Faculty and Staff

Ashley Bender, PhD

Interim Chair of Language, Culture & Gender Studies; Coordinator of FYE; Associate Professor of English
PhD, University of North Texas
Office: CFO 801
Phone: 940-898-2334
Email: abender@twu.edu 

Interests: Literature of the long 18th century, especially drama; Shakespeare in the 18th century; sex and gender in the 18th century; textual studies; service learning in the composition classroom; experiential education and multimodal pedagogy

Rima Abunasser, PhD

Assistant Chair of Language, Culture & Gender Studies; Assistant Professor
PhD, University of North Texas
Office: CFO 806
Phone: 940-898-2345
Email: rabunasser@twu.edu

Interests: Abunasser’s teaching and research focus on British and global writing and activism, specifically looking at how transnational writers, at home and in the diaspora, articulate nation, freedom and self. Her teaching specialties are British literature from the eighteenth century to the present, the Global Anglophone and Francophone novel and the literature of the Middle East and North Africa, with additional expertise in diaspora studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender studies, and race and ethnic studies. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Journal of North African Studies, Routledge Press’s Remembering Kahina: Representation and Resistance in Post-Independence Maghreb, Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs, and The Companion to Arab American Literature.

Jamie Barker, PhD

Senior Lecturer
PhD, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Office: CFO 912
Phone: 940-898-2348
Email: jbarker2@twu.edu

Interests: Barker teaches a wide range of courses from first-year composition to graduate-level courses, specializing in and researching 20th- and 21st-century American minority literature and the trauma found within. Barker is working on his second monograph, Broken Fences and Instrumental Lessons: Trauma, Healing, and Identity in Selected Plays of August Wilson. His first monograph, Trauma in 20th Century Multicultural American Poetry: Unmuted Verse, was published as part of the Reading Trauma and Memory series in 2020. He also won the International Award in 2022 for an article published in New Directions in Humanity Journal.

Will Benner, PhD

Associate Professor of Spanish
PhD, Tulane University
Office: CFO 910
Phone: 940-898-2316
Email: wbenner@twu.edu 
Website: sites.google.com/view/williambenner

Interests: Benner teaches courses in Spanish proficiency, Latin American Women Writers and Filmmakers, and Medical Interpreting. His research explores the artistic productions by post-dictatorship generations in the Southern Cone. He is also developing a secondary area of expertise in medical interpreting pedagogy. Benner has published in English and Spanish in "Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, Archivos de la Filmoteca," and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. He has a book chapter in The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema published by Bloomsbury in 2022. Benner is writing an article on virtual reality as an artistic medium to testify against labor exploitation on the U.S.-Mexico border, and is working on a book project, Entangled Specters, which examines the digital turn in Southern Cone memory studies.

Matthew Brown, PhD

Associate Professor of English
PhD, University of Notre Dame
Office: CFO 901
Phone: 940-898-2371
Email: mbrown39@twu.edu

Interests: Medieval Literature, Literary Theory, History of the English Language

Gretchen Busl, PhD

Director, Quality Enhancement Plan; Professor of English 
PhD, University of Notre Dame
Office: CFO 908
Phone: 940-898-2331
Email: gbusl@twu.edu

Interests: World Literature, Adaptation, Translation, Multilingualism, Graduate Student Writing

Vivian Casper, PhD

Associate Professor of English
PhD, Rice University
Office: CFO 808
Phone: 940-898-2344
Email: vcasper@twu.edu

Interests: Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, modern drama

Daniel Ernst, PhD

Assistant Professor of English
PhD, Purdue University
Office: CFO 903
Phone: 940-898-2336
Email: dernst@twu.edu

Interests: Ernst teaches courses in writing and rhetoric, grammar, technical communication, research methodology and pedagogy. His research focuses on generative AI and related language technologies and the rhetoric of large language models, examining their impact on writing and educational assessment and literacy practices.

Brian Fehler, PhD

Professor of English
PhD, Texas Christian University
Office: CFO 804
Phone: 940-898-2220
Email: bfehler@twu.edu
Website: brianfehler.com

Interests: Fehler teaches courses in history, theory and practice of rhetoric; feminist rhetorics; expository writing; energy humanities; and American literature. Fehler researches and recovers marginalized, overlooked and forgotten voices in the history of rhetoric, particularly in American life from the 19th century forward; considers and re-evaluates the rhetorical practices and methods of individuals and groups who rarely had access to prominent oratorical stages; and applies lenses of contemporary rhetorical criticism (Burkean studies; rhetorical ecologies; feminist and queer historiography) to redefine and more broadly consider practices of rhetorical and political participation.

His articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as Rhetoric Review and Rhetoric Society Quarterly and in outlets such as Gay and Lesbian Review. He is currently at work on projects exploring issues of Anthropocenic U.S. literature and the rhetorical frameworks of petrocultures.

Jackie Hoermann-Elliott, PhD

Director of First-Year Composition; Associate Professor of English
PhD, Texas Christian University
Office: CFO 130
Phone: 940-898-2338

Interests: Elliott teaches first-year composition, rhetoric and composition pedagogy, embodied writing and writing program administration courses. Her research focuses on a wide range of topics including embodied writing, writing pedagogy, dual credit, corequisite composition and issues related to writing program administration. Elliott's work has appeared in national and international journals (such as College English, Composition Forum, and the WPA Journal), and her first book, Running, Writing, Thinking: Embodied Cognition in Composition, was published by Parlor Press in 2021. She is working on her second book, an edited collection that takes a critical look at how graduate student parents find support within the academy.

Gage Jeter, PhD

Undergraduate Program Coordinator; Assistant Professor of English
PhD, University of Oklahoma
Office: CFO 913
Phone: 940-898-2347
Email: gjeter@twu.edu

Interests: Jeter teaches courses in secondary English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR) methods, writing process and pedagogy, and theories and practices of teaching texts. His research focuses on humanizing conceptions of academic discourse, process-oriented and critical approaches to literacy teaching and learning, and social justice literacies in ELAR classrooms.

Dundee Lackey, PhD

Graduate Studies Coordinator; Associate Professor of English
PhD, Michigan State University
Office: CFO 911
Phone: 940-898-2159
Email: dlackey@twu.edu

Interests: Lackey teaches courses in digital rhetoric, technical and professional writing, multimodal pedagogy, research methods and methodologies. Her research explores the intersections of pedagogy, technology, community, culture and literacy. Current projects include an article on the development of the department's Digital Composition Lab and a video archive of interviews exploring how scholars make decisions about research methods and methodologies. She is a former editor of Kairos PraxisWiki, and currently serves as assistant chair of the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric, and as a member of the editorial board for College Composition and Communication.  She is currently the graduate program coordinator for the MA in English and the PhD in Rhetoric.

Sierra Mendez, PhD

Associate Director of First-Year Composition; Assistant Professor of English
Office: CFO 902
Phone: 940-898-2348
Email: smendez11@twu.edu

Interests: Mendez teaches courses in rhetoric and composition. Her research examines rhetorical productions of coloniality/modernity, race and Americanity in settler archives, with particular attention to visual rhetoric and assemblage. Her current project focuses on networks of settler tourism postcards in San Antonio, Texas, at the turn of the 20th century, tracing across time-space cooperation between dominant imperial nations to mass-(re)produce themselves and impose their structural patterns of power. You can find her work in Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Angela Mooney, PhD

Spanish Minor Advisor; Assistant Professor of Spanish
PhD, Tulane University
Office: CFO 909
Phone: 940-898-2150
Email: amooney4@twu.edu

Interests: Mooney teaches courses in Spanish, Latin American Women Writers and Filmmakers, and Latin American Culture. Her research examines representations of race, gender and social class in contemporary Latin American cultural production with a focus on women authorship, specifically in literature and film. It highlights how a group of female artists reformulated long-established perceptions of representation and participation in the industry while revealing new narratives with the power to influence signifying practices in contemporary Latin American culture. Mooney has published scholarly articles in journals such as Hispania, Journal of Lusophone Studies, The Latin American Literary Review, Spanish and Portuguese Review and The Latin Americanist, among others.

Salena Parker, PhD

Lecturer
PhD, Texas Woman's University
Office: CFO 128
Email: sparker19@twu.edu

Interests: Parker teaches courses in Introduction to Writing, Composition I and II and World Literature. In the past decade, she has taught English in Ghana, Russia and Japan. Her current research interests include travel writing, photography, women's life writing, transmedia storytelling, feminist geography and multimodal pedagogy. Parker's articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as CCTE Studies, University of Glasgow Arts & Sciences Journal, National Geographic Travel, and TEJASCOVIDO. She is currently working on a book chapter interrogating Aloha Wanderwell as a Jazz Age flâneuse for Women Wandering Purposefully: The Flâneuse in Literature and Popular Culture.

Sendy Rhone, PhD

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
PhD, University of Houston
Office: CFO 915
Email: srhone1@twu.edu

Interests:  Rhone teaches courses in Spanish Language and Culture and Medical Translation and Interpretation. With a background in Hispanic linguistics and heritage language studies, as well as being a professional translator and interpreter, Rhone’s research focuses on Spanish as a heritage language pedagogy, particularly on accent perception and classification/description of heritage speakers. Her other areas of interest are bilingualism, multilingualism, sociolinguistics, language pedagogy, speech perception and phonetic analysis. Rhone is currently working on medical translation and interpretation pedagogy in collaboration with Will Benner.

M. Genevieve West, PhD

Associate Dean for Research, College of Arts and Sciences; Professor of English
PhD, Florida State University
Office: CFO 906
Phone: 940-898-2324
Email: GWest@twu.edu

Interests: West teaches courses in American, African American and women’s literatures. Her research focuses on African American women in the inter-war period and the Harlem Renaissance, and she has a deep commitment to archival research and recovering "lost" voices. West's projects explore life as a department chair and the work of Marita Bonner. Her most recent volumes collect Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction in Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020) and essays in You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays (2022). West's essays have appeared in African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930, African American Review, and Religion and Literature.

Alicia Beretta, PhD student in rhetoric

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: aberetta@twu.edu

Beretta enjoys working closely with students on their writing and engaging them in their work in innovative and beneficial ways. She is enrolled in TWU's PhD in Rhetoric program with goals of becoming a first-year writing program director and helping students and teachers with their learning and success. Beretta has a heavy interest in the intersection of transfer pedagogy, archival studies and student engagement and how they inform and fulfill one another. One of her favorite things to do as a teacher is create engaging and multimodal scaffolding discussions and activities to help make the writing process and skill development more tangible and effective for her students. Her areas of specialization are First-Year Writing, Transfer Pedagogy, WPA, Writing Studies, Archival Studies/Pedagogy

Michael Cerliano, PhD student in Rhetoric

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Office: CFO 914
Email: mcerliano@twu.edu

Cerliano is a doctoral student in rhetoric at Texas Woman’s University. His work focuses on the intersection of rhetoric, esotericism and culture. He has published on witchcraft and the Enlightenment in Piers Haggard’s film "The Blood on Satan’s Claw" for Horror Homeroom (2021), and on H. P. Lovecraft, hauntology and apocalypticism in the collection Lovecraft in the 21st Century: Dead, but Still Dreaming (2022). His research examines magic, visual rhetoric and writing as practices of self-formation and knowledge creation. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, he currently serves the department as the English undergraduate advisor. His areas of specialization are Rhetorical theory, magic, esotericism, horror, gothic and art history

Scholarship:
“Witchcraft and the Enlightenment in the Blood on Satan’s Claw”
“Lovecraft, Hauntology, and the Rhetoric of Unthinkability”

Alyssa Grimley

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: agrimley@twu.edu

Interests: Grimley is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric at Texas Woman’s University. They hold a BA in Journalism and a Master of Professional Writing degree from the University of Oklahoma. They have previously worked as the assistant director of TWU’s Write Site and as a graduate reader at the University of Texas at Dallas. Assisting students with developing their skills, voice and confidence in their writing is a major passion. Their main areas of academic interest are pop culture, genre fiction (particularly horror), trauma-informed pedagogy and affect and embodiment theory. Their goal is to combine these research interests and apply them to multimodal pedagogical practices to cultivate a culture of empathy and growth in the classroom and beyond. Grimley has presented at conferences such as SWPACA, Computers & Writing, and CCTE about fandom, narrative, and myth. Grimley's areas of specialization are trauma-informed pedagogy, affect theory, embodiment theory and digital literacies.

Juliette Holder

Assistant Director of First-Year Composition; Graduate Teaching Assistant
Office: CFO 127
Email: jholder5@twu.edu

Interests: Holder is a teacher-scholar interested in feminist rhetorics, revision theory and popular culture studies. She has taught FYC for many years and currently serves as FYC assistant director. Her research focuses on feminist revision practices and the value of public revision, taking the work of Taylor Swift as a model. She has also written about the formation, promotion, and transformation of feminist messages in popular culture for both academic and public-facing audiences, including Ms. magazine and USA Today. She remains interested in thought leadership and emphasizes writing for multiple audiences and in varied forms in her FYC classrooms as part of a commitment to multimodal, embodied and accessible pedagogical practices.

Jennifer Judd

English BA Advisor; Graduate Research Assistant, First-Year Experience
Email: jjudd1@twu.edu

Interests: Judd is a PhD candidate in rhetoric. Her research interests include theories of belonging, feminist embodied and contemplative writing pedagogies and disability rhetorics. As a teacher-scholar, Judd's research and pedagogy intersect in writing classrooms, including developing first-year composition courses on belonging and wellness. Judd also writes about feminist rhetorics and identity, with a focused interest in disability, religion, and mothers/motherhood. Judd's writing on disability justice has appeared in The Dallas Morning News, and  Her creative writing for children has appeared in various children’s magazines, poetry anthologies and picture books. She currently serves as the English BA Advisor and a research assistant for the First-Year Experience program. Judd's areas of specialization are feminist, contemplative, and embodied writing pedagogies, feminist rhetorics, disability studies and writing studies.

Amanda Kerr

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: akerr1@twu.edu

Interests: Kerr is a first-year PhD student in the doctoral program in Rhetoric. She has a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Texas at Tyler, where she wrote a thesis on the intersections of teaching for transfer, expressivism and rhetorical genre studies pedagogies in first-year writing. She continues to study and draw upon this line of research in her current studies of affective theories of writing instruction. Kerr is fascinated by internal rhetorics and rhetorics of emotion. Kerr often pursues scholarly lines of inquiry that look at how language operates within structures of power and how this dynamic influences students’ construction of a writerly identity. She writes for both creative and scholarly audiences, and creative writing studies is another one of her areas of interest. Her lyric essay, “PP-PTSD,” was awarded the best nonfiction essay at the 2024 Conference for College Teachers of English and is forthcoming in CCTE Studies. 

Miranda Kuehmichel

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: mkuehmichel@twu.edu

Interests: Kuehmichel moved to Texas to attend Texas Woman’s University from Boise, Idaho. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Technical Communication from Boise State University. She gained teaching experience in Boise State’s Writing Center as an undergrad and as a writing tutor in the graduate college throughout her master’s program. Kuehmichel’s master’s research centered on racism through language perpetrated against Japanese-Americans during World War II with an emphasis on those incarcerated in U.S. concentration camps (known colloquially as Internment Camps). Her graduate research centers on cultural rhetorics by investigating racism through language and its effects on immigrant diasporas in Texas. Her areas of specialization are cultural rhetorics and antiracist language.

Cassie Kutev

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: ckutev@twu.edu

Interests: Kutev has a deep commitment to advancing the field of semitic rhetoric, where her academic journey includes a strong foundation in media studies, speech communication and forensics. Kutev holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from Stephen F. Austin State University, where she focused on the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and rhetorical analysis of 20th Century queer media. Her research interests, variables of anti-semitism, have garnered recognition through the Rhetoric Society of America. As an FYC instructor, Kutev’s teaching ethos rides on acute communication skills, media literacy and cultural literacy so that students understand the importance of writing and feeling empowered when creating their compositions, even after they leave the FYC classroom. Her areas of specialization are anti-semitic discourse, Middle Eastern discourse, information literacy and media studies.

Melanie Kuyoth

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Office: CFO 127
Email: mkuyoth@twu.edu

Interests: Kuyoth’s research focuses on the intersection of literature and history. Her background is in secondary education where she taught advanced academics and on level students including English language learners and students with challenges. This gives her unique insights into the needs of incoming freshmen. Kuyoth holds a BA in Literature and a BA in Historical and Political Studies from Chaminade University of Honolulu. 

Johnny Nguyen

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: jnguyen111@twu.edu

Interests: Nguyen has a background in working in writing centers as a writing tutor. He is interested in pursuing research in writing center development and how student feedback can be used effectively in the classroom and writing center. Nguyen enjoys working with students to develop their academic voices while they incorporate their experiences and perspective as embodied writing. His areas of specialization are writing center theory, cultural rhetoric, digital/multimodal rhetoric and embodied writing.

Shannon Quist

Graduate Coordinator, Digital Composition Lab; Student Assistant IV, Research & Sponsored Programs
Email: squist@twu.edu

Interests: Quist (she/her) is a PhD student in Rhetoric at Texas Woman's University and the author of Rose's Locket and Mirrors Made of Ink. She currently haunts her bespoke ghost kingdom and spends her days writing in practically every genre. She hopes to die someday in a library of her own words. 

Hugh Burns, PhD

Professor Emeritus
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
Email: hburns@twu.edu

Interests: Rhetoric, Computers and Writing, Digital Humanities

Russell Greer, PhD

Professor Emeritus
Email: rgreer@twu.edu

Interests: Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope

Lou Thompson, PhD

Professor Emerita
PhD, Texas Christian University
Office: CFO 908
Phone: 940-898-2347
Email: Lthompson2@twu.edu

Interests: Documentary film, creative writing (fiction), disability studies, visual rhetoric

Rachel E. Johnston, PhD

Director of Tutoring, The Write Site
Office: BHL 235
Phone: 940-898-2118
Email: rjohnston3@twu.edu

Interests: Johnston teaches courses in composition focused on global citizenship and wellness, and literature courses on domesticity, marriage, mobility, monsters and madness. Her research primarily explores the roles of women, marriage and failed marriage in early transatlantic novels, art and plays, expanding to motherhood and domesticity 1660-1860. Johnston is comparing several of Daniel Defoe's fiction and non-fiction writings which show Defoe's seemingly feminist opinions on mercenary marriage as well as employment opportunities and reproductive control for 18th-century women in Great Britain and America.

Natalie Hernandez

Senior Secretary
Office: CFO 131 & BHL
Phone: 940-898-2323
Email: nhernandez56@twu.edu

Aisha Jones

Administrative Assistant
Language, Culture, and Gender Studies
Office: CFO 905
Phone: 940-898-2326
Email: ajones168@twu.edu