American Literature
Dr. Bonney MacDonald teaches a wide range of American literature, and specializes in literature of the American West. In addition to courses on campus, Dr. MacDonald has offered onsite ranch courses on the literature, culture and history of the American ranching west. Dr. MacDonald is the author of Henry James’s Italian Hours, and has published articles on late 19th-century authors Henry James, Hamlin Garland, and William Dean Howells, as well as on 20th-century Western writers, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams, Wallace Stegner, and William Kittredge.
British Literature
Dr. Monica Hart specializes in 18th and 19th century literature, both the Romantics and the Victorians, with a particular emphasis on poetry. Her research interests include working-class poetry and autobiography, feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the Gothic. She has published essays on late 18th-century English poet Ann Yearsley and on The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain, British Romantic writer Charlotte Smith, Victorian working-class poet Ellen Johnston, and 19th-century American novelist Kate Chopin.
Contemporary Studies
Dr. Ryan Brooks’s research tries to account for the differences between contemporary American fiction and the postmodern writing that preceded it. His work explores how this literary shift intersects with broader changes in the way contemporary politicians, activists, and citizens understand the nature of social conflict. Dr. Brooks’s research and teaching interests also include earlier periods of American literature, transatlantic modernism and postmodernism, and the history of literary criticism and theory. His writing has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, 49th Parallel, Mediations, The Account, and the critical anthology The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television.
Medieval Studies
Dr. Daniel Helbert is a comparative medievalist who researches and writes about literature across multiple languages and cultures in the Middle Ages. His current research focuses on the legend of King Arthur that was produced on the border between England and Wales in Old and Middle English, Latin, Old and Middle Welsh, and Anglo-Norman French. He regularly offers graduate courses in both canonical and obscure literature from the Middle Ages with an eye toward both the historical/political/philosophical contexts in which it was written and the usefulness of medieval literature to our current moment and time.
Composition Pedagogy
Dr. Jeannie Bennett, the Director of Writing Programs offers pedagogy courses specifically aimed at educators and required of all graduate teaching assistants. Her research in writing pedagogy aims to inform the practice of teaching writing. Dr. Bennett is a disability studies scholar who works in the field of medical rhetoric. Her work focuses on how language and values shape medical practice, how social and cultural values determine what counts as legitimate knowledge, and how science and medicine have shaped our society, culture, and ultimately ourselves.
Language Studies
Language Studies at the graduate level is a study of language in linguistic depth including the phonology (the meaningful sounds of a language), morphology (how words form meaning), syntax (the arrangement of words to form meaning), and lexicon (the words, prefixes and suffixes in English). Dr. Daniel Helbert leads the study of English linguistics as it is spoken and written today (in standard and non-standard varieties), as well as historical forms of English (Old, Middle, and Early Modern English) and how those forms developed into Present Day English. Language study, at times intense, is at times also humorous and entertaining as the changing body of English informs our literature, our society, and our culture.
World Literatures
Dr. Meljac’s research interests include poetry, modern and postmodern narrative, and particularly continental philosophy and how such philosophy can shape a reading of a poem or narrative. He has published essays on J. M. Coetzee, Philip Larkin, James Joyce, and even Chaucer, all with cues taken from various 20th- and 21st-century theorists. His current pursuits have led him to the field of ethics, and current projects include the consequences of the death penalty and how it is represented in literature, as well as sociological and political ramifications that affect African American writers, such as Toni Morrison. Dr. Meljac frequently teaches African literature as well.
Shakespeare/Renaissance
Dr. Matthew Harrison is the Wendy and Stanley Marsh 3 Assistant Professor of Shakespeare Studies at West Texas A&M University. He teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, poetry, and drama classes. His book, tentatively titled Tear Him For His Bad Verses, explores the rhetoric of bad poetry in early modern England, along with the self-deprecation, failures, and errors that poets and playwrights use to describe the craft of writing. He has recently published on new media and the tradition of rearranging Shakespeare’s Sonnets, on the “layered temporality” of poetic reception, on the “glitch” as a mode of reading poetic failure, and (with Michael Lutz) on video game adaptations of Hamlet. Additionally, Dr. Harrison offers a summer course specifically aimed at secondary educators to assist with their teaching of Shakespeare.
Western Studies
Dr. Alex Hunt, professor of English, serves as the Director of the Center for the Study of the American West. His research interest focus on issues of literary genre and representation to issues of environmentalism, identify, and regional history. Dr. Hunt has published books on novelist Annie Proulx, postcolonial ecocriticism, and 19th century British investment in the American West. He has published articles on Texas Panhandle history, works of Western and Southwestern literature, Native American and Chicano/a studies, and popular culture--most recently on the television series Breaking Bad. Dr. Hunt has been editor of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review and the Haley Professor of Western Studies since 2012. Dr. Hunt teaches courses on US American literatures, ecocriticism, sports and literature, and war literatures, often returning to an early fascination with Southwestern authors like Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Cormac McCarthy.
Creative Writing
Dr. Pat Tyrer teaches creative writing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She offers a graduate level creative writing course every other summer online. She has published short stories, poems and essays in a variety of journals in addition to her research work in American modernism. She has two books of poetry, Creative Hearts and Western Spaces, Western Places, and is the author of Evelyn Scott's Contribution to American Literary Modernism 1920-1940. Dr. Tyrer's research interests include creative writing, recovering women writers in early-through-modern American literature, third-wave feminism in contemporary literature, film studies and technology's impact on teaching and learning.
Technical Communication
At the graduate level, technical communication focuses on a variety of contexts in which professionals of varied degrees and credentials engage in written communication. Specific methodologies for composing documents, web pages, training materials, digital texts, and other media is studied. Dr. Jeannie Bennet’s expertise as a technical communicator in the field of medical rhetoric and disability studies is on the cutting edge of scientific research. Courses focus on special topics of interest.
Comparative Literature
Dr. Roos teaches courses on world masterpieces, postcolonialisms, and transatlantic modernisms. Her research focuses on transatlantic modernisms and postcolonialisms, and has a particular affinity for the writings of James Joyce. She is co-editor of Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives, co-editor of Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives, author of the book Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: The World, and The Politics of Peace, and co-author of Expanding Abstract Expressionism: Women Artists and the American West. In addition to several book chapters, she has published articles appearing in Comparative Literature, Modernism/Modernity, Irish University Review, Yale Journal of Criticism, Joyce Studies Annua l, American Art, and Research in African Literatures, among others.
