Faculty & Staff in English

English Office Information
Department Chair:
Dr. Karen Steigman 
Location:
Towers Hall 228, 1 S. Grove St.
Hours: Monday – Friday (8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.)
Contact: Tess Schwarz, Administrative Assistant
Phone: 614-823-1218
Email: tschwarz@otterbein.edu

Suzanne Ashworth

Suzanne Ashworth

Professor


Suzanne Ashworth is a professor in the Department of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. She has taught early American literature, women’s literature, GLBTQ literatures, gender & sexuality studies, film studies, and the emotional, political, and interpersonal implications of social media. Her research interests include the history of reading, pop culture and media studies. Her published work examines the interplay among literature; histories of the body, desire, sexuality, and gender; and critical theory.…

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Tammy Birk

Tammy Birk

Associate Professor of English & Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program


Tammy Birk is an Associate Professor of English and has been director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program since 2009. She regularly teaches in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies foundational core as well as courses in experimental women’s writing, contemporary graphic narrative, gender and madness, and seminars in topics as varied as Disability Cultures and Human/Animal: Seminar in Critical Animal Studies. Her research interests are centered on critical cosmopolitanism and its radicalizing impact on global learning pedagogy.…

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Phyllis Burns

Associate Professor


Specializations:African American Literatures, Hip Hop Culture, Black Women’s Culture Studies, and Black Radical Theory.

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Patricia Frick

Patricia Frick

Professor


Specializations: Victorian British literatures and culture, especially the novel; Victorian women, gender, and identity; Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson. Scholarship: My recent scholarship has focused on Victorian places and spaces, particularly the use of markets and marketplaces in Dickens' depictions of Victorian London. My essays have appeared in International Journal of Women’s Studies, Philological Quarterly, and VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal. Recent or new topical courses: "The Victorian Novel," "Our Monsters, Ourselves," and "Literary London," “The Strange Case of Edinburgh:…

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Margaret Koehler

Margaret Koehler

Professor


Margaret Koehler grew up in rural upstate New York; earned her B.A. in English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT; and earned her Ph.D at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. She specializes in 18th-century British literature. Her first book, Poetry of Attention in the 18th Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), considers attention as both a thematic preoccupation and a readerly skill cultivated by 18th-century poems. Her current research project explores connections between poetry and medicine in this period. She teaches courses…

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Shannon Lakanen

Shannon Lakanen

Professor


Shannon Lakanen is an essayist and professor in Otterbein's English department and Integrative Studies program. She grew up in a working-class family in northern Florida and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. At Otterbein, she teaches writing courses in personal essay and memoir, and production courses in podcasting and digital literature for the English department. She has developed several different Integrative Studies courses for first-year students focusing on critically and creatively exploring memory and memoir, living with intentionality, and reflecting on…

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Jeremy Llorence

Jeremy Llorence

Assistant Professor


Jeremy Llorence is a Black American playwright from Metro-Detroit. His ten-minute, one act and full-length plays have been seen in venues all over the Midwest, including Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Milwaukee, and Chicago. As a writer, he is interested in exploring topics of masculinity and place through both comedy and drama. As a teacher, he is interested helping students find the voices to tell the stories that matter most to them. And, of course, he loves to talk about his favorite…

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Karen Steigman

Professor, Department Chair


Karen Steigman is a Professor of English, specializing in 20th- and 21st-century American literatures, postcolonial literature and theory, literary theory, and film.  She completed her PhD at the University of Minnesota. Her current research focuses on the post-war fiction and journalism of Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Jamaica Kincaid, and Elizabeth Hardwick. She has published articles on Graham Greene, Joan Didion, and critical university studies in College Literature, a/b: auto/biography studies, and the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. She…

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Tess Schwarz

Tess Schwarz

Administrative Assistant


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Part Time Faculty in English

Candyce Canzoneri

Part-Time Faculty in English


Timothy Christensen

Part-Time Faculty in English