91ÖÆƬ³§

Mark Letcher, Associate Professor of English Education and Director of the English Language Arts Teaching Program, joined the 91ÖÆƬ³§ 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.Ìý 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. 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.Ìý He is at work on two book-length manuscripts—his memoirs of growing up in India and Nepal and a collection of essays on the southern plains of Nepal called Madhes.

Dr. Simone Muench, Professor and Director of the English Studies Writing Concentration, began at 91ÖÆƬ³§ 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 91ÖÆƬ³§ 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.

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.