Our New Faculty

This year the English Department welcomes eight new faculty members.

Amanda Bailey

Renaissance scholar Amanda Bailey joins us from the University of Connecticut, where she was an Assistant Professor of English. Her specialties include early modern drama, masculinity studies, political theory, and New Economic Criticism, and her newest project explores conceptions of personhood in the context of political thought.  Professor Bailey has written several monographs, including the forthcoming Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Person in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press), and her articles have appeared in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and Renaissance Drama.  She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and will be teaching a course in ancient and medieval literature (ENGL201), as well as Shakespeare (ENGL404), in the fall.

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Kellie Robertson

Kellie Robertson joins our medieval literature faculty from the University of Wisconsin, where she was an associate professor.  She received her PhD from Yale University.  Her current project focuses on the intersection between medieval science and poetry, and she also specializes in issues of work and labor in the Middle Ages.  Her most recent monograph, The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500 studies the impact of labor regulation in 14^th-century England, and a forthcoming book on medieval keywords (Wiley-Blackwell 2012) examines “the inter-illumination of language and culture in a list of key terms employed by late medieval British writers.”  Her teaching interests include Old English, History of the English Language, and History of the Book. In addition to serving as Director of Graduate Placement, Professor Robertson will also be teaching Arthurian Legend (ENGL466) this fall. 

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Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, a specialist in nineteenth and twentieth century American and hemispheric studies, comes to UMD from Kenyon College, where she was a Visiting Instructor in the Department of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.  Prior to her time at Kenyon, she was an Associate Instructor at the University of California Davis, where she also earned her PhD.  Her current project, From Flags to Freeways: Hemispheric Routes of Exchange, Marginalized Economies, and Liberal Rights, is based on her dissertation and, in her words, “analyzes hemispheric acts of illegal exchange across the longue durée of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”  Professor Balachandran Orihuela’s has published in the South Asian Review, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, and the Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies.  Professor Balachandran Orihuela will teach two courses in American Literature, ENGL313 and 433, in the fall.

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Lee Konstantinou

A novelist and scholar of post-WWII US fiction, Lee Konstantinou received his PhD from Stanford University, where he also taught courses on rhetoric, crisis, and political satire.  As an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Princeton University since 2011, his teaching experience included courses on science fiction and post 9/11 literature and culture.  His current project, derived from his dissertation and under contract with Harvard University Press, is a literary history of countercultural irony.  Professor Konstantinou’s work examines various character types such as the hipster and the punk in order to trace a shift from ironic to “postironic” types.  He has published in venues such as boundary 2 and Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and he has edited the collection The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press).  His own fiction work includes Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire (Ecco Harper/Perennial).  Professor Konstantinou will teach courses in Postmodern Literature (ENGL475) and Twentieth Century Fiction (ENGL346) this fall. 

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Emily Mitchell

Emily Mitchell joins our department from Cleveland State University, where she was an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA program.  She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, and since then she has taught classes in literature, craft, and theory, as well as courses in creative writing.  Her novel The Last Summer of the World (W.W. Norton & Co.) was named the Best Book of 2007 by Madison Capital Times, Providence Journal, and Austin American-Statesman.  Her current project, under the working title The War of Light and Shadows, is slated for publication by W.W. Norton & Co. in the fall of 2013, and her short stories have been published in venues such as the New England Review, Ploughshares, and Raritan.  Professor Mitchell will lead undergraduate (ENGL498) and graduate (ENGL689) fiction workshops this fall.

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Scott Trudell

With research interests in early modern song and literary form, Scott Trudell hails from Rutgers University, where he recently received his PhD.  His current project, inspired by his dissertation entitled Literary Song: Poetry, Drama and Acoustic Performance in Early Modern England, works through questions of music and literature in the works of authors such as Sidney, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton.  An essay on Hamlet and media theory is published in the Spring 2012 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, and an article on Thomas Wyatt’s psalms is forthcoming in Studies in Philology.  Professor Trudell’s teaching experience includes early modern tragedy, sixteenth-century literature, and poetry.  In the fall, he will be teaching courses on Shakespeare’s early works (ENGL403) and on Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists (ENGL305).

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Christopher Hazlett

Christopher Hazlett, a new PhD recipient from the University of Florida, joins the department as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Academic Writing.  His dissertation, Prison Sentences: Understanding the Prison Writing Network, is the basis for his current project, in which he explores how writing is generated in and moves about in a prison context.  In doing so, he focuses specifically on incident reports and the short and informal writing among prisoners.  With extensive experience teaching first-year and advanced composition, Professor Hazlett will teach Scholars sections of English 101 this fall.  His teaching interests also include discourse and genre studies and pedagogical theory.  Recently, he has contributed to Turning Points and Transformations: Essays on Language, Literature, and Culture (Cambridge Scholars 2011), and he has also published in Composition Forum.

Learn more about Professor Hazlett..

Travis Webster

Travis Webster, a recent PhD recipient from Michigan State University, joins the department as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Academic Writing.  His dissertation, What Ex-Exgays Can Teach Us About Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Rhetorics, traces how stories told by gay men in online communities can enact activism.  Professor Webster’s work, with Matthew Cox, on LGBTQ identity is also appearing in the forthcoming Metamorphosis: The Affects of Professional Development on Graduate Students. The Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development.  His extensive teaching experience includes courses on first-year writing, science and technology, composition and literature in digital environments (at Miami University), and structures of the English language (Stephen F. Austin State University).  He is currently working on a collection about queer methodologies, and he’ll be teaching Scholars sections of English 101 this fall. 

Learn more about Professor Webster...