English/ Comparative Literature / SDSU Faculty Biographies SANDRA ALCOSSER, MFA Professor of English Sandra Alcosser's two books of poems, Except by Nature and A Fish to Feed All Hunger, have won the highest awards from the National Poetry Series,The Academy of American Poets, and the Associated Writing Programs. Her four artist book collaborations with Brighton Press are in museum collections and exhibited internationally. She has received numerous honors including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker,The New York Times,  The Paris Review, and The Push Cart Prize Anthology. Alcosser directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at San Diego State University each fall and has been a recent visiting writer at the University of Michigan  and the University of Montana. She currently serves as a Poet-in-Residence braiding poetry and conservation philosophy for the Central Park Zoo, Poets House New York, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.  She also directs the 2004-2005 SDSU International Writing Program at National University of Ireland, Galway. Alcosser is poetry editor for Parabola Magazine. ALIDA ALLISON, Ph.D. Professor of English Alida Allison was born in Brooklyn, New York, had a happy childhood in Palm Springs, California, and undertook three different majors as an undergrad at SDSU in the 1960s before dropping out to spend two years hitchhiking to India. In the early 1970s, she and her husband worked for the American Friends Service Committee (Quaker Service) as Hong Kong Representatives, traveling frequently to wartime Vietnam. She received a degree in English with a specialty in Creative Writing from SDSU in the early 1980s, at the same time she was writing children's books. Doctoral study in Comparative Literature was completed in 1990 at UC Riverside, the same year she began teaching at SDSU as a children's/YA literature specialist. In addition to articles and conference presentations, she has published three academic books, on academic publishing, on the children's stories of I.B. Singer, and on Russell Hoban's writings for children. Dr. Allison is married and has two sons. For other information, go here. LAUREL AMTOWER, Ph.D. Professor of English Laurel Amtower teaches medieval literature, with yearly forays into Chaucer, Arthurian Literature, and Folk Literature. Her work examines the reading practices and the uses of literature, especially the connection among reading, self-reflection, and ethics.  She is the author of Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages (Palgrave) and co-editor of The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation (MRTS), and has published articles in such journals as Philological Quarterly, The Dalhousie French Review, and Studies in the Humanities, among others She has also written a serialized novel for children, published in Japan by The Asahi News, called Maggie Starr and the Demon Cat. Dr. Amtower is faculty adviser for Sigma Tau Delta, the National English Honors Society. QUENTIN BAILEY, D. Phil. OXFORD Assistant Professor of English Quentin Bailey joins SDSU from the University of Oklahoma, where he has spent the past year adjusting to ‘life in America’. Prior to this he completed an M.Phil and a  D.Phil at the University of Oxford, learning to understand the university’s arcane terminology and writing a thesis on Wordsworth’s youthful radicalism. An article on this subject is shortly to appear in Romanticism. A previous article, on ‘Heroes and Homosexuals’ in the work of E.M. Forster, appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, and he is currently working on a comparison of Wordsworth and Baudelaire’s poetry about beggars and vagrants. He completed a BA at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, starting a week after Nelson Mandela was released and graduating in the same month as the first non-racial elections. It’s probably as a result of this that his scholarly and teaching interests focus on highlighting the social, historical and political contexts within which literary texts function. MICHAEL BORGSTROM, Ph.D. UC DAVIS Assistant Professor of English   Michael Borgstrom joined the SDSU faculty in 2004.  His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, sexuality and gender studies, ethnic literature, and cultural studies.   His work has appeared in PMLA and African American Review, and he is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Textual Profiling: Narrative Identity in the Nineteenth-Century United States. JOANNA BROOKS, PH.D. Associate Professor of English Joanna Brooks (Ph.D., UCLA 1999) teaches American literature, including African-American literature, Native American literature, and women’s studies. Her book American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford, 2003) was the winner of the Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Award for outstanding book in African-American literature.  She is also the editor of The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century America (Oxford, 2006). A fourth generation Los Angelino, Brooks grew up behind the Orange Curtain in Santa Ana, California.  Her favorite places on earth are Phillipe’s, the Original, LA; San Onofre, California; and Kolob Canyon, Utah. Brooks comes to literature.sdsu.edu from her last gig in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. The Longhorn's loss is the Aztec's gain!  Welcome! GERALD J. BUTLER, Ph.D.  Professor of English Inspired by Wayne Burns's "Panzaic Principle," my academic work has been devoted to the theory of the novel. Work in English most useful for my purposes is the eighteenth century British novel, but I've also taught courses in the nineteenth century British novel, notably in Dickens, and in some modern fiction, including the novels of L.-F. Céline. At first, however, I studied the work of D. H. Lawrence. I saw his novels could only be accepted in the academic world if they were sanitized in the reading--a view I expressed in my "This Is Carbon": A Defense of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow Against His Admirers. But I soon began to realize that such is the case with all great literature. When it comes to criticism and teaching, the institutional function of literary studies--especially in America--is to discipline reading so it will not upset accepted clichés and pieties. The teacher's and academic critic's job--as far as the institution is concerned--is to make literature rationalize or even justify human suffering in an inhuman world. This is true even if--especially if--the professor appears very radical. To try to resist this institutional imperative I wrote articles and books (e.g. Fielding's Unruly Novels) that might be called "anti-criticism." Not surprisingly, most of my "anti-criticism" was published out of the mainstream, and my warmest reception was abroad, especially in France, where my wife Evelyn and I have lived and taught on several occasions. ¶ Before I came to San Diego State, I wrote poetry and fiction of my own, which was published in such magazines as Hudson Review, Chicago Review, West Coast Review, and New York Quarterly . In fact, many years ago while I was in graduate school, I was invited because of my poetry publications to join the Iowa Writer's Workshop, but I turned the invitation down because I thought I would be more likely to keep whatever original voice I had if I made a living at something other than "po" business. Though I underestimated how crushing the workload would turn out to be at San Diego State, I still think I made the right choice. I was able to publish some poems and stories over the years, but a novel, originally accepted for publication in England by Calder and Boyars, never appeared because it contained subjects that, especially because of the way I treated them, were apparently too taboo. ¶ I have taken a partial early retirement so I can have the chance not only to finish a book of "anti-criticism" but above all to put the time and energy into my own fiction and poetry that I would not have otherwise. Laurie Champion, Ph.D. Professor of English and Comparative Literature Laurie Champion is a native Texan who moved to San Diego to teach at San Diego State in 1999. She specializes in twentieth-century American literature with an emphases on the intersection of race, class, and gender. She has edited or co-edited eight books and published twelve short stories and over fifty scholarly essays in literary journals and anthologies. She is currently finishing her first novel and gathering short stories for an anthology of poker related fiction. She and her husband of thirty years, Bill-Bill, often visit their son, Billy, and their daughter-in-law, Hanna, in Finland or spend time in San Diego with their daughter, Brooke. When not enjoying their children, they keep busy chasing their three cats, Doo-Dah, Fat Cat, and Splinter and pampering their high-maintenance teacup poodle, Mimi. MARILYN CHIN, MFA Professor of English MARILYN CHIN is the author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (Paterson Book Prize, 2003), The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (P.E.N. Josephine Miles Award, 1994) and Dwarf Bamboo (nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewer's Award in 1987).  Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in numerous classrooms nationally. She also co-edited Dissident Song, a Contemporary Asian American Anthology (1991) and co-translated The Selected Poems of Ai Qing, Indiana University Press, 1985.  Her poetry has been anthologized in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, the Norton Introduction to Literature, and the Best Poetry of 1996,  edited by Adrienne Rich, among others.  She is a recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship from Harvard, a Stegner fellowship from Stanford, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, a Lannan residency,  four Pushcart Prizes and the Mary Roberts Rinehart award in creative writing. She has received residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Centrum, Blue Mountain Center for the Arts and Villa Montalvo. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, she considers the Pacific Rim her home and San Diego her most recent exile. JUNE CUMMINS LEWIS, Ph.D. Columbia University Associate Professor of English June Cummins specializes in children's literature and modern British literature.  Her publications, ranging in subject matter from feminism and consumerism to postcolonialism and multiculturalism, concern such children's texts as Disney's Beauty and the Beast [in Children's Literature Association Quarterly (Winter 1999)], Curious George [Ariel 28.1 (1997)], Harry Potter [Times Higher Education Supplement], and Peter Rabbit.  Her most recent article, "Understood Betsy, Understood Nation:  Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Willa Cather Queer America," [Children's Literature 32] reflects her interest in American national identities.  As an outgrowth of her interest in Jewish children's literature, she has published two articles about Sydney Taylor the author of the All-of-a-Kind Family books, and is currently working on Taylor's biography.  For more, go here for a recent profile, or here, for a recent article. JERRY FARBER, Ph.D. Professor of English Jerry Farber teaches the literature of Western European authors between the mid-seventeenth century and the first World War.  His academic interests include history and theory of comedy, aesthetics, Marcel Proust, the late eighteenth century, French symbolist poetry, the literature of romantic love, children's literature, reader response theory, narrative theory, comparative prosody, inter-arts study, the troubadour poets,  Murasaki Shikibu, Rainer Maria Rilke, and a number of British poets, including Pope, Keats, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas.  He is also obsessively interested in the teaching of literature.  He has written several books, including a work of aesthetic theory, and a number of scholarly articles, including "The Third Circle: On Education and Distance Learning," which attempts to establish a theoretical basis for evaluating the claims that have been made for screen-based teaching modes.  His undergraduate work at UCLA was in English literature, and his Ph.D., from Occidental College, is in comparative literature.  He was born in El Paso and grew up in Hollywood.  He and his wife, who is a pre-school teacher, have four children.  CATHERINE FIELD, Ph.D, University of Maryland Our New Assistant Professor Catherine Field graduated from the University of Maryland with her Ph.D. in English Literature and Language (May 2006). She is a feminist literary historian specializing in the study of manuscripts (especially recipe collections) and women’s writing in early modern England. She is currently revising her dissertation, “‘Many Hands Hands’: Early Modern Englishwomen’s Recipes and the Writing of Food, Politics, and the Self,” into a book manuscript, and she has presented her research at many conferences in the U.S. and in England. Field recently published an essay on the role of the female practitioner and her use of a medicinal recipe in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, and she has also written about how the recipe was an early, significant form of autobiographical writing by British and European women in the Renaissance. She continues to be fascinated by the ways in which studying recipe writing can help us gain a sense of everyday, lived experience in Shakespeare’s England, a world that was (like our own) often understood through its complex relationship to popular foods, diets, and medicine. She spends her free time traveling (most often to Italy), cooking (her favorite cookbook is How to Be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson), and writing.  She looks forward to beginning her first year of teaching and research at San Diego State, and she can be reached at fieldca@gmail.com or cfield@mail.sdsu.edu.  EDITH FRAMPTON, Ph.D. Lecturer Edith Frampton researches and writes about contemporary literature written in English from around the globe, with a particular focus on women writers and issues of gender, the body, and identity.  She is the author of Michèle Roberts, forthcoming in the Northcote House series Writers and Their Work, and an essay of hers on this prominent British writer also appears in the Winter 2006 issue of Textual Practice.  In addition, Dr. Frampton has published essays on Toni Morrison, in the Routledge journal Women: A Cultural Review, and on Melanie Klein and the “British School” of psychoanalysis, in the Taylor and Francis journal Australian Feminist Studies.  Her essay on the figure of the wet nurse – through history and as imagined in recent writing – is included in the 2007 anthology Back to the Future of the Body.  Dr. Frampton is on the Editorial Board of the new Oxford University Press journal, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and is an active member of the UK-based organization, Contemporary Women’s Writing Network.  For the past several years, she has divided her time between San Diego and London, earning her MA and PhD in literature from the University of London, after having launched her graduate studies at Yale.  As a Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at SDSU, Dr. Frampton has taught a range of British literary topics, from the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf  to Black British writer Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel, On Beauty.  She has also taught contemporary American fiction, drama, and poetry.  She can be contacted at eframpto@mail.sdsu.edu.   MARY GALBRAITH, Ph.D., Lecturer Mary Galbraith grew up in Los Angeles and London, shuttling back and forth with her family via train and ocean liner three times in her first twelve years. Now she teaches children's literature. Because of her childhood, she's particularly interested in transatlantic literature--especially picture books by artists who were born in Europe and immigrated to the United States, often to escape war in their homelands. Professor Galbraith wrote her dissertation on the traumatic experiences of child characters in the first chapters of three classic English biographical novels: Jane Eyre, What Maisie Knew, and Great Expectations. She sees a great deal of literature about children as being motivated by authors' need to restage their own childhood experiences of extreme fright, grief, and perceived betrayal by adults. She promotes a new area of interdisciplinary studies: childhood studies, which brings together material from literature, psychology, history, anthropology, and neurobiology on childhood experience in the interests of "feeling from the other side" children's existential situation. Rather than approaching childhood from an adult standpoint, this area of studies attempts to articulate the child's experience at a very deep level using all the skills of adult language, science, and art. RONALD J. GERVAIS, Ph.D. Professor of English  Ronald Gervais specializes in American Literature and teaches courses in American Romanticism and Realism-Naturalism, American Poetry, and American Nature Literature. He took his B.A. and M.A. at Michigan State University and his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon, and has been teaching at San Diego State University since 1969.  His teaching emphasizes the beauty of literature. He writes, "It's the catch in the heart at the moment you suddenly realize that A Song of Myself or Huckleberry Finn is wonderful. The poetry or the prose are perfect because no one else could have done it in the way Whitman or Twain did it. That's what great literary artists do, they do something in a unique and original way that is, in some sense, beautiful. Teaching literature is about revealing that beauty." Professor Gervais's classes show how this originality is suffused with tradition. He believes that the great writers of the past become touchstones for all the great writers who come after them, and that teaching literature is also about revealing this literary tradition, showing how the inventors have borrowed.  MICHAEL GRATTAN, Lecturer, PhD-program, UCSD We welcome camera-shy, UCSD PhD candidate Michael Grattan back to Montezuma Mesa for Spring 2008. Having spent much of his adult life as a student at SDSU (including stints in Sigma Tau Delta and the Lit Club), Michael ventured all the way to La Jolla to pursue his doctorate in Early Modern English literature at UCSD. There, besides hectoring undergraduates in his Milton and Shakespeare classes, he studied English poetry, drama and prose (all while starting a small village--actually, just three children). Grattan hopes to publish the first chapter of his dissertation in a forthcoming anthology on Early Modern historiography edited by SDSU English and Comparative Literature collegue Peter C. Herman.  Grattan is working the night-shift teaching our E533 this Spring; there, he will, in his own words, pursue the study of "[p]ower hungry dukes, war-loving monarchs, murderous thanes, sex crazed twenty-somethings, naughty bishops, liars, adulterers and cross-dressing women."    SINDA GREGORY, PH.D. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH | COMING SOON.... JERRY GRISWOLD, Ph.D. University of Connecticut (Go Huskies!) Professor of English Jerry Griswold is a specialist in Children's Literature and in American Literature and Culture. He is the author of seven books, including the prize-winning “Audacious Kids” (in paperback, “The Classic American Children's Story”), “The Meanings of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’” and  “Feeling Like a Kid.” Griswold has also published more than 200 essays in Paris Review, The Nation, New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. He has been a visiting professor at UCLA and UCSD and (for one hilarious year) the National University of Ireland in Galway. Griswold has won a number of awards (including research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies) and lectured all around the globe (from Seoul to Salamanca to São Paolo). Currently, he is Director of the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature. You can get more information about Jerry Griswold (as well as his interests, publications and travels) by clicking here. PETER HERMAN, Ph.D. Columbia University Professor of English Peter C. Herman received his Ph.D. in 1990 from Columbia University. He has published two books, Destabilizing Milton: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of Incertitude (Palgrave, 2005), and Squitter-wits and Muse-haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Wayne State University Press, 1996), as well as edited a number of anthologies, including Approaches to Teaching Milton's Shorter Poetry and Prose ( MLA, 2007), Historicizing Theory (SUNY Press, 2004), and Reading Monarchs Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I (MRTS, 2002). His essays have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, SEL, and Criticism, as well as in various collections, such as Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Sweet, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), and royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Wayne State University Press, 2002).  HAROLD JAFFE, PhD, NYU Professor of English Harold Jaffe went to Grinnell College for his B.A., and received a Ph.D in Literature, with Distinction, from New York University. Professor Jaffe is the author of fourteen books: 10 collections of fiction, "docufuction" and creative nonfiction, and four novels. These include Mourning Crazy Horse (1982),  Dos Indios (1983), Beasts (1986), Madonna and Other Spectacles (1988), Eros Anti-Eros (1990), Straight Razor (1995), Othello Blues (1996), Sex for the Millennium (1999), False Positive (2002), 15 Serial Killers (2003),  Terror-dot-Gov (2005), Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture (2007), Jesus Coyote (2008). Jaffe's writing has been anthologized in Pushcart Prize on three occasions, in Best American Stories, Best of American Humor, Storming the Reality Studio, American Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, After Yesterday's Crash, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, City Lights Review, and elsewhere.  His writings have been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Turkish, and Czech. He has won numerous awards, including two NEAs for fiction; a California Arts Council grant for fiction; a New York CAPS grant for fiction; a San Diego COMBO grant; and two Fulbright grants to Prague and to India.  Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International, an award-winning literature-cultural journal which was founded in New York in 1973, and under Jaffe's editorship is devoted to progressive and innovative writing and art. ILYA KAMINSKY, JD, University of California Assistant Professor of English ILYA KAMINSKY is a poet. Born in Odessa, in the former Soviet Union, he arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. His recent book, Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), won the Whiting Writer's Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kaminsky has served as a Writer In Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, taught at California College of the Arts and at numerous literary centers and conferences.  Educated in English Literature at Georgetown University and the University of Rochester, he also has a graduate degree in Law from University of California, and has worked for several public interest organizations, including Bay Area Legal Aid and National Immigration Law Center. In late 1990s, he co-founded Poets for Peace which sponsored hundreds of poetry readings across the country with the goal of supporting such relief organizations as Doctors Without Borders and Survivors International. He is the poetry editor for Words Without Borders and was a Distinguished Visiting Writer 2006-2007 at Arizona State University--his colleagues? Zadie Smith; Michael Chabon; Ben Bova; and Walter Mosley, among others. You can find more information here: www.ilyakaminsky.com. NEIL KENDRICKS, MA, FILM, SDSU  | Lecturer A San Diego-based filmmaker, artist, photographer, writer, and the Film Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), Neil Kendricks's award-winning short films like 2002's loop have screened at international film festivals including the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, the Havana Film Festival, and a special short-film screening at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s American Pavilion. His photography and artwork have also been exhibited in the San Diego Museum of Art, the African-American Museum of Fine Arts, London's Royal College of Art, and other venues. His writing on film and the arts have been published in such publications as The San Diego Union-Tribune, Art Ltd. magazine, Moviemaker magazine, Art Week magazine, and numerous other publications. Kendricks is currently an adjunct photography professor at Grossmont and Southwestern Community Colleges, and he has been running MCASD's Film program since 2005. He is also the founder and ongoing participant of MCASD’s popular film event, alt.pictureshows, an annual short-film festival screening at the Museum since 2003. Kendricks will be teaching our English 570 Screenwriting class after jetting back from the Sundance Movie Festival in January. DOROTHEA KEHLER, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of English Dorothea Kehler specializes in English Renaissance drama. As a teacher her greatest pleasure lies in giving her students the gift of Shakespeare. She has published over three dozen essays (primarily on Shakespeare), two anthologies (In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama and A Midsummer Night's Dream: Critical Essays), and a literary reference guide (Problems in Literary Research: A Guide to Selected Reference Works), now in its fourth edition. SHERRY BURGUS LITTLE, Ph.D. Professor of English, Associate Dean, College of Arts and Letters Sherry Burgus Little is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University where until 1996 she directed the Technical and Scientific Writing Program which she initiated and developed. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in technical writing, literature, and rhetoric. Her research interests include social construction and collaboration, rhetoric of technical and scientific communication, gender studies, the disciplinarity of writing studies, pedagogy, experiential learning theory, assessment, ethics, writing in nonacademic settings, genre studies, usability and validation testing methodology and principles, technology and writing, and modern British and American Literature with a specialty in James Joyce.  She also works as a technical writer, editor, and consultant in business and industry, conducting workshops and seminars in communication and improvement of instruction in training programs for supervisors, technicians, engineers, and management personnel; proposal writing and sources of funding; job search training; usability testing; and  documentation principles.  Her clients have included Kelco,YWCA, The Price Club, Woodward-Clyde Consultants, Medtronics, Xerox, Nike, and NCR, as well as federal and state agencies. Her research has been published in such journals as Journal of Business and Technical Communication, WPA: Writing Program Administration, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Computers and Composition, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, The Technical Writing Teacher, and numerous proceedings and other periodicals.  She has edited and co-authored technical texts for McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, Houghton Mifflin, American Technical Society, and Breton publishing companies and contributed chapters to books published by Irwin Press, the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and Croom Helm.  She is currently at work on a text on rhetoric and ethics in technical communication in addition to a study of archival materials about James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland.  LAWRENCE "LARRY" McCAFFERY PH.D. Professor of English Larry McCaffery is a literary critic, editor, and professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. McCaffery's work focuses on post-modern literature, science fiction, contemporary fiction. Larry McCaffery has published numerous scholarly books and essays dealing with postmodern literature and culture including four volumes of interviews: Anything Can Happen (with Tom LeClair), Alive and Writing (with Sinda Gregory) and Across the Wounded Galaxies, and Some Other Frequency. He is the editor of the influential Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (featuring the work of authors such as William Gibson, Samuel Delany, Don DeLillo,  Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida), and of After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology. McCaffery has been known to indulge in periodic moments of Bruce Springsteen fetishism and is alleged to consort with the ghosts of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges. DAVID MATLIN, PH.D. Associate Professor of English David Matlin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His collections of poetry and prose include the books China Beach, Dressed In Protective Fashion, and Fontana's Mirror.  His first novel, How the Night is Divided, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. His newest book, Vernooykill Creek: The Crisis of Prisons in America, published by San Diego State University Press, is based on a ten-year experience teaching in one of the oldest Prison Education Programs in the nation in New York State. This extended essay is a discussion of the crisis of prisons, the invention of surplus populations, and how, in making prison our largest growth industry, we are mining our own civil disintegrations at unprecedented levels. The author studied with Robert Creeley, John Clarke, Diane Christian, and wrote his Ph.D. on William Blake at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His interests lie primarily with Black Mountain, the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance, with the visual arts, and the questions and concerns posed at the threshold of a new century, and especially as the great poets Robert Duncan and William Carlos Williams formulated the starkness of these issues: "Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, H.D., Eliot, have a black voice when speaking of the contemporary scene, an enduring memory of the first World War that has revealed the deep-going falsehood and evil of the modern state ... Their threshold  remains ours. The time of war and exploitation, the infamy and lies of the new capitalist war-state, continue. And the answering intensity of the imagination to hold its own values must continue," Robert Duncan, and William Carlos Williams: "Poetry is a rival government always in opposition to its cruder replicas."  SEAN MEIGHOO, PhD, York University, Lecturer Sean Meighoo received his Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought from York University (Toronto, Canada).  His current teaching and research interests include continental philosophy, literary theory, postcolonial and race theory, and feminist and queer theory.  His most recent publication is "Derrida's Chinese Prejudice" (forthcoming in Cultural Critique 68, Winter 2008). Meighoo's piece is a true coup, as CC is known for its  "international and interdisciplinary explorations of intellectual controversies, trends, and issues in culture, theory, and politics. Emphasizing critique rather than criticism, the journal draws on the diverse and conflictual approaches of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, political economy, and hermeneutics to offer readings in society and its tranformation." literature.sdsu.edu is thrilled to welcome Meighoo to our graduate and undergraduate faculty. FRED MORAMARCO, Ph.D. Professor of English Fred Moramarco is Editor of Poetry International, an annual poetry journal published by the Department and SDSU Press. He teaches courses in both Literature and Creative Writing, and has written extensively on 20th Century American Literature. Professor Moramarco is the co-author of Modern American Poetry (U of Mass Press, 1989) and Containing Multitudes: Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (Twayne, 1998). He is co-editor of Men of Our Time: Male Poetry in Contemporary America (U of Georgia Press, 1992) and is currently at work on an International anthology of men's poetry. He teaches undergraduate courses in Contemporary American Literature (Eng 525), the Contemporary American Short Story (527), Teaching Literature (510), Techniques of Poetry (570) and graduate courses in Contemporary Poetry as well as the Introduction to Graduate Study Course required of all MA students. He has also taught a course, on both graduate and undergraduate levels on "The Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver." Because of his interest in Gender Studies, he is also a member of the Associate Graduate Faculty of SDSU's Women's Studies Program. Along with Professor Jerry Griswold, he has pioneered various uses of technology in teaching literature and has developed a widely heralded multi-media presentation on "The Poetry of John Keats." His own poetry is published widely, both in print and on the WWW. You can discover more about his interests, classes, and publications here. WILLIAM A. NERICCIO, Ph.D. Cornell University Professor and Chair of English & Comp Lit A Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, William Nericcio also serves on the graduate faculty of the Department of Chicana/o Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies.  Nericcio's first book, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of "Mexicans" in America, appeared with the University of Texas Press in February 2007. His newest book, an edited edition of playwright Oliver Mayer's The Hurt Business has also just appeared in April of 2008.   Other recent essays include Nericcio's lurid meditations on the life of Pee-wee Herman (aka Paul Reubens) in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies and an illustrated survey of the cool graphic narrative Mestizo stylings of Gilbert Hernandez and his spiritual godmother, Frida Kahlo, for NYU Press's Latino Popular Culture. Links to these works and more, too much, on Nericcio are available here while his latest blog entries on stereotypes and American mass culture can be found at textmex.blogspot.com. HARRY POLKINHORN, Ph.D. New York University Professor of English Harry Polkinhorn is an experimental poet/artist, translator, and editor whose works have been exhibited and published worldwide. He has published over thirty books of poetry, fiction, translation, and edited collections. His areas of scholarly interest focus on the international avant-garde and the culture of the U.S.-Mexico border region, as well as psychoanalytic theory. He is a training candidate in adult analysis at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and has a private practice. He has translated works from Italian, Portuguese, German, and Spanish. Blue Shift (a book-length poem) was published by Ex Nihilo Press, San Francisco (1999). He co-edited a bilingual English/Spanish anthology of poetry by Baja California poets published by Junction Press (2002). Educated at the University of California, SDSU, New York University, the Kunstgewerbeschule of the City of Zurich, and Pacifica Graduate Institute, he is a permanent visiting professor in the Ph.D. program in Semiotics and Communication of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil. He is Director of San Diego State University Press. harrypolkinhorn.org STEPHEN POTTS, Ph.D. Lecturer Stephn Potts won the J. Lloyd Eaton Award in 1993 for The Second Marxian Invasion: The Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Borgo Press). His scholarly work includes "A Tale of Two Cultures: Science and Critique," presented at the 20th J. Lloyd Eaton Conference, UC Riverside, 17 January 1999;  "'We Keep Playing the Same Record': A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler," in Science-Fiction Studies 23 (November 1996); "The Many Faces of the Hero in The Lord of the Rings." Mythlore 17/4 (Summer 1991). He is currently working on The Great American Fairy Tale, a study connecting American ideology, folk and fairy tales, and human development theory.  WILLIAM ROGERS, Ph.D. Professor of English William Rogers, who holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, teaches a wide range of courses in British literature, with a concentration in the nineteenth century (Romantic, Victorian, and Late Victorian-Edwardian), but his interests also encompass modern Chinese and Japanese literature (Women in Modern Chinese and Japanese Literature; Literary Revolutions in China and Japan; Chinese and Japanese Short Fiction). A particular area of specialization and research concerns "cross-cultural encounters" in British texts that are situated in the contested spaces where different cultures meet. His areas of expertise and range of interests are suggested by some of the writers and topics covered in M.A. theses he's directed--Spenser, Blake, Byron, Keats, Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Hardy, Wilde, Conrad, Conan Doyle, Yeats, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Emerson, modern Chinese fiction, children's literature in China, and questions of gender in modern Japanese fiction.  PHILLIP SERRATO, PhD, UC RIVERSIDE Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature As a teacher and scholar, Phillip Serrato tends to fret over issues of race, gender, and sexuality in children's and adolescent literature. Aided and abetted by his students, he fusses over constructions of masculinity in children's books, explores the ways that books for young adults engage the subjects of love, sex, and desire, and generally goes out of his way to test students' presumptions about the limits of literature for young people. Trained in Chicano/a literary, cultural, and film studies at UC Riverside, he brings to the SDSU children's literature program a specialization in Chicano/a children's and adolescent literature. Over the past few years, he has published essays on Latino professional wrestlers and on the Personal Memoirs of Juan Seguín, and he has co-authored an article on Gloria Anzaldúa's two illustrated books for children. His current work focuses on the construction, deconstruction, and re-imagination of Chicano masculinity in books for children and young adults by Chicano and Chicana authors. Warning: If given a chance, he will talk ad nauseam about Rage Against the Machine, Shakira, American Chopper, Night of the Living Dead, Where the Wild Things Are, U2, El Vez, and Pablo and Miguel (his two beautiful sons).  KATHY SHUMATE, MA, SDSU My interests are wide-ranging and eclectic.  I began college aiming for a course of study in archaeology and anthropology.  Although I ended up with two degrees in English instead, I keep up with these interests, Egyptology and evolution, in particular, as well as astronomy, music, art, photography, history, and genealogy.  These interests influence my reading and my approach to teaching.  Being close with two of my nephews, from babyhood to young men in college, brought me back to children’s literature.  I gave one of my nephews The Hobbit when he was in fourth grade; at 22, he now has read most all of Tolkien’s works and has been working on his own Tolkienesque project.  My younger nephew, now a sophomore at SDSU, never liked reading until Harry Potter arrived.  Now, we have lively discussions about the books and movie adaptations. Since I also teach at area community colleges year-round, I don’t have much time for creative or scholarly endeavors.  When I can, I work on revising my poetry manscript for future publication.  Through teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in English 220, Introduction to Literature—and being a LOST fan—I have been researching the connections between the two. My interest in genealogy led me to research Huguenot family roots in Southwestern France for a historical novel in progress. JOSEPH THOMAS, PhD, Illinois State University Reared on comic books, salacious playground rhymes, and stolen lascivious pulps, Assistant Professor Joseph Thomas is a fan of all things carnivalesque, reveling in, as Bakhtin put it, the “peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ (à l’envers), of the ‘turnabout,’ of the continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings,” even as he is, again in the words of Bakhtin, “hostile to all that [is] immortalized and completed.” Having written the first book-length study on U.S. children's poetry, Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry (Wayne State UP), Joseph is now working on a book concerning Shel Silverstein's life and work, tentatively titled, “The Devil's Favorite Pet”: Shel Silverstein, an American Iconoclast. His book of Oulipo-inspired poetry, Strong Measures, has recently been published by Make Now Press. Intrigued by all things queer and uncanny, his interests range from contemporary theory, to the avant-garde, to children's literature (broadly defined), to childhood studies, to image-text studies, to pedagogical theory, to 20th century and contemporary poetry, to Situationist theory, to Dada, to“creative” writing, to “uncreative” writing, to plagiarism, to LANGUAGE poetry, to nonsense poetry, to film, to jazz (particularly that of the avant-garde variety). He's especially fascinated by how these varied areas relate to and inform one another. Although he abhors consistency, we can count on him disavowing all of his completed work, while passionately defending works-in-progress. A chameleon of rapid and self-interested change, Joseph is against the high cost of living, against the future, and for the absurd. Dada is a virgin microbe. He can be reached at  jtthomas@mail.sdsu.edu ROY WHITAKER, MA, MA, PhD, abd, Claremont Roy Whitaker is a Doctoral degree candidate at Claremont Graduate University in the philosophy of religion and theology doctoral program.  He holds two master’s degrees from Harvard University (2002) and Princeton Theological Seminary (2000) respectively and has traveled, studied, and worked in Jamaica, India, and Germany.  Whitaker's areas of interest include comparative religion, sociology of religion, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy of religion, philosophies of liberation, African-American philosophy, and religious thought, pragmatism, social theory, and literary criticism. This Spring he will be teaching one of our English 405 Bible as Literature courses.