Sister Mary Hotz, a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart, came to USD in 1996. She received her PhD from The University of Chicago in 1997, with a concentration in Victorian literature. Her central interests include nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Native American literature, and the development of the novel. Her most recent project, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England, explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England by locating corpses at the center of a surprisingly extensive range of Victorian concerns: money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity.

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Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast and assistant poetry editor at Callaloo. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies. Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego. New Issues Poetry & Prose published his first book PLEASE.

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Cynthia L. Caywood, PhD, has been a member of the faculty since 1984.  She is currently serves as co-director of the London Summer Program.  In the English department, Caywood offers undergraduate courses on restoration and eighteenth century British literature, world drama, and women's literature and graduate courses in seventeenth and eighteenth century drama.  Her research interests include Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, and August Wilson, with special interests in British and American theatre history, stage production, and feminist theory.

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Dennis M. Clausen, PhD, has been a member of the University of San Diego faculty since 1972. Clausen has taught undergraduate American literature courses with a special emphasis on authors who write about American small towns.

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Halina Duraj joined USD after receiving her PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Utah in 2010. She also holds a B.S. in biological sciences and an M.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Davis. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in literary journals including Witness, Third Coast, and Confrontation. Her novel, Fatherland, was a finalist for the 2010 UC Davis Maurice Prize in Fiction, and other work has been recommended for the 2009 PEN/O’Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize. Her teaching interests focus on fiction writing, the literature of war and trauma, and the intersection of literature, science, and nature. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

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Dr. Floyd specializes in African-American literature, mixed race and ethnic studies, identity and community, and representations of children and childhood. He has recently written for and edited a special volume on August Wilson in College Literature. Dr. Floyd has been teaching at USD since 2000.

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Areas of interest: late classical and medieval; history of the English language; textual criticism and historical linguistics.  Recent publications include A History of the English Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010) and Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts Housed in Switzerland (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 2009), and articles in Notes & Queries, Journal of English & Germanic Philology, Mediaevistik, Studia Neophilologica, and The Chaucer Review.

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Gail Perez, PhD, came to the university in 1992 to teach American ethnic literature.  Since that time, she has co-founded the Ethnic Studies major and now has a joint appointment with Ethnic Studies.  She teaches courses in U.S. women of color,  multicultural California, introduction to ethnic studies, and creative writing.  She has advised MEChA, has given the Chicano Graduation Keynote, and has been nominated as a USD Woman of Impact three times.  Her research interests include pedagogy, social space and race, and literature by women of color.

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Atreyee Phukan, PhD, teaches courses in world literature and post-colonial literature. Her research interests focus on contemporary literature and theory, in particular those of the Caribbean and South Asian diaspora.

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Fred Miller Robinson, PhD, served as chair of the English Department from 1991 until 2005.  From 2005-06 he was interim director of the Theatre Arts program, and from 2009 he has served as the chair of the Music Department.  He has taught a variety of undergraduate courses in modern literature, including Modern Poetry, Modern Drama, Narrative Theory and Writing Autobiography, and a text course in modern drama to the USD/Old Globe MFA students.  His research focus has shifted from comic theory to cultural studies: a social history of The Man in the Bowler Hat and, currently, the interculture of Ireland and the U.S. Robinson also taught for a year (each) at the Universite de Haute Bretagne in Rennes, France, and the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK.

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Abraham Stoll, PhD, specializes in Renaissance and early modern literature, particularly the literature of seventeenth-century England. His recent book, Milton and Monotheism, is on the poetry and theology of John Milton. He also edited the five-volume edition of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Currently, he is working on a study of conscience in the early modern period. Stoll has taught at the University of San Diego since 2000, and was visiting professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2006-07.

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Barton Thurber received his BA degree from Stanford and his AM and PhD degrees from Harvard. He teaches classes in poetry, Romanticism and 19th century British literature; his research interests include those areas as well as the impacts of digital technologies on narrative and on the humanities generally.

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Dr. Vander Elst received his PhD from Princeton University in 2006. Following a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship at the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Dr. Vander Elst began teaching at USD in 2009. He specializes in Middle English literature, especially Chaucer and fourteenth-century English romance, literature, rhetoric, and propaganda of the later crusades, and literary representations of medieval politics.

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Irene Williams, PhD, has been a member of the faculty since 1982.  She offers undergraduate courses in nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. literature, modern European literature, and literature of genocide and occupation.  Her research focus is nineteenth-century U.S./New England literature.

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