Faculty Profiles

Cordelia Barrera (Ph.D. University of Texas San Antonio, 2009) spercializes in Latina/o literatures and the American Southwest, as well as U.S. border theory, third space feminist theory, popular culture, and film. She writes movie reviews for the borderlands journal LareDOS, and has published articles and reviews in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video and the Journal of Popular Culture. She is working on a book project that explores cyber technologies, social justice, and forms of oppositional consciousness in borderlands science fiction.

Michael Borshuk (Ph.D. Alberta, 2002) specializes in African American literature and cultural studies. He is the author of Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006), for which he received the President's Book Award in 2008, and various essays, reviews, and encyclopedia entries on African American literature, music, and American modernism. He has co-edited two special issues on the city and urban culture for Studies in the Literary Imagination, and for ten years, from 1999 to 2009, was a regular contributor on jazz to Coda masgazine. His current book project addresses jazz, performance studies, and visual culture. He is also currently co-editing a special issue of Popular Music and Society on the work of Randy Newman, and will be a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter. In 2011, he won the President's Excellence in Teaching Award at Texas Tech.

John Samson (Ph.D. Cornell, 1980) focuses on historical and theoretical approaches to 19^th- and 20^th-century American literature. He is the author of White Lies: Melville's Narratives of Facts (Cornell UP, 1989) and articles and book chapters on American fiction, nonfiction, and criticism, in such journals as American Literature, American Quarterly, and Intertexts. For nine years he wrote the “Melville” chapter for American Literary Scholarship (Duke UP, 1995-2003). His latest publication is “The Critical Response to Herman Melville” in Critical Insights: Herman Melville, ed. Eric Link (Salem Press, 2013).

Yuan Shu specializes in contemporary American literature and comparative literature with an emphasis on transpacific American literature, post 9/11 American literature, postmodern American literature, Vietnam War literature, and Asian American literature. His research interest includes transpacific American studies, globalization theory, technology and discourse, as well as comparative race studies. He has published over twenty articles in books and journals such as Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, and MELUS. He has co-edited two volumes, American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific (Dartmouth College Press, 2015) and Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). He has also edited/co-edited special issues/forums for Verge: Studies in Global Asias, SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, and The Journal of Transnational American Studies. His monograph, Negotiating the Technological Empire: Technology, Racial Formation, and Transpacific Chinese American Life Writing, is under contract.

Sara L. Spurgeon (Ph.D. Arizona, 2000) works in literatures of the American West/Southwest, as well as nature/environmental writing, gender studies, and ecocritical, frontier, and postcolonial theory, and directs the graduate concentration in Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE). She is editor of the critical anthology Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road (2011), author of Exploding the Western (2005), the monograph Ana Castillo: Western Writers Series (2004), and co-author of Writing the Southwest (1995, revised 2^nd edition 2003). She has published essays in the journals Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Western American Literature, Southwestern American Literature, and Intertexts, and was 2012 President of the Western Literature Association.

Elissa Zellinger (Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) focuses on nineteenth-century American poems, and the way these works were dynamic centers of cultural, political, and aesthetic exchange. Specifically, she combines lyrical poetry and liberal political philosophy to examine the conflation of poet and poem, specifically in nineteenth-century American women's poetry. Her book, Lyrical Strains: Liberalism and Women's Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press; November 2020) examines how poetry by women allowed writers and readers to "strain" against and thereby clarify the assumptions of liberal selfhood in the U.S. during this period. These ideas have inspired her second project, in which she explores the late nineteenth-century "profession" (in the sense of both a line of work and a declaration) of writing poetry.