Welcome to the web page of

I am a relative newcomer to the world of academia. After spending more than a decade in corporate endeavors, I am now a junior-level faculty member teaching literature and writing. Currently, I hold the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Shepherd is a public, liberal arts institution about 90 minutes from Washington, DC. At Shepherd I teach courses in American, world, and ethnic literature, as well as composition and science writing.

In May of 2005, I graduated from The George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC with a Ph.D. in English. Most of my courses at GW and at William and Mary, where I completed an M.A., focused on American literature, but my field of specialization, independent studies, and certain classes in my graduate studies adopted a more geographically expansive purview. The dissertation I wrote was on twentieth-century writers from both sides of the Atlantic and their experiences of exile. Specifically, I investigated how queer sexuality, ethnicity, and national identity intersected in the lives of Christopher Isherwood, Klaus Mann, James Baldwin, and Arturo Islas and how these oppositional forces manifested themselves in their writing. (Click here if you'd like to read an abstract of my project.) If you're interested in taking a look at the reading list I developed in preparation for my field exam and dissertation—a rather long catalog of queer/exilic texts, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers from several national traditions who experienced some manifestation of exile—click here.

Should you be interested in learning more about me, you can find a brief overview by taking a look at my curriculum vitae. For more complete information, click on any of the hypertext links below. I will tell you, by way of conclusion, that I don't see my time in the business arena as separate from or unimportant to my new career in academia. Rather, my corporate experiences fostered in me what I like to call a pragmatic approach to teaching and interacting with students.

 

Isabel Allende
James Baldwin
Christopher Isherwood
Thomas Mann
Toni Morrison
Eudora Welty
Walt Whitman