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FacultyPaul Eisenstein, Ph.D. Suzanne Ashworth, Ph.D. Tammy Birk Phyllis Lynne Burns, Ph.D. Norman Chaney, Ph.D. Beth Daugherty, Ph.D. Patti Frick, Ph.D. - Thomas Carlyle
Carlyle's commentary on learning in the nineteenth century captures for me the essence of education. While I hope students will benefit from time spent in my classroom, their real learning - what defines them - is often measured by what happens after graduation and if they choose to keep on learning. Learning should be a life-long commitment - personal, inspired, addictive, and fun. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Rochester, and I completed my Master's and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Toronto. Studying in Canada fueled my passion for nineteenth-century British literature, particularly the novels of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. My interests as a teacher and a scholar center on the Victorian novel, Victorian concepts of the female and "the other," and the Victorians' struggles with technology. I am also intrigued by monsters throughout literary history and will offer a course, "Our Monsters: Our Selves," through the Integrative Studies Program next year. I regularly teach a variety of other courses in the Integrative Studies sequence, as well as the English Department's introductory course on critical theory and genre. I look forward (someday) to designing a travel course on literary London. After all, as Samuel Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life"! Towers Hall 332, (614) 823-1352. Email: pfrick@otterbein.edu. Jim Gorman, Ph.D. Terry Hermsen, Ph.D. Abhijat Joshi, MFA Margaret Koehler, Ph.D. Shannon Lakanen, Ph.D. Alison Prindle, Ph.D. Jeremy Smith, Ph.D. Karen Steigman, Ph.D. Emeriti Professors Jim Bailey, Ph.D. Lonnell Johnson, Ph.D. Wayne Rittenhouse, Ph.D. Nancy Woodson, Ph.D.
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Department Chair
(in Lacan and Contemporary Film, The Other Press, 2004), and an essay on John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany (in Literature, Interpretation, and Theory, 2006). Currently, I am pursuing a project that deals with deliberately unrealistic (what are sometimes called "magical realist") Holocaust narratives.
"We shall not cease from exploration/and the object of all our exploring/is to arrive at the beginning/and know the place for the first time." That's T. S. Eliot. And for me, that passage expresses both the experience and the impact of teaching. I like the idea that each course is a journey - "an exploration" - for me and for my students. And I like the idea that education fuels both discovery and rediscovery. I've been teaching for 10 years, and I'm definitely in it for the "ah-ha!" moments - for the click, the charge that comes when those discoveries are made. More practically, I should note that I earned my master's and Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University, and I did my undergraduate work at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I teach early American literature, women's literature, gay and lesbian literature, and Integrative Studies courses. My research interests include: fan letters, literary celebrity, and the history of reading.
I believe that teaching is all about asking the important and messy questions. When a class is at its best, answers may seem beside the point or less interesting than the questions themselves. Here at Otterbein, I regularly teach in the Integrative Studies program (both 270 and 300), and I tend to see these courses as meaningful philosophical experiences rather than assigned core requirements. I also teach Women Writers and, in early 2005, I will launch a reading course in the Graphic Novel and an SYE course in Global Citizenship. My interests include critical theory generally, psychoanalysis, feminist work of all sorts, modern poetry, global studies (especially when it can make possible a fuller reading of literary and cultural texts), and pedagogical exploration.
I was born in Brazil, Indiana, a south-central Indiana mining and farming community. My academic journey from Brazil High School to Otterbein College has led me to The University of Indianapolis, Indiana University, Yale University, and The University of Chicago. I have also studied at Cambridge University, and been a scholar in residence at The University of Edinburgh, and The Australian National University. I understand students who struggle to find their major. After a two-year stint in the Army Medical Corps, I went to college thinking I would major in pre-medicine. Then came music, German, philosophy, religion, and English. When I left college I had probably three majors, not one of which has defined my career, but all of which have informed it. If one theme or word has dominated my academic interests, it is "nature," as thinkers and writers from the ancient Greeks to the post-Romantics have invested that word with meaning over the centuries. I believe Nature, or ecology, is the most socially important theme that faces world culture in the twenty-first century. 
Some of my earliest memories include lying on the floor and "reading" a newspaper (picking out the few words I knew), writing a fairy tale for my parents (imagining a sky that rained money), and "teaching" my sisters on the front porch (pointing to letters on a small chalkboard). So is it any wonder I've always loved reading, writing, and learning/teaching? That I've been in a classroom as a student or as a teacher most of my life? At Otterbein, I regularly teach Words and Forms: An Introduction to the Literary Imagination (English 155) and Modern English Literature (English 330). Virginia Woolf is my scholarly passion; I've edited a book about teaching To the Lighthouse and am writing about her essays as education. (I also read mysteries for fun.) 
"What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us.
The greatest university is a collection of books."
As an Italian-American, I have over one hundred words for spaghetti (pasta, noodle, linguini and so on). As a creative writer, I have written many, many stories about spaghetti, noodles and other forms of food. My second chapbook of stories, Will Work for Food, won the Illinois Writers fiction award in 1993. Subsequent titles in this series include Will Cry For Food, Will Kick and Scream For Food and Will Go On Hunger Strikes for Food. I also write poetry and my first collection includes such poems as "Thirteen Ways of Eating a Blackbird." For a recent sabbatical I traveled to Ireland to explore my Irish ancestry and to write about the Irish culture's one thousand words for its sustaining substance, drink. 
I started writing poetry in high school . . . on the sly. There were no "official" creative writing classes then. We fell in love with words by reading. Eliot and Plath. Robert Frost. W. S. Merwin. We'd go months reading one poet alone . . . imitating. Maybe that's where it all begins. We hear a chorus and we want to join in. After college (at Wittenberg, a place very similar to Otterbein, that I also loved), I knew I wanted to write . . . took a job in a bookstore . . . then fell backwards, in a way, into teaching poetry through the Ohio Arts Council's Poetry in the Schools program. I've probably visited a couple hundred classrooms around Ohio. I find that poetry is always "beginning fresh with language," as if we've never spoken it before. As if a word were a crystal worth carrying for a long while in your hand. I've since gotten an MFA in poetry from Goddard College, taken a good number of years to teach composition and literature at OSU-Marion, and recently gone on to get my Ph.D. in Art Education from Ohio State. I love tracing out the connections between images (paintings, photographs, even advertisements) and words: as if the two were always speaking to each other, which I've come to firmly believe. My two chapbooks are: 36 Spokes: The Bicycle Poems and Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre. I've also co-edited a selection of writings by Ohio teachers, poets and students, Teaching Writing from a Writer's Point of View, and a collection of contemporary poems about food, O Taste and See. A dance-script of mine, Meet Me At the Gene Pool, was performed by Total Theater of Columbus in 1998. I love bicycle, tennis, long walks, going to plays and movies, and singing around the fire.
I taught English literature and wrote feature films in India before coming to the U.S. It worked out nicely, as my professor colleagues used to think that there must be some merit to my writing - whatever my credentials as a teacher, and my writer friends didn't write me off completely thinking I must be a good teacher - whatever the merit of my writing! I got my MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas of Austin. Apart from teaching and writing, my major passions are Shakespeare and cricket. By cricket I mean a game popular in India, not the insect. A game that I shall willingly teach anyone who teaches me a little bit about American football.
One reason I like to spend my time reading, writing, and talking about eighteenth-century British poetry is the utter variety of subjects it explores (sofas, city showers, locks of hair, pet hares, liberty, the passions, and sheep-shearing, just to name a few). Gwendolyn Brooks, a twentieth-century American poet, said that poetry is "life distilled." I like that description because it emphasizes that poetry is relevant and real ("life") and that poetry shapes parts of life into articulate form ("distilled"). I did my undergraduate work at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and my graduate work at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Here at Otterbein I will teach courses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature, poetry, and linguistics, as well as IS courses. When I think about the best parts of this job, I think one has to be getting to wake up in the morning, drink coffee, and read books. That's up there with the things I most like to do! Outside of work I also like animals, jogging, cooking, and politics.
One of the most frequent questions I'm asked after telling someone I teach creative nonfiction writing is, "What's that?" The shortest answer I have (which hardly ever seems short enough) is: writing that interrogates our notions of truth, how they are formed, and what it means to call an expression of a sentiment, a depiction of a person or relationship, true. I also advise Quiz and Quill and teach Integrative Studies classes and poetry writing. I can identify with writing students who have trouble choosing a genre: I focused on fiction and poetry writing for my BA at University of Tampa, completed an MA in poetry at Florida State, and I was halfway through a Ph.D. in poetry at Ohio University before realizing I'd been writing nonfiction all along. My most frequent research endeavors include: Montaignian tradition of the personal essay, 20th century American literature, women writers, memoir, travel writing, and literary journalism.
One of my most memorable experiences was spending my junior year in high school in London. I had loved the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before I went, loved them more because of seeing places like Hampton Court Palace and Stratford-upon-Avon. My undergraduate work, in history and literature, continued this passion and let me study the medieval and renaissance periods in an interdisciplinary way. My recent work is on women's diaries of the 17th century, and on the narratives of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Recently a sabbatical took me to the new Globe Theater, to manuscripts in the British Library and to castles in Cumberland. In graduate school, I also discovered that my deepest love is teaching. At Otterbein I teach Shakespeare and early modern British literature, as well as linguistics, technical writing, and the wide range of literature in our Integrative Studies program. 
I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University in 1985, and have now taught in the English Department at Otterbein since 1988. My interests include: the interrelationships among religion, philosophy, and literature; the interrelationships among philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, and literary criticism; and African literature in its historical and cultural context. I regularly teach courses in literary criticism, African literature, and African culture. I have published articles and/or presented papers in all my major areas of interest. Currently I am pursuing two different projects; one involving the relationship of phenomenology to aesthetics; and the other dealing with the history of missions in Sierra Leone. Otterbein College has a long standing connection with Sierra Leone, and the research I have done both in our archives and through travel to that country has shed interesting light on the connections among religion, literature, and history in Africa. 
If critical theory teaches us that each text theorizes its own practice of reading, the practice of reading teaches each of us to become literary theorists in our own right. In my teaching, I aim to help students become close readers of literature while considering the larger geopolitical and institutional significance of literary study itself. In other words, we trace the relation between literature and politics. My research focuses on twentieth century American literature and cultural studies (especially cold war and contemporary fiction), film studies, narrative theory and the political thriller, and postcolonial and global literatures. I teach courses in American literature, world literature, and the core methods course on the "literary imagination." I also teach composition and literature for Otterbein's Integrative Studies program, and I am currently designing two new IS courses, one on "Disaster Narratives," and another on the "American frontier." I received my B.A. and M.A. from SUNY-Buffalo, and my Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
My years at Otterbein allowed me to teach courses in my special interests such as 19th century American literature and the novel as well as to develop courses in areas personally significant to me, such as playwriting and gay and lesbian literature. Having left the ranks of full-time teaching, I have more time for my own writing and for working with local theatre companies and for relaxing activities such as traveling and gardening. 
With a pharmacy degree from Purdue, I discovered the joys of teaching in the Army. I worked as information analyst, public relations director, and studied for the ministry, before earning a Master's degree in English from Emporia State University and eventually completing the Ph.D. at Indiana University. I came to Otterbein in 1994 and have taught African-American literature, Harlem Renaissance, Black Studies and Integrative Studies. In 2004 I took a leave of absence to establish Ambassador Press, LLC, a book publishing firm, which is now my fulltime enterprise (
1952- . Lucky draw: All-star parents, grandparents, Honorable Mention sisters...ironed with mom in basement, rode tricycle around ping pong table to Sousa's marches...sat on Friday night bench rooting for dad's high school teams...five dollar dog, YMCA work and basketball, Columbus' west side, Knicks...led little league in homeruns, cut from all sports in high school...caught fish hook in nose casting indoors. Lucky choice: Wilmington College B.A. English, freedom, yellow pad poetry, girlfriend, library, campus center sit-in...surprised at passion beyond sports...friends, Bill Guthrie, tennis team, basketball. Lucky move: New York University M.A. English Education, grad courses stepping over homeless...life beyond Kansas without Dorothy...worked with students in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island. Lucky ending and beginning: Ohio State Ph.D. 1988, Otterbein since 1982. Theory: Soviet psychology, Paulo Freire, psycholinguistics. Practice: students stacked at door, five o'clock mornings, papers papers everywhere...colleagues, meetings, yellow pad poetry...basketball gym bag shoes in backseat, Sousa on CD in car now. 
Dr. Nancy Woodson recently retired from the English Department in June of 2004. Dr. Woodson taught many courses in the Department including three courses in Integrative Studies and three SYE courses. Dr. Woodson's interest in nonfiction writing was the focus of her teaching and she taught all three nonfiction courses. She developed the course, "Writing Life Stories," and has published several of her own memoirs. She continues to work in the nonfiction and memoir genres and will teach SYE courses in the future. Dr. Woodson was the Chairperson of the college Honors Program and served on many college committees. Her current scholarship includes a study of New England mill towns, a collection of memoirs about World War II, and her first attempt at a mystery novel, "Amaryllis." 