People

Tyler Hoffman, Professor, Chair,  and Interim Undergraduate Program Coordinator
Ph.D.: Virginia
American Literature and Culture, Poetry and Poetics
Email: thoffman@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: https://hoffman.camden.rutgers.edu/

Holly Blackford Humes, Professor
Ph.D: California (Berkeley)
American Literature, Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Office: 426 Armitage Hall
Phone: (856) 225-6310
Email: blackfor@camden.rutgers.edu

Holly Blackford Humes (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is a Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches and publishes literary criticism on American and children’s literature. Her books include Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls (Teachers College, Columbia University, 2004), Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee’s Novel (University of Tennessee Press, 2011), The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (Routledge, 2011), edited volume 100 Years of Anne with an ‘e’: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables (University of Calgary, 2009), and edited volume Something Great and Complete: The Centennial Study of My Antonia. Her newly released monograph titled Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel (University of Tennessee Press, 2018) demonstrates the influence of early developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, and sexology on “child study” in modern novels. She is an associate member of the Childhood Studies doctoral program at Rutgers-Camden. Her next project is The Animation Mystique: Sentient Toys, Puppets, and Automata in Literature and Film.

James Brown, Associate Professor
Ph.D.: University of Texas at Austin
Director of the Digital Studies Center
Office: Digital Commons 104, Johnson Library
Email: jim.brown@rutgers.edu

Jim specializes in rhetoric, writing, and digital studies, and he has published in journals such as Amodern, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and Computers and Composition. His work also appears in various edited collections, including Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities and Creative Writing in the Digital Age. His book, Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software (University of Michigan Press, 2015) examines the ethical and rhetorical underpinnings of networked software environments. He is also Director of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center.

Travis DuBose, Assistant Teaching Professor and Undergraduate Program Director of the Writing Program
MA: Rutgers University-Camden
New Media and Professional Writing
Director, Writing Program

Travis teaches classes focused on digital media and professional writing at Rutgers-Camden and serves as director of the Writing Program. His current research interest is the scholarship of teaching and learning, with recent work projects focusing on issues of civic engagement and digital capital. He also maintains creative interests in hypertext narratives and procedural generation. He was also founding director of the campus’s Writing and Design Lab. An alumnus of the Rutgers University Graduate School–Camden, Travis earned his master’s degree in English in 2014. That same year, he received the James Sanderson Graduate Award, which is awarded to the student who wrote the best graduate paper in the previous academic year.

Richard Epstein, Associate Professor
Ph.D.: California at San Diego
Linguistics
Email: repstein@camden.rutgers.edu

Author of papers on the semantics, pragmatics and discourse structures of English, medieval French and Tiipay (a Native American language spoken in San Diego county and Baja California, also known as Diegueño), including the journal articles “The definite article, accessibility, and the construction of discourse referents” (in Cognitive Linguistics, 2001), “Reference and Definite Referring Expressions” (in Pragmatics and Cognition, 1998); “L’article défini en ancien français: l’expression de la subjectivité” (in Langue française, 1995), as well as chapters in books such as Grounding (Mouton de Gruyter, 2002); Discourse Studies in Cognitive Linguistics (John Benjamins, 1999); Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language (Cambridge, 1996); Perspectives on Grammaticalization (John Benjamins, 1994). He is currently researching the use of the definite article in some of the earliest Old English texts as well as the use of language in current discussions of environmental issues.

Shanyn Fiske, Associate Professor, and Graduate Director of English and Media Studies 
Ph.D.: Pennsylvania
Victorian and Modernist British Literature
Director of Classical Studies Minor
Phone: (856) 225-2937
Email: fiske@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: https://fiske.camden.rutgers.edu/

Shanyn Fiske specializes in Victorian literature and culture and the history of classical reception in nineteenth-century England. She is the author of Heretical Hellenism: Woman Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Ohio, 2008). She has published articles on Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Ellen Harrison, Alicia Little, and others. She is currently working on a book project that examines literary relations between England and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Fiske directed the Writing Program and the Classical Studies Minor at Rutgers Camden.

Christopher Fitter, Professor
Ph.D.: Oxford
Shakespearean drama, English Renaissance literature, early modern social history and popular politics
Phone: (856) 225-6554
Email: fitter@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: https://english.camden.rutgers.edu/people/christopher-fitter/

Chris Fitter received his D.Phil. from St. John’s College, Oxford in 1989, and has given guest seminars at Columbia, Oxford and Yale. His first book, Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory (Cambridge: 1995) discussed representations of the natural world from Homer to Milton in literature, art, and formal thought, and suggested some foundational sociological principles behind the conceptualization of nature as landscape. Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (Routledge: 2012) placed Shakespeare’s early plays within contexts of political opposition and debate normally overlooked in the field, arguing for the playwright’s alignment with popular sufferings and populist politics. Following this he edited the pioneering volume Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History (Oxford, 2017), which introduces to Shakespeare studies the political culture, often skeptical and combative, of the mass of ordinary commoners in contemporary England. His most recent book is Majesty and the Masses (Routledge 2021), a study of Western anti-monarchism, and of Shakespeare’s History Plays as unfolding within it.  His current books, nearing completion, are In Reclamation of Shakespeare’s Henry V: Three Historical Readings; and, as editor and contributor, The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Politics. He has published nearly twenty essays and book chapters, along with many reviews.

William FitzGerald, Associate Professor, Writing Program Director, and Director of the Writing and Design Lab
Ph.D.: Maryland
Rhetoric and Writing Studies
Phone: (856) 225-2925
Email: wfitz@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: fitzgerald.camden.rutgers.edu

Bill FitzGerald specializes in rhetoric and writing studies with particular interests in the rhetoric or religion, Kenneth Burke and the rhetoric of style. At Rutgers, he also teaches undergraduate courses in media and literacy studies and graduate courses in genre, composition theory and research methods. His book Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance (Penn State Press 2012) is part of a larger project on the relationship between speech in general and speech addressed to God. Finally, Bill directs the Teaching Matters and Assessment Center in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Ashley Gimbal, Assistant Teaching Professor
Ph.D.: Arizona State University
Communication
Email: ag1588@camden.rutgers.edu

A 2018 graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University, Dr. Gimbal’s research focuses on media framing, terrorism, audience effects, and how these elements alter the way news is created and shared.  She has served as an instructor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at ASU and at Grand Canyon University, among other universities. 

Keith Green, Associate Professor
Ph.D.: Michigan
African American literature, Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Autobiography
Office: 476 Armitage Hall
Phone: (856) 225-6601
Email: keigreen@camden.rutgers.edu

Keith Michael Green is a proud alumnus of Camden High, and his research and teaching interests center people of African descent in speculative fiction, captivity narratives, disability studies, and multilingualism. His first book, Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage: 1816-1861 (Alabama, 2015), explored neglected forms of captivity blacks experienced and recounted in the nineteenth century. He also co-edited a collection of essays on bondage and subjection in the contemporary moment, entitled Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (Routledge, 2019). His current projects explore the meanings of Cuba for blacks in the United States, multilingual African American literary production, as well as the married and religious life of two enslaved persons in colonial New England, Hannah Hovey and Briton Hammon.

Lauren Grodstein, Professor and Graduate Director of Creative Writing
MFA: Columbia
Creative Writing, Fiction and Non-Fiction, Modern Drama
Office: 483 Armitage Hall
Phone: (856) 225-2934
Email: lgrodste@camden.rutgers.edu

Lauren Grodstein is the author of the Amazon.com Book of the Month Our Short History, The Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything, and the New York Times– bestselling A Friend of the Family, among other works. Her stories, essays, and articles have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, and have been translated into French, German, Chinese, and Italian, among other languages. Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New York Times, Refinery29, Salon.com, Post Road, and The Washington Post, among other publications. Her new novel, We Must Not Think of Ourselves, will be published in 2023.

M.A. “Rafey” Habib, Distinguished Professor
D. Phil.: Oxford
Literary Theory and Criticism, Islamic Studies
Phone: (856) 225-6558
Email: mhabib@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: https://habib.camden.rutgers.edu/

Author of seven books: Shades of Islam: Poems for a New Century (Kube, 2010); Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2010); Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A History (Blackwell, 2007); A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present (Blackwell, 2005); An Anthology of Modern Urdu Poetry in Translation (MLA, 2003); The Early T.S. Eliot and Western Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999); and The Dissident Voice: Poems of N.M. Rashed: Translated from the Urdu (Oxford, 1991). He is currently editing three volumes: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Vol. 6: the Nineteenth Century; The Oxford Anthology of Literary Criticism and Theory; and Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Wiley-Blackwell/Penguin). He is also working on a book entitled Myths of Islam.

Ophelia Eryn Hostetter, Associate Professor, and Undergraduate Program Coordinator
Ph.D. Princeton
Old and Middle English Literature, Food and Cooking in Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialisms, Travel and Globalism, Translation and Translation Theory
Email: akh58@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/

 

Ophelia is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University-Camden, where they study medieval English literature and culture. Their first book, Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance, studies food and cooking in medieval English romance, primarily as they are used to discuss political theory. Ophelia’s current project questions the way that Old English poetry is translated and how that stagnates innovation and impedes inclusivity in the field. This approach informs their translations and brings in queer theory, translation theory, glitch, hip hop, & affective studies alongside more traditional methods such as codicology, linguistics, and historicisms. Ophelia’s teaching involves the interplay between medieval and modern, demonstrating what sophisticated knowledge of the Middle Ages can reveal to our contemporary world. They are eager to work with students interested in pursuing their own independent research.

Debra Hudasko, Department Secretary
debra.hudasko@rutgers.edu

Ellen Malenas Ledoux, Associate Professor, and Director of Liberal Studies Program
Ph.D. Virginia
The Romantic Era, eighteenth-century transatlantic literature, women’s writing, and Gothic writing
Office: 465 Armitage Hall
Phone: (856) 225-2997
eledoux@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: ellen.ledoux.us and https://ledoux.rutgers.edu/

Ellen Malenas Ledoux is an Associate Professor in the English and Communication Department at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research focuses on transatlantic literature of the eighteenth century. She is the author of two books: Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming 2023) and Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has published widely on women’s cultural history and Gothic writing in journals such as Studies in Romanticism, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Women’s Writing, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.

Paul Lisicky, Professor, and Creative Writing Graduate Director
MFA: University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop
Editor, Story Quarterly
Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Music in Literature, Graphic Novel
474 Armitage Hall; (856) 225-2927
paul.lisicky@rutgers.edu
Web: https://www.paullisicky.net/

Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books including Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf, 2020), The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship (Graywolf, 2016), Unbuilt Projects (Four Way, 2012), The Burning House (Etruscan Press, 2011), Lawnboy (Graywolf, 2006) and Famous Builder (Graywolf, 2002). Later was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020 and The Narrow Door was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Randy Shilts Award. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, and other magazines and anthologies. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment from the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He is currently the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Camden, where he is the editor of StoryQuarterly. His next book, The Sky in It: A Life with Joni Mitchell, is forthcoming from HarperOne in 2024.

Howard Marchitello, University Professor
Ph.D. SUNY Buffalo
Early Modern Literature and Culture, Science Studies, Shakespeare, Critical Theory
480 Armitage Hall; (856) 225-6110
marchitello@camden.rutgers.edu

Howard Marchitello served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School from 2019 through 2021. Professor Marchitello is the General Editor of the multi-volume series, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science and, together with Evelyn Tribble, co-edited the volume on early modern literature and science in that series. He is the author, most recently, of Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Palgrave, 2019) and The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is currently at work on a book to be called The Shakespeare Photograph.  

Emud Mokhberi, Lecturer
MFA UCLA
MS UCLA
Film and Film Theory
emud@ucla.edu

Emud Mokhberi is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker. He teaches courses in Art of Cinema, Film History, and Screenwriting at Rutgers University, Camden. He studied Animation at Gobelins in Paris, France, and holds an MS in Computer Science and MFA in Film from University of California, Los Angeles

Allison Page, Associate Professor
Ph.D.: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Office: 472 Armitage Hall
Email: allison.page@rutgers.edu

Allison Page is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Communication at Rutgers University, Camden. Her research interests include race, feminist media studies, digital media, media activism, and critical theory.  Her first book, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. Her work has been published in Cultural Studies, Television and New Media, the Journal of Consumer Culture, Feminist Media Studies, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Communication, Culture and Critique. She is currently working on her second monograph, The Cultural Politics of Policing, which historicizes how media technologies became positioned as a prime solution to racialized police violence.

Patrick Rosal, Professor
MFA, Sarah Lawrence College
Creative Writing-Poetry, Twentieth Century American Poetry, Poetry in Performance
425 Armitage Hall; 856.225.2807
patrick.rosal@rutgers.edu

Patrick Rosal is the author of Boneshepherds, named one of the best small-press books of 2011 by the National Book Critics Circle, My American Kundiman, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive. He has won, among other honors, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, the Global Filipino Literary Award, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tin House, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Drunken Boat, and Language for a New Century.

Jillian Sayre, Associate Professor and Director of Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (M.A.R.C.H.)
Ph.D Texas (Austin)
Early American Literature, Literary Theory and Criticism, Hemispheric Studies
472 Armitage Hall
jillian.sayre@rutgers.edu

Dr. Sayre’s research focuses on narrative theory, affect, and community in early national American literatures. She has published on the necropolitics of early nationalism, translation in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, the humic nationalism of The Book of Mormon, spatializing practices in the American West, and digital humanities practices and pedagogies. Her first book Mourning the Nation to Come: Creole Nativism in Nineteenth-Century American Literatures (LSU Press, 2020) is a comparative study of early national romances in North and South America. She teaches courses on Native American literature, women’s writing, horror, experimental literature, and literary theory. 

Carol J. Singley, Professor 
Ph.D. Brown
19th and 20th Century American Literature and Culture, Childhood Studies, Narrative, Feminist Criticism, Composition
479 Armitage Hall; (856) 225-6629
singley@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: https://singley.camden.rutgers.edu/

Author of Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature (Oxford, 2011) and Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge, 1995). Editor/co-editor of seven volumes: Ethan Frome (Broadview, 2013); The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers, 2003); Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Casebook (Oxford, 2003); A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (Oxford, 2002); The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women (SUNY, 1993); and The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (New England, 1997). Articles on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture; feminist collaboration, and the theory and practice of teaching of writing. Co-founder of Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Kinship, and Identity. Former president of the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Edith Wharton Society, and the Women’s Caucus of NEMLA.

Matthew Sorrento, Lecturer
Film
msorrent@camden.rutgers.edu

Matthew Sorrento has taught film and media studies at Rutgers-Camden since 2007, with specializations in film genre and history, law and cinema, popular culture, and media criticism. He is Interview and Book Review Editor of the journal Film International (Intellect Publishers; online at filmint.nu), where he regularly contributes. The author of The New American Crime Film (McFarland, 2012), Sorrento has recently contributed book chapters toA Companion to the War Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), The New Western (McFarland, 2016), and Framing Law and Crime (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016), with contributions forthcoming in The Encyclopedia of the Lost Generation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and Becoming: Essays on NBC’s Hannibal (Syracuse UP, 2017). He is on the advisory board of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Book Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities and co-directs the Reel East Film Festival.

Lisa Zeidner, Professor, and Film and Media Studies Program Director
M.A. Johns Hopkins
Creative Writing, Contemporary Fiction and Poetry, Film and Screenwriting
417 Armitage Hall; (856) 225-6490
zeidner@camden.rutgers.edu
Web: www.lisazeidner.com

Author of five novels: Customs (Knopf, l98l); Alexandra Freed (Knopf, l983); Limited Partnerships (North Point, l989), Layover (1999) and most recently Love Bomb (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012).  She has also published two books of poetry, Talking Cure (Texas Tech, l982); and Pocket Sundial (Wisconsin), which won the 1988 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. A screenwriter, she has been commissioned for screenplays by Universal Studios and Focus Features. Fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews in GQ, Mademoiselle, The New York Times, Boulevard, Poetry, The Washington Post and other publications.  Recipient of the 1993 Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Provost’s Teaching Award and the Lindback Award.

Faculty Emeriti of the English Department

• J.T. Barbarese, Ph.D., Temple University
• William D. Lutz, M.A., Marquette; Ph.D., Nevada (Reno); J.D., Rutgers University
• Timothy Martin, Ph.D., Pennsylvania
• Robert M. Ryan, A.B., A.M., Ph.D., Columbia
• Geoffrey Sill, PhD., Pennsylvania State University