A University in Motion. Apply now!
Department of English and Philosophy
The mission of the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University at Montgomery is to prepare students for thoughtful engagement with diverse, multicultural communities and issues through high-impact, community-engaged teaching and learning and through advances in research in literature, rhetoric and composition, creative writing, digital humanities, and philosophy.
The Department of English and Philosophy offers majors courses ranging from Victorian Poetry and Prose to Children’s Literature to Shakespeare to Women in Literature to Applied Ethics to Critical Reasoning. Majors may also take courses in rhetoric and composition, language and linguistics, literary criticism, and creative writing. A cornerstone course, English as a Field of Study, introduces students to career possibilities and to the English faculty. Learn about the Composition program at AUM.
Department of English and Philosophy Opportunities
Our students benefit from a varied and supportive environment that includes small classes and intensive, personal instruction from experienced professors who hold terminal degrees and have published significant research in their specialties. You’ll have a wealth of opportunities to develop intellectually while pursuing diverse academic, professional and personal goals.
Our offerings include a Bachelor of Arts in English and minors in:
English as a Pre-Law Degree
Did you know English is a great degree for law school?
Law schools are looking for students who can:
These are the same skills that are fostered in the English program at AUM. The Philosophy minor is also useful for students pursuing law studies, for its use of analytical reading and writing, and for the training in Logic, which can be especially helpful on the LSAT. The American Bar Association recommends an undergraduate education with a broad scope of education in English language and literature, philosophy, history, human behavior and social interaction, and basic mathematical competence.
Advising
Students are strongly encouraged to see their advisor every semester to ensure that they make informed choices that will keep them on the path to graduation and to discuss career options. English majors with 0 – 58 semester hours are advised in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Advising Center. English majors with more than 58 semester hours are advised by Mrs. Hillary Porter ([email protected] or 334-244-3892).
The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences offers students a traditional liberal arts education to meet the needs of the 21st century, allowing them to compete for a variety of careers in an increasingly complex and evolving world.
Department of English and Philosophy
Aaron Cobb
Chair, Professor of Philosophy | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
I began working at AUM in 2010. Prior to that, I completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Saint Louis University, a M.A. in Philosophy from Western Michigan University, and a B.A. in Philosophy and Psychology from Greenville University.
My dissertation focused on 19th-century British philosophy of science. I was interested in debates among these philosophers concerning the role of experiment in the justification of scientific knowledge. Although my research focused in this area, my teaching experience at Saint Louis University focused broadly on applied ethics, the history of philosophy, and in philosophy of religion. Since coming to AUM, I have continued to teach courses in these areas. And my research interests have shifted to focus broadly on virtues and vices in both ethics and epistemology. I have written two books: A Virtue-Based Defense of Perinatal Hospice and Loving Samuel: Suffering, Dependence, and the Calling of Love, a philosophical and theological memoir on the life and death of his son. I’m currently working on a third book, under contract with Cambridge Elements series The Problems of God, tentatively titled Suffering, Virtue, and God.
In addition to my teaching and research within the Department of English and Philosophy, in 2017 I took on the role of coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies degree plan. In this role, I oversee all aspects of the program including advising students and teaching the Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone course.
Michel Aaij
Associate Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Michel Aaij is a Dutch native who received a Ph.D. with a specialization in Old English language and literature from The University of Alabama in 2003, and now teaches in the English and Philosophy Department at Auburn University, Montgomery. He has presented and published on various subjects, most recently hagiography and is currently at work on a book-length study of the modern veneration of St. Boniface in Germany, the Netherlands, and England.
Erin Boyle
Lecturer | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Erin M. Boyle is an English Lecturer at Auburn University at Montgomery where she teaches all levels of English composition. Prior to teaching composition, Erin worked as a tutor in the AUM Learning Center, where she gained valuable insights into the unique needs of the student population. These experiences ultimately led to her decision to complete the Master of Teaching Writing degree in Fall of 2019.
As a part of the English Composition Program, Erin has contributed to the development of a curriculum that focuses on reflection and teaching for transfer. One of Erin’s favorite parts of teaching composition is the opportunities she finds to learn alongside her students.
Outside of teaching, she enjoys writing poetry, crocheting, and spending time with her husband and four kids. She lives in Pike Road, Alabama, where she enjoys life in the country with her family.
Elizabeth Burrows
Interim Director of Composition, Distinguished Senior Lecturer
Elizabeth Burrows
Interim Director of Composition, Distinguished Senior Lecturer | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Elizabeth Burrows is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in the Department of English & Philosophy at Auburn University at Montgomery. Her primary research interests are the rhetoric of popular culture, writing program administration, pedagogy, and online instruction. She teaches in the Honors program and University Success in addition to her composition courses and literature surveys. Ms. Burrows went to Auburn University as an undergraduate where she was a Senior Honors Scholar as well as a DJ and Station Manager at the campus radio station; she also graduated with a Master’s degree in English at Auburn before working as a full-time research assistant. As of 2022, she has been teaching college courses for over 15 years. On a personal note, Ms. Burrows is a New Jersey native; she also has three dogs: a pitbull named Night Fury, a Caribbean potcake named Snitch, and a half-husky/half-pitbull named Harley Quinn.
Angela Fowler
Lecturer | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Angela Fowler is a lecturer at Auburn University at Montgomery where she teaches English Composition courses, with the occasional survey literature class. Her research interests lie in nineteenth-century literature, Sherlock Holmes, and gothic literature. She often injects popular culture themes into her composition courses, as she considers media literacy vital to writing and thinking.
Angela graduated from Mississippi State University in 2005 with a B.A. in English and in 2007 with an M.A. in English with an emphasis on creative writing. She taught at Mississippi State for a year before she was accepted into the doctoral program at Auburn University, where she graduated with a Ph.D in English in 2014. Her dissertation was titled “Arthur Conan Doyle and British Cosmopolitan Identity: Knights, Detectives, and Mediums.” She has also published the article “’The Great unifying force:’: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Spiritualist British Commonwealth” for English Literature in Transition.
Angela is currently working on a scholarly companion to Arthur Conan Doyle for McFarland Publications.
Heath Fowler
Senior Lecturer | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Heath Fowler has taught English at Auburn University at Montgomery since Fall of 2013. He teaches composition courses as well as “Business and Professional Writing” and “Technical Writing.”
Heath graduated from Mississippi State University in December of 2003 with a B.A. in Communication and a double emphasis in Journalism and Public Relations. He then worked in newspapers for 7 years, serving as a copy editor, page designer, and assistant copydesk chief at the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal for four years before working as a copy editor and page designer at the Montgomery Advertiser for three years.
He then left newspapers to continue his education at Auburn University, earning his Master of Technical and Professional Communication degree in May of 2013, minoring in Rhetoric and Composition. Since then, he has continued his studies while teaching at AUM, earning his Certificate of Teaching Writing in Fall of 2019.
Outside of academia, his interests include music, travel, and attending sci-fi/fantasy conventions. He lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with his wife, Dr. Angela Fowler, and their dog, Goofy.
Jason D. Gray
Senior Lecturer | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Bio:
I began teaching philosophy at AUM in 2016. Prior to 2016 I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama, Birmingham (2 years). I have also taught philosophy at Georgia State University.
I received my PhD in Philosophy in 2013 from the University of California, Riverside. I hold two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Alabama and I received an MA in philosophy from Georgia State University (2005). My philosophical interests vary, but I specialized at the intersection of the metaphysics of free will and moral responsibility. the philosophy of death, and the philosophy of addiction.
Although I was born in Maryland, I grew up in Tuscaloosa, AL. I am an avid football and baseball fan (Crimson Tide and the Atlanta Braves). I enjoying reading non-fiction history (especiallt 19th. I have a fairly extensive collection of autographs from Hall of Fame baseball players. I have bungee jumped, stood on a glacier, repelled down a 100 foot wall, and once was so lost (along with everyone else in the car) that we weren’t sure whether we were in Luxembourg or France (“Excuse me, could you tell me what country I am in?).
Darren Harris-Fain
Honors Professor; Distinguished Research Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Dr. Harris-Fain teaches and writes about British and American literature since the 1800s and popular culture. The topics of his publications include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. G. Wells, Tarzan, James Bond, superheroes, Star Trek, Ray Bradbury, Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, New Wave science fiction, Harlan Ellison, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Alison Bechdel, among others. His courses include surveys of British and American literature as well as upper-level and graduate classes on editing, American film history, and science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels. Dr. Harris-Fain was a reference book editor and writer before beginning his teaching career and has taught at AUM since 2011. In 2015, he was a three-day champion on Jeopardy!
Joyce Kelley
Professor of English | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Bio:
Joyce E. Kelley is Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery where she teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth-century British and American literature, children’s literature, and poetry writing. She is the faculty sponsor of English Club and plays cello in the Montgomery Symphony.
Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Victorians, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Children’s Literature, The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Critical Insights: Walt Whitman, Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century, and in the collection Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing. Her books include a monograph on the women modernists and travel, Excursions into Modernism: Women Writers, Travel, and the Body (Ashgate, 2015), and an edited collection, Children’s Play in Literature: Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child (Routledge, 2019).
Robert Klevay
Associate Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Amy Lee Marie Locklear
Distinguished Senior Lecturer | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Amy Lee M. Locklear, PhD, is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer and Honors Faculty in the Department of English and Philosophy. She specializes in digital writing and rhetoric, composition pedagogy, and learning sciences. Her research interests include teaching rhetoric in the composition classroom, cognitive science and education, digital writing spaces and rhetorical practices, and research writing. She has published a number of works related to the intersections of cognitive science and critical thinking and learning, especially in terms of writing pedagogy.
She teaches first year writing courses (English 0103, 1010, and 1020), as well as Advanced Writing (English 3050) and the first-year Seminars for the Honors Program (The Hero’s Journey Into Thinking – Honors 1757).
Dr. Locklear is originally from Virginia, and attended the College of William & Mary in Virginia for her B.A. in English Literature. From there she moved around the country as an Air Force spouse, ending up in Alabama in 2000. She earned her M.A. in English from Auburn University, specializing in rhetoric and literature, and recently earned her Doctorate from Old Dominion University in Digital Rhetoric and Composition. Her dissertation, “Concept Maps as Sites of Rhetorical Invention: Teaching the Creative Act of Synthesis as a Cognitive Process,” is based on interdisciplinary research on the brain, active learning, and writing pedagogy. Her other publications are pedagogical in focus, including writing and co-editing open-educational resources for first-year writing courses.
In addition to her teaching and research pursuits, Dr. Locklear is a fan of science fiction and dragons.
Kent Quaney
Assistant Professor, Coordinator of Creative Writing | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Kent Quaney is an Assistant Professor of English and the coordinator of the Creative Writing program at AUM. His areas of expertise include fiction writing, postcolonial criticism, and the contemporary literature of East Asia and the South Pacific.
Dr. Quaney has published several short stories in journals such as Literally Stories, Polari, Riversedge, and Chelsea Station. His first novel, One Breath from Drowning, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022.
Seth Reno
Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Seth T. Reno is Professor of English, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, ecocriticism, affect theory, climate fiction, and the environmental humanities. He regularly teaches classes in these areas, as well as literature surveys and writing courses. Seth hails from Ohio, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University (that definite article is important!). Before joining AUM in 2013, he taught at Wittenberg University, Ohio State, and Columbus State Community College. He is author of Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Amorous Aesthetics: Intellectual Love in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, 1788–1853 (Liverpool University Press, 2019); editor of The Anthropocene: Approaches and Contexts for Literature and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021) and Romanticism and Affect Studies (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, 2018); co-editor (with Allison Hamilton) of William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (COVE, 2022); and co-editor (with Lisa Ottum) of Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century (University of New Hampshire Press, 2016). He has also published dozens journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews.
Dr. Reno is currently working on an anthology of lesser-known industrial writers, titled Popular British Industrial Writings: A Critical Anthology. It contains hundreds of relatively unknown (and often unpublished) poems, essays, and other forms of writing that chronicle the British Industrial Revolution. He has received over $20,000 in grants to fund this project and to hire AUM students to work as part of the editorial team.
In addition to literature, Dr. Reno has a passion for music, food, and travel. He plays banjo, guitar, trumpet, percussion, and dulcimer; has self-released two albums of original music; and has a banjo YouTube channel. He loves cooking, he teaches courses on food and culture, he has undertaken several domestic and international research trips and study abroad courses, and he once came in fourth place at a burger-eating competition (he has since given up his professional food-eating aspirations).
Jason Shifferd
Senior Lecturer | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Jason Shifferd is a lecturer for the Auburn University at Montgomery Department of English & Philosophy. He primarily teaches English Composition and helps in curriculum design for the English Composition Program, including the creation of several assignments in the AUM edition of Writer/Designer and the creation of multiple Composition II themes, such as Fake News and Conspiracy Theories. He has also taught English Literature and has previously served as a writing tutor for the AUM Learning Center. A two-time alumnus of AUM, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in English in 2009 and his Master of Liberal Arts in 2014. His master’s thesis, available online and in print at the AUM library, is entitled The Case for Humor in the Classroom: An Annotated Bibliography. He has also published essays of literary criticism for Critical Insights including “Humor in the Autobiographical Writings of Maya Angelou: Maya Meets Mr. Julian” (2016) and “Maxine Peake’s Female Hamlet: A Survey of Responses” (2019). As a graduate student in 2013, he worked as a research assistant for the Department of Sociology and helped to publish the article “Who Lives Where: A Comprehensive Population Taxonomy of Cities, Suburbs, Exurbs, and Rural Areas in the United States” (2016) for The Geographical Bulletin. In 2019, he co-led a presentation on the AUM English Composition Program’s Teaching-for-Transfer curriculum at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Pittsburgh. He is currently working on a creative writing side project and looking into options for pursuing a PhD.
Eric Sterling
Distinguished Research Professor, MLA Program Director | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Heather Witcher
Assistant Professor | College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Heather Witcher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy. Her teaching and research focus on nineteenth-century British poetics, collaboration, and sociability, as well as archival theory and digital humanities. Alongside British Literature II, she teaches courses on Victorian poetry, with special focus on archives and digital creation. She is the author of Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation (Cambridge, 2022), and the co-editor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (Palgrave, 2020). She was the 2016 Amy P. Goldman Fellow in Pre-Raphaelite Studies. Her current projects focus on Pre-Raphaelite poetry and mapping Pre-Raphaelite influence in 19th century Chelsea.
