Linda Bensel-Meyers studied dramatic theory at the University of Chicago (BA 1975) and Renaissance drama and rhetoric at the University of Oregon (PhD 1985). From 1986-2003, she directed the Writing Programs at the University of Tennessee, where she uncovered systematic academic fraud in the athletic program. In 1999, she released documents to The New York Times and ESPN to expose the need for college athletic reform. Her reform efforts included speaking nationally, including before the Knight Commission on Collegiate Sports, and as keynote speaker for the National Institute for Sports Reform. Her awards include the distinguished Service Award from the International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame and the Robert M. Hutchins Award for Academic Integrity. She came to DU in 2003.

Clark Davis came to DU in 2000. His primary areas of interest include early and nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the New England tradition. He regularly teaches courses on the American Puritans, early American poetics, the Transcendentalists, and the American novel and short story.

Prof. Davis’s research has been devoted primarily to major figures of the mid-nineteenth century, Melville and Hawthorne in particular. In recent years, however, he has devoted more time to the twentieth century, completing the first full-length literary biography of William Goyen, author of The House of Breath and Arcadio. For more information see: https://portfolio.du.edu/cldavis

Donna Beth Ellard is an Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature, specializing Old English poetry. Her research and teaching interests are eclectic and include early medieval literature, archaeology, and historiography; biolinguistics and biosemiotics; and psychoanalysis and Deleuze studies.

In addition to journal articles published in Exemplaria, postmedieval, and Rethinking History, she has just completed her first book, Anglo-Saxon(ist) pasts, postSaxon futures (Punctum, Summer 2019) and is at work on a second project, Writing with Birds, Writing with the Biosciences.

Donna Beth is a co-founder of IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic) a professional organization for early medieval studies that seeks to bring together the highly-nationalized, often-siloed, and hierarchical fields of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Old Norse studies within a framework that denationalizes, decolonizes, and deperiodizes these fields.

Rachel Feder is an assistant professor of English and literary arts working at the intersections of literary history, creative nonfiction, and poetry with a focus on Romanticism broadly construed. Her projects include a hybrid book about Mary Shelley, Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the Sign of Frankenstein (Northwestern University Press, 2018), a book-length serial poem, Bad Romanticisms (Astrophel Press, 2018), a book of poetry about astrology, motherhood, and literary history, Birth Chart (under advance contract with SUNY Press), and a literary-critical investigation of infinity discourse, experimental poetics, and the environmental humanities (in process).

I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee; raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin; and educated at Beloit College, George Mason University, and the University at Buffalo. My scholarly and creative interests are poetry and poetics; 19th- and 20th-century American literature; and critical theory. Kids: check; pets: nyet. You can find out more about my work here.

Tayana Hardin is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature. Her teaching and interdisciplinary research bridge the literary, the embodied, and the historical, and rely on the disciplinary insights of African American and American studies, feminist and gender studies, and performance studies. Dr. Hardin's commitments to teaching, reflexive pedagogical practices, and intellectual community-building were recognized by the University of Denver when she was named the 2017 William T. Driscoll Master Educator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the following journals: Dance Chronicle; The Black Scholar; Journal of Transatlantic Studies; Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture; and Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture.

Doug Hesse is Professor and founding Executive Director of Writing at the University of Denver, where he was named University Distinguished Scholar.  Hesse is currently President-Elect of the National Council of Teachers of English.  Previously, he chaired the Conference on College Composition and Communication, was President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and held leadership roles within MLA.  He spent 20 years at Illinois State University, where he directed the writing program, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, and the University Honors Program.  Hesse’s numerous articles and four co-authored books focus on creative nonfiction and the personal essay; on narrative, rhetoric, and belles lettres; and on professional issues in writing programs.  He’s been keynote or plenary speaker at some forty conferences, and he has consulted and completed program reviews at some fifty colleges and universities.  His current projects include a longitudinal study of 60 undergraduate writers, archival work on the correspondence of the first astronomer at the University of Denver, a collection of personal essays, and a defense of journalism in composition studies.  Hesse’s PhD is from Iowa. He’s an avid hiker and photographer, and he sings professionally with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus. 

Joanna Howard is Assistant Professor of Literary Arts specializing in prose writing and prose and poetry hybrids, with a background in narrative theory and contemporary literature. She is the author of the novel Foreign Correspondent (Counterpath, 2013), a story collection On the Winding Stair (Boa editions, 2009) an artist's book In the Colorless Round, (Noemi, 2006) and Field Glass, a speculative novel co-written with Joanna Ruocco (Sidebrow, 2017). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Verse, McSweeney's, Bomb, Chicago Review, Brooklyn Rail, and places elsewhere. She has also collaborated on translations from French, Walls by Marcel Cohen (Black Square, 2009) and Cows by Frederic Boyer (Noemi, 2014). Her memoir The Rerun Era is forthcoming from McSweeney's (2019).

W. SCOTT HOWARD received his Ph.D. in English and Critical Theory from the University of Washington. His teaching, research, and publications engage the fields of Renaissance/early modern literature and culture; modern and postmodern American poetics and poetry; literary theory, historiography, and digital humanities. He teaches in the Department of English and also in the Emergent Digital Practices Program, the Critical Theory Program, the University Honors Program, and the DU-Iliff Ph.D. Program. His work has received support from the Modern Language Association, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. 

Portfolio:

Eleanor McNees is Professor of English specializing in 19^th and 20^th century British literature with an emphasis on Virginia Woolf and her Victorian predecessors. She received her BA from Colgate University, her MA from Northwestern University and her PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder. In addition to her book, Eucharistic Poetry, she has edited collections of essays on the history of the novel, the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf, as well as an annotated edition of Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel, The Years.  Her essays have appeared in a variety of journals from Victorian Periodicals Review to the Dickens Quarterly. 

Maik Nwosu is Professor of English specializing in African, African Diaspora, postcolonial, and world literatures; semiotics and critical theory. He worked as a journalist (and received the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Journalist of the Year) before moving to Syracuse University, New York for a Ph.D. in English and Textual Studies. Nwosu is a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; the Civitella Ranieri Center, Umbertide, Italy; and the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is also a member of the Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars. Nwosu's published works include fiction (A Gecko's Farewell, Alpha Song, Invisible Chapters, and Return to Algadez), poetry (Suns of Kush), a coedited anthology (The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honor of Michael J. C. Echeruo), and critical studies (The Comic Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema: A Poetics of Laughter and Markets of Memories: Between the Postcolonial and the Transnational).

R. D. Perry is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in late medieval and early modern literature and critical theory. He is currently working on two books: Chaucerian Coteries and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition looks at the role of coterie poetics in the formation of an English canon and The Complete 'Canterbury Tales' examines the aesthetics of incompleteness in Geoffrey Chaucer great poem and its reception. He is also co-editing essay collections on Charles d'Orléans English poetry, European literary culture during the Hundred Years War, and the conceptual role of the Middle Ages in the mid-20th-century work of writers like Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Frantz Fanon, and Simone Weil. His work has appeared in Poetics Today, Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and the Yearbook of Langland Studies.

In addition to offering classes in medieval literature and critical theory, he has offered or is teaching soon classes on medieval intersectionality, theories of horror both pre-modern and contemporary, dream theory from antiquity to present, queer memoirs, and the aesthetics of incompleteness. He would be pleased to offer classes or tutorials on works of antiquity and their reception, medieval and early modern literature (from Chrétien de Troyes to Shakespeare, but especially anything having to do with Chaucer and Langland), the influence of medieval philosophy and theology on modern philosophy, and critical theory (especially Kant and Hegel, the Frankfurt school, the Marxist tradition, and varieties of contemporary theory including but not limited to psychoanalysis and queer theory).