Assistant Dean for Academic Success

 I am the Assistant Dean for Academic Success and an Associate Professor in the English Department at Elmhurst University in the western suburbs of Chicago. I have been teaching college writing since 1991 and have been at Elmhurst University since 2001. I oversee the Learning Center and Access & Disability Services and focus on student retention and support. I grew up in a working-class family as a second-generation American. I was not only a first-generation college student but was the first of my siblings to graduate from high school in a traditional way despite having an older brother and sister (my brother joined the military and finished and my sister passed her GED when she turned 40). As a child, reading and writing stories, as well as learning and going to school, gave me access to a bigger world and possibilities beyond my family and neighborhood.

I have taught courses in writing, rhetorical theory, film studies, creative nonfiction and LGBTQ studies. My research interests include writing program administration, feminist theory, pedagogy and student support. My work has appeared in WPA: Writing Program Administration Journal, Pedagogy, Lore: An e-Journal for Teachers of Writing, and the collection Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education & the Internet. More recently, I collaborated with my English Department colleague Nick Behm and Peg Cook, faculty librarian, to publish a book chapter (“Are They Really Using What I’m Teaching? Applying Dynamic Criteria Mapping to Cultivate Consensus on Information Literacy”) and have a forthcoming piece in Pedagogy (“Writing Faculty and Librarians Collaborate: Mapping Successful Writing, Reading, and Information Literacy Practices for Students in a “Post-Truth” Era). While I started my undergraduate career as an accounting major on a full scholarship at DePaul University, I switched my major to English after tutoring in their Writing Center and completed my MA in English at Indiana University in Bloomington and my PhD in Language, Literacy and Rhetoric from the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am, in fact, still paying my student loans (even from undergrad). It’s been worth it.  

What energizes me in my teaching is the element of surprise—what students bring to the classroom, what they will say, and what they will create. My field is rhetoric, which is both about analyzing texts and producing them, so I love seeing how students develop as thinkers and writers and the ways they can use those abilities to make meaningful personal and social change.

I think people who don’t know me well might be surprised that I am both a product of the 80’s (completed both high school and college during that decade) and am happy to stay there in terms of pop culture. I’m talking Atari 2600 Space Invaders, MTV, “college radio,” The Cure, Depeche Mode, the Metro, Wax Trax! Records, “big hair, don’t care” (mine was magenta), etc. To this day, I will see U2 in Chicago. Every. Single. Tour. 

I live with two rescued cats in a house that should probably be condemned (in 2020 alone, it was hit by an EF1 tornado and a couple months prior had two gas leaks over a period of several months). I’m currently obsessed (I’m Greek and Italian—we don't do “like”) with Queer Eye (especially JVN), The Mandalorian (and the Disney gallery docs), dashes, chickpeas, cauliflower, protest signs, and memes and mashups from Schitt’s Creek.