Faculty and Staff
A varied and committed group of scholar-teachers, UTC's English faculty has garnered numerous awards from the University
and from regional, national, and international organizations. Among us are several Student Government Association Outstanding Professors,
and the University of Tennessee National Alumni Association has frequently honored members of our faculty with its prestigious Outstanding
Teacher Award. UTC's College of Arts and Sciences, too, has repeatedly recognized the English department with prizes for excellence in
teaching, advisement, scholarship, and service.
An unusual number of our faculty hold distinguished professorships at the University, and many have received awards for teaching, writing,
and scholarship from such organizations as The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Fulbright Scholars Program, The Guggenheim Foundation,
The National Endowment for the Arts, and The National Council of Teachers of English. In addition to authoring scores of books, articles, poems, and stories,
our faculty members also edit important professional journals such as The Tennessee Philological Bulletin and Poetry Miscellany.
Full-Time Faculty and Staff
Amy Anderson
Lecturer (M.A.,Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
Amy Anderson teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, for which she has been named
Outstanding Professor by the Student Govenment Association.
Office: Grote 247
Phone: 423-425-5476 Email:
amy-anderson@utc.edu
Gwendolyn Spring Kurtz Atkinson
Lecturer (M.A., San Diego State University)
Spring Kurtz teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and Western humanities.
Office: Grote 223
Phone: 423-425-5481 Email:
spring-atkinson@utc.edu
Sybil Baker
Assistant Professor (M.F.A., Vermont College of Norwich University)
Sybil Baker teaches creative writing, rhetoric and composition, and Western humanities. Her fiction has
appeared in numerous journals, including, most recently, Paper Street and The Bitter Oleander.
Her essays have
recently appeared in The Writer's Chronicle and A Woman's World Again (an anthology), and she
was the winner of
Seoul, South Korea's essay contest in 2005. Her novel The Life Plan is forthcoming from Casperian Books.
She is currently working on a collection of short stories,
and new essays.
Office: Holt 325
Phone: 423-425-2338 Email:
sybil-baker@utc.edu
Thomas Balazs
Assistant Professor (Ph.D., The Unversity of Chicago)
Thomas Balazs teaches creative writing, Western humanities, and the literature of British modernism.
His fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including The North American Review, The Dos Passos
Review, and REAL, as well as in The Vermont College 25 Anniversary Fiction Anthology and
Robert Olen Butler Prize
Anthology 2004. He has also published scholarly work in The James Joyce Annual. He is currently working
on a collection of short stories.
Office: Holt 202
Phone: 423-425- Email:
thomas-balazs@utc.edu
Craig Wallace Barrow
Professor (Ph.D., University of Colorado)
Craig Barrow specializes in genre studies, the English and American novel, science fiction, Native American literature, and
literature of the twentieth century. In addition to teaching a wide variety of courses in literature, he regularly teaches classes
in theory, rhetoric, and writing, for which he has won the Student Government Association's Outstanding Professor Award. His research interests
include critical approaches to contemporary authors, particularly the
speculative fiction of Ursula K. LeGuin and the work of Native American writer Louise Erdrich.
Office: Holt 338-B
Phone: 423-425-4615 Email:
craig-barrow@utc.edu
Jennifer Beech
Assistant Professor and Director of The UTC Writing Center
(Ph.D., University of Southern Mississippi)
Jennifer Beech specializes in composition and rhetoric studies, the ethnography of literacy, and working-class and critical
writing pedagogies. Her research concerns Southern working-class literacies, cultural studies, composition pedagogies,
and academic labor reform. Her scholarship has appeared in College English, The IWCA Update (newsletter for
the International Writing Center Association), Duke UP's journal Pedagogy, and Bedford St. Martin's online journal Lore.
Office: Holt 320/119
Phone: 423-425-2153/425-1774 Email:
jennifer-beech@utc.edu
Frances K. Bender
Mildred Routt Distinguished Teaching Professor
(Ed.D., University of Tennessee - Knoxville)
Fran Bender teaches professional writing and literature for children and adolescents. She also serves as director of the department's computer
classroom. Dr. Bender's most recent research has focused on censorship in young adult literature, and on the use of writing groups and
portfolios in technical writing courses. She has been honored with the University's Outstanding Service Award.
Office: Holt 324
Phone: 423-425-4636 Email:
fran-bender@utc.edu
Jacqueline Boals
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Jacqueline Boals teaches courses in rhetoric and composition and professional writing.
Office: Grote 241
Phone: 423-425-4238 Email:
jacqueline-boals@utc.edu
Earl S. Braggs
UC Foundation Professor (M.F.A., Vermont College of Norwich University)
Earl Braggs teaches creative writing, poetry, African-American literature, and Russian literature.
He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Hat Dancer Blue (winner of the 1992
Anhinga Prize), Walking Back From Woodstock, House on Fontanka, and Crossing
Tecumseh Street. In Which Language Do I Keep Silent: New and Selected Poems is scheduled for
publication in 2006, and he is currently working on a volume entitled Sketches of Spain.
In addition to his numerous prizes for poetry and fiction, he has been named
Outstanding Professor by the Student Government Association, and Outstanding Teacher by The University
of Tennessee National Alumni Association.
Office: Holt 338-C
Phone: 423-425-4793 Email:
earl-braggs@utc.edu
Ann Buggey
Lecturer (M.F.A., The University of Memphis)
Ann Buggey teaches courses in rhetoric and composition. Her poetry has appeared most recently
in the Tulane Review and Bayou. She has new work scheduled to appear in
Cairn, Calyx, Blueline, Poetry International, Gingko Tree
Review, and Subtropics.
Office: Grote 241
Phone: 423-425-4238 Email:
ann-buggey@utc.edu
Rebecca Cook
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Rebecca Cook teaches writing and Western humanities. She writes poetry and prose and is
particularly interested in writing that defies genre. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee
and has published in many literary journals and magazines. New work is forthcoming from
Northwest Review, Orchid, Tar Wolf Review, Red Rock Review,
Powhatan Review, and Quarter After Eight. Her chapbook of poems,
The Terrible Baby, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2006.
She is founder and president of the Chattanooga Writers Guild.
Office: Grote 222
Phone: 423-425-5481 Email:
rebecca-cook@utc.edu
Suzy R. Davis
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Suxy Davis teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and professional writing.
Office: Grote 246
Phone: 423-425-5475 Email:
suzy-davis@utc.edu
Joshua Edwards
Lecturer (M.A., University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Joshua Edwards grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and also lived in Boston before moving to
Chattanooga in 2001. His undergraduate work focused primarily on Philosophy and Religion and,
prior to graduate school, he also spent four years researching effective teaching practices in
public schools in Hamilton County with the Public Education Foundation. He teaches courses in
Rhetoric and Composition, Western Humanities and is also a part-time music teacher and
professional recording musician.
Office: Grote 241
Phone: 423-425-4238 Email:
joshua-edwards@utc.edu
Matthew Evans
Lecturer (M.A., University of Southern Mississippi)
Matt Evans teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and Western humanities.
Office: Grote 138
Phone: 423-425-4238 Email:
matthew-evans@utc.edu
April Green
Lecturer (M.A., University of Tennessee - Knoxville)
April Green teaches courses in rhetoric and composition.
Email:
april-green@utc.edu
Heather Grothe
Executive Secretary
Heather Grothe serves as Executive Secretary for the department of English.
Office: Holt 203
Phone: 423-425-4238 Email:
heather-grothe@utc.edu
Matthew Guy
Assistant Professor (Ph.D., Louisiana State University)
Matthew Guy specializes in literary theory and criticism, phenomenology, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies,
comparative literature, and world literature. His current research examines the works of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas,
revealing the hermeneutics of Levinas's Talmudic readings.
Office: Holt 326
Phone: 423-425-4613 Email:
matthew-guy@utc.edu
Bryan Adams Hampton
Assistant Professor and Co-ordinator of Humanities
(Ph.D., Northwestern University)
Bryan Hampton is a Milton scholar and has teaching and research interests in the cross-currents
of seventeenth-century literature, politics, and religion. He has published in Milton Studies,
and has written on the Leveller John Lilburne in The Age of Milton, edited by Alan Hager
(Greenwood Press). Most recently, he has completed an essay on Paradise Lost and the
politics of nonconformity, forthcoming in A Poem Written in Ten Books: Paradise Lost, 1667,
edited by Michael Lieb and John Shawcross (Duquesne University Press). Currently, in addition to
co-ordinating UTC's interdisciplinary Humanities major, he is at work on
a book manuscript that examines how Milton's radical theology of the Incarnation informs his
hermeneutics, politics, and ecclesiology.
Office: Holt 325
Phone: 423-425-2274 Email:
bryan-hampton@utc.edu
Lauren Sewell Ingraham
Associate Professor and Director of Composition
(Ph.D., University of Louisville)
Lauren Ingraham specializes in rhetoric and composition studies as well as professional writing. In addition
to directing the first-year writing program at UTC, she pursues
research in composition theory,
research, and pedagogy, writing program administration, and ethnographic research in composition.
Office: Holt 231-B
Phone: 423-425-5232 Email:
lauren-ingraham@utc.edu
Margaret L. Jackson
Lecturer (M.A., Middlebury College)
Marg Jackson teaches courses in Western humanities, professional writing, and rhetoric and composition.
Office: Holt 232-J
Phone: 423-425-2317 Email:
margaret-jackson@utc.edu
Richard Jackson
UT National Alumni Association Distinguished Service Professor
(Ph.D., Yale University)
Richard Jackson teaches creative writing and poetry, humanities in UTC's interdisciplinary honors program, and
writing seminars at Vermont College and the Breadloaf Writers Conference. He is the author of nine books of poems, most recently
Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (2004) and Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems (2003). His work has
been translated into a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poems, among other
collections. He has edited two anthologies of Slovene poetry, as well as the journals Poetry Miscellany and mala revija.
In addition to several dozen essays and reviews that have appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review,
Contemporary Literature, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner, he is the author of Dismantling
Time in Contemporary American Poetry (Agee Prize), and Acts of Mind:
Interviews With Contemporary American Poets (Choice Award). He has been awarded the Order of Freedom Medal by the
President of Slovenia for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans, and
has been named a Guggenheim Fellow.
Office: Holt 333
Phone: 423-425-4629 Email:
richard-jackson@utc.edu
Michael Jaynes
Lecturer (M.A., University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Mike Jaynes teaches courses in developmental writing, rhetoric and composition, Western
humanities, and twentieth-century American fiction. His research interests include Animal Rights and Ethicism, Ufology, the cult of the individual, the embraced rogue, experimental
fiction, and freedom theory. His academic writing, fiction, creative non-fiction, and
poetry have appeared in Farmhouse Magazine, The Riverwalk Journal, Aalst Magazine
(UK),
The Central California Poetry Review, Raunchland, Eureka Studies in Teaching Short
Fiction, Contemporary Southern Poets of 1998, UFO Magazine, and Harold Bloom's Modern Critical Views New Edition on Alice Walker.
Office:
Phone: Email:
michael-jaynes@utc.edu
Rebecca Jones
Assistant Professor (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Rebecca Jones specializes in rhetorical theory, discourse, composition, and women's studies.
Her most recent work is forthcoming in two edited collections: Revisioning the Borders: Teaching
Writing at Hispanic Serving Institutions edited by Christina Kirklighter, Susan Loudermilk,
Diana Cardenas, and Susan Wolff Murphy, and Image Events: From Theory to Action edited by
Joe Wilferth and Kevin DeLuca. Dr. Jones has also won the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding
Teacher Award.
Office: Holt 202
Phone:423-425-4608 Email:
rebecca-jones01@utc.edu
Paige Joyner
Lecturer (M.F.A.,Vermont College of Norwich University)
Paige Joyner teaches courses in rhetoric and composition.
Office: Grote 244
Phone: 423-425-5473 Email:
paige-joyner@utc.edu
Immaculate N. Kizza
UC Foundation Professor
(Ph.D., University of Toledo)
Immaculate Kizza specializes in African literature, the slave narrative tradition, British modernism,
and literary analysis; she also teaches
African culture and literature in the University's interdisciplinary honors program. Her current research
interests include the slave narrative tradition, the African oral tradition, and inter-textual threads in
African and African American literatures. In addition to numerous articles on literature, she is the
author of Africa's Indigenous Institutions in
Nation Building: Uganda. She has also been named Outstanding Teacher by The
University of Tennessee National Alumni Association.
Office: Holt 232-D
Phone: 423-425-4617 Email:
immaculate-kizza@utc.edu
Chad Littleton
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Chad Littleton teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and professional writing.
Office: Grote 245
Phone: 423-425-5474 Email:
chad-littleton@utc.edu
Gale Mauk
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Gale Mauk teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and Western humanities.
Office: Grote 223
Phone: 423-425-5481
Email:
gale-mauk@utc.edu
Mary McCampbell
Lecturer (Ph.D., University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne)
Mary McCampbell teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and Western humanities. Her
current research interests are in postmodern fiction and theory and their relationship to theology
and popular culture. She has a chapter on Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma forthcoming in
the collection Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination.
Office: Holt 230
Phone: 423-425-2152 Email:
mary-mccampbell@utc.edu
Tiffany Mitchell
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Tiffany Mitchell teaches courses in rhetoric and composition and Western humanities, and is an e-structor
with Smarthinking.com, an online writing center. Through her work with Friends of Moccasin Bend National
Park, she is one of the voices of Moccasin Bend Moments, heard on 90.5 FM.
Office: Holt 230
Phone: 423-425-2152 Email:
tiffany-mitchell@utc.edu
Sheena Monds
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee - Knoxville)
Sheena Monds teaches courses in rhetoric and composition.
Office:
Phone: Email:
sheena-monds@utc.edu
Andrew Najberg
Lecturer (M.A., University of Tennessee - Knoxville)
Andrew Najberg teaches courses in rhetoric and composition.
Office:
Phone: Email:
andrew-najberg@utc.edu
Marcia Noe
Professor and Coordinator of Women's Studies
(Ph.D., University of Iowa)
Marcia Noe teaches courses in American literature, drama, and women's
studies. She is the author of Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland and
over twenty other publications on this Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. She has been a
Fulbright Senior Lecturer-Researcher at the Federal University
of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; with Junia C.M.
Alves, she has edited a collection of essays on the
Brazilian theatre troupe Grupo Galpao (Editora Newton Paiva, 2005). She
is a senior editor of The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, editor of
the journal MidAmerica, and chairs
the editorial committee of the Society for the Study of Midwestern
Literature, which gave her the MidAmerica Award for distinguished
contributions to the study of midwestern literature. She has
won the UTC College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teacher award, and is an elected member of UTC's Council of Scholars.
Office: Holt 338-E
Phone: 423-425-4692 Email:
marcia-noe@utc.edu
Coral Norwood
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Coral Norwood teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and Western humanities. She is
currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Her research interests include literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century British
literature, modern Irish literature, and science-fiction/fantasy novels and games.
Office: Grote 223
Phone: 423-425-5481 Email:
coral-norwood@utc.edu
Gregory O'Dea
UC Foundation Professor and Director of The University Honors Program
(Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Gregory O'Dea teaches courses in the English-language novel, Restoration and eighteenth-century British
literature, British romanticism, postcolonial literature, and literary analysis. He is co-editor of
Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley After Frankenstein (Fairleigh Dickinson UP), and his scholarship
has appeared in such journals as The South Atlantic Review, Papers on Language and Literature,
and the online journal Romanticism on the Net. In addition to directing UTC's interdisciplinary honors
program, he is Co-Director and Scholar in Residence for literature and medicine programs sponsored by the
American College of Physicians. He has been named Outstanding Professor by UTC's Student
Government Association, University Outstanding Advisor, and Outstanding Teacher by The University of Tennessee National Alumni Association.
In 2005, The American
College of Physicians honored him with the Clifton R. Cleaveland Medical Humanities Award for outstanding contributions
to humanism in medicine. His current research concerns crime and criminology in the novels of Charles Dickens.
Office: Holt 229-D/Guerry 202
Phone: 423-425-4611/4166 Email:
gregory-o'dea@utc.edu
Heather Palmer
Assistant Professor (Ph.D., Georgia State University)
Heather Palmer specializes in ancient and modern rhetorical history and theory, feminist rhetorics
and women's studies, and media and cultural studies. Her most recent work was published in Modern Language
Studies and in a collection entitled Collaborating, Literature, and Composition: An Anthology for Teachers
and Writers of English, edited by Peter Khost and Frank Gaughan. An article for Pedagogy is scheduled
for publication in 2008. She is currently working on a book proposal about the function of parrhesia in the
history of women's rhetoric from the Delphic Oracles to the Second Sophistic.
Office: Holt 338-A
Phone: 423-425-4693 Email:
heather-palmer@utc.edu
Tim Parker
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Tim Parker teaches courses in professional writing and rhetoric and composition.
Office: Holt 332
Phone: 423-425-2338 Email:
tim-parker@utc.edu
Tracye Pool
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Tracye Pool teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and writing for the social sciences.
Office: Grote 247
Phone: 423-425-5476 Email:
tracye-pool@utc.edu
Verbie Lovorn Prevost
George Connor Professor of American Literature and Department Head
(Ph.D., University of Mississippi)
In addition to serving as Head of the English department, Verbie Prevost specializes in American literature, literature of the
American South, and women authors. She pursues research interests in these areas, and particularly on the work of women novelists
of the American South. She also teaches courses in international fiction, and has recently led students on seminars abroad,
studying short fiction in Ireland and
Australia. Dr. Prevost is active in directing several ongoing programs, including the University's Take Five lecture series and
the Arts and Education Council's Young Southern Writers Contest.
Office: Holt 203
Phone: 423-425-4238 Email:
verbie-prevost@utc.edu
Katherine Heinrichs Rehyansky
Dorothy and James D. Kennedy, Jr. Professor
(Ph.D., University of Virginia)
Katherine Rehyansky teaches medieval literature (particularly Geoffery Chaucer), the history of the English language, and courses
in grammar and linguistics. Her research focuses on Chaucer's Romance sources, and she is currently at work on a hypertext edition of the
Oriel manuscript of Piers Plowman. She is editor of The Tennessee Philological Bulletin, and has been named Outstanding
Teacher by The University of Tennessee National Alumni Association. She is also an elected member of UTC's Council of Scholars.
Office: Holt 229-A
Phone: 423-425-4604 Email:
katherine-rehyansky@utc.edu
Aaron Shaheen
Assistant Professor (Ph.D., University of Florida)
Aaron Shaheen specializes in American modernism and gender theory. Other academic
interests include Henry James, literature of the American South, and postbellum cultural studies. He has
published articles in The Southern Literary Journal, Children's Literature, and
The Henry James Review. At present he is working on a book-length manuscript that examines
the ways in which American modernists used scientific, religious, and racial notions of androgyny
to formulate models of national cohesion.
Office: Holt 310
Phone: 423-425-5398 Email:
aaron-shaheen@utc.edu
Edgar McDowell Shawen
Associate Professor (Ph.D., Yale University)
Mac Shawen teaches Shakespeare, early English drama, literature of the English
renaissance, Japanese literature, and rhetoric and composition. He has been named
Outstanding Teacher by the University of Tennessee National Alumni Association. His
current research interests include twentieth-century poetry and fiction, with
particular focus on Japanese fiction.
Office:
Phone: Email:
edgar-shawen@utc.edu
Jenny Cooper Smith
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Jenny Cooper Smith teaches courses in scientific writing and rhetoric and composition.
Office:
Phone: Email:
jenny-smith@utc.edu
Joyce Caldwell Smith
Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English
(Ph.D., Georgia State University)
Joyce Smith teaches American Literature, Western humanities, Latino/a literature, and professional and scientific writing.
Her current research and special teaching interests focus on the works of Stephen Crane and Erskine Caldwell, Latino/a literature,
and the use of computers in composition.
Office: Holt 229-C
Phone: 423-425-4623 Email:
joyce-smith@utc.edu
Christopher Stuart
Katharine H. Pryor Associate Professor
(Ph.D., University of Connecticut)
Chris Stuart teaches courses in American literature (particularly the American novel), and
humanities in the University's interdisciplinary honors
program. He has been named Outstanding Teacher by The University of Tennessee National
Alumni Association and serves on the Editorial Board of the University of Tennessee Press.
His scholarship has appeared in such journals as American Literary
Realism, Critique, and Literature and Belief. His current research focuses on the works of Henry James.
Office: Holt 322
Phone: 423-425-2140 Email:
chris-stuart@utc.edu
Jane Sutton
Lecturer (M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Jane Sutton teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and Western humanities.
Office: Grote 224-A
Phone: 423-425-5481 Email:
jane-sutton@utc.edu
Thomas Clayton Ware
Professor
(Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Thomas Ware specializes in Romanticism, Victorian literature, British transitional literature, and James Joyce. He also writes on the
literature of the First World War, U.S. Civil War cemeteries, and modern Irish autobiography. He is co-author, with Nathaniel Cheairs
Hughes Jr., of Theodore O'Hara: Poet-Soldier of the Old South
(University of Tennessee Press), and two of his most recent publications have appeared The James Joyce Quarterly,
and Nua': Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing.
Office:
Phone: Email:
thomas-ware@utc.edu
Kristine Whorton
Lecturer (M.A., University of Alabama)
Kristine Whorton teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, and Western humanities.
Office: Grote 244
Phone: 423-425-5473 Email:
kristine-whorton@utc.edu
Joe Wilferth
UC Foundation Associate Professor and Associate Department Head
(Ph.D., Bowling Green State University)
Joe Wilferth teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in professional writing,
intermediate and advanced composition, ancient rhetoric, medieval and renaissance rhetoric,
rhetorical analysis, and modern rhetorical theory. In addition to ongoing research in areas
such as hypertext/hypermedia and teaching with technology, he is currently at work on a
co-edited collection of essays concerning image events and visual rhetorics.
Office: Holt 229-B
Phone: 423-425-4621 Email:
joe-wilferth@utc.edu
Web Site
Jane Womack
Lecturer and Director of The English as a Second Language Institute
(M.A., The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Jane Womack teaches courses in rhetoric and composition and English as a second language.
Office: Holt 229-E
Phone: 423-425-2273 Email:
jane-womack@utc.edu
