English Department Faculty

Rick Blackwood
Visiting Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 06. Phone: 909-607-2955.

Bio: Rick Blackwood joins Pomona this year from Louisiana State University, where as Associate Professor of English he taught Film and Screenwriting. During his military career, Professor Blackwood served as Chief of Intelligence Requirements for the U.S. Department of Defense, winning the Defense Superior Service Medal in 2005. He has also written and designed projects for the Departments of Defense, and won the Director CIA Intelligence Meritorious Unit Award in 1999. He is the producer of the 1995 PBS documentary American Utopia, and some of his writing credits include Deadlock, Pyramider (co-written with Sam Denno), Dead Before Dawn and many more. He is currently working on a novel, Plaisir d'Amour.

Toni Clark
Associate Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 112. Phone: 909.607.0870.

Education: B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara
Interests: modernist and postmodern fiction, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, environmental and feminist literature.

 
Charmaine Craig
Visiting Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 208. Phone: 909.607.8134.

Courses: Beginning Creative Writing - Fiction; Topics in Contemporary Fiction

 
Nancy Jugan
Academic Department Coordinator
Office: Crookshank 106. Phone: 909.607.2212.



Kevin Dettmar
Professor of English, Department Chair
Office: Crookshank 103. Phone: 909.607.8032.

Bio: Professor Dettmar splits his research and teaching between British & Irish modernism, esp. James Joyce, and contemporary popular music. He is the editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies, editor for Oxford University Press of the book series Modernist Literature & Culture, and general editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor of English and Media Studies
Office: Crookshank 202. Phone: 909.607.1496.

Education: B.A., M.F.A., Louisiana State University; Ph.D., New York University
Interests: contemporary fiction and media studies; also teaches courses in Marxist and media theory and screenwriting.
Current work: The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television.

Kamran Javadizadeh
Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 201. Phone: 909-607-8358.

Bio: Kamran Javadizadeh's research and teaching focuses on twentieth-century American literature and culture. His dissertation project (nearing completion at Yale) is on the dynamic relationship between madness and poetry in postwar America; he is interested in putting a variety of discourses (literary, biographical, theoretical, and so on) into critical conversation.

Aaron Kunin
Assistant Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 206. Phone: 909.607.2209.

Education: Ph.D., Duke University; M.A., Johns Hopkins University; B.A., Brown University
Interests: early modern literature; Renaissance literature; color theory; preservation; food studies; psychology; the novel; creative writing; contemporary literature; film theory; Henry James

 
Paul Mann
Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 105. Phone: 909.607.2232.

Education: B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz; M.A., University of Chicago; Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz
Interests: critical theory and the history of literary criticism; twentieth-century poetry and poetry creative writing courses; organized a major in literature, with an emphasis on theory and comparative literary study, that disbanded in 1994.
Current work: Rimbaud in Africa (poetry); Vigils (poetry); The Theory: Death of the Avant-Garde (critical theory); Masocriticism (critical theory).

 
Sarah Raff
Assistant Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 104. Phone: 909.607.2837.

Education: B.A., Ph.D., Yale University
Interests: theories of reading, narrative, and the novel; Jane Austen; literary instruction and the development of the maxim; 18th- and 19th-century literary culture; and psychoanalytic theory.

 
Claudia Rankine
Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 208. Phone: 909.607.8134

Education: Williams College; Columbia University
Claudia Rankine has written four collections of poetry and edited two anthologies. She has taught at Barnard College, Iowa Writer's Workshop, and University of Houston.

 
Arden Reed
Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 102. Phone: 909.607.2217.

Education: B.A., Wesleyan University; M.A., Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University
Interests: Romantic literature, literature and the visual arts, especially in the early modernist period; has recently begun teaching one course a year in Art History.
Current work: Manet, Flaubert, and Modernism: Blurring Genre Boundaries; Constance DeJong: Metal; Regularly reviews for Art in America and The Magazine.

 
Dara Regaignon
Assistant Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 205. Phone: 909.607.8032.

Education: B.A., Amherst College; M.A. and Ph.D., Brandeis University

 
Valorie Thomas
Associate Professor of English and Black Studies
Office: Crookshank 209. Phone: 909.607.9242.

Education: B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.F.A., University of California, Los Angeles; M.A., Ph.D., Univeristy of California, Berkeley
Interests: African- American literature (eighteenth-century through contemporary); also teaches courses in Native American literature and screenwriting.

 
Kyla Tompkins
Assistant Professor of English and Gender & Women's Studies
Office: Crookshank 204. Phone: 909.607.2817.

Education: B.A., York University; M.A., University of Toronto; M.A. and Ph.D., Stanford University
Interests: Cultural theory; American studies, food studies, nineteenth-century U.S. literature, critical feminist theory

 
Catherine Winiarski
Visiting Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 07. Phone: 909.607.2214.

Courses: Medieval and Renaissance Literature; Shakespeare: The Tragedies and Romances

 
Meg Worley
Assistant Professor of English
Office: Crookshank 203. Phone: 909.607.8124.

Education: B.A., Emory University; Ph.D., Stanford University
Interests: Old & Middle English literature; medieval European literature, culture, and linguistics; translation theory; Bible translation; postcolonial theory; children's literature; digital culture; graphic novels; music videos.

 
David Foster Wallace
Roy Edward Disney '51 Professor of Creative Writing
and Professor of English


February 21, 1962 - September 12, 2008

In Memoriam