The following is a collection of brief autobiographical statements prepared by those members of the English faculty who teach upper-division English courses. Students have shown interest in knowing the academic credentials of their instructors and the books they have published, hence their inclusion here. In addition, each professor has given some indication as to where his or her particular scholarly interests lie, together with his individual approach to those upper-division courses that he has taught or will teach at VCU. Condensed as these statements are, we hope that they will nevertheless prove helpful as an introduction to the individual members of the department and as a guide to choosing intelligently both the course and the teacher in a department that may appear at first to be bewilderingly large.

Katherine C. Bassard, Associate Professor. BA Wake Forest University; MA Virginia Commonwealth University; PhD Rutgers University. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing.

My interests include African American and women writers, the Bible as literature, the Bible and literary theory, and issues of history and religion as they are given expression in the literary imagination. I strive to strike a balance between scholarship, creative writing and teaching which, for me, are not mutually exclusive categories. For me, the ideal classroom environment is a safe space for the active, engaged communication of ideas through writing and discussion.

Laura Browder, Associate Professor, BA Brown University; MA Boston University; PhD Brandeis University. Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America; Slippery Characters: Ethnic Imposters and American Identities.

Since drama is not a written, but a performative genre, both my playwriting and my dramatic literature classes stress the importance of making the transition from page to stage. Thus, students in my playwriting courses are required not just to write, but to stage their scripts at semester's end. In my dramatic literature classes, we discuss plays both as cultural artifacts—products of a specific time and place—and as texts whose meaning changes depending on when and where they are performed, by whom, and for whom. My research and teaching interests include American Studies as well as drama. My most recent project examines a century and a half of fake ethnic autobiography in American culture.

David Coogan, Assistant Professor, BA College of Wooster; MA, PhD SUNY/Albany.

My research is on rhetoric and social change. The work began with studies of computer-mediated communication and its impact on the teaching of writing. My contribution was to define the emerging rhetoric of online tutoring as a catalyst for larger disciplinary changes in Composition Studies. In my book, Electronic Writing Centers: Computing the Field of Composition, I argue that asynchronous, written exchange conducted over a period of several weeks changes the "interaction ritual" of talking about a text and emphasizes instead the generative possibilities of collaborative writing, or talking with text. Since the publication of my book, my research program has expanded to encompass public rhetoric and service learning, with a special focus on urban issues such as transportation, neighborhood history, housing, and education. Where my earlier work identified the writing center as a vehicle for generating changes in our conception of literacy, my current work identifies rhetoric as a vehicle for generating change in under-served communities. One piece, recently accepted for publication in College Composition and Communication, uses a materialist perspective on rhetoric to analyze how students and community partners advocated to increase parent involvement in Chicago Public Schools. Another piece, which will appear in College English in 2005, analyzes the rhetorical dynamics of building human capital in Chicago’s public housing developments. Currently, I am working on an edited book collection that addresses the pedagogical, curricular, institutional, and scholarly challenges that arise when use "the public" to rethink the theory and practice of rhetorical work in Composition Studies.

From this research, I have developed courses that teach students how to research community issues, analyze rhetorical situations, and work collaboratively with community partners to produce influential texts. I also teach graduate courses in contemporary rhetorical theory and the teaching of writing, where I introduce students to a wide range of theories and practices, including materialism, postmodernism, dialogism, constructivism, expressivism, and others. My goal in these classes is to help students develop their own point of view about rhetoric so that might go on to use it in their own work as writers, teachers, and scholars.

Marcel Cornis-Pope, Professor. AB, MA Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca; PhD University of Timisoara. Modern Fiction: 1880-1950; Anatomy of the White Whale: A Poetics of the American Symbolic Romance; Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting; Violence and Mediation in Contemporary Culture (coed. with Ronald Bogue).

Marcel Cornis-Pope is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. His publications include Anatomy of the White Whale: A Poetics of the American Symbolic Romance (1982), Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Poststructuralism (1992), and Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (2001). He has also published numerous articles on contemporary fiction, narrative studies, and critical theory in journals and collective volumes. His current project is a multi-volume work (coedited with John Neubauer) entitled History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Century, which explores East Central European literatures from a comparative-intercultural perspective, cutting across traditional national partitions. Vol. 1 of this work, on "Nodes of Political Time" and "Histories of Literary Form," was published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in 2004. His awards include a Fulbright teaching and research grant (1983-85), an Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University (1987-88), a year-long Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Wassenaar, The Netherlands), and the 1996 CELJ Award for Significant Editorial Achievement for his work as editor of The Comparatist.

He says:
My areas of specialization are modern and contemporary literature, narrative studies, current critical approaches (reader-oriented, feminist, semiotic postmodern). I am particularly interested in exploring the nature and function of narration in modern culture, or the relation between fiction and poetics, text and interpretation. I am asking how literary texts are constructed, organized rhetorically, and come to have full meaning in the process of reading. In both my literary surveys and my criticism classes, I mix informal lecture with discussion and workshop writing, engaging students in various stages of critical analysis (response analysis, text interpretation, critical argument) in order to render our interpretive activities conscious, to foreground our role in meaning-making. These courses and seminars aim at giving readers the vocabulary and tools of critical analysis, making their experience of literature more responsive and creative.

Tom De Haven, Professor. BA Rutgers/Newark; MFA Bowling Green State University. Freaks' Amour; Jersey Luck; Funny Papers; U.S.S.A.; Joe Gosh; Sunburn Lake; Walker of Worlds; Pixie Meat; The End-of-Everything Man; The Last Human; Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies; Dugan Under Ground.

When you're teaching, you're performing, and a performer always prepares. When I run a fiction workshop, I come to the table with crazily marked-up student manuscripts and several typewritten pages of notes. I don't often refer to my notes. I have them memorized. And when I teach an American Studies course, I write out all of my lectures, and memorize them too, as best I can, and then I go in and perform. Sure, I'll be glad to take student questions and have a class discussion, but let me finish the lecture first—all right? I teach fiction workshops because I'm a fiction writer with twenty years of working experience that I like to pass on to younger writers. I consider the writers in my classes to be colleagues; we're all in this thing together, it's our mutual profession. I'm most interested in strategies of storytelling, narrative voice, and the engines of successful narratives. In my American Studies work, I'm a popular culturist without portfolio interested in American comic strips, detective and science fiction, the Hollywood studio system, film noir, and social histories of the twentieth century.

Gregory Donovan, Associate Professor. BA University of Missouri; MA University of Utah; PhD SUNY/Binghamton; Ph.D. State University of New York at Binghamton. Calling His Children Home.

My approach to teaching is based on a few basic principles: the sleeping student learns nothing (so I am shameless in prompting students to be alert); learning is fundamentally the student's own property and responsibility (thus I work to be neither patriarchal nor patronizing in my teaching—I take students quite seriously); storytelling is an endangered art and a vital tool in drawing literature and life closer (so I tell all sorts of stories in my classes); education is not primarily a first step in the process of getting a job—it's the basis for getting a life (therefore I continue to learn as I teach). I frequently teach creative writing workshops in both poetry and fiction, and those experiences have confirmed my belief that the reading and writing of literature are fundamentally connected. In literature classes (where my courses frequently cover twentieth century American and British fiction and poetry, particularly contemporary poetry, often with a women's studies focus on the poetry of American women), I usually ask for a substantial amount of writing from students including on exams (I loathe multiple-choice or quotation-identification exams). In creative writing courses, I ask students to read a great deal, and I return written responses to every piece of writing I receive, as well as encourage wide-ranging workshop discussions which nevertheless are focuses on helping the student writer achieve a stronger poem or story; I also offer students as many individual conferences as they need, and ultimately work hard to make myself expendable—as the developing writer learns to become his or her own most helpful and demanding critic.

Joshua Eckhardt, Assistant Professor. BA Valparaiso University; MA, PhD University of Illinois.

Richard Fine, Professor. AB Brown University; AM, PhD University of Pennsylvania. James M. Cain and The American Authors' Authority; West of Eden: Writers in Hollywood.

My general fields are American studies and American literature, and my own work has focused on the profession of authorship and I published a book on writers' experience in Hollywood during the 1930s; more recently I've become interested in theories of intellectual property and systems of copyright law, this growing out of the work I did on writers' attempts to organize in the marketplace after World War II. I also routinely teach courses in contemporary British literature, Asian-American literature, and the American film industry, and so have some knowledge in these areas as well.

My degrees are in American Civilization rather than English, and I teach the upper-level American Studies courses as well as Contemporary American Literature. By temperament and training an interdisciplinarian, I concentrate in class on the ways in which methods and materials of a variety of disciplines—history, art, music, political science, sociology and anthropology as well as literature—may be used to study American life, past and present. My main academic specialization is the relationship between American artists and writers and their society, and I am also interested in the workings of the American film industry. My classes usually include both informal lectures and discussions, and I generally assign two or three short papers and a comprehensive final exam in most classes, and a longer research project in seminars.

Nicholas Frankel, Associate Professor. BA Oxford University; MA University of Southern California; PhD University of Virginia. Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books.

I principally teach British writing of the Victorian period, with occasional forays into Poe, Baudelaire and other non-Brits without whom British literature would be a sadder affair. I don't have much time or use for the museum-piece approach. I believe that the literature of the past can teach us an immense amount about the limits of our own understanding, so in my classes I emphasize the dynamic and affective qualities of literary texts—their continued capacities to move and thrill us—as much as the intellectual, historical and cognitive. I place a heavy premium on acts of reading and interpretation, and I demand that students respond actively and imaginatively to texts that, in many cases, seem alien and uncomfortable at first. Typically this means that a large part of my classes are given over to live reading, discussion and debate. I encourage students to be vocal and to take a personal stake in what they read, not to expect formulas or easy solutions delivered on a plate.

My research interests are in Victorian poetry, the 1890s, aestheticism and decoration, visual poetics, environmentalism, textual theory, and the history of the book. I am the author of Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books (U. Michigan, 2000) as well as a contributor to The Victorian Illustrated Book (U. Virginia, 2002), Marking the Text (Ashgate, 2000) The Fin De Siècle Poem (Ohio U. P, forthcoming) and Fakes and Forgeries (Cambridge Scholar's Press, forthcoming). I have published essays and reviews in such journals as Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, TEXT, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, Victorians' Institute Journal, and Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide. I am currently working on two books, The Discourse of Decoration and The Textual Environment, as well as an essay on Oscar Wilde's embrace of the typewriter as a mode of literary production. In 2001 I was the recipient of the Fredson Bowers Memorial Award and Clowes Fellow in Fine Art at the National Humanities Center.

Les Harrison, Assistant Professor. BA Miami University; MA, PhD Texas A&M University. The Temple and the Forum: The Museum and Cultural Authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe and Whitman (forthcoming)

Elizabeth S. Hodges, Associate Professor. BA Syracuse University; MS, PhD University of Pennsylvania. What the River Means.

I teach nonfiction writing and courses in teaching writing and empirical research in composition. Whatever the course, I always emphasize connections between writing, reading, and orality as well as the connections between writing and learning. I went into composition studies and research because I believe that candid, lucid and informed communication is crucial to our lives. I also think language is a lot of fun and try to help my students think so too. As a researcher, I look at language conventions in a variety of contexts, though currently I look most at postsecondary literacy education. My research strategies are sociolinguistic and ethnographic. To date, I have looked through these lenses in an effort to understand, and improve how we teach and learn writing. By doing so, I believe we can enable students to use writing and reading with greater ease. Ease with language is, after all, foundational to all other learning. My classes are generally framed to allow plenty of room for students' observations, opinions, questions, and other delving into language and ideas. We work hard, but I think most students feel they get a lot out of my classes. I know I myself learn a lot from my students.

Catherine E. Ingrassia, Associate Professor. BA Grinnell College; MA, PhD, University of Texas/Austin. Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit.

Catherine Ingrassia works on the literature and culture of Restoration and eighteenth-century England. Her research has been focused on the material and symbolic economies that emerged in the early part of the eighteenth century, and their effect on the cultural representations of class and gender. In addition to focusing on canonical authors of the period (particularly Alexander Pope and Samuel Richardson), she is also particularly interested in women writers. Her publications include Authorship, Commerce, and Gender: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge University Press, 1998); "More Solid Learning": New Approaches to Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, co-editor with Claudia Thomas (Bucknell University Press, 2000); and a modern edition (with appendices and introduction) of Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding's Shamela (Broadview Press, 2004). She is also the co-editor, with Paula R. Backscheider, of The Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture (Blackwell, forthcoming), and the editor of volumes 33 and 34 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press). She has also published essays on Eliza Haywood, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, and the film. Currently she is working on a book-length project on the eighteenth-century novelist, Eliza Haywood.

Michael Keller, Instructor. BA James Madison University; MFA Virginia Commonwealth University.

My areas of interest are poetry and nonfiction as well as network technologies as they support or interact with teaching, especially in the writing classroom. In addition to teaching poetry workshop and advanced composition using electronic discussion boards as a critical component of the workshop process, I also support and train other faculty in their use of technology. I have a long-time interest in experimental online work, much of which might now fall under the category of "New Media." I’m currently designing both an undergraduate course in Writing Hypertext and a reading course in New Media Literature. I am one of the founding editors of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts and work with undergraduate interns in that capacity.

James Kinney, Professor. BA St. Bonaventure University; PhD University of Tennessee. Understanding Writing; Amalgamation!: Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel.

I teach courses in American literature and in rhetoric and composition. I'm interested in how writers use language to affect readers, both literary authors and student writers. How and to what extend can writers control readers' responses? How do readers construct their responses to the texts they read? How do the two entities of writer and reader interact through a text to create meaning? My classes explore these and other questions, especially how the processes of writing and reading, of making meaning, are a part of the social and cultural context of the times in which they take place. I'm particularly interested in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, and how it both reflects and affects the culture of that time, especially cultural attitudes about race. My classes combine informal lecture and discussion, with the proportion of each determined by how actively students choose to participate. I usually require two exams and one or two papers. Advanced composition requires more written work but no exams.

Elisabeth D. Kuhn, Associate Professor. MA Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University/Frankfurt; MA, MJournalism, PhD University of California, Berkeley. Gender and Authority.

In my introductory linguistics courses, students will acquire tools to understand and analyze how language works. In more advanced courses, they will have the opportunity to apply those tools to design and conduct their own research projects. I am very interested in how people use language to accomplish their goals—how they communicate with each other, how they get others to do or believe things. Language and gender/power, and cross-cultural and cross-style communications have been the focus of my work for years. After getting much of my data from college classrooms, I am now also studying cross-cultural communication in various ethnic communities in the greater Richmond area.

David E. Latané, Associate Professor. BA Roanoke College; MA University of Vermont; PhD Duke University. Browning's Sordello and the Aesthetics of Difficulty.

David E. Latané, Jr. is a specialist in British literature of the 1780-1850 period, and also publishes on contemporary British poetry. He edits the scholarly annual Victorians Institute Journal, is Associate Editor of the literary quarterly Stand (Leeds, UK), and serves on the advisory board for Victorian Poetry. Publications include Browning’s Sordello and the Aesthetics of Difficulty (1987), and essays on diverse subjects from Blake and Susan Ferrier to Philip Larkin and Michael Foucault. Current research is focused on the literary culture of the 1820-1840 period as it intersects with the political sphere. Recent work in this area includes seven entries for the newly revised Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), a forthcoming essay "Who Counts? Popularity, Modern Recovery, and the Early Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet," and research into the life of the reputed blackmailer Charles Molloy Westmacott, editor of the satiric Age newspaper. In 2000-01 Latané received an NEH Fellowship for work on "UnCorked: William Maginn and the Denial of Authorship," planned to be the first scholarly biography on the Irish journalist and poet William Maginn (1794-1842). The archival basis of this project has been laid by research in libraries from Los Angeles to Dublin. Recent published essays and conference papers arising from this project include "Perge, signifer—or Where Did William Maginn Stand," "The Two Dr. Maginns," and "Alaric ‘Attila’ Watts, the Fraser’s Portrait Gallery, and William Maginn," as well as the entries on Maginn for the DNB, DLB, and Encyclopedia of Ireland. Interests in the later Victorian period focus on poetry; he has edited a special edition of Victorian Poetry on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury that includes comments from poets in the latest edition on this monument to Victorian taste, and recently wrote the entry on the poet Augusta Webster for the Encyclopedia of British Literature forthcoming from Oxford.

He says:
I teach 19th-century British literature, contemporary poetry, and poetics. My concerns include the contextual field—a typical assignment might be to explore a 200-year-old copy of the Times—and the aesthetic object (you also might be assigned a poem to explicate as a "stand alone" work of art). I think of students as intelligent beings with 12-15 years of "English" behind them who are ready to work somewhat independently.

A. Bryant Mangum, Professor. BA University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill; MA, PhD University of South Carolina. A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories.

The area of my particular fascination is the Jazz Age of American literature; and I am especially interested in the lives of the lost generation writers, as well as in the development of the novel in the post World War I decade. In addition to close reading out of class and spontaneous discussion of that reading in class, I encourage students to consider relevant historical information about the work in question: whether it was written for love or money and whether contemporary audiences liked the work, for example. I give hour quizzes—usually three—and an inclusive final examination.

Clint McCown, Associate Professor. BA, MA Wake Forest University; MFA Indiana University. The Weatherman; The Member-Guest; War Memorials.

I have been most active in the field of fiction writing, although I have interests in screenwriting, creative nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting, as well. My work in literary editing has kept me engaged with contemporary literarure, particularly in the genre of the short story. My writing classes are run as workshops in which students are required to critique each other's work. The goal of the workshop is to help the writer bridge the gap between what was intended by the author and what was received by the reader. The emphasis is upon writing as communication, rather than as undisciplined self-expression. My literature classes are combinations of lecture and discussion.

Charlotte C. Morse, Professor. AB Brown University; MA, PhD Stanford University. The Pattern of Judgment in the Queste del Saint Graal and Cleanness; articles on Chaucer's Clerk's Tale.

Because I like to watch my students grow in confidence and capacity to think for themselves, I usually design a syllabus that builds on itself. That is, the reading assignments for the beginning of the term, however odd they may seem, provide the student with literary and intellectual context, so that by midterm students can be sophisticated, knowledgeable readers and critics. Medieval and Renaissance literature, inter-disciplinary medieval studies, women's studies, epic and romance, medieval ways of reading the Bible, Chaucer fascinate me; I hope that you, too, will find the literature and culture that begins the distinctively Western tradition inviting. The range is terrific—the love of God and sexual love, ladies and viragos, saints and sinners, high seriousness and low comedy.

Terry Oggel, Professor. BA Monmouth College; MA Kent State University; PhD University of Wisconsin. Index to Reviews of Bibliographical Publications; The Letters and Notebooks of Mary Devlin Booth; Edwin Booth: A Bio-bibliography.

I teach and I write in late nineteenth-century American literature and theatre, with a special focus on Mark Twain and Edwin Booth. Most of my publications have a significant bibliographic and textual component, and I regularly teach the department's graduate course that introduces students to research in English studies and to principles of textual studies. Besides literature, theatre and drama of the post Civil-War period, I also work in law and in psychology.

Patricia H. Perry, Associate Professor. BA, MLS North Carolina Central University; PhD SUNY/Stony Brook. A Composition of Consciousness: Roads of Reflection from Freire and Elbow.

My primary areas of interest are Composition Studies and American Literature. My work in Composition Studies focuses primarily on modernist composition theory and pedagogy, especially the classical, theoretical, and philosophical roots and intersections of the work of Peter Elbow, compositionist, and Paulo Freire, cultural critic. Sub-areas of this focus include the phenomenology of consciousness, dialogics, epistemology, literacy, and cultural criticism as they relate to theories of teaching and learning writing. My study of texts in these areas seeks to improve writing pedagogical practices through continuous exploration of theories of knowledge-making, composing, rhetoric, cognition, culture, media, and society.

My interest in the phenomenology of consciousness informs my study and teaching of American literature texts, especially African American texts. The basis of my inquiry into American texts is consciousness, writers' awareness of being itself, particularly being "American." For African American texts, my inquiry is informed by the W. E. B. Duboisian concept of double consciousness, consciousness of the conflict of being both American and black and giving voice to this dilemma. My interests in American literature range from its beginning texts and voices to its contemporary ones, with emphasis on the novel.

Richard K. Priebe, Professor. BA (English) Franklin and Marshall College; BA (French) Virginia Commonwealth University; MA University of Michigan; PhD University of Texas. Artist and Audience: African Literature as Shared Experience; Perspectives on Ghanaian Literatures; The Teaching of African Literature; Manuscripts from Southern Africa; Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas; Myth, Realism, and the West African Writer.

Although my main area of interest is African literature, I have a very strong secondary interest in folklore. I feel it is impossible to divorce literature from society and try in the classroom to place the work under consideration in its particular cultural milieu before attempting close analysis of the work itself. In the first two or three weeks of my African literature class I lecture on African history, culture, religion, and oral literature, dividing the remaining time equally between lectures and class discussion. Students should expect papers, a mid-term, and a final.

Gary Sange, Associate Professor. BA, MA San Francisco State College; MFA University of Iowa. Sudden Around the Bend.

Only when I'm making a poem am I a poet; the rest of the time I love to run, teach, grow food, and live on my farm. I teach in order to be with people who are surprising themselves, becoming more precise in the self-criticism, and who know they are about the spontaneous composition of a happy, tense, shared understanding that can come from their being together. My Poetry Workshop will likely vary from ruly to unruly. I will make assignments that range from a study of the psychology of linebreak to the writing of "sound" poems (in which you may overlook sense and indulge yourself in especially sonorous words) to a "dream" poem (for which you must sleep and get up at 3 a.m.) to a "painting" poem (for which you might imagine what could happen next to a painting, or what could take place just outside its frame) to sonnet, quatrain, terza rima, and to writing in accentuals or syllabics. And I will also make no assignments, a fact to which I expect you to respond often and spontaneously with new poems you wouldn't write for a teacher.

Nicholas A. Sharp, Assistant Professor. BA University of Kansas; MA, PhD Ohio State University.

For the last several years, my research interests have focused on the form, theory, development, and practice of sonnets, especially the connections between earlier sonnet practices (Renaissance and Romantic-Victorian) and later 20th century "sonneteers" such as John Berryman, Henry Taylor and Marilyn Hacker. The most recent article which I have written and submitted (but not yet found a journal to take) concerns Berryman’s conscious adaptations from the earliest English sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt. The last article I published looked at Henry Taylor’s nostalgic evocation of Keats’s romantic sonnets in "One Morning Shoeing Horses" (from his 1985 The Flying Changes). Because of my role as Associate Chair of the Department, much of my actual "research" in the last 5 years has been the crassest sort of applied research aimed at supporting departmental operations, so I also have a strong secondary interest in the evolving identity of "English" as an institutionalized phenomenon and its relationship to the rest of the university enterprise

As I understand the discipline of English, it is both analytical and synthetic, both critical and creative. In my classes, therefore, I try to help people sharpen their analytical faculties by examining the literary structures in poetic and dramatic texts. At the same time, however, I try to emphasize the creative part of the critical process. I ask students to write papers which use critical analysis as a basis for imaginative interpretation. Typically, my teaching style is lecture or lecture-discussion, and I usually require two short papers, a long paper, and a final examination in my upper division literature classes. In my grading, I put significant emphasis on the organization, development, and style of student papers.

Sachi Shimomura, Assistant Professor. AB Stanford University; MA, PhD Cornell University.

My major interest is medieval literature, especially romances and Arthurian texts. Currently I am studying the ways time and space work in medieval and later narratives. I like to teach modern movies and science fiction against medieval works. My classes combine discussion and short lectures, and require active participation in analyzing passages, ideas, and connections. I stress careful reading and writing, and the shapes and structures of medieval literature and culture—sometimes very alien, sometimes very similar to our modern experiences.

David Wojahn, Professor. BA University of Minnesota; MFA University of Arizona. Spirit Cabinet; The Falling Hour; Late Empire; Mystery Train; Glassworks; Icehouse Lights; Strange Good Fortune; A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry (coed.); The Only World (ed.).

I have been teaching poetry writing and literature classes concerning poetry for some twenty-five years now, at nine universities, and came to VCU in 2003 after teaching at Indiana University for 17 years. I wish that I could say that this experience has led me to a very clear idea of how creative writing should be taught. But the writing of poetry and the teaching of poetry writing remain for me mysterious processes. There are a few things I do know, however: reading poetry, both contemporary verse and the work of the tradition, is crucial for any developing poet; revision is similarly crucial; and poetry workshops, flawed as they sometimes are, can help students to be better writers and readers. I want my writing students to be careful readers, scrupulous revisers, and good citizens of their poetry workshops. These goals are easy to list, but hard to achieve. I suppose my goal as a teacher is to make these goals easier for my students to attain.