Submitted by Henry J Laufenberg on November 19, 2016 - 3:02pm
Megan Callow joined the English department in Fall 2015 after completing a Ph.D. in English Education at the University of Maryland’s College of Education, specializing in writing in the disciplines, writing in the sciences, and faculty development for writing instruction. Professor Callow teaches in and is currently Associate Director of the department’s Interdisciplinary Writing Program.
Her dissertation, "Going to the Source: A Case Study of Four Faculty and Their Approaches to Writing Instruction," investigated the ways that history and engineering professors conceived of, assigned, and assessed writing in their undergraduate courses. Professor Callow presents research on disciplinary writing instruction at conferences like the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Writing Research Across Borders, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the American Educational Research Association.
On campus, Professor Callow teaches writing seminars linked with the biology department. She brings to the Interdisciplinary Writing Program an interest in the pedagogies of disciplinary writing, particularly the ways that instructors’ strategies for teaching writing vary across disciplines. In addition to her teaching and research, Professor Callow works in faculty development, training graduate teaching assistants, and supporting instructors who desire to integrate writing in their courses. She is currently co-leading a Simpson Center for the Humanities-supported Interdisciplinary Research Cluster titled “Writing Across Difference.”
A Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, Stephanie Clare works in feminist, queer, and critical race theory. Before joining the department, she held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Oxford, Duke University, and Syracuse University as well as an appointment as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is a specialist in feminist philosophy, queer theory, ecocriticism, and contemporary documentary cinema. At its broadest, her research considers twentieth-century cultural representations of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds.
Professor Clare’s publications have appeared in Diacritics, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She has a forthcoming essay in Social Text on neoliberalism and contemporary coming out narratives. Currently, Professor Clair is working on revising her book manuscript, Earthly Encounters, a study investigating sensations of the more-than-human world: the chill of winter, the warm embrace of the wind, the feeling of being immersed in water, and a stifling sense of containment. These sensations are unevenly distributed within social worlds and are productive of racial, ethnic, national and gendered subjectivities. A second project—which considers how one might figure personal “uniqueness” (if it indeed exists) in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class—examines the creative production associated with progressive social movements in the United States and Canada.
David Crouse joins our department from DePauw University, where he was Associate Professor of English since 2013. He completed his MFA from University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 1994. Afterwards, he took a position as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Chester College of New England (2001-2005) and then Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Chester College (2005-2007). From 2007-2013, he was Assistant and then Associate Professor of English at University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
Professor Crouse is an award-winning short story writer and teacher. His collection of short fiction, Copy Cats, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2005 and was nominated for the Pen-Faulkner the following year. A second collection, The Man Back There, was published in 2008 by Sarabande Books and was awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
His stories have appeared in some of the country’s most well regarded journals, including Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Greensboro Review, The Southern Review, Chelsea, Quarterly West, and The Beloit Fiction Journal. His comic book writing has been anthologized in The Darkhorse Book of the Dead, published by Darkhorse Comics.
David is a fan of a stylistically diverse group of writers. These include Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, James Salter, Philip K. Dick, Mary Robison, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, and Sherman Alexie. His current projects include: I’m Here: Alaska Stories; Bloodless, a novel about human trafficking; and a collection of novellas entitled Trouble Will Save You.
Leila Kate Norako completed her Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in Spring 2012. Afterwards, she took up a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in the Introductory Studies program before joining us this Fall. Professor Norako specializes in late medieval literature and culture, with particular interests in Middle English romance, crusades literature, and matters of Otherness. Her articles have been published in The Chaucer Review and Literature Compass, and she is currently at work on her first book, entitled "Imagining the Crusades in Late Medieval England."
She recently joined In the Middle as a contributing blogger, and continues to serve as the creator and general editor of The Crusades Project. Other projects include a special issue of postmedieval on world-building in medieval literature (forthcoming 2018), a critical edition of Magnussona saga, and a digital project on Richard Coer de Lyon that will provide scholars with transcriptions of all extant versions of the romance. Professor Norako is also working on her first collection of poems, a few of which can be read at Revolution John, Amaryllis, and By&By Poetry.