Dr. Badia has a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 20th Century American and Ethnic Literature. She is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English.
"Since 2004, I have had the privilege to serve as
the Director of Undergraduate Studies in English, a position
that has allowed me to work very closely with our English majors
through advising and English-related “extracurricular”
activities like the open-mic events we host each semester. Last
year my students and I hosted a Plath Reading, an event that gave us all a chance to share our favorite
Plath works with a wider audience. Of course, I enjoy these
interactions immensely, especially since they help me recreate
the community of common intellectual pursuit that was so
instrumental to my own studies as an undergraduate at Wheeling
Jesuit College. While it isn't always easy to create the feeling
of a small, tight-knit community at a university as large as
Marshall, I think we come pretty close to it in the English
department and in the College of Liberal Arts more broadly.
Among my most recent projects as Director, I have been working
with a group of English majors to start a new student
organization at Marshall designed to provide additional
extracurricular activities and opportunities for students
interested in literary, textual, and cultural studies. "Books
Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present. Ed. with Jennifer Phegley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2005.
Most Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“Ms. Mentor and the Perils of Advice: (Re)Imagining Women’s Authority in the Academy.” Professional Studies Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Fall 2006. 1-15.
“The Bell Jar and Other Prose.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. Ed. Jo Gill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. 124-138.
Forthcoming Articles and Book Chapters
“The Priestess and Her Cult: Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers.” In The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ed. Anita Helle. University of Michigan Press. Forthcoming 2007.
Work in Progress
Who Will Buy This Book? Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and the Mythology of Women Readers
Teaching Interests
Twentieth-Century American Literature; Women’s Writing; Cultural Studies; Book History
English Courses Frequently Taught
Senior Seminar; Sylvia Plath; U.S. Women’s Writing After 1945; American Literature 1860-Present; Ethnic Literature
Favorite Book
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Favorite Non-Plath Books : -)
Straight Man by Richard Russo; Rose by Li-Young Lee; Middlemarch by George Eliot
Currently Reading
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind by Gerald Graff
name: Janet Badia
title: Associate Professor
office: Corbly Hall 427
phone: 304.696.2357
email:
badia@marshall.edu
Christina FranzenDr.
Christina E.
Franzen recently completed her Ph.D. in Classics from the University
of Washington in Seattle and joined the Marshall University faculty
as an assistant professor of Classics.
Her primary research interests lie in the poetics of social and political exclusion and inclusion, especially the creation of the ‘other’. Consequently, she has developed a great interest in spectacle and the deployment of power through spectacle, because the ‘other’ is first and foremost marked by its visual singularity.
Dr. Franzen’s research interests play an active part in the content of her teaching: the enthusiasm that she feels for her current project often influences her current courses. Because her research often deals with universal themes such as the deployment of power, sexuality, ethnicity, politics, and empire, Dr. Franzen’s students are able to relate to ancient literature more easily through their own experiences with current events and recent history and literature.name:
Christina Franzen
title: Assistant Professor
office: Harris Hall 405
phone: 304.696.4642
email:
franzen@marshall.edu
Dr.
Hoey just finished a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the
Center for Ethnography of Everyday Life in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Center for the Study of Working
Families. His longstanding interest in career change, personal
identity and the moral meanings of work informs ongoing research
on what he terms “New Work,” unconventional arrangements of
work, family and community life explored by so-called
free-agents of the post-industrial economy. His dissertation
research in Northwest Lower Michigan explored non-economic or
“life-style” migration where downsized and downshifting
corporate workers relocate as a means of starting over in
geographic places they believe provide necessary refuge to
rethink work, family and personal obligations.
In addition to domestic research, Hoey has worked extensively in the Republic of Indonesia. As a Fulbright Scholar there, he studied the contested nature of constructing personally and culturally meaningful space within the process of creating imagined and intentional community. He worked in far-flung agrarian settlements built from the ground up as part of a government-sponsored migration program. Now in its preliminary stages, Hoey’s most recent project expresses an ongoing fascination with the anthropology of space and place and, in particular, therapeutic ideals attached to particular physical settings – including the case of purposive communities, ranging from the 19th century moral treatment asylum to today’s new urbanist developments. Together, his projects address a number of themes including personhood and place, migration, narrative identity and life-transition, community building, and negotiations between work, family, and self in different social, historical, and environmental contexts.
Hoey’s active research agenda is an integral part of teaching where his goal is to work with students to find personally meaningful ways to apply anthropological knowledge and practice to real world problems. He has published on these and other subjects in the American Ethnologist, the Journal of Anthropological Research, the Journal for Contemporary Ethnography, and Ethnology.
name:
Brian Hoey
title: Associate Professor
office: Smith Hall
phone: 304.696.
email:
hoey@marshall.edu
Dr. Warner has a Ph.D. from Penn State University in Political Science with a minor in Women’s Studies. She is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Political Science.
"I
became interested in non-traditional forms of political communication because of
a roommate I had in graduate school. Interestingly, she had no sense of humor,
or, more accurately, she didn’t seem to understand humor. She wasn’t grumpy or
depressed, but just seemed confused about laughter. In fact, she never laughed
spontaneously, but, instead, watched others to see when it was appropriate to
laugh. Watching her struggle, I began to wonder about laughter, something I
believe is very important, perhaps one of the few things that unite us as human
beings. Around this same time, I had an amazing graduate course with Alphonso
Lingis at Penn State that approached philosophy from a radically different point
of view, emphasizing the importance of bodies and emotions rather than
rationality and logic. That class blew my mind.
Because I am trained as a political theorist, I then began to research and
eventually write about people and groups who use humor and laughter as a
political tactic, such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, The Onion, the
Radical Cheerleaders, and Billionaires for Bush. What, I wondered, is the place
of humor and laughter – and, by extension, satire and parody – in a democracy?
Do humorous messages facilitate or close off democratic communication? Is humor
always appropriate and/or effective? How does it work? The articles listed
below explore various facets of these issues and I’m currently working on a book
manuscript that will examine them in more detail.
Recent Articles
"Political Culture Jamming: The Dissident
Humor of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Popular
Communication 5:1 (Spring 2007): 17-37.
"Rah-Rah-Radical: The Radical Cheerleaders’ Challenge to the Public Sphere,” Politics & Gender 2:3 (Fall 2006): 281-302. (with Margaret Farrar)
"Politics and Entertainment: Civic Catastrophe or Democratic Possibility?" New Political Science 28:3 (September 2006): 431-436.
Works in Progress
“Spectacular Resistance: The Billionaires
for Bush and the Art of Political Culture Jamming.” (with Margaret
Farrar). Currently under review.
“Political Culture Jamming:
Parody, Politics, and Truth in the American Public Sphere.” (book
length manuscript)
Teaching Interests
Political Theory, Political Communication,
Women's Studies, American Government
Political Science Courses Frequently Taught
Modern Political Thought, Political Ideologies, Fundamentals of
Politics, Women and Political Thought, American Political Thought.
Favorite quotation:
“A little vertigo is indispensable to creative thinking.” –
William Connolly.
Favorite Political
Theory/Women’s Studies Books
The Genealogy of Morals by
Friedrich Nietzsche; The Politics of Truth by Michel
Foucault; This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.
Favorite Fun Books
Straight Man by Richard Russo; all Harry Potter; the
Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Currently Reading
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael
Pollan
name: Jamie Warner
title: Associate Professor
office: 710 Smith Hall
phone: 304.696.2761
email:
warnerj@marshall.edu
Her dissertation, Metaphors and Gestures for Abstract Concepts in Academic English Writing, conducted under the Sociocultural theory of language acquisition, examines the significance of metaphors and gestures in language learners’ conceptual development process. She collected data from ESL (English as a second language) composition classes over two semesters to identify how composition instructors employed metaphors and gestures in totality to concretize/materialize abstract conventions of Academic English Writing (EAP). She further established association between metaphor and gesture production of ESL student writers and their instructors to strengthen the argument that metaphor and gesture are important mediational tools to assist the development of abstract concepts.
Her primary research interests lie in Second Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics, Sociocultural theory of language acquisition, Cognitive function of gestures in language acquisition, Pragmatics, Second Language Writing, Language Teaching Methodology, etc.
Dr. Zhao’s research interests not only guide her to explore new teaching methods in her classes, but also enable her to bring new theoretical perspectives to her classes. Dr. Zhao offers and will offer Introduction to Sociolinguistics and TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) Methods, Second Language Acquisition and Research Methods in Applied Linguistics.
name:
Jun Zhao
title: Assistant Professor
office: Corbly Hall 441
phone: 304.696.2420
email:
zhaoj@marshall.edu
Dr. Hagen earned a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Geography with a minor in History. He has taught at Marshall since 2003.
“I
have been interested in understanding other countries, cultures,
and places, as well as the relations between them, for as long
as I can remember. When most of my friends signed up for
Spanish in high school, I decided to do something different and
studied German. As a result, my interests in Germany and Europe
grew. Eventually, I decided to focus most of my subsequent
college coursework on the region’s history, culture, and
politics. Given my interests, I could have pursued my studies
in history, political science, or a number of other
departments. Yet I quickly realized that the spatial aspects of
European societies were the most fascinating for me, so I
decided to become a human geographer.
Since then, I have explored and written on these issues at a variety of scales. I have studied how Europe’s rulers, from Roman emperors and medieval kings to totalitarian regimes and modern democracies, have attempted to reorganize urban areas in support of their particular political and cultural goals. I am currently conducting research on the efforts of the Nazi regime to achieve an ambitious spatial reorganization of Germany through the monumental redevelopment urban areas; the construction of new civic landscapes for educational, athletic, and leisure pursuits; the improvement of transportation, industrial and military infrastructures; and the creation of networked landscapes of fear, slave labor, and genocide. On a broader scale, I am also examining the geopolitical aspects associated with the transformation of European space from a collection of independent states toward a more integrated supranational union. Specifically, I am interested in how this transformation will affect European borders, both in their roles as symbols of national identity and territorial attachment as well as practical matters related to the movement of goods and people.”
Recent Publications:
Hagen, Joshua (2007) ‘Pork’ Spending, Place Names, and Political Stature in West Virginia, Southeastern Geographer 47:2, 341-364.
Hagen, Joshua (2006) Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism: The Jewel of the German Past. Ashgate Publishing: Aldershot, UK & Burlington, VT.
Hagen, Joshua, and Robert Ostergren (2006) Architecture, Spectacle, and Place during the Nuremberg Party Rallies: Projecting a Nazi Vision of Past, Present, and Future, Cultural Geographies 13:1, 1-25.
Works in Progress:
Hagen, Joshua, and Alexander Diener (eds) (forthcoming) Border Lines: The History and Politics of Odd International Boundaries. Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham, MD. (book length manuscript)
Hagen, Joshua, and R. Ostergren, Building Nazi Germany: Place, Space, Architecture and Ideology. (book length manuscript)
Hagen, Joshua (forthcoming) Wie Rothenburg das Kleinoid der deutschen Vergangenheit geworden ist, in Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Eine Reichsstadt und ihre Umland im Wandel der Zeiten, ed. Karl Borchardt. Theiss-Verlag: Stuttgart
Geography Courses:
Introduction to Cultural Geography, Geography of Europe, Geography of European Cities, Geography of Russia, Political Geography, Population Geography
Ironic Quote:
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” Ambrose Bierce
(In 2006, 63% of Americans aged 18-24 could not locate Iraq on a map.)
Currently Reading:
Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City by Borden Painter.
Traces on the Rhodian Shore by Clarence Glacken.
name: Joshua Hagen
title: Associate Professor
office: 207 Harris Hall
phone: 304.696.2505
email:
hagenj@marshall.edu
Kelli PrejeanI have a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisville, and I am currently Director of the Writing Center in the Department of English.
I came to Marshall in 2005, having heard great things about the department from a recent Marshall graduate who went to Louisville for her Master’s degree. In addition to feeling at home at Marshall because of its similarities to my undergraduate institution, the opportunity for growth in developing undergraduate and graduate courses in Rhetoric and Composition sold me immediately. I have developed five new Rhetoric and Composition courses for the English department and an online version of English 302.
My Directorship of the Writing Center was more happenstance, as I was asked to fill the position temporarily my first year so the Director could pursue work in the Honors College. As it turns out, she wished to continue that work, and I was able to step in permanently and am currently in my third year as Director. I have worked in Writing Centers since I was an undergraduate and have wanted to Direct a Writing Center for nearly that long, so I couldn’t be happier in my current position.
In addition to Writing Center theory and practice, I have focused much of my research on language, identity, and narrativity, particularly how 1.5 generation students negotiate identity and use personal writing to establish positions of power within majority cultures. This research has caused me to re-examine popular classroom practices, such as peer review, textual critique, and the use of “I-writing” in American academic discourse and their potential alienating effects on second language students. I have shared my research at numerous conferences and use the knowledge I have gained to help new writing teachers become sensitive to the needs of language minority students.
Outside of work, I like to spend my time learning about and talking about food. I am obsessed with the Food Network (and have cable solely for that reason) and love to ponder the connections between food and culture. I think growing up in south Louisiana’s Cajun country is perhaps the reason I have cultivated interest in both language and food.
As Writing Center Director…
I am responsible for hiring, training, scheduling, and maintaining the staff operations of tutors. My staff is comprised of both graduate teaching assistants in the Department of English who tutor throughout their two-year assistantship and undergraduate students who apply and are selected based on their writing and interpersonal skills. I currently have a staff of seventeen tutors, twelve graduate and five undergraduate tutors.
Since January of this year, we have logged 1239 appointments with students from various majors, academic levels, and language backgrounds. The student need is there, and it is up to the tutors and me to continue to think about ways we can better serve Marshall and CTC students. One of our goals is to reach out to students in courses across the disciplines by offering in-class writing workshops. These workshops can focus on any writing-related task faculty members would like to address with their students.
On a day-to-day basis, I make every effort to ensure the Writing Center runs smoothly by making myself available to address issues that arise with scheduling, with meeting students’ writing needs, and with communicating to students and faculty about what we do in the Writing Center.
For more information, please visit the Writing Center web page
at
http://www.marshall.edu/english/writingcenter/
name: Kelli Prejean
title: Assistant Professor
office: 341 Corbly Hall
phone: 304.696.2711
email:
gradk@marshall.edu
Jess
Morrissette
Jess Morrissette recently completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Georgia and joined the Marshall University faculty as an assistant professor of Political Science, specializing in international relations and comparative politics.
His dissertation ("The Myth of Water Wars: A Hydropolitical Economy of Conflict and Cooperation") challenges the widely-held assumption that severe water scarcity in the developing world is linked with the outbreak of violent interstate conflict. Dr. Morrissette argues that the "water wars" literature errs in its understanding of water as a zero-sum, nonsubstitutable resource that, by its very nature, produces competition and conflict. By reconceptualizing water as a economic resource within the context of an increasingly globalized economy, Dr. Morrissette provides an explanation for how countries have thus far avoided war over scarce water resources, as well as establishing an understanding of how they might achieve meaningful cooperation.In addition to environmental scarcity and violent conflict, Dr. Morrissette's research interests include foreign policy decision-making and contemporary Russian politics. In turn, this research agenda informs and energizes his activities in the classroom, where he teaches classes ranging from introductory courses in comparative and world politics to upper-level courses on global terrorism, international organizations, and the politics of developing nations.
Dr. Morrissette happily lives in Huntington with his wife, Dr. Kourtney Morrissette, and their cocker spaniel, Levi.
name:
Jess Morrissette
title: Assistant Professor
office: Smith Hall 739
phone: 304.696.2760
email: morrissette@marshall.edu
Elaine Baker
Elaine Baker, Professor of Psychology; MU-ADVANCE
Administrative Partner; and Director of the Center for the Advancement of
Teaching and Learning (CATL), will soon be retiring after 36
years at Marshall University. Beginning her academic career at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio, Dr. Baker says that hers was an “accidental life.” As a junior, the Dean of Students came to her and insisted that she pick a major. She was enrolled in a psychology course and decided that that was what she would do. After completing her B.A., Dr. Baker went on to Miami University where she would earn a M.A. in General Psychology and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, specializing in Animal Behavior. Following one year as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wilmington College, Dr. Baker was offered and accepted a position in Marshall’s Psychology Department, where she has dedicated herself to her students and to the improvement of the university at large.
Dr. Baker has not yet mapped out her retirement plans. She will continue to care for her elderly mother, and plans to volunteer for Branches Domestic Violence Center and perhaps the Public Library. Teaching English abroad or joining the Peace Corps in Bulgaria are just a few of the many possible adventures in Dr. Baker’s future.
Although she “accidentally” became a psychologist, Dr. Baker says that if she had her life to live over, she would do it exactly the same.
The faculty and staff of the College of Liberal Arts extends a sincere thanks and much gratitude for nearly four decades of dedication.
name: Elaine Baker
title: Professor
office: Old Main 109
phone: 304.696.5268
email:
bakere@marshall.edu
Professor
Stephen CooperI’m not sure if the Guinness Book lists a record for oldest assistant prof, but I might have been it when I came to Marshall in 2001! I decided to retool myself, midcareer, as an academician—so I spent most of the ‘90s working a full-time day job and slowly grinding through my master’s and doctorate at Rutgers. Yeah, there were times when I wasn’t sure I was going to actually make it all the way, but somehow it happened and I’m very happy that Marshall offered me a job. I’d never been to West Virginia before, but it felt like home right away. For a while I made something of a pest of myself by telling everybody all the ways it was nicer to be here than where I’d been—but eventually I figured out they either already knew that or else didn’t want to hear it from me! So now I just tell people I was a hillbilly mistakenly born in a flatlander’s body, and leave it at that.
My master’s thesis had to do with news media, and my dissertation had to do with computer-mediated communication. I’ve been very fortunate to have some publishing opportunities along those lines. Early after I started at Marshall, a friend at Radford University asked me to join her conference panel on media bias, so I threw together a talk about the high-quality media criticism I’d been noticing on some of the better weblogs. When the panel was over, a guy from the audience came up and said, “You know you’ve got a book there, don’t you?” Duh, no, I didn’t—not until he gave me a clue. It took a while to get it done, but I was fortunate to find a publisher that liked putting out scholarly work with a bit of an iconoclastic edge. The acquisitions folk at Drinko were kind enough to add a copy of Watching the Watchdog to the collection. (I can’t take credit for the great cover art, though; the editor came up with that.)
These days I’m working on another book-length monograph about blogstorms, those periodic controversies that originate in the blogosphere and sometimes spill over into the mainstream press. The forged memos that so embarrassed 60 Minutes, back in 2004, would be an example of a blogstorm. The Koran-flushing story Newsweek ran but then retracted is another. In the 2006 Lebanon War, bloggers correctly identified war photographs which had been radically altered with Photoshop; Reuters issued picture kills (the photojournalism equivalent of a retraction). More recently, The New Republic goofed when it ran what were purported to be first-hand accounts of a soldier’s experiences in Iraq—but neglected to do even rudimentary fact-checking; the distressing tales did not hold up under bloggers’ scrutiny, and TNR reluctantly admitted its lack of diligence. I guess I won’t be lacking for material.
But the real juice for me in this job is the teaching, I think. That’s a chance for me to pass along the gifts my teachers gave me, and I relish it. It’s a funny thing about critical thinking skills or disciplinary knowledge, as opposed to other valuable things which happen to be in material form. You can give away what you know, and then another person has it—but you still have it, yourself. I like that about teaching.
name: Stephen Cooper
title: Associate Professor
office: 246 Smith Hall
phone: 304.696.2733
email:
coopers@marshall.edu