About the Students Participating in English 495

Karen Chachere is a PhD student in English at Illinois State University. After finishing her MA degree in English at Chicago State University in 1992, she taught for several years at Alabama State University before returning to study for the PhD. She plans to write a dissertation on the issue of miscegenation in American literature.

Hsueh-hua Chen (Vivian) is an MA student in English at Syracuse University. She has a BA in philosophy from Taiwan and, as of December 1999, an MA in Speech communication from Syracuse University.

Mary Dwiggins is a Ph. D. student in English at Illinois State University concentrating in Children's Literature (particularly interested in picture books as sequential art).  She earned her MA at Eastern Illinois University in 1997.  She is currently teaching full time at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois.  This semester she is teaching three sections of Comp II entitled "Literature Between the Wars: The Lost Generation" and one lit course entitled "The Comics: An American Icon" (comics as a postmodern text). She expresses confidence that this course will give her a new way for viewing comics

Jodie Evans received a BA in English from George Mason University in 1999. She has a particular interest in cultural studies and theory and plans to pursue an MA. in English. She is taking this course as an at-large student while she evaluates graduate programs in the Washington, D.C. area near her home in Alexandria Virginia.

Matthew Gross teaches literature and composition at Ottawa Township High School in Ottawa Illinois. He is a part-time student in the MA program in English at Illinois State University.

Rhea N. Galati is a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction with an
emphasis in secondary English at Clemson University. She teaches
American literature and applied graphics (yearbook) at Habersham Central High School in Mt. Airy, Georgia. She is also a PADI Scuba Diving Instructor and wishes she lived with her husband who is presently stationed at Tripler Medical Center in Oahu, Hawaii.

Lorenza Gramegna: Italian and living in Italy, Lorenza is a PhD student in English at Illinois State University. She graduated in EFL in Italy, and currently teaching English language and English and American literatures in an Italian grammar school and English language and culture in an Italian middle school. She received a Master of Arts from ISU in 1991. She reports that she loves Normal(!)

David Hammontree is a second year MA student at Illinois State University. He received his BA in Political Science at the University of Illinois. Fields of interest for David include Victorian fiction, popular culture, and politics. After completing his MA in English, he plans to return to Political Science for a second masters in the hopes of being more diversified for the ever narrowing community college job market.

Max Gulias teaches philosophy at Southwestern Oregon Community College.

Zoevera Jackson is an MA student at Illinois State University. She also has an MA in Human Relations from the University of Oklahoma, and is a U. S. Army veteran who was stationed in Germany during the late 1990s.

Adam Jones (adjameson) is an Illinois State grad student in Fiction. His
interests include cinema, music, philosophy, politics, and science.

Amy Johnson is a first year MA student at Illinois State University. She is also a first-year senior English teacher at Central High School in Clifton, llinois. She has joined the course late because she found herself bored after the conclusion of an exciting basketball season, and Dr. Strickland agreed that her need to do one thousand things at once should be satisfied.

Elizabeth Kleinfeld is a PhD student in English at Illinois State University. She teaches at Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood Colorado, and is participating in the course from her home in Colorado.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Koski is an MA student in English at SUNY-Albany.

Virginia Kuhn is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. She has a background in Art History and is interested in hypermedia. Her course web pages can be viewed at: http://www.uwm.edu/~vkuhn

Hyun Jung Kwak is an MA student in English, focusing on Linguistics, at Illinois State University.

Aimee Lanoue is an MA student in English at Illinois State University.

Carol Lind is a first year MA student in English at Illinois State
University. Her particular interest is medieval literature.

Nivedita Majumdar is a PhD student (ABD) in English at the University of Florida, and an adjunct instructor at CUNY-Hunter College.

Chris McGee is a PhD student in English at Illinois State University. Among other things, he is studying the politics of postmodern slasher films.

Sopin Mongkolsirikiate is a PhD student in English, focusing on TESOL, at Illinois State University.

Richard Parent is a second year MA student at Mills College in Oakland, California. His literary interests currently focus on North American postmodernism, but "in the never-ending struggle to broaden his academic horizons," and "in a last ditch effort to achieve a certain breadth of knowledge before plunging ahead for his PhD," he is taking Marxist Theory "for the fun of it and due to sheer intellectual curiosity."

Jeff Pietruszynski is a PhD student in English at Illinois State University.

Risë Quay is a PhD student in English at Illinois State University. She also teaches full-time at Heartland Community College in Normal, Illinois. She is interested in composition studies, cultural studies and materialist feminism.

Gary L. Smith is a free-lance writer who recently started part-time studies toward an MA in English at Illinois State University. His earlier academic background was in philosophy and religious studies. He lives in a rural area outside Peoria, and is working on a history of a central Illinois children's service agency as a case study in the 20th-century management of marginalized children.

Sherryl Vint is a sessional instructor of English at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She has research interests in theories of the body, feminism, and cultural studies.

Ruixan Wang is an MA student in English at Illinois State University. She
came from China. She is very interested in the Maxism taught in the US vs
the one that prevails in China.

Miriam Windham is a second-semester Ph.D. student in English Studies with an emphasis in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at ISU.  She has an MS from ISU in Curriculum and Instruction.  Her undergraduate work was done in North Carolina, and she grew up in Texas.  She has been teaching Written Composition and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lincoln Christian College in Lincoln, IL for fourteen years.  She also directs and teaches in the TESOL program there