Our Faculty

Our Faculty

Faculty Name Faculty Information Faculty Picture
Sarah Arroyo
Sarah.Arroyo@csulb.edu
Sarah J. Arroyo is a Professor of English. She received her BS in Education at New Mexico State University, her MA in English at CSULB, and her PhD in Rhetoric at The University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Arroyo teaches graduate and undergraduate courses ranging from Theories and Practices of Composition to Critical Theory to Digital Rhetoric and Video/Participatory Cultures. She also co-directs CSULB’s First-Year Composition Program. Her research explores the implications arising from the convergence of identity building, community building, teaching, and learning taking place in and through participatory and networked cultures. Dr. Arroyo has published several articles and videos as well as a book, Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy. arroyo_sarah_crop
Elyse Blankley
Elyse.Blankley@csulb.edu
Elyse Blankley received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. As a specialist in literary modernism, she has published on 20th-century fiction, literature and film, contemporary poetry, and expatriate women writers in Paris. Her essays and reviews have appeared in anthologies, journals, reference works, and magazines, such as the NWSA Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and Albion.  She has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Université de Bordeaux III in France. Dr. Blankley is currently a board member of the Long Beach Literary Women Festival of Authors, and she is active in the Modernist Studies Association. A portion of her current work on film adaptations of E.M. Forster’s novels has recently been published in Visual Media and the Humanities (U of Tennessee P). blankley_elyse_crop
Susan Carlile
Susan.Carlile@csulb.edu
Susan Carlile’s specialization is Eighteenth-Century British Literature. She teaches Approaches to English Studies, Adolescent Literature, the survey of British literature before 1800, Eighteenth-Century British literature, and courses on Charlotte Lennox, Jane Austen, and Samuel Johnson. A former English language teacher in Madrid, Spain, and high school teacher and teacher trainer in Phoenix, AZ, she earned her BA at Taylor University and her MA and PhD at Arizona State University. Dr. Carlile has published Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (Toronto University Press, 2018), Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s (ed.) (Lehigh, 2010), and Charlotte Lennox’s 1758 novel Henrietta (Kentucky, 2008). She is a 2014 recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Huntington Library, Chawton House Library, and the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University. Susan Carlile-NEW
Stephen Cooper
Stephen.Cooper@csulb.edu
Stephen Cooper received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine and his PhD from the University of Southern California. In addition to scholarly articles in literary and film journals, he has published numerous short stories. Among his honors are an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and CSULB’s Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activities Award. He is editor of Perspectives on John Huston and author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante. Dr. Cooper discovered and edited the manuscript of John Fante’s last book, The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959, and co-edited John Fante: A Critical Gathering. His biography of Fante and his edition of The John Fante Reader were named among the Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year. Branching out into film, he co-wrote and produced the 2018 Netflix Original Documentary Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski. His latest book, coedited with Clorinda Donato, is John Fante’s ‘Ask the Dust’: A Joining of Voices and Views (Fordham UP, 2020). cooper_stephen_crop
Araceli Esparza
Araceli.Esparza@csulb.edu
Araceli Esparza specializes in and teaches 20th– and 21st century U.S. literature, Latina/o/x literature and cultural production, literature by women of color, critical theories of race and racialization, gender theory, and women of color feminism. She earned her PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Her articles and chapters have appeared in Feminist Formations, Chicana/Latina Studies, “White” Washing American Education, and The Un/Making of Latina/o Citizenship. She is currently working on a book-length project that focuses on Latina/o representations of the Central American civil wars of the post-WWII era. esparza_araceli_crop
Lisa Glatt
Lisa.Glatt@csulb.edu
Lisa Glatt’s most recent novel is The Nakeds (Regan Arts, 2015). Her previous books of fiction are A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (Simon & Schuster, 2004), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction award, and The Apple’s Bruise (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a collection of short stories. Her books of poetry include Shelter and Monsters and Other Lovers, both published by Pearl Editions. A recipient of a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, Lisa’s work has appeared in such magazines as Zoetrope: All-Story, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, Pearl, and The Sun.  glatt_lisa_crop
Suzanne Greenberg
Suzanne.Greenberg@csulb.edu
Suzanne Greenberg’s novel Lesson Plans was chosen as a Library Journal Editor’s Pick. Her collection, Speed-Walk and Other Stories, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including the Santa Monica Review, LA Fiction Anthology, Mississippi Review and The Washington Post Magazine. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. For more information, visit her website, www.suzannegreenberg.com. suzanne_greenberg_new
Gary Griswold
William.Griswold@csulb.edu
Gary Griswold’s area of specialty is composition studies, and since 1989 he has taught all levels of writing courses at CSULB, including technical and professional writing, proposal writing, and professional editing. In 1992, he founded the Writer’s Resource Lab, the English Department/College of Liberal Arts’ writing center program, which he directed for 20 years. Dr. Griswold earned his Ph.D. in Educational Studies from Claremont Graduate University (CGU) in May of 2003. His dissertation, Writing Centers and Their Directors: Issues and Prospects for a New Era, focused on the history and current status of writing center programs in American colleges and universities. Dr. Griswold’s other research interests include the use of technology in the teaching of writing, the history of composition studies, and technical and professional writing. griswold_gary_crop
George Hart
George.Hart@csulb.edu
George Hart received his BA from Kent State University and his PhD from Stanford University; he teaches 19th– and 20th-century American literature, with a specialization in 20th-century American poetry and poetics. His other research interests include ecocriticism, postmodernist poetics, and the Beats. Dr. Hart is the author of Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness (Fordham UP, 2013), and currently he is working on a book titled A Line that May Be Cut: Larry Eigner’s Ecopoetics. hart_george_crop

David Hernandez
David.Hernandez@csulb.edu

David Hernandez’s most recent collection of poetry is Dear, Sincerely (U of Pittsburgh P, 2016). His other books include Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Always Danger (SIU Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series, and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press). David has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in Field, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins.  hernandez_david_crop
Mimi Hotchkiss
Wilhelmina.Hotchkiss@csulb.edu
With a BA (English, German) from CSU Fullerton and a PhD (English) from UCLA, Mimi Hotchkiss specializes in and teaches late 18th– and early 19th-century British literature. Among her recent topics for ENGL 656 are Frankenstein at 200—the Shelley-Byron Circle in 1816; Rethinking Poetic Form & British Romanticism; and Borders of Gender and Geography in British Romanticism. She also teaches senior seminars in Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as British verbal and visual cultures, 1760-1840. Along with publications on Wordsworth and Constable, she has written on performance-based Shakespeare pedagogy, which she practices in Shakespeare I & II. Outside of English, she designed and taught the University Honors Program’s Harry Potter & Friends and Art, Community, Place: The LA Interchange  
Helen Hu
BA, Berea College; MA, University of Wisconsin; PhD, University of London.
Fields of Interest: Semantics, grammar, linguistic analysis of literature.
Extension: 54229.
 
Neil Hultgren
Neil.Hultgren@csulb.edu
Neil Hultgren received his BA from Augustana College in Illinois and his MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. He has held a year-long postdoctoral fellowship at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA, and in summer 2017 he was on a one-month fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Hultgren teaches courses in Victorian literature and culture, postcolonial studies, Oscar Wilde, popular fiction, and the novel. He is the author of Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes (Ohio UP, 2014). He has published essays on H. Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde. He is currently working on a project titled “Cosmic Romance: The Universe in British Fiction, 1885-1925.” hultgren_neil_crop
Lloyd Kermode
Lloyd.Kermode@csulb.edu
Lloyd Edward Kermode is Professor of English with a specialization in Renaissance Studies. BA (English Literature, U of Sheffield and U of Maryland), MPhil (English Literature, The Shakespeare Institute), MA (Creative Writing, Johns Hopkins), PhD (English, Rice U.). He is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Dr. Kermode’s research is in early modern drama, 16th-century national and ethnic identity in England, British Renaissance cultural studies, and theories of space and consciousness. He teaches courses in medieval and early modern literature, poetry, and literary criticism and theory. His books include Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge, 2009); Three Renaissance Usury Plays (Manchester, 2009); and Tudor Drama before Shakespeare (ed.) (Palgrave, 2004). In a parallel universe, Dr. Kermode plays rock and blues guitar and writes and records music. kermode_lloyd_crop

Moyang Li
Moyang.Li@csulb.edu

Moyang Li is an Assistant Professor in English. She received her PhD from Rutgers University and her BA in mathematics and literature from Columbia University. Dr. Li’s main field is global Anglophone literature and culture and its conditions of production. She takes an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the fields of literature, mathematics, and computing. Her research explores how postcolonial literature engages with the claims of European science and philosophy, and in particular with those texts that give definition to the human. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in postcolonial literature and theory and modernisms and modernity. Her research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and by Rutgers University’s Raritan Fund. Dr. Moyang Li
Dennis López
Dennis.Lopez@csulb.edu
Dennis López is Associate Professor of English with specializations in Latin@ and Chican@ literatures and U.S. ethnic literatures. He received his BA from California State University, Fullerton, MA from California State University, Northridge, and PhD from the University of California, Irvine. He teaches courses in Chican@ and Latin@ literatures, U.S. ethnic literatures, U.S. radical protest literatures, and 20th-century U.S. literature. His scholarship has been published in MELUS, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, Science and Society, Twentieth-Century Literature, and American Studies. Dr. López’s most recent publication will appear in the forthcoming critical collection, Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, edited by Marcial González and Carlos Gallego (U of Michigan P).

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Tina Matuchniak
Tina Matuchniak@csulb.edu

Tina Matuchniak received her B.Sc. in Chemistry from Bombay University, India, her M.A. in English – Literacy Studies from CSULB, and her Ph.D. in Education – Language, Literacy, and Technology, from UC Irvine. Dr. Matuchniak teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the Rhetoric and Composition Program, ranging from Theories and Practices of Composition to Teaching Literacy. She is a 2007 recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award at CSULB. Her research explores best and equitable practices for tutor/teacher education and professional development, specifically in diverse teaching and learning contexts and for under-served student populations. She has co-authored a book, Helping English Learners to Write, and published several peer-reviewed articles, appearing in journals such as the Review of Research in EducationJournal of Educational Psychology, and Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Dr. Matuchniak also serves as the Director of the University Writing Center. Tina Matuchniak photo
Ilan Mitchell-Smith
Ilan.Mitchellsmith@csulb.edu
Ilan Mitchell-Smith is an Associate Professor of medieval Literature and culture. He received his BA and MA in Medieval Studies with an emphasis in History (UC Davis and Fordham), and his PhD is in English Literature (Texas A&M University). He teaches a range of early- and late-medieval British Literature courses, and he is Co-Director of the CSULB Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He also sponsors the Medieval and Renaissance Student Association. His research focuses on later Middle English chivalric romances, and he also writes on race, identity, and nationalism in contemporary recreations of the Middle Ages. Dr. Mitchell-Smith’s publications include work on lesser-known chivalric romances, Chaucer, the Ashmole 61 manuscript, Disney Princesses, Dungeons & Dragons, and American nationalistic medievalisms.  mitchell-smith_ilan_crop
Bill Mohr
William.Billmohr@gmail.com
William (“Bill”) Mohr is a Professor of English who primarily concentrates on 20th-century American literature. He earned his MA and PhD in Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation became the basis for Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, which was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011, and widely praised. As well as contributing chapters to several volumes on West Coast poetry, he has also had articles published on William Carlos Williams, fiction writer and poet Joseph Hansen, and Venice West beat poet Stuart Z. Perkoff. Dr. Mohr’s honors include a visiting scholar award at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and grants to do research at the Huntington Library in San Marino. mohr_william_crop
John Scenters-Zapico
john.scenters-zapico@csulb.edu
John Scenters-Zapico (PhD, Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English, University of Arizona) is the Director of  Writing Across the Curriculum, the Graduation Writing Assessment Coordinator, and Professor. In 2016-2017 the biannual Thomas Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Louisville invited him as a featured and then keynote speaker; a forthcoming chapter, “Small m to Big M-Mobilities: a Model,” will appear in Academic Mobility Stories: Transitions, Reinventions, New Understandings.  His ethnographic study exploring traditional and digital literacies in low and minimum wage jobs, Literacy in the Margins, is accepted pending revisions. He has two other books: Generaciones’ Narratives: Traditional and Electronic Literacy Narratives on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Utah State UP/Computers and Composition Digital P, 2010), and Identity: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP, 2013). scenters-zapico_john_crop 
Norbert Schürer
Norbert.Schurer@csulb.edu
Norbert Schürer received PhD from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. His teaching and research pull him in many directions. He teaches ENGL 696 (aka graduate boot camp), ENGL 655 (Restoration and 18th-century British literature), and major author courses (ENGL 681) on Jane Austen and J.R.R. Tolkien. His research interests include 18th-century British literature, book history, women’s writing, the Anglo-Indian encounter, and the digital humanities. He recently published the anthology British Encounters with India (with Tim Keirn, 2011), the collection Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents (2012), the cultural guide Berlin (2014), and the local history study Boom and Bust: Miner Smith and His 1920s California Bungalow Mansions (2015). Every other winter session, Dr. Schürer (with Tim Keirn) takes students on a study abroad trip to India. schurer_norbert_crop
Patty Seyburn
Patty.Seyburn@csulb.edu
Patty Seyburn’s fourth collection of poems, Perfecta, was published by What Books Press in fall of 2014. Her third book, Hilarity, won the Green Rose Prize given by New Issues Press (Western Michigan UP, 2009). Her two previous books of poems are Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State UP, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998), which won the 1997 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize and the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award for 2000. She won a 2011 Pushcart Prize for her poem, “The Case for Free Will,” published in Arroyo Literary Review. Prof. Seyburn grew up in Detroit. She earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a PhD in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. seyburn_patty_crop

Rene H. Treviño
Rene.Trevino@csulb.edu

Rene H. Treviño is Assistant Professor of English. He received his BA in English from the University of Texas-Pan American, his MA in English from the University of Arkansas, and his Graduate Certificate in Africana Studies and his PhD in English from Texas A&M University. During 2014, he held a Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS)/HEEP Graduate Fellowship. He teaches courses on pre-1900 American Literature and on U.S. Ethnic Literatures. His research interests include the Female Gothic, literary animal representations of the long 19th century, and the African-American slave narrative tradition. Dr. Treviño serves as the webmaster for the American Literature Association, and he has scholarship forthcoming in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. trevino_rene_crop
Martine van Elk
Martine.Vanelk@csulb.edu
Martine van Elk is a Professor of English, with MAs from the University of Amsterdam and Rice University and a PhD from Rice University. Her PhD focused on Shakespeare, constructions of femininity, and identification. She teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, Milton, English drama, and Irish literature. Her book Early Modern Women’s Writing: Domesticity, Privacy, and the Public Sphere in England and the Dutch Republic came out with Palgrave in 2017. Dr. van Elk is co-editor of Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2004) and has published essays on Shakespeare, vagrancy, and early modern women. Current research interests include 17th-century women on and behind the stage in England, France, and the Low Countries and early modern women as makers of domestic artifacts. She also runs a blog titled “Early Modern Women: Lives, Texts, Objects.” vanelk_martine_crop
Dianne Vipond
Dianne.Vipond@csulb.edu
Dianne Vipond earned a BSc from McGill University (Montreal), an MA from Concordia University (Montreal), and a PhD from York University (Toronto). Her area of specialization is 20th-century British and American literature. She teaches a graduate course on John Fowles; senior seminars on metafiction and the work of John Fowles and Lawrence Durrell; and literature for adolescents, appreciation of literature, and a survey of English literature. Her primary research focus is the fiction of John Fowles and Lawrence Durrell. Dr. Vipond’s most recently published articles explore Durrell’s use of the uncanny in The Avignon Quintet and examine the television adaptation of Fowles’s novella The Ebony Tower. She is a member of the editorial board of Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal.

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Charles Webb
Charles.Webb@csulb.edu
Charles Harper Webb, MFA, PhD has published eleven books of poetry. His latest collection, Brain Camp, was published in 2015 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. A Millions MFAs Are Not Enough, a collection of essays on the craft of poetry, was published in 2016 by Red Hen Press. Webb’s awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. His poems have appeared in many venues, including American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Poets of the New Century, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize. A former professional rock musician and psychotherapist, he is the editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology and the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation. webb_charles_crop
Frederick Wegener
Frederick.Wegener@csulb.edu
Frederick Wegener, Professor of English (BA, Columbia University; MA, PhD, Harvard University), joined the English department in 1998, with a specialization in American literature. His publications include Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (Princeton UP, 1996), the Penguin Classics edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel A Country Doctor, and several articles on other aspects of Wharton’s career as well as essays on Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Charles W. Chesnutt. Dr. Wegener is currently a member of the editorial board of The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, to be published in 30 volumes by Oxford University Press. The courses that he teaches are focused mostly on post-Civil-War U.S. literatures; ethnic American writing; forms of narrative; and critical theory. wegener_fred_ crop
Mark Williams
Mark.Williams@csulb.edu
Mark T. Williams is Professor of English who teaches courses in rhetoric and composition. A former journalist in Mexico and Texas who taught science and ESL in middle/high school, Dr. Williams earned a BS at Utah State University, an MA at the University of Texas-El Paso, and a PhD at the University of Arizona. He has published in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, the Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society, the Journal of Basic Writing, and has co-authored book chapters on rhetorical history and basic writing.  williams_mark_crop
Rafael Zepeda
Rafael.Zepeda@csulb.edu
Rafael Joseph Zepeda, Professor of English, has published numerous books, among them, the novel Desperados, Tao Driver and Selected Poems, Horse Medicine and Other Stories, The Witchita Poems, The Durango Poems, The Yellow Ford of Texas, along with several other books of poetry and fiction. Among his awards are a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction, a California Artists Grant in fiction, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and have been translated into Spanish and French. Along with being a writer of fiction and poetry, he is an artist and a photographer.