English & Philosophy

Faculty Achievements

Michel Aaij (Ph.D., University of Alabama) is a medievalist and linguist, specializing in Old English language and literature and in continental Europe during the age of conversion. He has presented and published on various subjects, most recently hagiography; publishes regular review articles on Dutch and German scholarly works; and is currently at work on a book-length study of the modern veneration of St. Boniface in Germany, the Netherlands, and England. His interests lie in modern uses, appropriations and appreciations of the (medieval) past.

Nancy G. Anderson (M.A., University of Virginia), a Distinguished Teaching Fellow, has published The Writer’s Alliance: A Reader for Composition (1991) and has written about authors of Southern and American literature, especially Lella Warren and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. She has edited several books, including Lella Warren’s Family Fiction (1989) and Kay White Schad’s They Call Me Kay: A Courtship in Letters (1994), and is currently working on the papers of novelist and historian Richard Marius. She is Director of Actions Build Community: The AUM-Taulbert Initiative, which was recognized by USA Weekend and the Paul Newman Foundation in April 2004 for sponsoring one of the top ten Make A Difference projects in the nation. Professor Anderson was recently awarded the Current-Garcia Award from the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama, the state's highest honor that can be bestowed on an English professor.

Oliver Billingslea (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison), an American literature specialist, has written and taught on the contemporary novel as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, and William Faulkner. Dr. Billingslea is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow.

Robert C. Evans (Ph.D., Princeton University), Distinguished Teaching Professor, Distinguished Research Professor, and former AUM Alumni Professor, is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (1989) and Habits of the Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson’s Reading (1995), as well as nearly a hundred articles and notes. He specializes in literature of the English Renaissance and literary theory, but has also published on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American literature, especially short fiction. He is especially interested in collaborative work with students. Dr. Evans was recently awarded “Outstanding Teacher” South Atlantic Association of Departments of English (SAADE) award for 2006 for excellence in teaching.

W. B. Gerard (Ph.D., University of Florida) teaches eighteenth-century British literature and essay writing. He has published on Laurence Sterne, the interpretive value of book illustrations, and William Blake in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, among others. His book, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (Ashgate, 2006), explores the roles of visual language and visual imagery in the work of Laurence Sterne. He has edited a collection of essays discussing Sterne's sermons for the University of Delaware Press and is co-editing a festschrift (with E. Derek Taylor and Robert C. Walker) in honor of his mentor, Melvyn New. He is Co-Editor of the bi-annual journal The Scriblerian and a regular contributor to The Shandean.

Alan Gribben (Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley), Head of the Department of English and Philosophy, has written frequently about Mark Twain’s life, image and reading. He was named the Henry Nash Smith Fellow at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College in 1997, co-founded and served as President of the Mark Twain Circle of America, and was made a Distinguished Research Professor in 1998. The second edition of his Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction (1980) will appear shortly. He serves on the editorial board of American Literary Realism, among other journals. He was recently the recipient of the AUM Alumni Association's Faculty Service Award. Dr. Gribben received the Dr. Guinevera A. Nance Alumni Professorship in 2007.

Samantha Harvey (Ph.D., Cambridge University ) is a specialist in British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism in British and American literature. She has edited a book on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge's Responses: On Nature and Vision (Continuum, 2008) which presents the best of Coleridge’s writing about the natural world and the nature of perception. She is currently writing a book on S.T. Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and transatlantic Romanticism for publication with Ashgate. Other areas of interest include religion and literature, and literature of the environment. Dr. Harvey also competed in the 2004 Olympics in the sport of Modern Pentathlon.

Alexander L. Kaufman (Ph.D., Purdue University) is a specialist in late-medieval English literature, particularly historical writing and outlaw studies. He has published on Sir Thomas Malory, early medieval outlaw tales (including Robin Hood), and medieval historiography. His current project is a study of Jack Cade's 1450 Rebellion in the London Chronicles.

Joyce Kelley (Ph.D., University of Iowa) specializes in British and transnational modernism. She joins the department of English after a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Her other teaching and research interests include literature by women, Victorian literature, music and literature, children's literature, and travel writing. She is
working on a book project titled Excursions into Modernism: Women Writers, Travel, and the Body. Dr. Kelley has published articles on early twentieth century women travel writers and on the literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. She is currently writing an article on Virginia Woolf and music for the forthcoming
Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, edited by Maggie Humm.

Chaunda A. McDavis (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University), teaches courses in African-American literature, American literature, and English composition. In addition to Dr. McDavis’s specialization in African-American literature, her research interests include Third World feminisms, Afro-Caribbean literature, Pan-Africanism, and Black Intellectualism. Her current project is an analysis of Black American women writers and their literary responses to Black Cultural Nationalism and public policy.

Eric Sterling (Ph.D., Indiana University), Distinguished Teaching Fellow (2005-2008). Dr. Sterling specializes in drama (Shakespearean, modern, and African American) and Holocaust literature. He has published The Movement Towards Subversion: The English History Play from Skelton to Shakespeare (1996) and Life in the Ghettos During the Holocaust (2004). He has published dozens of articles in books and refereed scholarly journals, covering a wide variety of authors as well as essays on teaching methodology. Dr. Sterling has won the College English Association's Robert E. Hacke Scholar-Teacher Award, the University of Wyoming's Amy and Eric Burger Award for Essays on the Theatre, the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama's (ACETA's) Calvert Award for scholarship, and ACETA's Woodall Award for pedagogy. He serves as English major advisor and Director of the Internship in Writing and Editing Program.

David Walker (Ph.D., Florida State University) teaches logic, theory of knowledge, ethics, and philosophy of religion, and has published in some of these areas.

Barbara Wiedemann (Ph.D., University of South Florida) teaches writing poetry, Business and Professional Writing, Southern Women Writers, and American Literature of War and Conflict. She has recently published a book of poetry, Half-Life of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Dr. Wiedemann has written Josephine Herbst’s Short Fiction: A Window to Her Life and Times (1998); with Robert C. Evans and Anne Little, Short Fiction: A Critical Companion (1997); and edited with Robert C. Evans, “My Name Was Martha”: A Renaissance Woman’s Autobiographical Poem (1993).

Susan Willis (Ph.D., University of Virginia) Dr. Susan Willis joined the AUM School of Liberal Arts in 1978 as a specialist in modern British literature. Almost immediately she began doing extensive research in Shakespeare production studies, her other academic specialty, became a teaching specialist in Shakespeare, and produced The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon based on her observation work at the BBC. She also served as Coordinator of the Master of Liberal Arts program from 1992-2003. She currently teaches Shakespeare and occasionally Fantasy, and has taught Modern Drama, Modern British Poetry, and Modern British Novel.

Elizabeth D. Woodworth (Ph.D., Texas Christian University ) specializes in Victorian literature. She is an associate editor and member of the editorial board that won an NEH Scholarly Editions grant in 2005 for The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto). She has published in Victorian Poetry, Browning Society Notes, and has a forthcoming essay in Studies in Browning and His Circle. Dr. Woodworth also specializes in composition/rhetoric and curriculum development; she spent eight years as a professional writer and in executive management working for educational publishing firms in New York, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. She is currently finishing a book-length treatment and edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Italian political poetry.

Professors Emeriti

Marion Michael, Professor Emeritus, (Ph.D., University of Georgia)

Gerald W. Morton, Professor Emeritus, (Ph.D., University of Tennessee)

Guin Nance, Chancellor Emerita, (Ph.D., University of Virginia)

Susie Paul, Professor Emerita, (Ph.D., University of South Carolina)