Faculty Biographies
Dr. Jordan Canzonetta
Assistant Professor
Coordinator of Internships
Office: DL-213-N
Phone: 815-836-5793
Email: jcanzonetta@lewisu.edu
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Dr. Jordan Canzonetta, Assistant Professor, earned her PhD from the department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition at Syracuse University. Dr. Canzonetta specializes in professional and technical writing, algorithmic rhetorics, and rhetoric and technology. As a researcher, she focuses on automation and teaching labor in the college writing classroom, plagiarism detection services, and algorithmic data collection in educational contexts. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Writing Assessment, in several Routledge edited collections, and she recently co-edited the Best of Rhetoric and Composition series with colleagues in her discipline. As a practitioner of technical writing, Dr. Canzonetta has worked on a government-funded grant project to develop software for intelligence analysts. At 宅男福利社, she plans to coordinate internships for undergraduate students in the English Studies Department, and she teaches technical communication, professional writing, and first-year writing courses.
Dr. Jennifer Consilio
Professor
Director of First Year Writing
Office: DL-211-N
Phone:
815-836-5727
Email: consilje@lewisu.edu
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Dr. Jennifer Consilio, Professor and Writing Center Director, began her career at 宅男福利社 in 2005. She earned her Ph.D. from Purdue University in Rhetoric and Composition, with secondary areas in digitality and underrepresented rhetorics. She has taught courses including Writing for the Professions, Document Design, The Electronic Word, Advanced Technical Writing, Writing in the Disciplines: Law Enforcement, Theories of Composing, Rhetoric for Writers, Advanced Writing, and courses in the First-Year Writing sequence. Recent scholarship presentations include "Reuse, Recycle: Constructing a (Re)New(ed) Ethos for Composition Studies," and "Playgrounds of the Mind: Online Play with Identity." She serves as the area chair in Virtual Identities and Self-Promotion for the National Popular Culture/American Culture Association and is currently working on a project examining technology and identity.
Dr. Serafima Gettys
Associate Professor
Chair of World Language Department
Office: MC-005
Phone: 815-836-5544
Email:
gettysse@lewisu.edu
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Dr. Serafima Gettys, Associate Professor, the Director of the Foreign Language Program, joined 宅男福利社 in June 2004. She earned her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition from St. Petersburg State University of Education, Russia. Prior to teaching at 宅男福利社, she taught in a variety of institutions of higher education, including UC Berkley and Stanford University. At 宅男福利社 she established an innovative Foreign Language Program, which currently offers courses in ten world languages. Dr. Gettys teaches Russian language courses and a course in Linguistics. Her current research interest is Cognitive Approaches in SLA and is a regular presenter at ACTFL, NCOLCTL, and AATSEEL conferences, as well as a number of international conferences and workshops. She is currently working on the 2nd edition of Russian for Dummies and serves as a member of the Graduate Council.
Ms. Therese Jones
Assistant Professor
Director of Writing
Placement
Editor/Coordinator of Windows Fine Arts Magazine
Office:
DL-206-N
Phone:
815-836-5321
Email:
jonesth@lewisu.edu
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Therese Jones, Assistant Professor, began teaching part-time for the English Studies Department in 1994, was promoted to half-time in 2000, and gained full-time status in 2011. She has a Master's in English with a concentration in Literature and Composition Studies from St. Xavier University. Assistant Professor Jones is the Director of Writing Placement, responsible for placing incoming first-year and transfer students in their first-year composition course (1999-present), and she is the Editor, Designer, and Coordinator of 宅男福利社' annual journal, Windows Fine Arts Magazine (2003 to present). She regularly teaches two classes in the First-Year Writing sequence, The Essay and College Writing 1, as well as the general education literature course titled The Experience of Literature. Assistant Professor Jones serves the Department on numerous task forces, publishes creative writing, and regularly presents papers at conferences.
Dr. Mark Letcher
Associate Professor
Director of English and Secondary Education
Office: DL-215-N
Phone: 815-836-5601
Email: letchema@lewisu.edu听
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Mark Letcher, Associate Professor of English Education and Director of the English Language Arts Teaching Program, joined the 宅男福利社 faculty in 2015. A former high school English teacher, he earned his PhD in English Education from The Ohio State University. He teaches literature and writing methods courses for ELA Secondary Education majors, drama, as well as courses in the First-Year Writing sequence.听 His research interests include adolescent literature and literacy, writing teacher education, and teacher advocacy. He is one of the founding editors of Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care, a peer-reviewed blog advocating for best writing practices in K-16 classrooms.
Dr. Letcher is actively involved with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the Conference on English Education (CEE), and the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN). He is a former young adult literature editor at English Journal, and serves as the chair of the 2015-16 Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award committee of ALAN, which annually selects young adult books representing literary excellence, positivity, and broad appeal. He has also served as a commission chair within CEE and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).
Dr. Thomas McNamara
Associate Professor
Director of the Writing Center and
Writing Across the Curriculum
Office:
DL-219-N
Phone:
815-836-5647
Email:
tmcnamara1@lewisu.edu
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Dr. Tom McNamara joined the 宅男福利社 English Studies department in 2018 and coordinates the university’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program. Dr. McNamara was previously a faculty member at California State University Fresno, where he coordinated the WAC program and taught English Education courses, and he completed his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Center for Writing Studies. Dr. McNamara’s research interests include literacy studies, critical race theory, critical pedagogy, race and globalization, and ethnographic methods. An article drawing on his ethnographic study of Chinese international students has been published in Literacy and Composition Studies. His current projects include another article drawing on his work with Chinese undergraduates, as well as a collaborative project about the Mendez v. Westminster Supreme Court case and its implications for language rights advocacy. Dr. McNamara has presented research at CCCC, the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, and the International Writing Centers Association conference.
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Dr. Pramod Mishra, Professor, joined the Department in the fall of 2010. Dr. Mishra came from Augustana College, Rock Island, IL, where he had taught since the fall of 2002 and had been recommended for tenure and promotion by the Faculty Welfare committee, the Dean and the President. Dr. Mishra earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in English with an emphasis on Postcolonial literature and theory and his M.A. in English from Northern Illinois University. He teaches courses in the First-Year Writing sequence, in the general education literature curriculum, Non-Western and Postcolonial majors' courses, and American and British literature when needed. He is also available to teach literary theory and courses in Third-World film. He has published articles on international and postcolonial issues in Ariel: A Journal of International English Literature and CR: The New Centennial Review. He has presented papers and given presentations at the MLA and other places both in the US and overseas both for the academic community and the general public. Since 2009, he has written a regular column on literature, culture, and society under Crossroads for The Kathmandu Post.听 He is at work on two book-length manuscripts鈥攈is memoirs of growing up in India and Nepal and a collection of essays on the southern plains of Nepal called Madhes.
Dr. Rebecca Morgan Frank
Assistant Professor
Office:
DL-214-N
Phone:
815-836-5580
Email:
rfrank@lewisu.edu
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Dr. Rebecca Morgan Frank, Assistant Professor, joins the 宅男福利社 Faculty in Fall 2024. She received her PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati and her MFA from Emerson College. Her short fiction and poems can be found in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Joyland, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland, Prairie Schooner, Catapult, and elsewhere, and her criticism appears in such places as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, and The American Sonnet (University of Iowa Press), as well as the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books and Lit Hub, where she co-writes a monthly column. She is the author of four collections of poems, including Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon, 2021) and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2012), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and her collaborations with composers have been performed widely.
Her awards and honors include a Meier Achievement Award, the Orison Anthology Fiction Award, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as fellowships from such places as the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Emory University’s Manuscripts and Rare Books Library, and the Mississippi Arts Commission, and she served as writer-in-residence at the Hemingway Birthplace in Oak Park. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.
Dr. Simone Muench
Professor
Director of Creative
Writing
Office:
DL-216-N
Phone:
815-836-5554
Email:
muenchsi@lewisu.edu
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Dr. Simone Muench, Professor and Director of the English Studies Writing Concentration, began at 宅男福利社 in 2003, and regularly teaches Creative Writing classes, Film courses, and Publishing Practicum. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is the author of six full-length poetry collections including Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry and NYT Editor’s Choice; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her chapbook Trace received the Black River Award (Black Lawrence, 2014), and her collection, Suture, a book of sonnets co-written with Dean Rader, was also published by Black Lawrence (2017). She co-edited the anthology They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and her collaborative chapbook, Hex & Howl, co-written with former 宅男福利社 professor Jackie K. White, is forthcoming (Black Lawrence Press, 2021).
Some of her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, several Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry, and residency fellowships to Yaddo, Artsmith, and Vermont Studio Center. In 2014, she was awarded the Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, which recognizes artists for innovation, achievements and community contributions. Currently, she serves as faculty advisor for and the , senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, poetry editor for Jackleg Press, consultant for the , and creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series.
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Dr. Jamil Mustafa, Professor, joined 宅男福利社 in 2000 after completing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago. He has served as the Department Chair, the Director of Literature and Language, and the Director of the Scholars Academy. He specializes in Victorian literature, the Gothic, and film studies. He has taught Introduction to English Studies, Stories into Film, The Horror Film, British Literature: 1800 to Present, Advanced Study in 18th- and 19th-Century British Literature, and Senior Seminar in English Studies. He has also taught Literary London and Imperial London, and he is one of the leaders of the London Travel Study.
Dr. Mustafa is the author of (University of Wales Press, 2023). His book chapters include “Strange Cases of the Queer Fin de Si猫cle” (The Queer Gothic, Edinburgh University Press, 2023), “Shadows of the Vampire: Neo-Gothicism in Dracula, Ripper Street and What We Do in the Shadows” (Neo-Gothic Narratives, Anthem Press, 2020), “Haunting ‘The Harlot’s House’” (Wilde’s Worlds, Routledge, 2018), “Lifting the Veil: Allegory, Ambivalence, and the Scottish Gothic in The Bride of Lammermoor” (Gothic Britain, University of Wales Press, 2018), “‘You can’t spell subtext without S-E-X’: Supernatural, Gothic Intertextuality, and the (Queer) Uncanny"' (Supernatural and the Gothic Tradition, McFarland, 2016), and “Rediscovering Pleasure in the English Classroom” (Dimensions of Curiosity, University Press of America, 2004). Forthcoming is a chapter in Ghosts and the Gothic (Manchester University Press). His short story, “Vicious Circle,” was published in the February 2015 issue of The Horror Zine, where he was the featured author. He is currently researching a book on Victorian psychology, cartography, and the Gothic novel.
Dr. Mustafa’s journal articles include “Monsters in Mirrors: Duality and Multiplicity in Two Adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde” (Humanities, 2023), “Obsessional Neurosis, the Paranoid-Schizoid Position, and the Bourgeois Family in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle” (American Imago, 2021), “Penny Dreadful’s Queer Orientalism: The Translations of Ferdinand Lyle” (Humanities, 2020), “The American Gothic and the Carnivalesque in Something Wicked This Way Comes” (The New Ray Bradbury Review, 2019), “Representations of Masculinity in Neo-Victorian Film and Television” (Neo-Victorian Studies, 2018), "'The Lady of the House of Love': Angela Carter's Vampiric Sleeping Beauty" (Cabinet Des F茅es: A Fairy Tale Journal, 2007), and “‘A good horror has its place in art': Hardy's Gothic Strategy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles" (Studies in the Humanities, 2005).
Dr. Mustafa regularly presents papers in the United States and abroad at meetings of the Modern Language Association, the International Gothic Association, the North American Victorian Studies Association, the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and other organizations. In 2019, he was invited to address the National Bioethics Symposium on the topic of bioethics in Frankenstein. In 2017, he was the keynote speaker for the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Convocation.
In 2020, Dr. Mustafa served on the Conference Organizing Committee for Gothic in a Time of Contagion, Populism, and Racial Injustice, hosted by Simon Fraser University. In 2019, he hosted Gothic Terror, Gothic Horror, the 15th conference of the International Gothic Association and the first held in the United States. In 2012, he was selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Oscar Wilde and His Circle,” at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. As Director of the Scholars Academy, he hosted the 2011 Annual Spring Student Research Conference of the Honors Council of the Illinois Region. The 2007 records his experiences as a Visiting Associate Professor at Bethlehem University in the West Bank.
Dr. Mardy Philippian
Professor
Director of Literature and Language
Office:
DL-212-N
Phone:
815-836-5287
Email: philipmd@lewisu.edu
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Each semester Dr. Mardy Philippian tells his students, "How you read is who you are," a statement that makes clear his commitment to developing a generous repertoire of reading strategies. The claim also makes clear his love of surprise, especially when it results in the experience of knowing the familiar, as T. S. Eliot wrote, for the first time. Reading and rereading should surprise and, in so doing, sustain the mind, heart, and spirit.
This approach to reading literary and visual texts is quite different from the strategies that characterized reading in the early modern period, the area of research and writing in which Dr. Philippian completed his doctoral work at Purdue University. In the sixteenth century in particular it was normative to read to confirm what one already knew. And yet the English Renaissance was the period of the greatest flowering of creative energy in the history of the English language, exemplified in the work of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, and Milton among others. Reading to confirm and to discover are two sides of the same page and experiencing the tension between them is part of what animates and directs the courses Dr. Philippian teaches and serves as one area of his research.
Since 2012 the primary focus of his research has concerned representations of cognitive disability in early modern texts. In an essay, “The Book of Common Prayer, Theory of Mind, and Autism in Early Modern England,” for example, Dr. Philippian considers how the BCP may have served as a social script for parishioners with underdeveloped Theory of Mind (or ToM). The essay appears in Recovering Early Modern Disability (Ohio State U P, 2013).
His reviews, articles, and book chapters have appeared in Literature and Film Quarterly, Film Criticism, Prose Studies, and Forum for World Literature Studies. He has also presented his work at numerous academic conferences in the United States. In addition, since fall 2010, he has served on the editorial board of The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English, published at the University of South Carolina, Aiken.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Paso Robles, California, Dr. Philippian earned a B.A. in English from California State University at Chico and a M.A. in English and Ph.D. in English Renaissance Literature and Culture from Purdue University. He joined the faculty of the Department of English Studies in 2016.
Rocio Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
Director of Spanish Language and Culture Program
Office: MC-001
Phone: 815-836-6007
Email: rodrigrx@lewisu.edu
Dr. Ana Roncero-Bellido
Assistant Professor
Office:
DL-217-N
Phone:
815-836-6206
Email:
aroncerobellido@lewisu.edu
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Ana Roncero-Bellido joined the 宅男福利社 English Studies Department in Fall 2020, and she teaches US Latinx, Latin American, Spanish Peninsular and other multicultural literatures as well as writing courses. Dr. Roncero-Bellido earned her Ph.D. in English Studies with a concentration in Latinx Literatures, Rhetorics and Cultures from Illinois State University (2017) and a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, and was previously an assistant professor in the English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Gonzaga University. Her scholarly interests include Latinx feminist literatures, transnational feminisms, life writing, food studies, and feminist pedagogies. Her current research focuses on the development of Latina feminists’ use of testimonio methodology to articulate new and revised forms of knowledge, theories and discourses. Through her teaching, Dr. Roncero-Bellido aims to empower students to bring their diverse forms of knowledge into the classroom to educate their whole person and create a diverse learning community.
She is an editorial assistant of a/b: Autobiography Studies. She has presented her research at various conferences, such as the Latina Feminist Roundtable, The International Conference on Chicano Literature and Latino Studies, Cultural Rhetorics, Feminist Rhetorics, and CCCC. Her work appears in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social; The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics; and the edited collection Feminist Pedagogy, Practice, and Activism: Improving Lives for Girls and Women (Martin, Nickels, Sharp-Grier).
Maria C. Sanchez
Administrative Assistant
Office: DL-222-N
Phone: 815-836-5227
Email: Msanchez7@lewisu.edu
Dr. Christopher Wielgos
Professor
Chair of English
Department
Office:
DL-221-N
Phone:
815-836-5873
Email: wielgoch@lewisu.edu
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Dr. Christopher Wielgos, Professor, a member of the faculty since 1997, serves as both the Director of Film Studies and the Department's Director of Technology and Tech- Supported Pedagogies. He received his Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University and teaches courses in modern and postmodern US and British Literatures, Film Studies, and First-Year Writing. He also has extensive experience in teaching online courses and the short story. He is a regular presenter for the University's Arts and Ideas program, and recently presented a series of ten films and lectures on Postmodern Film. Dr. Wielgos is an award-winning web site author, and recently published an article published in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Fiction on the work of Mark Costello. He currently chairs the Teaching and Learning with Technology Roundtable and has chaired the Technology Taskforce for nine years.
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