Graduate Faculty

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: Desirée Henderson specializes in American literature, life writing, and women's writing, and is the author of two books: Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870 (Ashgate, 2011) and How to Read a Diary: Critical Contexts and Interpretive Strategies for 21st-Century Readers (Routledge, 2019). She has published numerous essays including in the edited collections A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry and The New Dickinson Studies, and in journals such as a/b: Auto/biography Studies, American Periodicals, Early American Literature, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Her research interests include: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, feminist literary criticism and women's writing, genre studies, autobiography studies, archival research and manuscript studies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).

Additional Info: Amy Hodges is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington, specializing in technical writing and professional communication. Her research examines the language, writing, and communication strategies of multilingual engineers in transnational corporations, and she also researches what writing programs can do in order to create a more inclusive environment and prepare all writers for linguistically diverse workplaces. Her work has appeared in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication and the Writing Center Journal. Prior to her appointment at UTA, Dr. Hodges taught technical writing, composition and rhetoric, and English as a Second Language courses in the US, Qatar, and Singapore. Her research interests include: Technical and Professional Communication, Multilingual Writers, Rhetoric and Composition, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines.

Research Interests: Penelope Ingram works at the intersections of race and gender theory. She teaches courses in critical theory, race theory, postcolonial theory and literature, women's and gender studies, and film studies. She has directed dissertations and theses in the fields of ethics, queer studies, postcolonial theory, motherhood, pedagogy and literature, African-American literature, and popular culture. She is the author of The Signifying Body: Toward an Ethics of Sexual and Racial Difference(SUNY 2008) and numerous essays on race and gender. She recently completed a book manuscript on the role contemporary film and television play in shaping views about race in the US. She has twice been awarded the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Teaching Award for Tenured Faculty and was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at UT Arlington in 2017. She was nominated twice for Outstanding Graduate Advisor and received an Honorable Mention in 2014. She was a nominee for the Regents of Texas Outstanding Teaching Award in 2018 and was a finalist for the UTA Doctoral Mentoring Award in 2020.

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: Cedrick May is a Professor of English and the Digital Arts, and the author of The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon: Poems and Essays (University of Tennessee Press, 2017) and Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835 (University of Georgia Press, 2008). Professor May’s specializations and research interests include African-American Literature, Early-American Literature, Digital Humanities, Film Studies, and Screenwriting.

Additional Info: Tim Morris has published three books (on American poetry, sport literature, and children's literature) plus articles, essays, and journalism on topics ranging from Emily Dickinson and her contemporaries (Elizabeth Stoddard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, George Eliot) to baseball, suburban life, Civil War fiction, genre fiction for children, translation, and digital culture. He has served on nearly 200 graduate committees on a much wider range of topics.

Additional Info: Erin Murrah-Mandril earned her Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico. She is an Assistant Professor of English and a core faculty member of the Center for Mexican American Studies. Her research focuses on Mexican American literary recovery and literary history, and she teaches American literature and Mexican American Studies courses. Her book, In the Mean Time: The Temporal Colonization of Mexican America, examines the ways Mexican American authors navigated the colonizing force of U.S. time in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Additional Info: Nathanael O’Reilly is the author of six collections of poetry, including (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), Preparations for Departure (UWAP Poetry, 2017), and Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015). More than two hundred of his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies published in twelve countries. He is also the author, editor and co-editor of four other books: New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham (UWAP, 2017); Tim Winton: Critical Essays (UWAP, 2014), co-edited with Lyn McCredden; Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel (Teneo Press, 2012); and Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (Cambria Press, 2010). He is the author of dozens of journal articles, book chapters and reviews and was President of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies from 2012 to 2016. His research interests include: Poetry and poetics, especially place, landscape and belonging; post-1800 Australian, British, Irish and Postcolonial literature; suburbia; nationalism.

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.

Additional Info: Tim Richardson is the author of Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric (Parlor Press, 2013). His work has appeared in collections such as Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman and in journals such as Enculturation, JAC, Kairos, Popular Culture Review, and Pre/Text. His teaching and research interests include antique and contemporary rhetorics, psychoanalytic theory, and sound studies.

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.

Additional Info: Jim Warren specializes in rhetoric and composition and has published in Across the Disciplines, American Secondary Education, English in Texas, English Journal, Cognition and Instruction, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Writing Program Administration, and Written Communication. His research interests include adolescent literacy, argumentation theory, education policy, first-year composition, and teacher education. He has served on more than 70 graduate committees.