People

Additional Info: Neill Matheson is an Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor for the Department of English. He specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. His interests include the cultural meanings of emotion, especially the disordered moods and wayward feelings associated with noncompliant subjects in nineteenth-century American fiction. He has published essays along these lines on melancholia and queer sensibility in Nathaniel Hawthorne, charm in Henry James, and imitative desire and gender nonconformity in Constance Fenimore Woolson. His work has also focused on American writing about nonhuman animals and the more-than-human natural world, including articles on “Thoreau’s Inner Animal” in Walden, and on animal figures and racial environmentalism in Thoreau’s essay “Walking” and the Journal. Recent graduate courses include “Strange Ecologies,” a seminar exploring environmental approaches to Gothic, weird, and speculative fiction; “Love, Sex, and Friendship,” which considers forms of love and intimacy outside the nineteenth-century novel’s conventional marriage plot; and “American Literature and Animal Studies,” which examines literary and theoretical writing about the human-animal distinction and lived relations with nonhuman animals.

Areas: US History; Migration, Labor and Ethnic History, Gilded Age and Progressive Era, History of Radicalism

Areas: U.S. Social History, Women's History, Race & Gender from a Regional Perspective

Interests: Psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, second language acquisition and teaching, research methods.

Interests: TESOL, second language acquisition, bilingualism, phonology, phonological acquisition, phonotactics, experimental phonology/phonetics, Romance languages (especially Spanish), dialects of the Southern U.S.

Bio: Dr. Clifton Evans currently serves as Director of Orchestras, Associate Professor of Music, and String Area Coordinator at the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Evans has enjoyed a conducting career that has taken him to Hong Kong, England, China, Austria, the Czech Republic and throughout the United States. Highly sought after as a clinician and lecturer, Dr. Evans has conducted numerous Region Orchestras and Bands and given multiple lectures on conducting and rehearsal technique. His upcoming schedule includes a return engagement with the American Festival for the Arts Conservatory Orchestra in Houston in the summer of 2021. In addition to his duties as a professor at UTA, Dr. Evans maintains an active schedule at summer festivals, conventions, and workshops. For six years, he conducted the Fargason concerts for the Texas Music Teachers Association, which featured concerto competition winners selected from across the state of Texas. He has also conducted the prestigious American Festival for the Arts Conservatory Orchestra in Houston numerous times and has been invited back for the 2020 season. In the summers of 2010, 2013, and 2017, he presented conducting workshops and other lectures at the state convention for the Texas Orchestra Directors Association in San Antonio. Each summer at UTA, he serves as Executive Director and a faculty member of the Texas Conducting Workshop, a program he founded together with the string faculty, and Summer Strings, a camp that hosts roughly 400 students from throughout the Metroplex. Dr. Evans’ previous positions include Artistic Director of the Arlington Youth Symphony, Director of Orchestras and Chamber Music for the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Music Director for the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Houston, Conductor for the Houston Youth Symphony, and Music Director and Conductor of the Houston Civic Symphony. He currently maintains professional memberships in TMEA, TODA, Conductors Guild, and Mu Omicron. He is an honorary member of the Tau Beta Sigma and Kappa Kappa Psi chapters at UTA and also served as the faculty advisor to the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia chapter for 5 years. He resides in Arlington with his wife, Christy, and their children.

Interests: International relations, foreign policy analysis (decision-making, identity, emotions), Middle East, Israel, Turkey, politics of Jewish identity

Research Specializations: Sociology of families; sociology of reproduction; and qualitative research methods

Additional Info: Associate professor Amy L. Tigner teaches and writes about about Shakespeare, food, gardens and ecological concerns in the early modern period. Her current research interest is in early modern women’s writing and manuscript recipe books. Author of Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II (Ashgate, 2012), she has also co-written with Allison Carruth Literature and Food Studies(Routledge, 2018) and co-edited with David B. Goldstein Culinary Shakespeare (Duquesne UP, 2017). She has also published numerous articles in journals and book collections. Founding editor of Early Modern Studies Journal, Dr. Tigner is also founding member of Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), a digital humanities project dedicated to manuscript recipe books.

Areas: U.S. Social History, Women's History, Race & Gender from a Regional Perspective

Interests: TESOL, second language acquisition, bilingualism, phonology, phonological acquisition, phonotactics, experimental phonology/phonetics, Romance languages (especially Spanish), dialects of the Southern U.S.

Bio: Dr. Clifton Evans currently serves as Director of Orchestras, Associate Professor of Music, and String Area Coordinator at the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Evans has enjoyed a conducting career that has taken him to Hong Kong, England, China, Austria, the Czech Republic and throughout the United States. Highly sought after as a clinician and lecturer, Dr. Evans has conducted numerous Region Orchestras and Bands and given multiple lectures on conducting and rehearsal technique. His upcoming schedule includes a return engagement with the American Festival for the Arts Conservatory Orchestra in Houston in the summer of 2021. In addition to his duties as a professor at UTA, Dr. Evans maintains an active schedule at summer festivals, conventions, and workshops. For six years, he conducted the Fargason concerts for the Texas Music Teachers Association, which featured concerto competition winners selected from across the state of Texas. He has also conducted the prestigious American Festival for the Arts Conservatory Orchestra in Houston numerous times and has been invited back for the 2020 season. In the summers of 2010, 2013, and 2017, he presented conducting workshops and other lectures at the state convention for the Texas Orchestra Directors Association in San Antonio. Each summer at UTA, he serves as Executive Director and a faculty member of the Texas Conducting Workshop, a program he founded together with the string faculty, and Summer Strings, a camp that hosts roughly 400 students from throughout the Metroplex. Dr. Evans’ previous positions include Artistic Director of the Arlington Youth Symphony, Director of Orchestras and Chamber Music for the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Music Director for the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Houston, Conductor for the Houston Youth Symphony, and Music Director and Conductor of the Houston Civic Symphony. He currently maintains professional memberships in TMEA, TODA, Conductors Guild, and Mu Omicron. He is an honorary member of the Tau Beta Sigma and Kappa Kappa Psi chapters at UTA and also served as the faculty advisor to the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia chapter for 5 years. He resides in Arlington with his wife, Christy, and their children.