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English Faculty


  • Department Chair

  • Adrienne Su
    Associate Professor of English, Poet-in-Residence (2000).
    East College Room 404
    sua@dickinson.edu
    (717) 245-1346

  • Department Faculty

  • Sharon J. O'Brien

    Sharon J. O'Brien
    Professor of English and American Studies, James Hope Caldwell Professor of American Cultures (1975).
    Denny Hall Room 201
    (717) 245-1497 | obrien@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., Radcliffe College, 1967; M.A., Harvard University, 1969; Ph.D., 1975.
    Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, 1985-1986.

    Sharon O'Brien teaches interdisciplinary courses in the American Studies and English Departments, looking at the multiplicity of American cultures through the lenses of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. The author of a biography of Willa Cather, she is now teaching and writing memoir and personal essay. Teaching and research interests include the politics of memory; illness and narrative; and lifewriting.

  • Thomas L. Reed, Jr.

    Thomas L. Reed, Jr.
    Professor of English (1977).
    East College Room 306
    (717) 245-1216 | reedt@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., Yale University, 1969; M.A., University of Virginia, 1971; Ph.D., 1978.
    Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, 1997-1998.

    His field is medieval literature, with special emphasis on Chaucer and Marie de France. Other research interests include Gothic fiction and representations of alcohol in Victorian England.

  • B. Ashton Nichols

    B. Ashton Nichols
    (on leave 2011-12)
    Professor of English Language and Literature; Walter E. Beach '56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies (1988).
    East College Room 305
    (717) 245-1359 | nicholsa@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., University of Virginia, 1975; M.A., 1979; Ph.D., 1984.
    Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, 1992-1993. Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, 1993-1994.

    His fields include 19th- and 20th-century British literature and contemporary ecocriticism, with emphasis on Romantic poetry and American nature writing. He also teaches courses in nature writing. His current research focuses on Romantic natural history, 1750-1850 and urbanatural roosting.

  • K. Wendy Moffat

    K. Wendy Moffat
    Professor of English (1984).
    East College Room 408
    (717) 245-1499 | moffat@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., Yale University, 1977; M.A., 1979; M.Phil., 1981, Ph.D., 1986.
    Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, 1994-1995.

    Her teaching interests include modernism, literature and sexuality, biography, and literary theory. Her biography, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster, received the Biographer's Club Prize in 2010 and was runner-up for the PEN Biography Prize in 2011.

  • Carol Ann Johnston

    Carol Ann Johnston
    Associate Professor of English, Martha Porter Sellers Chair of Rhetoric and the English Language (1990).
    East College Room 410
    (717) 245-1268 | johnston@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., Baylor University, 1978; M.A., 1980; M.A., Harvard University, 1983; Ph.D., 1992.

    Her teaching interests include literature of the Early Modern period, poetry workshop, and Southern Women Writers. Her current research investigates subjectivity and agency in seventeenth-century English poetry. She has written a book on Eudora Welty and is working on a manuscript placing poet Thomas Traherne in the context of seventeenth-century visual traditions.

  • Susan Perabo

    Susan Perabo
    Associate Professor of English, Writer-in-Residence (1996).
    East College Room 307
    (717) 245-1847 | perabo@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., Webster University, 1989; M.F.A., University of Arkansas, 1994.
    Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, 2001-2002.

    She teaches beginning and advanced workshops in fiction, as well as modern and contemporary literature classes that focus heavily on form and technique. Her recent published work includes a collection of short stories, a novel, and non-fiction essays for magazines and anthologies.

  • Adrienne Su

    Adrienne Su
    Associate Professor of English, Poet-in-Residence (2000).
    East College Room 404
    (717) 245-1346 | sua@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., Radcliffe College, 1989; M.F.A., University of Virginia, 1993.

    Her central course offerings include creative writing (poetry), The Craft of Poetry, and Writing about Food and Culture. Recipient of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is the author of three books of poems, 'Middle Kingdom' (1997), 'Sanctuary' (2006), and 'Having None of It' (2009).

  • David M. Ball

    David M. Ball
    (on leave 2011-12)
    Assistant Professor of English (2007).

    balld@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., Stanford University, 1998; M.A., Princeton University, 2003; Ph.D., 2007.

    His interests in questions of American modernism, popular culture, and minority and oppositional responses to the American experience have shaped his research on the meanings of success and failure in American prose literature. In the coming semesters, he plans to teach classes in contemporary literary theory, the American short story, graphic novels, and the shape of twenty-first-century American literature.

  • Paul R. Gleed

    Paul R. Gleed
    Assistant Professor of English (2008).
    East College Room 407
    (717) 245-1101 | gleedp@dickinson.edu
    B.A., Lancaster University, 1999; M.A., SUNY Binghamton, 2001; Ph.D., SUNY Buffalo, 2006.

    Paul Gleed's primary research and teaching interests are in early modern literature, especially Shakespeare and the contemporary life of his plays in film, television and other modern media. In addition to a broad selection of early modern literature classes, Professor Gleed also teaches classes on British film and contemporary British literature and culture.

  • Claire Bowen

    Claire Bowen
    Assistant Professor of English (2010).
    East College Room 403
    (717) 245-1921 | bowencl@dickinson.edu
    B.A., Middlebury College, 2002; M.Phil., Trinity College Dublin, 2004; Ph.D., Stanford University, 2010.

  • Siobhan K. Phillips

    Siobhan K. Phillips
    Assistant Professor of English (2011).
    East College Room 409
    (717) 245-1729 | phillisi@dickinson.edu | Visit Web Site
    B.A., Yale University, 1999; M.Phil., Oxford University, 2001; M.A., University of East Anglia, 2002; Ph.D., Yale University, 2007.

    She teaches and writes about poetry, modernism, and contemporary literature, particularly American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse, was published by Columbia University Press in 2010. Her current project examines the ethical and political implications of poets' letters in the post-war period.

  • Jacob Sider-Jost

    Jacob Sider-Jost
    Assistant Professor of English (2011; 2013).

    siderjoj@dickinson.edu
    B.A., Goshen College, 2002; B.A., St. John's College (Oxford, England), 2005; M.A., 2009; Ph.D., Harvard University, 2011.

  • Poulomi Saha

    Poulomi Saha
    Assistant Professor of English (2011; 2012).

    sahap@dickinson.edu
    B.A., Mount Holyoke College, 2004; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2011.

  • Adjunct Faculty

  • Sha'an Chilson

    Sha'an Chilson
    Adjunct Faculty in English.
    East College Room 308
    (717) 245-1920 | chilson@dickinson.edu
    B.A., Webster University, 1989; M.F.A., University of Arkansas, 1996.

  • Darrach S. Dolan

    Darrach S. Dolan
    Adjunct Faculty in English
    East College Room 309
    (717) 245-1219 | doland@dickinson.edu
    B.A., Trinity College, Dublin, 1988; R.S.A., The Language Center of Ireland, 1988; M.F.A., University of Iowa, 2000.