Alumni News
Michael Arnzen (PhD 1999) published his second novel, Play Dead, with Raw Dog Screaming Press in August. He describes the book as a “noir thriller about a group of pathological gamblers who play a deadly game of poker with photographs of their murdered victims.” Arnzen’s Shockingly Short Stories was also recently named a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. He is an Associate Professor at Seton Hill University, where he teaches in the country’s only program in Writing Popular Fiction. Arnzen also maintains an acclaimed weblog, “Pedablogue,” at http://blogs.setonhill.edu/Mike Arnzen/.
Patrick Barron (BA 1991) received an MA from Queen’s University of Belfast in 1995 and a PhD in English and an MS in Geography from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2004. He taught at the City College of San Francisco and is now an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He won the Roma Prize in Modern Italian Studies from the American Academy in Rome last year, and edited and translated Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology for Italica Press. His Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Rachel Dresbeck (M.A. 1992, Ph.D. 1998) recently published Oregon Disasters:True Stories of Tragedy and Survival (2006). She is also the coauthor of Insiders’ Guide to Portland, Oregon and Insiders’ Guide to the Oregon Coast.
Sandra (Klein Fischer) Ellston (PhD 1980) serves as chair of the English and Writing program at astern Oregon University. She recently received the Oregon Literary Arts award for drama for her play, The Last Kalapooyan, based loosely on the life of Indian Lize and the dispossession of the Santiam tribes. She also received the Eastern Oregon University “Woman of Vision and Courage” award for serving as a “catalyst for change” in conditions for women faculty and students. She is working on two collections of poems, Cosmic Outlaw and Poems Against Patriarchy.
Jan Eliot (BA 1977), creator of the internationally syndicated comic strip Stone Soup, is the 2005-2006 Distinguished Alumni Fellow in Humanities at the University of Oregon.
Jordana Finnegan (PhD 2005) has accepted a tenure-track faculty position in English at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, CA.
Mark Gallagher (PhD 2000) has accepted a tenure-track position as Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the Institute of Film Studies at Nottingham University in the UK. His book, Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary Adventure Narratives, was published in February 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Robert Glenn Howard (Ph.D. 2001, with an emphasis in rhetoric and folklore) is an assistant professor in the Communication Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and currently serves as Associate Director of the University’s Folklore Program. He teaches courses on rhetoric, communication technologies, religion, and folklore. He has introduced new courses on folklore and technology as well as taught graduate seminars ranging from the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke to the methods of online ethnography. Professor Howard’s research focuses on everyday expressive communication in network technologies. He has published across four fields including articles in Journal of Church and State, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Folklore Research, and Journal of Media and Religion. He has published on topics ranging from networks of pet Websites to the involvement of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation. Since 1994, his primary research interest has been an ethnographic study of the emergence of conservative evangelical Christian communities online. Based on this research, he is currently completing a book manuscript, Digital Jesus: The Emergence of Christian Fundamentalism on the Internet.
Matthew Kaiser (BA 1995) completed a PhD in Victorian Studies at Rutgers and is in his first year as an Assistant Professor at Harvard.
Scott Knickerbocker (Ph.D. 2006) has begun a two-year visiting assistant professorship at Albertson College in Caldwell, Idaho. His article, “Emily Dickinson’s Ethical Artifice,” is forthcoming in ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment).
Kristen Lennon (BA 2005) is currently working on her MA in literature at the University of Leeds in the UK.
Luchen Li (PhD 1998) has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan.
Matthew Luskey (Ph.D. 2003), who has been teaching in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program at the University of Washington, has just accepted a tenure track job in English at San Francisco State University.
Sara McCurry (Ph.D. 2005), who has been teaching in the Liberal Studies Department at the Art Institute of California-San Diego, has just accepted a tenure-track job at Shasta College in Redding, the job and location of her dreams.
Julia Major’s (PhD 2002) essay, “The Arch of Serena as Textual Monument: Reading the Body of the Poem-Within-the-Poem,” was awarded the annual Stationers and Newspaper Makers’ Prize for the best essay published in the journal Reformation for 2004. Julia is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College in Maine.
Kasia Marciniak’s (PhD 1998) book Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile and the Logic of Difference has been published by the University of Minnesota Press; her article, “Second Worldness and Transnational Feminist Practices: Agnieszka Holland’s A Woman Alone,” was published last year in East European Cinemas in New Perspectives, edited by Aniko Imre, as part of Routledge’s AFI Film Readers series.
Elle Martini and Ilsa Spreiter’s (MAs 2005) documentary Crossing the Abyss was accepted by the New York International Independent Film Festival for multiple screenings in November 2005; it was also nominated for a 2005 Emmy award by the Northwest chapter of the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Chad May (PhD 2005) has accepted a three-year position (with the possibility that it may be converted to tenure-track) at Central Arkansas University in Conway.
Michael McGriff (BA 2003) is a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2004 his manuscript for Iron was a finalist for the Wick Prize, selected by Philip Levine; in 2005 a revised version was a finalist for the Bakeless Prize. In summer 2005 Michael was awarded a $15,000 Ruth Lilly Fellowship by Poetry magazine, and next fall he will enter the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow. His poetry has appeared in Red Rock Review, Northwest Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Wandering Army.
Last July, Chris Perdue (B.A. 2005) won second place in the national Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor Competition. Judges for the competition, including the popular columnist and humorist Dave Barry, praised Perdue’s essay for its success at emulating the style of the award’s namesake and inspiration, Robert Benchley, a renowned critic and satirical writer of the early twentieth century.
Alice Persons (B.A. 1973, M.A. 1976) left Oregon after graduate school and moved first to Wisconsin, then Boston, then Portland, Maine, where she has lived since 1983. She earned a J.D. from the University of Maine School of Law in 1986. She has taught English in high school and several colleges, and works for a legal publisher. She is the co-editor and publisher of Moon Pie Press, a small poetry press based in Maine, which has published 2 books. Eight of their poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on the Writer’s Almanac on National Public Radio. She has published two poetry chapbooks of her own, Be Careful What You Wish For and Never Say Never. The press website is www.moonpiepress.com. You can contact her at moonpiepress@yahoo.com.
Danny Strieff (B.A. English, 1999) has just completed his M.A. in history of international relations at the London School of Economics with distinction. His M.A. dissertation, which focused on British policy in Palestine during the Mandate period, was given the year’s highest mark and thus won the department’s annual prize for best dissertation. His professors have encouraged him to submit the paper to journals for publication and have encouraged him to apply to their PhD program. Meanwhile Streiff continues his career in journalism, as a writer/editor/producer for MSNBC.com and NBC News in London.
David Sumner (Ph.D. 2000) was recently granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor of English at Linfield College. He also recently received a Fulbright fellowship and will spend spring semester teaching two courses at the University of Bayreuth in Germany: “Western Dreams and Western Landscapes” and “Literature and the Object World: Empiricism, Ethics and American Nature Writing."
Jeannie Banks Thomas (Ph.D. 1992, with an emphasis on folklore) is now a Professor of English and Folklore and Director of the Folklore Program at Utah State University. Her work focuses on gender, legend, and material culture. Her book publications include Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender (2003); Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women, and Serious Stories (1997) winner of the Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize; and Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (forthcoming from Utah State University Press) with Diane Goldstein and Sylvia Grider.
Nicholas Wallerstein (Ph.D. 1989) has been promoted to full professor in the Department of English at Black Hills State University, located in the scenic northern Black Hills of South Dakota. Wallerstein, who has fifteen scholarly publications, teaches Shakespeare, survey of early British literature, and various rhetoric classes. He also teaches a course in western religions (he holds a graduate degree in theology from Harvard). He lives with his wife, Jean (an occupational therapist), and his two stepchildren, in Spearfish, SD.