BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Esmeralda Assistant Professor of English
Job Titles:
- Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of First Year Writing Program
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Job Titles:
- Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Job Titles:
- Teaching Assistant ( Instructor of Record )
Carla Barger is an ecolyric poet and essayist who hails from the farmlands of southwest Ohio. She holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the PhD program at SUNY Binghamton. She's currently ABD at the University of Illinois Chicago where she also teaches. Her work has appeared in decomP magazinE, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Light Ekphrastic, MidAmerica and elsewhere. She received the 2019 David Diamond Writing Prize from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Malcolm Sedam Writing Award for Poetry from Miami University, and was nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project Award.
Carla's creative work explores place and landscape, liminality, family dynamics and transgenerational trauma, and our degradation of nature and each other. She also researches and writes about film rhetoric, all things spectral, and Emily Bronte's canonical novel, Wuthering Heights. Carla has a keen interest in environmental and public humanities and uses digital tools to create interdisciplinary public-facing projects that marry lyric poetry and research in various fields. She also sometimes collaborates with visual artists, scholars, and other writers on various types of projects.
Carla is a former editor and academic administrator. To learn more about her career background, visit https://carlabarger.com.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer and Internship Director for Undergraduate Studies
Job Titles:
- Department Head and Professor
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator from Spanish, whose books of poetry include:
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press, 2024)
Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House Press, 2021)
Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh, 2018). Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize
The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016). Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015)
The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011)
His translations include:
The Deer Book by Cecilia Vicuña (Radius Books, 2024)
The Loose Pearl by Paula Ilabaca Nuñez (Coimpress, 2022). Winner of the Pen Award for Poetry in Translation
Valdivia by Galo Ghigliotto (Coimpress, 2017). Winner of the American Literary Translation Association's National Translation Award
The Country of Planks by Raúl Zurita (Action Books, 2015)
Song for his Disappeared Love by Raúl Zurita (Action Books, 2010)
Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenún (Action Books, 2008)
He holds a joint appointment in English and Latin American and Latino Studies; and he is Director of UIC's new Center for Latinx Literature of the Americas (lxla.uic.edu), a cultural and programming hub for hemispheric art and literature. He has also served as a Founding Artistic Director for the Lit and Luz Festival. He teaches courses in Creative Writing, Literature, and Latin American and Latinx Culture.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of English
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor Emerita
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor and Director of the Program for Writers
Job Titles:
- Graduate Program Director
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Job Titles:
- Clinical Assistant Professor & Director of Professional Writing
Job Titles:
- Lecturer and Internship Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies
Marc Baez's research and teaching focuses on First-Year Writing and Stand-up Comedy.
He has published poetry and prose in Blue Sky Review, Near South, and The2ndHand, and an essay on Andy Kaufman appeared in Mildred Pierce. He is currently at work on a chapbook of poems, FISHEYES.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of First Year Writing Program
- Director of the First
Mark Bennett has served as director of the First-Year Writing Program since 2012. He earned his PhD in English from UIC in 2013. His primary research interests are in composition studies and rhetoric, particularly writing program administration, course placement, assessment, and international student education. He teaches the English 555 practicum, "Teaching College English" and oversees curriculum for the first-year writing courses. He regularly presents his research at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference.
Mark R. Brand has taught English since 2013 and served in 2018-2019 as Assistant Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara, one of the largest critical film and media studies departments in the U.S. He specializes in teaching research-writing, first-year writing, and writing-intensive courses concerned with digital literacies. His course topics have included alternative economies, relationships and technology, nostalgia narratives, catastrophe fiction by female science fiction writers, the anxieties of capitalism in zombie narrative, and virtual reality, augmented reality, and atmospheric media. He is a two-time winner of the Digital Literacy Teaching Award from the City Colleges of Chicago (2017/2018) for incorporating video games and new media into first-year writing. He has served as faculty mentor in English 555, and as a faculty judge for the UIC Undergraduate Research Forum. His scholarly work includes both creative and critical writing, and his most recent project is a collaboration with James Drown (UIC) concerning LGBTQ+ themes and empathy in video games and other new media.
Job Titles:
- Office Support Associate - Front Office
Job Titles:
- Clinical Associate Professor
Natasha Barnes' research interests are in anglophone Caribbean and African American literature and culture. Her articles have appeared in Small Axe and Researches In African Literatures. Her first book, Cultural Conundrums: Race, Gender, Nation And The Making Of Caribbean Cultural Politics, attempts to historicize the manner in which "the popular" has come to occupy a central position in the Caribbean postcolonial imaginary. In its discussion of cricket, carnival, dancehall and beauty pageants, this book is interested in the kinds of investments (social, political, ethical) brought to bear upon the popular arts to date. More recently, Barnes has been involved in the Atlanta 2002 exhibition of lynching postcards collected by James Allen's award winning book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography In America and is currently writing about the exhibition process.
Nicholas Brown teaches Modernism, African literature, and critical theory in the English Department and in the Department of African American Studies, with an affiliate position in Art History. His research interests include Marxism, Hegel studies, the history of aesthetics, Lusophone literature, and music studies. His first monograph, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton, 2005), examined the relationship between postcolonial literature and European modernism, and the relationship of each to continuing crises in the global economic system. His new book, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism (Duke, 2019), asserts the resumption of the modernist sequence - not always in the expected places - in the era after postmodernism. Chapters of Autonomy have appeared in nonsite, Postmodern Culture, and the Revista do Instituto dos Estudos Brasileiros. Former President of the Marxist Literary Group, Professor Brown chairs the editorial board of the journal Mediations and is a founding editor of the electronic/print press MCMʹ.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of First - Year Writing Program
Job Titles:
- Professor and Director of English Education
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of English Education