English Faculty

Chair
Steve Andrews
Associate Professor

Director, Center for the Humanities

I teach mostly 18th and 19th century American Literature, but I like to roam a little, especially if given the opportunity to team teach or supervise MAPs. During any four-year cycle I am likely to offer a seminar on Whitman and Dickinson; an American poetry seminar titled “Beat, Black, and...
Sherif Abdelkarim
Assistant Professor
Sherif Abdelkarim specializes in English historical linguistics and Old English, Middle English, and classical and early postclassical Arabic literature. His work has appeared in New Literary History, Postmedieval, and PMLA, among other distinguished journals. He has also published book chapters for...
Leah
Assistant Professor
Leah Claire Allen is Assistant Professor in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) and English at Grinnell College. Her current book project In Praise of Bad Critics revisits feminist critics from the 1960s and 1970s who have been labeled “bad critics” or “bad feminists” both within and...
Timothy Arner
Associate Professor

Associate Dean of Curriculum and Academic Programs

Tim Arner specializes in medieval literature. His research and teaching interests include the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the influence of classical texts on Middle English poetry, and the intersections between fourteenth- and fifteenth-century literature and politics. He has published articles on...
George Barlow
Associate Professor
George Barlow is a poet who earned a B.A. in English from California State University, Hayward, an M.A. in American Studies and an M.F.A. in Poetry, both from the University of Iowa. He specializes in African-American literature, poetry, and teaches Craft of Poetry and the Poetry Seminar most...
Elizabeth
Professor
Elizabeth Dobbs regularly taught courses on rhetoric and historical linguistics, and seminars on Chaucer and other English and European medieval writers. She co-taught a MAP Seminar, “Conceptions of Space and Place in Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-1650,” and has directed MAPs for the Linguistics...
Astrid
Professor
Astrid Henry teaches a wide variety of courses in Grinnell’s Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) Program, including Introduction to GWSS (GWS 111), Theory and Methodology in GWSS (GWS 249), and the Senior Seminar in GWSS (GWS 495), as well as Foundations of LGBTQ Studies (GWS 211) and...
Lakesia Johnson
Associate Professor
Lakesia D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Gender, Women’s, & Sexuality Studies and English at Grinnell College. Johnson received a bachelor’s from Smith College. She earned her J.D., M.A., and Ph.D. in Women Studies from the Ohio State University. Her areas of teaching and research include Black...
Kapila
Professor
I teach postcolonial literature from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and the settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia. I have also taught the Victorian novel with an emphasis on colonialism and gender. Once in three years, I have been able to teach a course on transnational feminism moving...
Assistant Professor
I study contemporary multi-ethnic American women’s literature. Specifically, I am interested in this literature’s pedagogical exploration of how to encourage ethical living. My dissertation examines how the magical realist novels of four contemporary African American and Asian American women promote...
A Black woman with glasses wears a red headwrap, pink sweater and pink chunky necklace looks straight at the camera. She stands in front of a bookshelf.
Assistant Professor
Makeba Lavan is an assistant professor in English at Grinnell College. Generally speaking, her research focuses on (African) American Studies, Afrofuturism/Speculative Fiction and Popular Culture. In the fall of 2018, Makeba was granted a fellowship in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality department at...
Clara Montague
Instructor
Clara Montague is a lecturer in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College as well as a doctoral candidate in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation project, Women’s Studies Worldwide, examines the transnational history of this interdisciplinary...
Hai-Dang
Associate Professor
Hai-Dang Phan has taught ethnic American literature, the craft of poetry, introduction to literary analysis, and studies in genre (the essay). He is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing . His poems have been published in The New Yorker , Poetry , Best American Poetry...
Lecturer

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Ralph
Professor
Professor Savarese has been on the faculty at Grinnell for 21 years. He has also taught at Deerfield Academy, Keene State College, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, the University of Florida, Duke University, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 2012-2013, he was a fellow at Duke University’s...
Erik Simpson
Professor

Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Professor of Humanities

Erik Simpson's literature courses focus on British writing from Shakespeare to the present, especially the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His primary research field is British and transatlantic literature of the Romantic period. He was the Principal Investigator for Grinnell...
Paul Smith headshot
Professor
Paula Vene Smith’s recent publications include “ Refashioning Diary Studies: The Tradition of Black Women’s Diaries ” in a/b: Autobiography Studies and (forthcoming) “Day Today: Circadian Rhythms and the Sense of Unending in Poetic Diaries by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen” in the Journal of...

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