Faculty and Staff

• Danit Brown

  Professor

  B.A., Oberlin College
  M.F.A., Indiana University

  Publications: Television for Women, a novel, forthcoming in summer 2025; Ask for a Convertible, a collection of linked short stories named a Washington Post best book of 2008 and winner of an American Book Award. Short stories in One Story, Storyquarterly, Story, Beloit Fiction Journal and others. She is currently at work on a novel.

  Courses: Introductory Creative Writing, Fiction Workshop-Form, Fiction Workshop-Genre, Advanced Fiction Workshop, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, Screenwriting Fundamentals, College Writing.

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-0438
  

• Lauren Brown

  Associate Professor

  B.A. SUNY Geneseo
  M.A., Ph.D., Binghamton University

  Publications: Dr. Lauren Brown’s research interests include American literature of the 20th & 21st centuries; race, ethnicity, and gender in U.S. literature; and literature and theory that deal with nation, postcolonialism, transnationalism, and/or im/migration. Dr. Brown has published peer-reviewed work in The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2018); The New Americanist (2020); MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.(2022); and Studies in the Novel (2023). She is currently at work on a longer-term project related to the philosophical arc of Toni Morrison’s nonfiction writing and speeches.

  Courses: (100-level) Writing Essentials; College Writing; Reading Dangerously; Dystopian Narratives; (200-level) Native American Literature; African American Literature; Divided Nations; (300-level) Contemporary U.S. Literature; The Problem of Race in U.S. Literature; A Friend of My Mind: The Work of Toni Morrison; (Un)Settling Homeland.

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-0334
  

• Michele Chinitz

  Visiting Assistant Professor of English

  B.A., Williams College
  M.A., Freie Universität Berlin
  M.Phil., Ph.D., City University of New York

  Research: Michele’s areas of interest include global Anglophone literatures,
  postcolonial studies, translation, music, film, and German Jewish studies. Her most recent publications appear in the Journal of Modern Literature and EuropeNow. She is writing a book about complicity in global Anglophone and German fiction.

  Teaching: In her teaching, Michele is eager to empower students to analyze and creatively reflect on the complexity of their own lives through a comparative
  consideration of literature, culture, and history in different parts of the world.

  Courses: Colonialism and Resistance in Literature and Film (389); Beyond Good and Evil (189); Contemporary Literature (251); College Writing (101W); The Twentieth Century in British and Postcolonial Literature (327)

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-0618
  

• Nels Christensen

  Associate Professor

  B.A., California State University
  M.A. & Ph.D. Michigan State University

  Research and Writing: Ecocriticism, Ecopedagogy, and Environmental Creative Non-Fiction.

  Publications: Learning Where the Weather Is Real: Why Teaching in Bad Weather Is Good. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Facing the Weather in James Galvin’s The Meadow and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) 21:1 (Winter 2014), Leaving a Trace Wake: Great Lakes Thought and Culture, The Art of Stillness Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Way You Do It Sports Afield.

  Courses: Composition, The Idea of Nature and the Nature of Ideas, Writing in Place, Terrorists and Treehuggers, Black Environmentalism.

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-0349
  

• Ian Reed Kelley

  Director of Writing Assessment

  BA: Boston University

  MA: University of New Mexico

  PhD: University of Louisville

  Publications: Dr. Ian Kelley’s areas of research interest include lifelong literacy development, fan studies, and writing across the community. Their book, Loving Fanfiction: Exploring the Role of Emotion in Online Fandoms was published by Routledge in 2021. Additionally, their work has been published in journals such as Computers and Writing and Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as The Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in the Digital Humanities and in The Sage Research Methods video series. They are currently working on a project to provide more equitable and ethical education to marginalized students.

  Courses: English 100W: Writing Essentials, English 101W: College Writing

  Email: [email protected]

  Phone: (517) 629-0828
  

• Ian F. MacInnes

  Howard L. McGregor Professor of Humanities

  Website: http://aulis.org/

  B.A., Swarthmore College
  M.A. & Ph.D., University of Virginia

  Publications: Ian’s scholarship focuses on representations of animals and the environment in Renaissance literature, particularly in Shakespeare. He has published essays on topics such as horse breeding and geohumoralism in Henry V, on invertebrate bodies in Hamlet, and on animal networks in early modern England. Along with his co-host, a medieval art historian, he has a podcast called Real Fantastic Beasts on medieval and early modern animals. He is also the senior editor for Unfortunate Creatures, a peer-reviewed, crowd-sourced site on pre-modern natural disaster narratives. His long-running website and webapp, Ian’s English Calendar, calculates dates for scholars of English history and Literature.

  Courses: Animal Tales, Us vs. Them, Monsters Within, Myth and Legend, Shakespeare, Age of Elizabeth, Voices of Liberty: Milton and His Age, Redeeming Eve: Early Modern Women’s Writing, Pre-modern Ecologies, Advanced Writing.

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-5660
  

• Helena Mesa

  Associate Professor

  B.A., Indiana University
  M.F.A. University of Maryland
  Ph.D. University of Houston

  Publications: A collection of poems, Horse Dance Underwater. She is also co-editor of Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Pleiades, and Barrow Street. She is currently at work on a new collection of poems.

  Courses: Introductory Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Writing (Poetry), Creative Writing Workshop (Poetry), Visual Poetry, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, Latina/o Literature, Composition.

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-0340
  

• Ashley Miller

  Associate Professor and Department Chair

  B.A., Vassar College
  M.A. & Ph.D., Indiana University

  Areas of Interest: 18th- and 19th-century British literature, ecocriticism and the history of science, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of ghost stories.

  Publications: Poetry, Media, and the Material Body (Cambridge, 2018). Other recent publications include essays in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2022 and 2014), Victorian Studies (2019), Victorian Literature and Culture (2018), and Studies in Romanticism (2011), and a chapter in Nineteenth-Century Energies (Routledge, 2016).

  Courses: ENGL 123: Family Matters, ENGL 129: Secrets & Lies, ENGL 224: Victorian Ghosts, ENGL 326: The British Romantics, ENGL 373: Victorian Sexualities, ENGL 375P: Literary Detectives, ENGL 380P: The Novel and the New, ENGL: 382: British Fiction after 1850, ENGL 100W: Writing Essentials, ENGL 101W: College Writing, ENGL 208W: Professional Writing, ENGL 303W: English Language.

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-0549
  

• Krista Quesenberry

  Associate Professor

  B.A., Ball State University
  M.A. and dual-title Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University

  Research Specialization: Krista’s teaching and research engages with professional writing, American literature, comics about medicine, and feminist, LGBTQ+, and disability studies. Her most recent publications are in The Journal of Medical Humanities, American Literary Scholarship, and various edited collections. She is currently working on archival projects to publish the letters of American literary figures, as well as a book about how diagnosis and identity are entangled in medical graphic memoirs. Krista also serves as the faculty adviser of the Albion Pleiad.

  Courses: Pleiad Practicum sequence; Professional Writing; Multimedia Journalism; Science, Technical, and Medical Writing; Writing in the Non-Profit Sector; Advanced Editing; LGBTQ+ Literature; Write Your Résumé; OUCH! Comics and Medicine; Honors: Race in Media; College Writing.

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-0310
  

• Jess Roberts

  Professor

  B.A., Dartmouth College
  M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan

  Jess believes in the community-making power of imaginative literature. She is the founding director of Albion’s Big Read, a program that aims to eradicate injustice inside and outside of the classroom by changing young people’s relationship to reading. She founded that program in 2015 with a group of outstanding people in Albion and runs it with the help of Nels Christensen. For more information about that program, please visit our website at albionbigread.org and follow us on Instagram @albionbigread.

  Jess’s most recent writing includes an essay called “Earned Trust and Albion’s Big Read,” which appears in the MLAs 2024 collection Social Justice in Action, and an article entitled ““The Poetess Laureate of Yoknapatawpha County: Rosa Coldfield and the Power of Convention” which appears in the Fall 2020 issue of The Faulkner Journal, published in 2024.

  In addition, Jess’s has published essays on Sarah Piatt in ESQ (2018), A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2017), and The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (2011). You can find her pedagogical essays in south: a scholarly journal 48.2 (2016) and the MLAs Options for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War (2016). Her writing has also appeared in Callaloo and Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature.

  Courses: Writing Essentials; College Writing; Professional Writing; Anti-racism and Young People Literature; Dealing with !@#$; Writing Women in the Nineteenth Century; Black Resistance in the Nineteenth Century; Love in the Nineteenth Century; the American Novel; Literature of the American Civil War; and Whitman and Dickinson in Context

  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: (517) 629-0463
  

• Angela Zito

  Director of Writing Consulting

  B.A., Albion College
  M.A., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

  Publications: Angela’s scholarship focuses on college writing as a vehicle of learning for both students and instructors. Her work has been published in the peer reviewed journals To Improve the Academy and Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and in edited collections by the WAC Clearinghouse and the IUP Scholarship of Teaching and Learning series. She is currently working on a collaborative research project focusing on the effectiveness and equity of different forms of written feedback on student writing.

  Courses: English 101W: College Writing

  Office: 203 Stockwell
  Email: [email protected]
  

Staff

• Mary Morrow

  Department Coordinator

  Office: Vulgamore 406
  Email: [email protected]
  Phone: 517/629-0232
  

Faculty Emeriti

• Scott Hendrix

  Professor Emeritus

  B.A., Oregon State University; M.F.A., University of Oregon; Ph.D., University of Kansas

  Email: [email protected]
  

• Sarah (Sally) Jordan

  Professor Emeritus

  B.A., Salem College; M.A. & Ph.D., Brandeis

• Judith Lockyer

  Professor Emeritus

  B.A., M.A., University of Kentucky; Ph.D., University of Michigan