Texas Tech University

Faculty Profiles


The following faculty conduct research and routinely teach courses in British literature after 1700:

Marta Kvande

Marta Kvande (Ph.D. Delaware, 2002) specializes in eighteenth-century British literature, with particular interests in women writers, the history of the novel, narrative, the Gothic, and the history of the book.  She has published articles on Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker, and Delarivière Manley in SEL and The Eighteenth-Century Novel and has co-edited the collection Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth Century Women Transforming Public and Private.  Her article on eighteenth-century theories of reading in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote  is forthcoming in the collection Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s.  Her current projects include a book manuscript titled "Narrating Power: Politics and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Women's Novels."

Marjean D. Purinton

Marjean D. Purinton (Ph.D. Texas A&M) is Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty, Women's Studies Program. A member of the Texas Tech University Teaching Academy, Dr. Purinton is the recipient of a President's Excellence in Teaching Award as well as numerous other recognitions for her pedagogy and administrative service.

Dr. Purinton's scholarly expertise lies in British Romanticism, especially the period's drama and women writers. She was one of a handful of faculty internationally that helped to re-establish and legitimize British Romanticism drama in the canon, in scholarship, in pedagogy, and in performance. She is the author of Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie and the anticipated Staging Ghosts and Grotesques: British Romantic Techno-Gothic Drama. She has written over 50 essays and book chapters.

Dr. Purinton has served as President of the International Conference on Romanticism and as a member of the Board of Directors for the National Collegiate Honors Council. In 2010, she hosted the annual meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism at Texas Tech University. She has been a member of the editing boards for the online project British Women Playwright around 1800, for the Doomsday: The Journal of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society, and The South Central Review.
A member of the Advisory Board for the Women's Studies Program, Dr. Purinton teaches Feminist Thought and Theories, a senior/graduate course she piloted at Texas Tech University. In addition to directing graduate work in British Romanticism, she sits on thesis and dissertation committees as an expert in feminist theory. Because her teaching and scholarship are interdisciplinary, she can serve as a resource for students interested in feminism, drama, pedagogy as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature.

Jen Shelton

Jen Shelton (Ph.D. Vanderbilt, 1995) has published essays on incest as a narrative structure in works of Joyce, Woolf and Nabokov and, in 2006 published her first book,  Joyce and the Narrative Structure of Incest (U of Florida Press).

William Wenthe

William Wenthe (Ph.D. Virginia 1992) has written two books of poems, Not Till We Are Lost and Birds of Hoboken. He has published poems in journals including Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review, and he is the librettist of Bellini's War, a full-length opera produced at Texas Tech.  In addition, he teaches 20th Century British Poetry and has written articles on Yeats, H. D., poetic form and literary theory.  His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts as well as two Pushcart Prizes.