Linda Anderson
Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
329C
231-6212
lianders@vt.edu
My principal research and teaching interests are in early modern (Renaissance)
literature, particularly drama, and most particularly Shakespeare. My principal
research approach is close reading, which is just what it sounds like:
I look very closely at the text for details and patterns that help explain
what the text means and how it creates that meaning. (As even that definition
demonstrates, I am not at all cutting-edge.) In the classroom, in addition
to looking (closely) at the text, I emphasize questions about authority,
class, gender, and race. I am also interested in performance issues: How
do the actors transform a script into a performance? What different interpretations
are possible? What choices have to be made? In addition, I’m interested
in looking at this literature as the popular culture of the Elizabethan/Jacobean
age and in light of the popular culture of our own period.
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Kelly Belanger
Associate Professor
Director, Center for the Study of Rhetoric and Writing
340C
231-8458
krbelang@vt.edu
My research interests
span several areas within composition and rhetoric studies. I’ve used historical and qualitative methods to study
worker-education programs and undertaken pedagogical studies focusing
on critical literacy, collaboration, business communication, basic writing,
writing program development, and learning communities. Most recently,
my research focuses on the literacy practices and persuasive strategies
of female athletes, a group whose contributions to the rhetorical tradition
and feminist rhetorics are relatively recent and underrepresented in
rhetorical studies. This work, particularly as it relates to the discourse
surrounding Title IX, has focused my attention on the rhetoric of social
movements, civic discourse, and organizational change as represented
in a variety of genres from government documents to online discussions.
While much writing within a social movement or organization necessarily
aims at building and sustaining support among like-minded people, I’m
especially interested in how existing theories of audience can be adapted
to facilitate and more effectively account for successful communication
across social, cultural, political, and philosophical differences.
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Eva Brumberger 
Assistant Professor
427
231-8321
ebrumber@vt.edu
My research areas include visual communication, intercultural communication,
and pedagogy, all within the broader field of professional communication. Perhaps
due to several years of industry-based work experience, my research interests
tend to be pragmatically-oriented, leaning toward the applied rather than the
highly theoretical. A group of past articles relies on quantitative experimental
methods to investigate the rhetoric of typography-the impact of typeface persona
on readers' interactions with a text. More recently, I have been focusing on
visual communication pedagogy, specifically on the role of visual thinking and
on the integration of the visual into professional and business writing courses.
In addition, I am very interested in intercultural rhetoric and am exploring
intersections between visual communication and intercultural communication.
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Sheila Carter-Tod
Assistant Professor
Associate Director of Composition
443
231-8448
sct@vt.edu
My principal area of research within the field of composition studies broadly
investigates issues of language and empowerment and/or language and dis-empowerment.
Most specifically, I look at the ways in which writing instruction and
writing program design and implementation enhances and/or inhibits student
voice and the development of students' sense of authority in their writing.
I am currently working on a research project that traces the ways in which
various historical movements within the field of composition studies have
sought to address students’ rights to their own language. This project
is also using both qualitative and quantitative research methods to specifically
address problems associated with student language rights in the writing
classroom. I am also looking at ways in which the electronic portfolios
may be used both as tools of programmatic assessment as well as tools for
encouraging, understanding and researching the ways in which students compose
themselves as well as the university environment in which they work.
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Gena Chandler 
Assistant Professor
231
231-7796
gechandl@vt.edu
My area of interest is African American literature with a particular focus
on post-1970 contemporary African American writers. My current work examines
the form and function of story in examining several distinct features that
I have outlined as an integral part of these writers’ narrative strategies.
I am particularly interested in the intersection of story and discourse
in expressing new epistemological and ontological understandings of black
identity as a diasporic condition found in the works of contemporary black
male and female writers. I am also interested in these writers’ expressions
of ideas about black being in their works rather than a monolithic concept
of black identity. My interests in contemporary African American literature
combine with my additional background in early African American literature
prior to 1970. The narrative changes that I examine in contemporary African
American prose arise particularly in response to the burgeoning presence
of several social, political, and cultural movements and these narrative
changes are indelibly indebted to and reflect an awareness of early moments
in the African American literary tradition. I also have a background in
Critical Theory, specifically postcolonial and Diaspora theory.
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Anthony Colaianne 
Associate Professor
355
231-8460
acolaian@vt.edu
My central research interest at this time is the history and evolution
of humanist thought, how it is formulated, stored in archives, and used
to advance understanding. This approach is grounded in the history of ideas,
using the fault line between the Medieval and Renaissance periods to explore
the parallel changes we face in communicating results of humanist inquiry
today. I am especially interested in the contents and organization of medieval
and renaissance libraries—that
is, how writers such as Chaucer, Erasmus, and Petrarch used the textual
sources available to them. I am also interested in the training of teachers
in the study of early English literature, the role of the humanities in
liberal education, and the varieties of humanistic rhetoric.
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James Collier
Associate Professor
433
231-8340
jcollie@vt.edu
My research integrates work in the fields of Scientific and Technical Communication
and Science and Technology Studies (STS)—the history, sociology and philosophy
of science and technology. Specifically, I examine the role of persuasion in
science—the rhetoric of science. My research interests extend to issues
regarding interdisciplinary approaches to science and technology, the social
production of knowledge (social epistemology), non-fiction writing, scientific
controversies, and the role of public intellectuals. My approach is philosophically
and textually based. More broadly, my research explores how we know, critically
assess, and communicate what we know about science and technology. In considering “how
we know what we know”, I analyze ways in which knowledge is both in, and
about, the world. Recently, I have become interested in how academics and intellectuals,
as distinct groups, conceive of, and approach, inquiry. Understanding how we
form problems helps us to create meaningful knowledge—not just put
knowledge to work.
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Fred D’Aguiar
Professor
415
231-7759
fredd@vt.edu
The first thing you do as a black poet is unzip the suit of your black
skin and walk away from it. The second thing you do as a poet is find that
suit of yours that fits you oh so well and step right back into it. That
suit paints behind your eyelids so you see it when you dream. That suit
is osmotic: it lets out sweat, breathes for you – your biggest organ – and keeps out the
elements. All history is in that skin. Poetry plays your skin like an instrument – listen,
touch, taste, look, and sniff. Dream-skin. Skin-song. Human.
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Clare Dannenberg
Associate Professor
423
231-8445
cjdannen@vt.edu
I am a language variationist, and I specialize in studying the phonology (sound
system) and morphosyntax (grammatical structure) of American English dialects.
I am especially interested in looking at the correlations between language and
identity, as language informs and is informed by all aspects of our cultural
socialization. So, I examine how our various identities, such as regional, gender,
ethnic, and socioeconomic, are negotiated over time and social space and reflected
symbolically through our language use. Specifically, my work focuses on American
Indian, Appalachian, and African-American varieties of English. I strongly believe
that research should apply to the real world and as such I facilitate dialect
awareness programs in various classroom environments to work to alleviate dialect
prejudice. I also manage the linguistic speech lab, which provides opportunity
for hands-on language study.
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James Dubinsky 
Associate Professor
Director of Professional Writing
429
231-7909
dubinsky@vt.edu
My research combines historical, rhetorical, and qualitative methods to
study both the teaching of professional communication and the importance
of civic engagement to that work. My focus on civic engagement emerges
from a combination of my historical research into the Aristotelian notion
of technê and the emphasis the field
places on practical wisdom (or phronesis). In addition, my military background,
which plays a role in my commitment to service and to my understanding
of the notion of an ideal orator who serves the public good, has acted
as a bridge between my past scholarly work in war literature and my next
major research project: an historical study of early technical writers,
many of whom worked for the military during World War II, writing documents
ranging from field and technical manuals to major policy statements.
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Charlene Eska
Visiting Assistant Professor
249
231-4271
ceska@vt.edu
My current research focuses on the editing
and translating of medieval legal texts from the British isles, particularly
those written in Old Irish and Old English. Working with
medieval legal texts is a largely interdisciplinary endeavor involving
linguistics, paleography, codicology, archaeology, and social history. I
am also interested in medieval vernacular literature, including texts
written in medieval Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, and Old
and Middle English. My teaching interests include medieval literature,
linguistics, Arthurian literature, law and literature, and medieval
British literature. |
Joe Eska
Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
335
231-6566
eska@vt.edu
I am interested in all aspects of the study of human language, but, in particular,
its cognitive components, e.g., the sound system, word formation, syntax, etc,
especially with regard to how they change over time. I work with data from many
languages, but do most of my research on Celtic, Germanic, Native American, and
Australian languages, and Latin and Greek. My graduate-level offerings usually
bear on the interrelationships between linguistic and cultural behaviour or the
exploitation of linguistic structures and mechanisms for purposes of verbal art,
and various aspects of Celtic studies.
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Carlos Evia 
Assistant Professor
437
231-8396
cevia@vt.edu
My research interests are located in the intersection of information technology,
technical communication, and multiculturalism. From the inside, I am interested
in how technical communicators create and manage knowledge while interacting
with professionals from other fields in the globalized organization. From
the outside, once the technical texts are delivered to the customers, I
like to study the way in which documentation (delivered through the Internet,
print, or digital media) faces political and cultural borders in order
to satisfy users’ needs.
I am also interested in cross-cultural problems in academic environments,
particularly in professional and technical writing courses. I like to adapt
ethnomethodological methods to study problems related to writing studies;
however, I always learn from the specific details of each situation to
decide the most appropriate method.
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Ed Falco
Professor, Director of Creative Writing and the MFA Program
411
231-7743
ed.falco@vt.edu
As a author and a teacher, I’m interested in both print and digital
writing. While most of the stories I’ve published over the years
in journals and books are traditional in structure, I’ve also regularly
published literary and experimental “short fictions” in various
small magazines, and I have recently published a collection of that work,
entitled In the Park
of Culture, with the University of Notre Dame Press. My interest
in digital writing (which is also referred to as “new media writing,” or “hypertext”)
dates back to the earliest days of personal computers, and I have a novel
and a poetry collection available on disk from Eastgate Systems, as well
as various works available online. Sabbath Night in the Church of
the Piranha, a
book of new and selected short stories, was also published recently. WolfPoint, a
novel, was published in October of ’05.
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Shelli Fowler 
Director of GEDI
Torgersen 3210
231-2176
and Associate Professor of English
Shanks 416
231-8468
sbfowler@vt.edu
My research and teaching interests represent a bit of a hybrid approach
in our discipline; that is, my work engages the fields of African American
literature, pedagogy, and composition/rhetoric. I am interested in the
ways in which we read race and recognize agency in the texts of 19th-century
African American women, and in the ways we read and/or misread the rhetoric
of resistance(s) within the larger genre of African American literature.
I am also interested in how Freirean pedagogical praxis might be reinvented
and reshaped to help us better address the teaching of literature and
writing in the complex 21st-century cultural contexts in which we live
and learn. Most recently, my work as the Director of the Graduate Education
Development Institute (GEDI) focuses on exploring how the critically
engaged integration of teaching and technology might help foster creative
and independent learners who are attentive to broader social contexts
in their acquisition of domain knowledges.
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Virginia Fowler
Professor
313
231-6919
vfowler@vt.edu
My research, like my teaching, focuses on African-American literature.
I am most interested in African-American women writers, particularly in
their strategies for resisting, through their art, oppressive practices
and structures, both social and literary. Black women’s fiction, which is currently enjoying a great
flowering, has been one important focus of my work, but I have also written about
black women’s poetry. I have recently become interested in the relationship
of gender to genre and in the relationship of genre to the social and political
contexts out of which—or against which—literature is written; these
relationships seem especially compelling when one considers the development of
African-American women’s literature over the last thirty-five years. My
current project takes me into a different kind of writing, at least for me: I
am writing a literary biography of Nikki Giovanni for a new series on women of
color, which is being published by Praeger. My research for this volume will
involve my surveying a wide range of materials, including Giovanni’s personal
papers at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library, which occupy
nearly two hundred library cartons. I will also be conducting interviews
with scores of people who have known Giovanni at various stages of her
life and her career. The challenge of this project is not simply the challenge
of writing biography, as opposed to criticism, but also (and much more
daunting) the challenge of writing a biography of a living writer.
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Thomas Gardner
Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor of English
417
231-6901
tom.gardner@vt.edu
I work on American poetry, with a particular emphasis on the way a poem
enacts the movement of the mind and emotions. I concentrate on contemporary
poets, often reading them alongside philosophers (Wittgenstein, Stanley
Cavell) or earlier writers (Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot). In two of my books,
I’ve paired critical
analyses with interviews with poets and am now completing a book-length interview
with a single writer—a form that interests me and seems to fit my way of
thinking. My own creative work—a play, some poems—could also
be seen as another attempt to enact the process of reading, from a slightly
different angle.
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Diana George
Professor
Director of Composition
406
231-4729
dianag@vt.edu
Currently, I am working on four distinct but interconnected projects. The
first has to do with the role the alternative press plays in the work of
small, nonprofit activist organizations—especially street papers,
public advocacy sheets, and small newspapers coming out of networks involved
with homelessness and issues of poverty and violence. An early version
of that work appears in the journal Reflections.
The second project has to do with the connection between popular visual representations
and public policy. An article, co-authored with Diane Shoos, on lynching photos
and other visual representations of execution appears in College English (July
2005). A second visual culture and literacy project, this one with Mariolina
Salvatore, has to do with the role holy cards or immaginette have played in the
school and religious lives of Catholics. Finally, my ongoing interest in the
teaching of writing is reflected in the textbook Reading Culture co-authored
with John Trimbur and in Picturing Texts written with Cynthia Selfe,
Lester Faigley, and Anna Palcek.
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Nikki Giovanni 
University Distinguished Professor
Gloria D. Smith Professor of Black Studies
212
231-9453
The recognition of Middle Passage as our porthole to prolonged space travel is
a unique way to understand both slavery and space which I explore in Quilting
the Black Eyed Pea.These two apparent opposites, our shameful past and the
possibility of water and atmosphere on a distant star, must combine to make not
just poetry but a better theory of life. My primary interest is the evolution
of Black America and the impact of that evolving upon Earth. Rhythm and Blues
was born from a fusion of gospel and jazz. Fusions continue in many other aspects
of the Black experience whether it is food, clothing, painting, movies or any
other art. We even Rock the Vote these days. Charles Darwin went in search of
The Origins of the Species. Much of his work has been used against him and the
rest of us. I am in search of Darwin by land and sea to put together my theory
of luck and happenstance. If luck and happenstance are factors, then responsibility
has to change. My primary interest is in learning something new.
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Peter Graham
Professor
401
231-6715
pegraham@vt.edu
Various research interests: 19th-century British literature and culture (especially
the Romantics, with Lord Byron and Jane Austen looming largest), irony, Philhellenism,
Darwin and Darwinism, and medical humanities, particularly the relations of literature
and medicine. My typical method of investigation pairs close reading or explication
with situating literary texts in their social, historical, and cultural contexts.
Current projects include a comparative book on Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, and
the cold, clear, empirical perspective they share and an essay for a collection
on Byron and ghosts.
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Bernice Hausman
Professor
206
231-5076
bhausman@vt.edu
My research crosses two main interdisciplinary fields: feminist theory and cultural
studies of medicine. In both areas I am interested in the concept of gender and
how it grounds cultural practices and body projects. Likewise, I investigate
the propensity of technological progress and technical practices to transform
commonplace perspectives on the body and personhood, including gendered identity
and sexuality. I have published one book on the emergence of transsexuality in
the mid-twentieth century and another on breastfeeding in contemporary American
culture. Both texts explore medical and popular representations of the sexed
body through semiotic and rhetorical analysis. I am also interested in queer
theory, narratology, contemporary women's fiction, and the novel of marriage
(pre-, proto-, and post-feminist).
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Paul Heilker 
Associate Professor, Co-Director of Ph.D. Program
414
231-8444
Paul.Heilker@vt.edu
I try to develop thoughtful, theoretical, philosophical examinations of
the processes and products of college-level writing instruction in the
hope that we may create more useful and fulfilling experiences for composition
students and faculty alike. To do so, I look hard at both a variety of
documents (historical treatises on rhetoric and teaching, 20th century
accounts of poststructural theory, contemporary textbooks, and the students’ own writing, to name but a few) and at my
own experiences and practices as a writer and teacher. One result of this work
is my abiding interest in creative nonfiction, especially the exploratory essay,
which I read and write as a literary artifact, use as a vehicle for my scholarship,
and employ as an alternative, empowering genre for students’ thinking
and writing.
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Bob Hicok
Associate Professor
243
231-4479
hicok@vt.edu
I write poems and stories. I have little faith or interest in my thoughts
on writing. Those who do a thing are often too close to be perceptive commentators,
particularly where love is involved. I love writing, maybe most of all
because it doesn’t matter, because poems don’t lift bridges or make refrigerators
shinier. The nakedness of the endeavor—just one person, sitting at a desk,
trying to express something they feel in a way that will allow others into their
mind—may be among the most human things we do. We are the mouths
of the world, and through poetry we speak.
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| Christine Kiebuzinska 
Professor
407
231-7712
chrystia@vt.edu
My research and teaching reflect my Comparative Literature training and
my background in European literature, particularly German and Polish,
Czech and Russian. Much of my research focuses on reception studies,
the way that a given work is interpreted across cultures. Drama is my
primary genre including theatre history and theory of representation.
However, I am also trained to cover the history of realism that includes
both drama and fiction. I am also very interested in film theory and
history of film. Among my areas of research in comparative literature
is the study of literary movements and particular modes of representation,
such as the Holocaust in representation in European and American film
and literature, the literature of the absurd and grotesque with a particular
focus on Central European twentieth century literature to include writers
such as Kafka, Gombrowicz and Kundera, and the continuity of the Faust
myth.
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Shoshana Milgram Knapp
Associate Professor
227
231-8462
dashiell@vt.edu
My main research focus has been nineteenth-century fiction—American, British,
French, and Russian—with some attention to related twentieth-century writers.
I also work with the Hebrew Bible, film, and non-fictional prose. In studying
the responses of one writer to another, I have published on such subjects as
Leo Tolstoy’s reading of George Eliot, George Eliot’s reading of
Victor Hugo, Chekhov’s reading of Herbert Spencer, Pinter’s cinematic
adaptation of a novel by John Fowles, and the impact of William James and Fyodor
Dostoevsky on Ursula K. LeGuin. Some of my research is a kind of literary detection.
I wrote the first scholarly articles about the mysterious “Victoria Cross” (whose
dates—1868-1952—and actual name had never before been documented).
I am currently writing a study of the life of Ayn Rand up to 1957 (i.e.,
from her birth in St. Petersburg, Russia, to the publication of her final
novel, Atlas
Shrugged); my project, which is based on access to primary sources,
presents her vision of the human ideal—the individual, rational mind in triumphant
action—as the integrating principle of her public and private life.
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Jeff Mann
Associate Professor
210
231-7706
jemann2@vt.edu
My creative work ranges among several genres. In poetry, I often focus on the
complexities of love relationships or the countryside and culture of Southern
Appalachia, though lately I have also been examining the mythologies of Northern
Europe. My creative nonfiction deals with the gay/lesbian experience, especially
in Appalachia, as well as the vagaries of aging, the legacies of family, the
many facets of eroticism, and travel in both Europe and North America. My fiction
portrays the darker depths and intensities of gay male relationships. Much of
my creative writing is informed by my eager interests in Southern literature,
gay/lesbian literature, Appalachian folk culture, and Appalachian literature.
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Erika Meitner
Assistant Professor
410
231-7728
Meitner@vt.edu
As a poet and teacher of creative writing,
I am generally obsessed with unhinging and investigating the connections
between emotion, language, and story. I am more specifically
interested in different ways of constructing narratives — straight-up,
fractured, beat-boxed, lyric, winding, and metaphorically luminous
testimony-poems. Though it is deeply un-sexy, I preach the gospel
of syntactical energy. My work tends to deal with women’s
bodies and female sexuality, the perils and pleasures of adolescence,
urban peripheries and interstitial spaces. My writing is often
informed by my interests in very contemporary American poetry of all
schools and un-schools, poetry and performance, and ethnic American
fiction. In addition to being a poet, I moonlight as an academic. I’m
currently pursuing a doctorate in Religion and Culture, focusing on
Jewish Studies, at the University of Virginia. My research interests
include Jewish and Muslim women’s literature, the Jewish-American
novel, material religion, and new ritual.
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Nancy Metz
Associate Professor, Associate Chair
308
231-8467
nancy.metz@vt.edu
My research specialty is nineteenth-century English fiction, specifically
the novels and journalism of Charles Dickens. My work has been described
as “literary
ethnography” providing readings of the novels “which interpret Dickens’s
words in relation to the culture that shaped them, and which originally gave
them meaning.” Thus, I often find myself digging through an eclectic array
of materials—conduct books, sanitary tracts, emigrant manuals, to
name just a few of the texts I consider. I am particularly interested in
Dickens as the great poet of the Victorian city. Several of my essays analyze
Dickens's profound understanding of the city as a human artifact created
over time through a complex process of accretion, encroachment, adaptation,
and archaeological layering.
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Daniel Mosser
Professor
229
231-7753
dmosser@vt.edu
My research focuses on the material structures of the manuscripts and pre-1500
editions of the Canterbury Tales and the relationship of those structures
to their presentation of the text. The methodologies I employ in this work
are known as codicology and bibliography. I publish descriptions of these “witnesses” to
the Canterbury Tales in association with the Canterbury Tales Project,
on CD-ROM and the internet. An offshoot of this work is my interest in
watermarks, and in this regard I am involved in a large, ongoing project
in collaboration with Ernest Sullivan and Len Hatfield: The Thomas L. Gravell
Watermark Archive and Database (www.gravell.org).
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Fritz H. Oehlschlaeger
Professor
409
231-5138
fritzoeh@vt.edu
My current research interests involve the relationships between literature
and ethics and literature and Christian theology. My primary writing at
the moment is on a book manuscript looking at bioethical matters from a
standpoint that is partly, but not wholly, influenced by Christian ethics.
I continue also to be interested in various aspects of American literature,
particularly but not exclusively that of the nineteenth-century. Thoreau
and the contemporary writer Wendell Berry are figures on whom I intend
to concentrate, at least for a time, after I finish the manuscript on which
I’m now working. A further and ongoing
interest of mine is in the debate concerning what I’ll call the conflict
between liberalism and tradition as it’s being played out in American
democracy and treated in work by such figures as MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Milbank,
Stout, Rorty, et al.
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Kelly Pender
Assistant Professor
445
231-6150
pender@vt.edu
My principal research areas are the history and theory of rhetoric and
writing. Recent work, for example, takes up the 2500-year-old debate
about rhetoric and techne, arguing that even in the light of the sometimes-radical
ways that postmodern and post-human theory have changed our understanding
of language, we can still understand rhetoric as a teachable, productive
art. Importantly, I try to demonstrate that such an understanding does
not reduce rhetoric to a mere tool but instead embraces both its inherent
value and its instrumental value, as well as the complex relationship
between the two. Other research interests include rhetorical theories
of invention and interpretation (including the debate about whether rhetoric
is a primarily productive or hermeneutic art), ethics in rhetoric and
writing (e.g., the ethics of particular theories and pedagogies of writing,
as well as the historical relationship between rhetoric and ethics),
cultural studies and composition, and, most recently, rhetorics of “pathography,” or,
writing about illness and death.
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|
Katrina M. Powell
Associate Professor
414
231-4729
kmpowell@vt.edu
I am interested in representations and constructions of the self, and
how those issues are tied to issues of literacy. Whether studying non-fiction,
literature, or student writing, I analyze the ways writers construct
selves that adhere to or resist cultural codes. Whatever the genre, I
ask questions about how individuals see and present themselves to others,
and the ways that race, class, gender, region, sexual identity, ethnicity,
and religion can affect those presentations. Recently I studied a collection
of letters written by mountain families in the 1930s. These letters were
written in response to families' imminent displacement from their homes
in order to form Shenandoah National Park. I examined the ways the letters
are a "situated literacy event," the ways that
"displacement rhetorics" tend to exclude the very people
being displaced, and the ways that the letter writers resisted their
displacement through self-representation. My current project extends
this notion of resistance through writing by studying the autobiographical
texts of several feminist writers. Using performance, genre, and
autobiography theories, this project examines the ways that life
writing functions as activism.
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David H. Radcliffe 
Professor
412
231-7663
drad@vt.edu
I am a literary historian and antiquary working in British poetry from
the Elizabethans through the romantics, taking a particular interest in
how modern ideas about culture evolved from the older idea of "genius" that
linked concepts of literature, education, and originality to national and
regional identities. More particularly, I look at how traditions operated
within the context of market economies in England, Scotland, Ireland, and
America, tracking the diffusion of English literature as it developed from
small coteries in courts and universities to become the broad-based institution
we know today. I can lend a hand with projects involving bibliographic
and philological research, and with electronic texts, databases, and dynamic
Web pages.
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Lucinda Roy
Professor of English and Alumni Distinguished Professor
413
231-6146
lroy@vt.edu
I am a novelist and poet, so my primary focus is creative writing. I enjoy
working with writers on their novels, short stories, and poetry collections,
and I work best with those who are profoundly curious about themselves,
about their assumptions, and about the world around them. I am fascinated
by prosody and technique, and I believe that it is necessary for writers
to appreciate the power of language, the complexity of form, and the demands
of perspective before they can write anything meaningful. I am preoccupied
with the process that is involved when one transforms experience into artistic
expression, and I try to experiment with different genres to see how one’s
subject matter is altered by the limitations and potential inherent in
a particular form.
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Carolyn Rude
Professor
Department Chair
303
231-8466
Carolyn.Rude@vt.edu
Within professional writing, I am interested in the genres that influence
policy and decision making, especially reports. One specific interest
is environmental policy. I draw on rhetorical theory to investigate ways
in which discourse shapes values and action, considering not only individual
texts but also texts as they are part of comprehensive strategic action
to influence change. A recent article, “New
Perspectives on Rhetorical Delivery” (TCQ Summer 2004), considers
the life history of a report, now a decade old, as it was used in field
work to encourage use of renewable energy and as it generated variations,
other genres, and a new edition as well as changes in policy and action.
I am also interested in pedagogy, genre theory, and information design.
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Steven Salaita
Assistant Professor
201
231-7696
salaita@vt.edu
I like to work at the intersection of scholarly, aesthetic, political,
and autobiographical discourses. My work focuses largely on Arab Americans,
a focus for which I was somehow prepared in the field of Native American
Studies. This background has led to a serious interest in all sorts of
comparative ethnic studies and an increasing focus on critical race studies.
I am an avid reader of all types of modern American literature, with
a special proclivity for Native literature, Arab American literature,
and so-called immigrant literature. I also try and find time for Anglophone
world literature, particularly that arising from Palestine and the Arab
Diaspora. These are the categories in which I have invested the majority
of my research. The rest of my research is trained on problematizing
the assumptions that invest those categories with meaning--i.e., I have
a secondary interest in literary theory.
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Robert Siegle 
Professor
215
231-7739
bob.siegle@vt.edu
I'm
interested in weirdness—by which I mean those other voices that have always
resisted the long march from Rome to Iraq in western culture. I focus particularly
upon three zones of recent work in this other tradition, or tradition of otherness:
recent American culture often ghettoed (or is that garroted) as "postmodern," recent
thought often ghettoed (see above) as "poststructural," and writing
that analyzes the global order from what is often ghettoed (see above) as "postcolonial." Such
works have their antecedents going back at least to Heraclitus and frequently
work by shredding from without, or imploding from within, the forms within which
what we call "The West" takes place. I am fascinated by what
happens when writing and other media mix up the borders of form, media,
genre, culture, and view. I admire the dexterity and resourcefulness
of artists who contest the drone-thought of their eras. I try not to
be a drone when I teach or write about them (but, then, nobody's perfect).
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Paul Sorrentino
Professor
405
231-8650
psorrent@vt.edu
My research focuses on American literature, especially the late nineteenth
century. As founder of the Stephen Crane Society and editor of its journal,
I am involved in several projects pertaining to Crane. I am currently interested
in textual, biographical, and critical issues: How does a modern editor
establish the “correct” text
to read, how does biography affect the way we read the text, and what are valid
ways of interpreting it? Put another way, how does one reconcile the fact that
the published version of Crane’s most famous novel, The Red Badge of
Courage, differs dramatically from what he wrote in the manuscript,
and how does one sort out fact from fiction when one realizes that the
most influential book about Crane’s life and work is based on forgeries?
I am also interested in how culture influences the way that texts are
written and marketed.
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J. D. Stahl 
Professor
312
231-8447
stahl@vt.edu
My research investigates literature that embodies messages bearing multiple
codes and cultural contexts. This includes children’s literature,
which is written by one group (adults) for another group (young people)
and which has evolved from didacticism to entertainment and (sometimes)
subversion. I am also interested in post-colonial literature: novels and
stories that describe the experience of having been colonized, and the
conflicted relationship to a language that was once used to dominate and
exploit. My writing about Mark Twain has delved into his perceptions of
European history and culture and how these perceptions furnished him with
images for describing his expectations about masculinity and femininity.
I am perennially intrigued by how different cultures perceive and represent
each other.
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Ernest W. Sullivan 
Edward S. Diggs Professor of English
408
231-6918
ewsii@vt.edu
Most of my research and teaching relates to authors who published between
1500 and 1700, with a primary focus on John Donne. My primary research
approach is textual bibliography—the study of the creation, transmission,
and consumption of literary texts and the artifacts on which they are inscribed.
The chief goals of this research are: (1) to understand how all of the
artifacts that contain the text(s) came into being and (2) to use information
about the genesis, transmission, and consumption of the text in all its
forms to illuminate the meaning of the texts. In actual practice, this
approach involves locating the artifacts (manuscripts, books, stones, etc.);
analyzing their physical characteristics (watermarks, ink, paper folds,
bindings, physical wear, handwriting, copyright records, wax seals, etc.);
using computer programs to sort out the relationships among their texts;
and, finally, establishing a text that most accurately represents what
the author wrote (for those using an author-centered approach) and critically
studying that text in the context of any other possibly authorial versions
of the text. Textual bibliography is not author or period specific; thus,
I have written on authors ranging from Shakespeare to Joseph Conrad as
well as on bibliographical theory.
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Karen Swenson
Associate Professor
435
231-8350
karen.swenson@vt.edu
My teaching
reflects my academic background and publications in Medieval Studies,
particularly the literature of the Anglo-Saxon and Norse cultures but
also extending into the literature of Middle English and the High Middle
Ages. My work has focused on theories of genre, narration, and performance.
My current research explores those theories within the context of digital
culture. I am writing about narrative and mimetic negotiation as they
occur within the best-selling “reality-based” game
The Sims. I am using tools of literary analysis to examine The Sims’ implicit
(and sometimes explicit) interrogation of the relationship between “reality” and “representation.”
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Dennis Welch
Associate Professor
205
231-7721
dwelch@vt.edu
Blake, Kant, and the Sublime—this project uncovers three avenues
by which Kantian ideas on time, space, and sublimity could have reached
Blake and with which he would have contended. The three avenues were (1)
associates of Blake who were avid (published) Kantians; (2) English studies
of Kant; and (3) substantial reviews of the studies in the Analytical Review,
whose publisher Blake worked for in the 1790s and whose other reviews on
Kant came from the University of Jena (the hotbed of Kantianism at the
time). Using relevant work by Adorno, Deleuse, Lyotard, and Nancy, I examine
several dimensions and problematics of the Kantian sublime that Blake would
have intuited and reacted to.
Blake and the Eighteenth Century—this project explores several
areas of English life and culture that Blake attended to closely. The
chapters include “Education and Identity in Songs of Experience,” “Gender,
Race, and Essence in Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” “Sensibility
and Commerce: Blake’s Apocalyptic Reply,” “Famine and
Economics in Blake’s Prophecies of 1795,” “Blake’s
Gift Economy,” “Blake vs. Burke and Smith on the Sublime”,
and “Blakean Infinitude.”
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