CSULA Department of English | Faculty and Staff

Faculty

Offices and Hours

Adobe Acrobat Icon Spring Semester 2017 Office Hours

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Staff

Jeanne Gee
(323) 343-4140
E&T A636

Stephanie Lai
(323) 343-4140
E&T A604

Tenured and Tenure-Track

Benjamin Bateman (Associate Professor) (webpage) (email) (Ph.D., University of Virginia) Transatlantic Modernisms; Queer Studies; Literary Theory; Studies in Popular Culture

Mary Bucci Bush (Professor) (webpage) (email) (D. A., Syracuse University) Creative writing (fiction)

Michael A. Calabrese (Professor) (webpage) (email) (Ph.D., University of Virginia) Medieval literature; Chaucer; classical studies

Roberto Cantú (Professor) (webpage) (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) Latin American and Mexican American literatures; literary theory and criticism; Chicano film; Mexican cultural history

Hema Chari (Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of Southern California) Twentieth-Century British literature; postcolonial literature; film; gender studies

Melvin B. Donalson (Professor) (webpage) (email) (Ph.D., Brown University) American Cinema; Creative Writing; Ethnic literature and American Popular Culture

Marilyn Elkins (Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of North Carolina) American literature; women's literature; African-American literature; composition

James M. Garrett (Professor and Department Chair) (webpage) (Ph.D., University of Southern California) British Romanticism; nationalism and literature; ecocriticism

Linda Greenberg (Associate Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) Ethnic American Literature; Women's Literature; 20th Century American Literature

Christopher S. Harris (Associate Professor) (webpage) (email) (Ph.D., Bowling Green State University, Ohio) History of composition instruction, writing pedagogy, digital rhetorics, objectives-based writing assessment

Michelle Hawley (Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of Chicago) Victorian literature; children's literature; cultural studies; aesthetics

Nicole Horejsi (Assistant Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) Eighteenth-century British literature; Neoclassicism; women's writing; classical studies

Martin Huld (Professor) (webpage) (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) Linguistics; history of the English language; language and culture

Steven S. Jones (Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of California, Davis) Folklore; children's literature

Maria Karafilis (Professor) (webpage) (email) (Ph.D., University of Maryland) American Literature to 1900; narratives of citizenship and belonging

Andrew Lyndon Knighton (Professor) (webpage) (email) (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) American Literature to 1900; Cultural Studies; critical theory; print culture; aesthetics.

Atef Laouyene (Associate Professor) (webpage) (Ph.D., University of Ottawa, Canada) Postcolonial Studies; Anglophone Literatures; Critical Theory; Arab Diaspora Studies

Jun Liu (Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts) Critical Theory, Twentieth Century American Literature, American Ethnic Literature, 19th Century and 20th Century European Literature, diasporic and postcolonial literature

Caroline McManus (Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) Shakespeare; Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English literature; women's studies

Kathryn Perry (Assistant Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of Louisville) Community Literacy and Literacy Studies; Composition Theory and Pedagogy; Ethnography and Ethnographic Methods; Qualitative Research; Narrative Theory; Actor-Network Theory

Ruben D. Quintero (Professor) (webpage) (Ph.D., Harvard University) Eighteenth-Century British literature; classical rhetoric

Lauri Ramey (Professor) (webpage) (Ph.D., University of Chicago) Creative writing, lyric poetry and poetics, African American literature, the intersection of critical and creative writing, formally innovative literature, modernism and postmodernism, and black British writing

Bidhan Roy (Associate Professor) (webpage) (email) (Ph.D., University of London) Postcolonial literature; Twentieth-Century British literature

Aaron Sonnenschein (Associate Professor) (webpage) (Ph.D., University of Southern California) Linguistics; language and culture; grammar

Alison Taufer (Professor) (email) (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) Medieval and Renaissance drama, Shakespeare, Arthurian literature, sixteenth-century English prose

Lecturers

Joshua Adachi (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Hasmik Barsamian (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Simon Black (Lecturer) (email) (MFA, Columbia University) Composition, Creative Writing

Deborah Conway de Prieto (Lecturer) (email) (Ph.D., Pacifica Graduate Institute) Composition

Christine Danelski (email) (Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University) Composition

Deborah Davis (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Daven Desai (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Tsoleen Donoyan (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Florence Emch (Lecturer) (email) (MA, Indiana University) Composition

Laura Garrett (Lecturer) (webpage) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Leone Hankey (Lecturer) (email) (JD, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) Composition

Margaret Hart (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Ximena Hernandez (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Fred Hess (Lecturer) (email) (MFA, University of California, Los Angeles) Composition

Jenny Hicks (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Victoria Holladay (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Noelle Kahwaji (Lecturer) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Rebecca Kershman (Lecturer) (email) (MFA, University of Massachusetts) Composition

Janet Kraft (Lecturer) (email) (MFA, California State University, Long Beach) Composition

Daniel Lambert (Lecturer) (email) (MA, Loyola Marymount University) Composition

Kevin McCabe (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Karen McDermott (Lecturer) (email) (JD, MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Lianna Manukyan (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Andrew Montana (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Judy Olson (Lecturer) (email) (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine) Composition

Phil Poulos (Lecturer) (email) (Ph.D., University of Tulsa) Composition

Lollie Ragana (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Veronica Reyes (email) (MFA, University of Texas, El Paso) Composition

Jorge Ribeiro (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Christopher Rock (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Albert Vargas (Lecturer) (email) (Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University) Composition

Niklas Watanabe (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Jonathan Zeiss (Lecturer) (email) (MA, California State University, Los Angeles) Composition

Announcements

We are now accepting applications for Fall 2018 admission to the Master of Arts program in English!

How to Apply

The deadline to apply for the Master of Arts program in English for Fall 2018 is March 15, 2018.

Applying to the Graduate Program in English requires two separate applications: one for admission to graduate study at the CSU and one for admission to the Master of Arts degree program in English. Both applications must be approved. To be considered, applicants must do the following:

1. Apply for admission to graduate study at Cal State LA by completing and submitting an online application through CSUApply. As part of the application for admission to graduate study, the applicant must request that official copies of all required transcripts be mailed directly to the Cal State L.A. Office of Graduate Studies from the institution(s) attended.

2. Apply for admission to the Master of Arts program in the Department of English by completing a Departmental Application for Admission and submitting it along with a writing sample to the department. For the writing sample, please submit an analytical essay on a literary topic. The writing sample should be an essay written for a previous undergraduate (or graduate) course, not original work written for the purpose of applying to the program. While the sample should be at least five pages, please note that no special consideration will be given to longer papers. (Students who were not English or literature majors can substitute an analytical, critical, or research paper on a non-literary topic.)

Notification of Decision

Applicants will received two notifications: one indicates whether they have been admitted to graduate status at Cal State LA by the Office of Admissions, the other indicates whether they have been admitted specifically by the Department of English. Generally, an applicant will receive notification from the Cal State L.A. Office of Admissions first, followed by notification from the Department of English. Regardless of the order of notification, an applicant is admitted to the Graduate Program in English only by the Department of English.

Admissions Overview

Generally, to be considered for admission to the Graduate Program in English, applicants must:

have completed a four-year college course of study and hold a baccalaureate degree in English (or a closely related field) from an institution accredited by a regional accrediting association, or shall have completed equivalent academic preparation as determined by appropriate campus authorities;

be in good academic standing at the last college or university attended;

have attained a grade point average of at least 3.2 (A = 4.0) in their English major.

Applicants who meet the above conditions but whose undergraduate degrees are in fields other than English can apply for admission to the graduate program in English. Such students, however, must complete a 24-unit program of upper division prerequisites (which might include courses previously taken) prior to beginning their graduate work. For more on the 24-unit requirement for non-English B.A. students seeking an M.A. degree in English, click here.

Please note that admission to the Graduate Program in English is competitive and meeting the minimum application requirements does not guarantee admission.

Under special circumstances, students who do not meet the department’s minimum requirements might be considered for admission. The Graduate Admissions Committee might consider the following additional criteria when reviewing applications from students who do not meet the minimum GPA requirement: GRE scores, the student's undergraduate institution, and specific courses completed at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Henri Coulette at the Huntington Library, Nov 11th

The work of Henri Coulette will be celebrated at the Huntington Library on November 11 (2 pm), with a reading of The War of the Secret Agents, his award-winning book of poems from 1966. Readers will include Timothy Steele, Jacqueline Coulette, Peter Brier, Robert Mezey, and Peter Everwine.

STATEMENT MAGAZINE: Submissions are now being accepted for the 2018 issue!

Submissions are now being accepted for the 2018 issue!

Deadline to Submit is December 15, 2017

Entering its 68th year of publication, Statement Magazine is California State University, Los Angeles’s student-run journal of literature and art. Students gain valuable professional and educational experience by assuming responsibility for all aspects of producing this magazine and learning many new skills. Major national and international writers and artists appear in its pages alongside talented creative students, many of whom have gone on to become highly respected figures themselves.

Statement’s pages have been graced by U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove and Los Angeles’s first Poet Laureate Eloise Klein Healy, along with countless others including Wanda Coleman, Charles Bukowski, Ai, Luis Rodriguez, Carolyn See and Sesshu Foster. Statement has also been distinguished with national recognition.

In 2008, the magazine received the National Program Director’s Prize in Content from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, competing against the literary magazines of 400 other universities.

Associate Professor Benjamin Bateman announces his new book, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival

This book explores an archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the four modernists examined here countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and environmentally sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” opposes “survival of the fittest” doctrines and Progressive-era masculinity with a feminist-inspired cultivation of ecological humility and interspecies collaboration. Oscar Wilde develops an autobiographical form that expresses collective subjectivity in De Profundis, an epistolary testament to the constitutive role of suffering in queer community formation. E.M. Forster imagines, in Howards End, how queer ideas and intimacies survive courtesy of invitations that awaken both inviters and invitees to unexpected relational possibilities freed from conventional timelines of development and realization. In Forster’s A Passage to India, the pursuit of “queer invitations” models an evolutionary succession defined by careful attention to creaturely inheritance and by ethical responses to the countless lives, including those obfuscated by imperial privilege, required for the successful survival of any individual life. Finally, Willa Cather’s short and long fiction, including “Consequences,” Lucy Gayheart, and The Professor’s House, argues for suicide as a way of life as it transforms the impulse to throw life away into an ethical alternative to the greedy logics of capitalism.

Benjamin Bateman, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Director, Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities

Cal State Los Angeles

Author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (forthcoming from Oxford University Press)