Category: 2018 New Faculty

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 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.

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.