Gerald Locklin
Ilan Mitchel-Smith
Bill Mohr
Alosi Moloi
Norbert Schürer
Patty Seyburn
Nancy Sheley
Ronanld Strahl
Martine van Elk
Dianne Vipond
Charles Webb
Frederick Wegener
Mark Williams
Ray Zepeda
Carol Zitzer-Comfort
Picture Postcard of waves breaking on beach
Sarah Arroyo
sarroyo@csulb.edu
picture of Sarah Arroyo

Professor Arroyo is an Assistant Professor of English. She received her BS in Education at New Mexico State University, her MA in English at CSULB and her PhD in Rhetoric and Critical Theory at The University of Texas at Arlington. Professor Arroyo teaches graduate and undergraduate courses ranging from Theories and Practices of Composition to Critical Theory to Digital Rhetoric and Writing for New Media. She also co-directs CSULB’s First-Year Composition Program and mentors Lecturers and Graduate Teaching Associates who teach in the program. Her areas of interest include: histories and theories of rhetoric, visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, composition theories and pedagogies, modern/postmodern theories, cultural studies, and post-secondary teacher education. Professor Arroyo’s research explores the intersections of rhetoric, writing, new media, and digital culture, and offers both theories and practices that operate as alternatives to traditional, literate-only conceptions of writing. She is interested in hte implications arising from the convergence of identity building, community building, teaching, and leavning taking place through the use of new media. She has published articles in JAC, Composition Forum, and Kairos, and her book manuscript entitles W/hole Writing: Toward and Electorate Composition, is currently under review.


Susan Carlile
scarlile@csulb.edu
Susan Carlile Profile picture

Professor Susan Carlile teaches eighteenth-century British literature, the survey of British literature before 1800, and Adolescent Literature. A former English language teacher in Madrid, Spain and high school teacher and teacher trainer in Phoenix, AZ, she earned her BA at Taylor University and her MA and PhD at Arizona State University. Her interests include: representations of identity, biography writing, 18th-century women’s writing in England and Spain, and constructions of history. Her books include Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s(ed.) (Lehigh, 2010), and Charlotte Lennox’s 1758 novel Henrietta (ed. with Ruth Perry, Kentucky, 2008). She has written on numerous authors, including, Isabel Allende, Frances Burney, Sandra Cisneros, Sarah Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Francisco Jimenez, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, and Delarivier Manley and has published articles and reviews inEighteenth-Century Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies,1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era,Yale University Library Gazette, The ALAN Review,andThe Journal for Adolescent and Adult Literacy. She is currently writing a critical biography of Charlotte Lennox.


Stephen Cooper
spcooper@csulb.edu
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Stephen Cooper received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, and his PhD from the University of Southern California. In addition to scholarly articles in literary magazines and film journals, he has published short stories in such periodicals as Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, American Fiction, and Hot Type. Among his honors are an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Fiction and CSULB’s Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activities Award. He is the editor of Perspectives on John Huston and the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante. He discovered and edited the manuscript of John Fante’s last book, The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959, and is also a co-editor of John Fante: A Critical Gathering. His biography of Fante and his edition of The John Fante Reader were named among the Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year.

Brian Finney
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Brian Finney gained his BA in English and Philosophy from Reading University , England, and his PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London. He taught at London University from 1964-1987, and since emigrating to the US at UCR, UCLA, USC and CSULB. He has published book-length studies of Beckett’s fiction, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, twentieth century literary autobiography as a genre and a biography of Christopher Isherwood, and has edited three books of Lawrence short stories. He published English Fiction since 1984 in 2006 and Martin Amis (Routledge Guide to Literature) in 2008. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best biography of 1979. He teaches courses mainly in twentieth century literature, drama and literary theory. He lives in Venice , where he plays tennis, runs and walks his dog. For his full vita, current syllabi and recent essays look up his Webpage at:http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney


Paul Gilmore
pgilmore@csulb.edu
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Assistant Professor Paul Gilmore is a graduate of the University of Mississippi (BA, 1991) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 1997). He teaches a range of subjects in American literature, but he specializes in American literature and culture of what might be called the long-nineteenth century;1776 to 1918. His first book, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Duke UP, 2001), examines concepts of masculinity as deployed by antebellum American authors through their evocation of racialized figures from mass cultural forms such as popular museums, minstrel shows, and daguerreotypal parlors. His current research argues that a strain of American romanticism constructed a materialist aesthetic through its use of discourses surrounding telegraphy. His work on writers such as Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge has appeared in a variety of academic journals, most recently American Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, Early American Literature, and ELH. He lives in Silver Lake with his wife, Reid, his daughter, Charlotte, and his beagle, Lily.

Lisa Glatt
lglatt@csulb.edu
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Lisa Glatt recieved an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of the novel A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That and the short story collection The Apple’s Bruise, both published by Simon & Schuster. Her poetry collections include Shelter and Monsters & Other Lovers. Lisa’s work has appeared in such magazines as Zoetrope, Mississippi Review, Columbia, Indiana Review, Pearl, and The Sun. She was recently awarded a fellowship to the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy.

www.lisaglatt.com


Suzanne Greenberg
greenber@csulb.edu
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Winner of the 2003 Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, Suzanne Greenberg is the author of Speed-Walk and Other Stories, published November, 2003. She is also the co-author of Everyday Creative Writing: Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink, which is now in its second edition. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including the Mississippi Review, West Branch, and The Washington Post Magazine. Recipient of Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, she received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland.

 


Gary Griswold
griswold@csulb.edu
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Gary Griswold area of specialty is composition studies, and since 1989 he has taught all levels of writing courses at CSULB, including technical and professional writing, proposal writing, and professional editing. In 1992, he founded the Writer’s Resource Lab, the English Department/College of Liberal Arts’ writing center program, which he has directed for more than a decade. Dr. Griswold earned his Ph.D. in Educational Studies from Claremont Graduate University (CGU) in May of 2003. His dissertation, Writing Centers and Their Directors: Issues and Prospects for a New Era , focused on the history and current status of writing center programs in American colleges and universities. Dr. Griswold’s other research interests include the use of technology in the teaching of writing, the history of composition studies, teacher education, and technical and professional writing. An experienced musician, Dr. Griswold he plays drums in a blues band with English Department colleague Lloyd Kermode. Dr. Griswold also volunteers as a forest ranger with the United States Forest Service, patrolling the Mill Creek area of the San Bernardino National Forest .

George Hart
ghart@csulb.edu
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Assistant Professor George Hart received his BA from Kent State University and his PhD from Stanford University; he teaches 19th- and 20th-century American literature, with a specialization in 20th-century American poetry and poetics. His current research focuses on how poets write about nature from a sacramental or skeptical point of view. How, in other words, poets celebrate value in nature through language, or, conversely, how they see language as constructing, or disrupting, that value. The poets he writes about include Robinson Jeffers, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, Lorine Niedecker, Larry Eigner, and Denise Levertov, among others. His other research interests include ecocriticism, postmodernist poetics, and the Beats. He is the editor of Jeffers Studies, which is sponsored by CSULB and the Robinson Jeffers Association, and a co-editor of a forthcoming book on literature and the environment in Greenwood Press’s Exploring Social Issues through Literature series. He gets out of the classroom and away from the computer by biking, hiking, and backpacking.

Lloyd Kermode
lkermode@csulb.edu
Lloyd Kermode
Lloyd Edward Kermode is an Associate Professor in Renaissance Studies. BA (English, U. of Sheffield and U. of Maryland), MPhil (English, The Shakespeare Institute), MA (Creative Writing, The Johns Hopkins U.), PhD (Rice U.). Professor Kermode taught at Ithaca College in New York State for two years before coming to CSULB in 2000. He is co-director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and an advisor for the Certificate and Minor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Professor Kermode’s research is in early modern drama, sixteenth-century ethnicity in England, and British Renaissance cultural studies. He teaches courses in medieval and early modern literature and literary criticism and theory. His books include Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge, 2009); Three Renaissance Usury Plays (Manchester, 2009); and Tudor Drama before Shakespeare (ed.) (Palgrave, 2004). In his other lives, Professor Kermode plays guitar in the rock band Lickerish, writes the occasional poem, and realizes his age when he tries to keep up with his bilingual children.

Beth Lau
blau@csulb.edu
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Professor Beth Lau received her BA, MA, and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She specializes in British literature of the Romantic period.  She is the author of Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (U of Michigan P, 1991), Keats’s Paradise Lost (UP of Florida, 1998), and numerous essays on Romantic-era writers.  She also edited Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) and co-edited (with Diane Hoeveler) Approaches to Teaching Bronte’s Jane Eyre (MLA, 1993). Her most recent book is an edited collection of essays, Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790-1835 (Ashgate 2009), for which she wrote the Introduction and two of the essays. Courses she teaches include undergraduate and graduate-level Romantic period classes, major authors seminars on Jane Austen, the Brontes, and John Keats, Victorian women writers, and British literature surveys.


Gerald Locklin
glocklin@csulb.edu
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Professor Emeritus Gerald Locklin is teaching one semester a year only as part of the Faculty Early Retirement Program. He received his BA from St. John Fisher College and his MA and PhD from the University of Arizona. His recent teaching has been mainly Creative Writing, 20 th Century English and American Literature, and Literary Theory. His dissertation was on Nathanael West, and he has published articles on West, Hemingway, Bukowski, Brautigan, Cummings, Edward Field, Gerald Haslam, and others, as well as having reviewed a great variety of books in various journals and newspapers. He has published over 125 books and chapbooks of his poetry, fiction, and criticism and over 3,000 works in periodicals here and abroad; serves as poetry editor of the Chiron Review; has given innumerable readings here and abroad; and was co-editor of The New Geography of Poets. In such ways he remains in personal contact with the living literature of our time. The “Locklin Collection” is among the largest maintained in the CSULB Library’s Special Collections and in indexed online. He enjoys jazz, art, travel, films, the Lakers, the Yankees, and the Sopranos. He does not enjoy swimming, but he does it, poorly.  He has taught here since 1965, after one year at CSULA.



Bill Mohr
wmohr@csulb.edu
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Bill Mohr received his PhD in Literature from the University of California, San Diego. His critical and creative work has appeared in dozens of magazines, including the Antioch Review, Blue Mesa Review, Chicago Review, Santa Monica Review, Sonora Review, William Carlos Williams Review and ZYZZYVA. As editor of Momentum Press from 1974-1988, he received four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and published two major anthologies of Southern California poets. His book and audio recording collections include Hidden Proofs, Thoughtful Outlaw, Vehemence, and a chapbook, Bittersweet Kaleidoscope, from If Editions. He has taught at St. John’s University and Rutgers University, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Norbert Schürer
nschurer@csulb.edu
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Welcome to CSULB! My main focuses in teaching and research here are eighteenth-century British literature and contemporary literary theory. My most recent graduate class (655) concentrated on literature written about the colonial margins (particularly the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia) or in the colonies (except America) and investigated how ‘human nature’ (British and non-British) is constructed in colonialist discourse. The class was underpinned by the theoretical work of Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, and Srinivas Aravamudan. Other authors and topics I discuss in class and write about are Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Salman Rushdie, the Bastille, and Anglo-German literary relations. I approach most of my work from the perspective of book history-one of the most recent developments in literary theory-which looks at these authors and literature in their material contexts, i.e., the writing, production, dissemination, and reception of books, while it also examines their aesthetic value. After getting my BA at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) and studying in Manchester (UK), I received my PhD from Duke University. Before becoming an assistant professor at CSULB, I taught at Wake Forest (North Carolina) and Xavier (Louisiana). Outside the office and classroom, I watch too much TV and movies, run the occasional marathon, and travel to the most out-of-the-way places I can imagine.

Patty Seyburn
pseyburn@csulb.edu
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Patty Seyburn has published two books of poems: Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998), which won the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award for 2000. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Paris Review, Poetry, New England Review, Field, Slate, Pleiades, Bellingham Review, Crazyhorse, Seneca Review, Passages North and Third Coast, and in the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2005). She grew up in Detroit. She earned degrees in journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. She is co-editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry, based in Los Angeles.

Nancy Sheley
nsheley@csulb.edu
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Associate professor Nancy Strow Sheley joined the CSULB faculty in 2001. She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas and her MA in English from the University of Illinois. Sheley holds a joint appointment in the English and Liberal Studies Departments, is an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies Program, and is currently an assistant chair of English. With special emphases in 19th and 20th-century American literature and ethnic writers, Sheley’s specific area of interest is women novelists. One research project explores the use of the 19 th-century Language of Flowers as a subtext in literature and as a cultural phenomenon which reflects imperialistic and racist attitudes of the dominant class. Additionally, Sheley’s dissertation and current research investigates the life and works of American artist Agnes Pelton (1881-1961), providing a cultural and historical context for the study of other early modernists in art and literature. For Liberal Studies, Sheley teaches courses in literacy and issues in education. In 2004, Sheley spent six weeks in Rwanda with a Fulbright-Hays project to study the country’s education system post-Genocide. In January 2008, Sheley will be a Fulbright Scholar for six months in Cyprus, teaching American Studies courses at two universities, the University of Cyprus and Eastern Mediterranean University.
See: http://www.sheleycyprus.blogspot.com.

Martine van Elk
mvanelk@csulb.edu
Martine van Elk
Martine van Elk is an Associate Professor, with MAs from the University of
Amsterdam and Rice University and a PhD from Rice University . Her MA thesis was on contemporary Irish drama, and her PhD focused on Shakespeare,
constructions of femininity, and identification. She teaches Shakespeare,
Renaissance literature, Milton, English drama, and Irish literature. Her
research interests are in early modern processes of identification,
Shakespearean and other drama, 17th century women writers, prose pamphlets,
and romance and genre. She is co-editor of _Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare_
(published by Palgrave, 2004) and has published numerous essays on
Shakespeare, vagrancy, and early modern women. At CSULB, she co-directs the
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Dianne Vipond
dvipond@csulb.edu
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Dianne Vipond is a professor of English and teaches a variety of English and English Single Subject courses. She has taught at the middle, high school, and university levels in both Canada and the United States. The fiction of John Fowles and of Lawrence Durrell are her primary research interests, and she has published quite extensively on both writers. She is also co-editor of Literacy: Language, and Power and currently is working on a project that details the relationship between literary theory and critical pedagogy.

Charles Webb
cwebb@csulb.edu
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Charles Harper Webb received his MFA in Professional Writing and his PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University of Southern California. His books of poetry include Reading the Water (Northeastern University Press), which won the 1997 Morse Poetry Prize and the 1998 Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Liver (University of Wisconsin Press), which won the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize; Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies   (BOA Editions, 2001), and Hot Popsicles (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Poets of the New Century. He is the editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, co-editor of Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles, as well as recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a licensed psychotherapist and worked as a professional singer and guitarist for many years.

Frederick Wegener
fwegener@csulb.edu
Frederick Wegener
Frederick Wegener, professor, received a BA from Columbia University and an MA and PhD from Harvard University. He joined CSULB in 1998, having served previously on the faculty of Boston University, Brandeis University, and Fordham University. His publications include Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (Princeton University Press, 1996, 1999) and the Penguin Classics edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1884 novel A Country Doctor. His essays on Wharton, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins gilman, Charles W. Chesnutt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others have appeared in American Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Criticism, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other journals as well as edited collections. He was an M. Louise Gloeckner, MD, Summer Research Fellow at the Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine, at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, and a 2002-03 Resident Research Fellow at the Francis C. Wood institute for the History of Medicine at College of Physicians of Philadelphia. More recently, he was awarded a publication grant from the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, in support of his ongoing work on a study of imaginative representations of women doctors in the United States from 1860 to 1920. His teaching interests are focused principally on post-Civil-War U.S. literatures; nineteenth-and twentieth-century American fiction; ethnic American writing; forms of narrative; and critical theory. Past director of CSULB’s Program in American Studies, he is also currently a member of the program’s Advisory Board.

Mark Williams
mwilliam@csulb.edu
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Mark T. Williams is an associate professor who teaches courses in rhetoric, composition, and literacy and who serves as Composition Program coordinator. A former journalist in Mexico and Texas who taught science and ESL in middle/high school, Williams earned a BS at Utah State University, an MA at the University of Texas-El Paso, and a PhD at the University of Arizona. He has published in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and The Journal of Basic Writing as well as co-authored book chapters on rhetorical history and basic writing.

Rafael Zepeda
rzepeda@csulb.edu
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Rafael Zepeda received his MFA from the University of Oregon. His books include Horse Medicine & Other Stories, The Yellow Ford of Texas, and The Durango Poems. His poems and stories have appeared in many anthologies and magazines. He is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Fiction and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award.
Carol
Zitzer-Comfort
ccomfort@csulb.edu

Carol Zitzer-Comfort

Professor Zitzer-Comfort is an Assistant Professor of English. She received her BA from CSU Fullerton, her MA from Cal Poly Pomona and her PhD from Claremont Graduate University. Her areas of interest include: Reading and Composition, Cognitive Development,  American Indian Literature,  Disability Studies and English Education. She has published several articles and a book chapter on Williams syndrome, authored a textbook for basic writing courses, co-edited an anthology of American Indian Women’s writings and presented at several national and international conferences. Carol serves on the Advisory Board for the SALK Institute Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, on the Board of Directors of the Williams Syndrome Association and on several CSULB department, college and university committees. Before coming to CSULB in 2005, Dr. Zitzer-Comfort taught and directed a Student Support Services program at Cal Poly Pomona for ten years.

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