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Graduate Faculty

The graduate faculty in the English Department have a wide range of specialties and research interests. They publish research in Children's Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, Creative Writing, English Education and Pedagogy, Linguistics/TESOL, Literary and Cultural Studies, Publishing, and Technical Writing. To learn more about an individual faculty member, click on his or her name.

Children's Literature

Creative Writing

  • Gabe Gudding

    Gabe Gudding

    Moral Philosophy as it Relates to Literary Production, Animals, Animality, Veganism, Hybrid Texts, Hybrid Writing, Sociology of Literary Production and Cultural Formation of Literary Taste, Transgeneric Writing.

  • Duriel Harris

    Duriel Harris

    Improvisation and Black Aesthetics, Memory and Trauma Studies, WOC Feminisms, Digital Technologies and the African Diaspora, 18th and 19th Century African American Literature, Oppositional/Experimental poetics.

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    Ray Levy

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    Jose Antonio Villaran

English Education and Pedagogy

  • Shelby Boehm

    Shelby Boehm

    Literacy play, humanizing pedagogies, young adult literature, secondary English teacher education

  • Danielle Lillge

    Danielle Lillge

    Professional development, secondary English teacher education, literacy, facilitation, interactional ethnography, qualitative methods

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    Maggie Morris Davis

Literary and Cultural Studies

  • Christopher Breu

    Christopher Breu

    20th Century American Literature, Popular Culture, Cultural and Critical Theory, Gender and Sexuality.

  • Christopher De Santis

    Christopher De Santis

    19th and 20th century American and African-American Literature, the Reconstruction Era and its Legacies, Racial Ideologies and National Identity, The Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Southern Literature.

  • Katherine Ellison

    Katherine Ellison

    17th- and 18th-Century Cryptography, Intelligence Networks and Swarms, Postal Systems, and the History of Information.

  • Susan Kalter

    Susan Kalter

    New American Literary History and the Archival Recovery of Noncanonical American Texts, 18th and 19th Century Literary and Cultural Studies, Early 20th Century Studies, Native American Studies/Native American Literatures, Ethnic Studies, Multiculturalism, Critical Race Theory and Post-Colonial/Anti-Colonial Theory.

  • Susan Kim

    Susan Kim

    Old English Language and Literature, Medieval Literature, History of the English Language.

  • Tara Lyons

    Tara Lyons

    Early Modern Drama, Book History, Rare Books, Sammelbande, Digital Humanities, Gender Studies, and Theater History and Performance.

  • William McBride

    William McBride

    Film Style, Drama Stage and Page, Biblical Hermeneutics, Cultural Theory, Formal Analysis, Coming of Age, Monotheism, Hitchcock.

  • Brian Rejack

    Brian Rejack

    19th century British Literature, Romanticism, Food writing and gastronomy, New media studies,Print culture and book history, Gaming and Internet culture.

  • Rebecca Saunders

    Rebecca Saunders

    Literary and Cultural Theory; Comparative Literature; Continental Philosophy; Late 19th and 20th Century Literatures of Europe and Africa, particularly of France, Greece, the Maghreb, and South Africa; Theories of Nationalism and Globalization; (Trans)gender and Postcolonial Studies; the Concept of the Foreign; Trauma and Modernity.

Publishing and Textual Studies

  • Katherine Ellison

    Katherine Ellison

    17th- and 18th-Century Publishing and Reading Histories, Textual Studies, Manuscript and Archival Studies, Digital Humanities and Editing.

  • Duriel Harris

    Duriel Harris

    Improvisation and Black Aesthetics, Memory and Trauma Studies, WOC Feminisms, Digital Technologies and the African Diaspora, 18th and 19th Century African American Literature, Oppositional/Experimental poetics.

  • Tara Lyons

    Tara Lyons

    Early Modern Drama, Book History, Rare Books, Sammelbande, Digital Humanities, Gender Studies, and Theater History and Performance.

  • Ela Przybylo

    Ela Przybylo

    Dr. Ela Przybylo is Associate Professor in the Department of English and core faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Illinois State University.

  • Brian Rejack

    Brian Rejack

    19th century British Literature, Romanticism, Food writing and gastronomy, New media studies,Print culture and book history, Gaming and Internet culture.

Rhetoric and Writing Studies

  • Angela Haas

    Dr. Rachel Gramer

    Narrative research, feminist methodologies and pedagogies, new writing teacher education/preparation, writing pedagogies, first-year writing, multimodal composition, writing program administration.

  • Elise Hurley

    Elise Hurley

    Professional and technical communication theory and pedagogy, visual communication and visual rhetorics, visual culture, rhetoric and composition studies, community outreach and civic engagement, digital rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, multimodal composition.

  • Julie Jung

    Julie Jung

    Feminisms and Rhetorics, Disability Rhetorics, Feminist Rhetorical Science Studies, Posthumanist Rhetorics, Burkean rhetorical theory.

  • Eda Ozyesilpinar

    Eda Ozyesilpinar

    Border rhetorics, rhetorical cartography and rhetorics of space/place, comparative and cultural rhetorics, non-Western rhetorics, digital rhetorics, rhetorical theory and histories of rhetorics (rhetorics of and from non-Western and underrepresented groups), feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial theories and methodologies.

  • Amy E. Robillard

    Amy E. Robillard

    Composition Theory, Rhetorical Theory, Authorship Studies, Life Writing and Autobiography, Creative Non-fiction, Academic Writing, Class Studies.

  • Dr. Barbi Smyser-Fauble

    Dr. Barbi Smyser-Fauble

    Disability studies, feminist theories, medical rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, digital and visual rhetorics, new media reading and composing strategies, Inter/intra cultural rhetorics and technical communication histories and theories.

  • Dr. Joyce Walker

    Dr. Joyce Walker

    Intersections where humans and their composing tools meet.

Rhetoric and Technical Communication

  • Angela Haas

    Angela Haas

    Cultural Rhetorics, Digital Rhetorics, Visual Rhetorics, American Indian Rhetorics, Histories and Theories of Rhetoric, Alternative Cyberfeminist Theory, Decolonial Theory and Methodology, Global and Inter-/Intra-Cultural Professional/Technical Communication, Cultural Usability Studies.

  • Elise Hurley

    Elise Hurley

    Professional and technical communication theory and pedagogy, visual communication and visual rhetorics, visual culture, rhetoric and composition studies, community outreach and civic engagement, digital rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, multimodal composition.

  • Dr. Barbi Smyser-Fauble

    Dr. Barbi Smyser-Fauble

    Disability studies, feminist theories, medical rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, digital and visual rhetorics, new media reading and composing strategies, Inter/intra cultural rhetorics and technical communication histories and theories.

  • Derek Sparby

    Derek Sparby

    Digital, feminist, and cultural rhetorics and technical communication, including social media, memes, and online aggression; gender and identity in digital public discourse; ethics and participation; tactical technical communication and crisis communication.

TESOL and Applied Linguistics

  • Kristina Lewis

    Kristina Lewis

    Language Teacher Identity, Second Language Teacher Education, Mentoring/Supervision in Teacher Education, Classroom Discourse Analysis, Practitioner Inquiry, Visual Methods in Applied Linguistics, Teacher Reflection

  • Lisya Seloni

    Lisya Seloni

    Second Language Writing, Academic Socialization, Critical Pedagogy in TESOL, Discourse Analysis, Educational Ethnography, Linguistic Landscape.

Theoretical Linguistics

  • K. Aaron Smith

    K. Aaron Smith

    Linguistics, Morphosyntax, Grammaticization, History of English, Germanic Philology.

  • Jesus Olguin Martinez

    Jesus Olguin Martinez

    My research straddles the subfields of usage-based linguistics, typology, morphosyntax, semantics, discourse, language documentation and description, corpus linguistics, and language contact.