Academic Credentials

B.S., Secondary Education, Duquesne University
B.A., English, Duquesne University
M.A., Literature, Duquesne University
Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, Duquesne University
Ph.D. Candidate, Literature, Duquesne University

Biography

Michelle B. Gaffey began her professional career as a high school and middle school English teacher, though she has been teaching composition and literature at the college level for nearly two decades.  Since 2015, she has enjoyed working with Marymount students in introductory and advanced writing classes.

Before joining Marymount’s faculty, she received several grants to support her development of service-learning projects (most notably, her “Community Listening Project”), an undergraduate critical reading course (Afrofuturist Coming-of-Age Stories), and an interdisciplinary action-learning course (Women Versus Sweatshops).  She previously worked as a reading and writing specialist at an all-women’s college in Northeast D.C., and she also served as the assistant director of Duquesne University’s Writing Center in Pittsburgh, PA.

Michelle was a first-generation college student, originally from northern PA.  Her working-class roots are at the heart of her scholarship, pedagogy, and activism.  She currently lives in northern Virginia with her husband, two daughters, and two cats.

Other Information

Teaching Area

• Composition

Research Interests

• Working Class Studies
• Twentieth Century American Literature
• Documentary Poetry and Poetics
• Science Fiction
• Composition

Publications

Author. “Sweatshops and Resistance in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries.” Fragments from the Fire: The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of March 25, 1911.  30^th Anniversary ed., Skye’s the Limit P, 2016, pp. 73-82.

Editor. Fragments from the Fire: The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of March 25, 1911, by Chris Llewellyn. 30^th Anniversary ed., Skye’s the Limit P, 2016.

Author. Rev. of When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, by Cynthia Hogue and Rebecca Ross. The Collagist: Online Literature from Dzanc Books, 20, March 2011, n. pag.

Author. “‘a storm is blowing from Paradise’: Historical Change and Salvation in Lola Ridge’s ‘The Ghetto.’” Florida English, 7, 2009, pp. 51-67.

Editor. “Iraq Heats Up Again, April 2004,” by Helen Gerhardt. The New People [Pittsburgh, PA], March 2007, n. pag.

Spotlights
K. Patricia Cross Future Leader in Higher Education Award Recipient.  Association of American Colleges and Universities: Spring 2011

Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching Recipient.  Center for Teaching Excellence, Duquesne University: Spring 2010

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Academic Credentials

B.A., Boston College
M.A., Pennsylvania State University
Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University

Biography

Dr. Michelle Zaleski is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Marymount University,
where she teaches courses in writing and literature that engage students with the
making of English in and around DC. Her research, which has appeared in
College English, accounts for the ways in which difference has affected the
rhetorical past and present. Her current project traces the translingual practices
of Jesuit rhetorical education in India during the early modern period.

Other Information

Teaching Area

• Rhetoric and Composition
• History of English
• Women Writers

Research Interests

• History of Rhetoric
• Cultural Rhetorics
• Multilingual Writing

Publications

“Beyond Words: Missionary Grammars and the Construction of Language in Tamil Country,” in Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, R.P. Hsia, and Robert A. Maryks, Brill (August 2018), 159–176.

“The Word Made Secular: Religious Rhetoric and the New University at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” College English (November 2017), 159–182.

“Collaborative Power: Graduate Students Creating and Implementing Faculty Development Workshops on Multilingual Writing Pedagogy,” co-authored with Dorothy Worden, Brooke R. Schreiber, Lindsey Kurtz, and Eunjeong Lee in Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education (Spring 2015), 28–45.
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Academic Credentials

B.A., Oberlin College
M.A., Ph.D., University of North Carolina

Biography

Other Information

Teaching Area

• 19th-century British literature
• African-American literature
• Popular culture
•  

Research Interests

• 19th-century British novels
• Early African-American fiction
• British colonialism
• History of popular culture
• Digital humanities
• Popular romance fiction

Dr. Sarah Ficke’s research and teaching interests span a wide range of subjects, including nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry; literature of the British empire; African-American literature; and popular genres, particularly romance. Her research has appeared in Studies in the Novel, Victorian Poetry, and The CEA Critic, and in The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Her current research is focused on popular historical romance fiction, and the intersection of nineteenth century and futuristic worlds in steampunk fiction. Dr. Ficke serves as one of the faculty advisors for Marymount’s undergraduate non-fiction journal, Magnificat.

Publications

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Academic Credentials

B.A., Louisiana State University
M.A., University of Missouri
Ph.D. and additional study, University of Kentucky

Biography

Other Information

Teaching Area

• First-year and advanced writing
• American literature
• Composition and literary theory
• Women writers
• Literary nonfiction

Research Interests

• 20th-century American literature
• Composition and gender
• Autobiography
• Literary journalism
• Multimedia writing

Dr. Bess Fox joined Marymount in 2007. Her work in gendered writing encompasses both student writers and professional woman writers such as literary journalists Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag. She specializes in literary life writing, studying the ways writers adhere to and challenge gendered models of authorship. She is currently working on a project tracing the effects of multimedia writing on concepts of authorship, particularly disembodied definitions of writing.

Along with Dr. Tonya Howe, Dr. Fox co-edits Magnificat, a Journal of Undergraduate Nonfiction. Magnificat is an annual publication of outstanding student work chosen and arranged by a student editorial board. Dr. Fox is also the faculty sponsor of Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society.

Publications

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Academic Credentials

B.A., Lewis and Clark College
M.A., Western Kentucky University
Ph.D., University of New Mexico
Other study/credentials: Women’s Studies Certificate, Western Kentucky University

Biography

Other Information

Teaching Area

• American Literature
• Women and Gender Studies
• Composition and Community Learning

Research Interests

• Mexican American/Chicano/a Literature
• Motherwork and Literary Activism

Dr. Leigh Johnson joined the Marymount University faculty in 2011. She was an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow for her dissertation “Domestic Violence and Empire: Legacies of Conquest in Mexican American Writing.” She enjoys the myriad opportunities the DC area provides for students to enhance their writing and thinking. 

 

Publications

“Unsexing I am Joaquín through Chicana Feminist Revisions.” A Sense of Regard: Essays on Race and Poetry. Editor Laura McCullough. U of Georgia P, (February 2015). 72-78. 
 
“Lorna Dee Cervantes.” Oxford Bibliographies. (Summer 2014). Web. 
 
“Covert Wars in the Bedroom and Nation: Motherwork, Transnationalism, and Domestic Violence in Black Widow’s Wardrobe and Mother Tongue.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 11.2 (2013): 149-71. 
 
“Helena Maria Viramontes.” Oxford Bibliographies. (Summer 2013). Web. 
 
“Teaching Stephen Crane’s ‘The Five White Mice’ Using Tableaux.” ALN: The American Literary Naturalism Newsletter 7.1-2 (Fall 2012): 8-11. 
 
“Foreign Incursions: Stephen Crane and Katherine Anne Porter’s Tourist Violence in Mexico.” Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures and Societies 2.1&2. (Spring 2011). 37-55. 
 
“‘Listen to Me! I Have Good Reason to Say This’: California Testimonios as Early Chicana Resistance.” 49th Parallel 24 (Spring 2010): 1-22. 
 
Co-Author with Richard Johnson-Sheenan, Charles Paine, and Mark Pepper. A Guide to Teaching: Instructors’ Manual for Writing Today. (New York: Longman, 2010) 
 
“Conceiving the Body: Sandra Cisneros and Ruth L. Ozeki’s Representations of Women’s Reproduction in Transnational Spaces.” Transformations: A Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 19.2 (2009): 32-41. 
 
Review of Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems. by Jimmy Santiago Baca (New York: Grove Press, 2014). Transmotion 1.1 (2015). 118-119. 
 
“Dreaming in the Factories” Blog Entry on teaching “The Factory Girl” for the Just Teach One Project. https://www.common-place.org/justteachone/?page_id=253 (2014) 
 
Review of The Writings of Eusebio Chacón translated and edited by A. Gabriel Meléndez and Francisco A. Lomelí. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012). New Mexico Historical Review 88.4 (Fall 2013). 469-70. 
 
Review of Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia 1730-1865 by A. Glenn Crothers (University of Florida Press, 2012). Southern Studies 19.2 (2012). 
 
Review of A Life Crossing Borders: Memoirs of a Mexican American Confederate by Santiago Tafolla (Arte Publico Press, 2009). Western American Literature (Winter 2012). 456-57. 
 
Review of Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World by Mary Beth Norton. (Cornell UP, 2011). Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 (March 2012). 
 
“The Black Legend.” Celebrating Latino Folklore. Ed. Maria Herrera-Sobek. Vol. 1-3. Santa Barbara: ABC_CLIO, 2012. 117-118. 
“Fabiola Cabeza de Baca.” Celebrating Latino Folklore. 183-184. 
“Comadre/ Compadre.” Celebrating Latino Folklore. 344-345. 
“La Llorona.” Celebrating Latino Folklore. 656-665. 
“Joaquin Murrieta.” Celebrating Latino Folklore. 813-815. 
“The Nuyorican Poets Café.” Celebrating Latino Folklore. 856-858.
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Academic Credentials

B.A., Rice University
M.F.A., Georgia State University
Ph.D., University of Cincinnati

Biography

Dr. Holly Karapetkova’s poetry, prose, and translations have appeared widely in print and online in places like The Southern Review, The Nashville Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her first book, Words We Might One Day Say (2010), won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Prize for Poetry. Her second book, Towline (2016), won the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize and was published by Cloudbank Books. She is also the author of more than 20 books and graphic stories for children and young adults.
 
Dr. Karapetkova serves as faculty literary advisor for Blueink, Marymount’s award-winning magazine of literature and art. Read more on her website, https://www.karapetkova.com.
 

Other Information

Teaching Area

• Creative Writing
• Modern and Contemporary Literature
• Composition Practice and Theory

Research Interests

• Creative Writing Theory and Practice
• Modern and Contemporary Poetry
• Literary Translation

 

Publications

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Academic Credentials

B.A., Smith College
M.A./M.A., English/Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University
Ph.D., Indiana University
Other study: Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)

Biography

Other Information

Teaching Area

• Medieval literature and cultures
• Middle English literature
• Women writers of the Middle Ages
• English, French, and Italian dream-visions and tales
• Travel writing

Research Interests

• Medieval urban legends
• Medievalism
• John Gower and medieval language ideologies
• Heritage construction and the invention of traditions
• History of the book

Combining her interests in medieval studies and folklore, and in English, French, and Italian literature, Dr. Katie Peebles teaches undergraduate and graduate courses from an interdisciplinary perspective.

She has taught in the DISCOVER program and encourages student research at all levels. Her own research areas include medieval urban legends (think of poisoned apples), heritage construction (flying monks), and medieval British multilingualism (with manuscript illustration of squirrels’ property rights).

Dr. Peebles coordinates foreign language courses and advises the French and Spanish minors.

Publications

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