Jane Wong holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the University of Washington. She is a former U.S. Fulbright Fellow and Kundiman Fellow, and received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley, and the Fine Arts Work Center. The recipient of The American Poetry Review’s 2016 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, Jane’s poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, The Volta, and Third Coast, as well as the anthologies Best American Poetry 2015 from Scribner, Best New Poets 2012 from The University of Virginia Press and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral from Ahsahta Press. Jane is also the author of OVERPOUR from Action Books and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western.
Ely Shipley
Ely Shipley graduated from Purdue University with an MFA and holds a PhD from the University of Utah. He taught for many years Baruch College and CUNY in New York City before becoming a professor at Western. Ely is the author of Some Animal from Nightboat Books, Boy with Flowers, winner of the Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, the Thom Gunn Award, and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and On Beards: A Memoir of Passing, a letterpress chapbook from speCt! Books. His poems and cross-genre work also appear in the Seneca Review, Western Humanities Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Interim, Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Witness, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Fugue, Third Coast, and elsewhere.
Kate Anderson
A specialist in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Anderson has published on torture, military trauma, and martyrdom in relation to Victorian studies, and is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain. The project argues for the centrality of torture to Victorian history and culture, and consequently, the importance of Victorian history and culture to a global and historical understanding of torture. Tracing acts and rhetorics of torture in India, Jamaica, South Africa, the South Pacific, and Britain itself, Anderson situates state-sanctioned exceptional violence in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism and changing narratives of citizenship and human rights. Twisted Words thus helps us better understand the global implications of contemporary state violence by establishing a longer historical genealogy of torture and terrorism sanctioned explicitly by liberal Western governments. Her research and teaching interests include empire, postcolonial, and global studies; gender and sexuality studies; critical terrorism studies; political theory and philosophy; human rights; moral philosophy; phenomenology; Anglophone literature.
Eren Odabasi
His research and teaching interests include global cinema, media policy and governance, diasporic filmmakers and audiences, and auteur theory. He has presented and published several articles on film festivals, transnational film production, and the cinemas of India. As a film critic, he has written extensively for Altyazi, the oldest and most widely read print film monthly in Turkey. In recognition of his work in film criticism, he was invited to the Talents Program of the Berlin International Film Festival twice and served as a jury member in the Semaine de la Critique section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2013.
Stefania Heim
Stefania Heim is a scholar, poet, translator, editor and educator dedicated to the intersections between those pursuits. Her essays on 20th-century and contemporary American poetry, women, war, and experimental practice have appeared in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Textual Practice, Jacket2, and through Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. An essay on Walt Whitman, amputation, and archives is forthcoming in the edited collection 21 | 19: Essays in Proximity. She is author of the poetry collections A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books 2014) and HOUR BOOK, chosen by Jennifer Moxley as winner of the Sawtooth Prize and forthcoming in early 2019 by Ahsahta Press. Geometry of Shadows, her book of translations of metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems, is forthcoming from APS Books. She is the recipient of a 2019 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.
Kathleen Lundeen
Kathleen Lundeen joined Western’s English Department in the fall of 1991 as a specialist in British Romantic literature. Along with Romantic literature, she has taught courses in physics and literature, intermedia art, epic poetry, the nineteenth-century novel, biblical literature, and literary and cultural theory. Throughout her distinguished teaching career, students and colleagues have expressed great admiration for her ability to explain complex theoretical concepts, the clarity of her rigorous writing assignments and feedback on student writing, finely tuned lectures, respect for students, attention to the visual elements of texts, and expert facilitation of class discussions.
In addition to publishing on a range of Romantic authors and subjects, she has written articles and book chapters on literature and science, intermedia art, film, and biblical literature. In her book Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology, she shows how Blake creates an epistemological alternative to empiricism and rationalism in his poetry and art. After completing her long-range study of Blake, she began pursuing the engagement between Romantic texts and the discoveries of late eighteenth and early nineteenth astronomers, notably William Herschel. Her work in this area has appeared in several journals and was solicited for a book on literature and science.
Kathleen also served as an elected officer of PAMLA (Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association), which culminated in her service as president of PAMLA in 2007. For several years she served on the editorial committee of Pacific Coast Philology, and she chaired the site committee when Western hosted PAMLA’s annual conference in 2002 and 2007. Her service outside of Western has included the mentoring of post-doctoral instructors through the Keats-Shelley Association mentoring program and participation as a grant referee of AAUW (American Association of University Women).
Kathleen’s participation in the English Department includes a term as department chair and several terms as associate chair, during which she attended to numerous personnel issues in a professional and compassionate manner, saw several faculty members successfully through the tenure and promotion process, initiated significant reforms in department procedures, developed a new and improved advising system, and developed a collaborative leadership style. We will miss her warm and compassionate presence.
2001, BA: Carter Hasegawa
Carter Hasegawa (BA 2001) is the author and photographer for Employees Must Wash Hands: A Bathroom Reader in Pictures, published by Sky Horse Books in 2017. He is a full-time children’s book editor at Candlewick Press and a photographer at Long River Photography.
1999, MA: Tommy Zurhellen
Tommy Zurhellen (MA 1999) is Associate Professor of English at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York. He is currently re-imagining Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Nazi-era Germany. The work, entitled Frankenstein: Konfidential, is a collaboration with painter Hyeseung Marriage-Song.
1997, MA: Star Hang Nga Rush
Star Hang Nga Rush (MA 1997) is Provost at Cornish College, and had served as Acting President in 2018.
1969, MA: George Drew
George Drew (MA 1969) is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently, Fancy’s Orphan (2017), Pastoral Habits: New & Selected Poems (2016), Down & Dirty (2015) and The View from Jackass Hill (2011, winner of the ). Drew has won several awards: the 2016 Knightville Poetry Contest, the 2014 St. Petersburg Review Poetry Contest, 2010 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and the Adirondack Literary Award for Best Poetry Book of 2009.