Administration

Additional Info: Trained in rhetoric and writing studies, Estee Beck’s research specialties include computers and writing, digital rhetoric and literacy, and surveillance and privacy. Dr. Beck is interested in directing empirical, historical, and pedagogical research projects. More specifically, she is interested in chairing committees in the following areas: Rhetoric and Composition; Computers & Writing; Digital rhetoric; Digital literacy; Online writing instruction; Internet Surveillance and Privacy; Multimodal Composition; Empirical Research Methods and Methodologies; Graduate Student Writing Studies; Composition pedagogies; Social justice and activism; Digital media and making; Cyber-, techno-, and data- feminisms. She interested in being a member of committees in any of the above areas, and in addition, the following areas: Rhetoric and Composition; First-year writing; WPA/TWPA; History of rhetoric, writing studies, literacy; Accessibility in technology/writing design; 19th century women’s rhetorics; Modern rhetorical theory. Within rhetoric and composition, she does not research in the following areas, and may not be a good committee member based on the project: WAC/WID; Transfer; Assessment; Basic writing; Labor activism; Writing Center; Community Literacy; Community-based teaching; L2 writers and readers; Translingual and multilingual pedagogies.

Additional Info: Jacqueline Fay specializes in early medieval literature and culture. She is co-editor of A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, published in 2012 by Blackwell, and Associate Editor for Old English and Old Norse for the five volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval British Literature (2017). She has published articles on a wide range of topics, including documentary texts, saints’ lives, plants, gender, riddles, and aging, and is the author of Engaging Matter in Early Medieval England, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is currently at work on a second book, Sinuous Histories: The Role of Worms in Early Medieval England. Her recent work concentrates on the relationship of the human and non-human in early medieval England, in particular re-reading texts in relation to plant and animal ecology.

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.

Additional Info:: Coordinator of Academic Coaches

Additional Info: Kevin Porter is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English. His areas of interest include composition studies, cultural studies, J. R. R. Tolkien, literary theory, philosophy of language, rhetoric, and theories of meaning. His book Meaning, Language, and Time (Parlor Press, 2006) won the W. Ross Winterowd Award, and his essays have appeared in venues such as College Composition and Communication, College English, Cultural Critique, and JAC. His more recent work includes a contribution to the collection Abducting Writing Studies (Southern Illinois UP, 2017), a forthcoming essay on the notion of kingship in the film Black Panther, and the ongoing compilation of a concordance of the fantasy writings of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Coordinator:: Developmental English Program