Faculty and Staff

Dr. Mark Cirino

Professor and Department Chair / Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature

Olmsted Hall, Room 325
812-488-2233
mc171@evansville.edu

Mark Cirino received his PhD at the Graduate Center-CUNY. Of his eight books about American literature as writer or editor, his most recent is One True Sentence: Writers & Readers on Hemingway’s Art (2022), with Michael Von Cannon. He serves as the General Editor for Kent State University Press's “Reading Hemingway” series, for which he wrote the volume on Across the River and into the Trees (2016) and co-edited Reading Winner Take Nothing (2021) with former UE student Susan Vandagriff. Dr. Cirino is the host of the popular Hemingway Society-sponsored podcast, One True Podcast.

Dr. Robert Baines

Associate Professor/English

Olmsted Hall, Room 327
812-488-2976
rb211@evansville.edu

Robert Baines earned his BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and his M.Phil. in Anglo-Irish Literature and his PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin. He specializes in twentieth-century British and Irish literature, and his research focuses on James Joyce. He has published articles and reviews in such journals as the Dublin James Joyce Journal, European Joyce Studies, the Irish Literary Supplement, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies. He is currently working on a monograph on the role of philosophy in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. He teaches twentieth-century literature, the second and third British literature surveys, Shakespeare, and Critical Theory.

Ms. Kristina Groves

Assistant Professor/English
Writing Center Director
Director of First Year Seminar

University Libraries, Room 253
kg76@evansville.edu

Kristina Groves earned her MA in English from the University of Louisville. Her composition and rhetoric studies focused on identity disruptions with an emphasis on gender, identity, and otherness in film. She has taught ELL courses for the Intensive English Center, as well as composition courses for international students, public speaking, and writing intensive first year seminar courses.

Dr. Kristina Hochwender

Associate Professor/English

Olmsted Hall, Room 330
812-488-2898
kh125@evansville.edu

Kristina L. Hochwender received her BA from Cornell College, and her MA and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2007, she has taught literature at the University of Evansville. Alongside her interest in literature for children, her research centers on the Victorian clerical novel, and particularly the ways in which the clergyman--in the words of Samuel Butler, "a kind of human Sunday"--mediates national and religious identities and crises in novels that captured the Victorian imagination throughout the latter 19^th century. She has published work in the Journal of Victorian Literature Online, The Victorian Web, and Religion and Literature. Dr Hochwender teaches courses in Children's and Young Adult literature, as well as courses in the British Novel, the novels of Jane Austen, Eighteenth Century literature, and Victorian literature. She received the Dean's Teaching Award in 2017.

Mrs. Katie Mullins

Associate Professor/Creative Writing

Olmsted Hall, Room 416C
812-488-2768
kd60@evansville.edu

Katie Darby Mullins has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net twice. She is the associate editor of metrical poetry journal Measure, and she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like The Rumpus, Hawaii Pacific Review, BOAAT Press, Harpur Palate, Prime Number, Big Lucks, Pithead Chapel, and she was a semifinalist in the Ropewalk Press Fiction Chapbook competition and in the Casey Shay Press poetry chapbook competition.

Dr. Lisa Nikolidakis

Associate Professor/Creative Writing

Olmsted Hall, Room 417A
812-488-2977
ln43@evansville.edu

Lisa Nikolidakis is a graduate of Rutgers University (BA and MA) and Florida State University (PhD). Her essay “Family Traditions,” which first appeared in Southern Indiana Review, was selected by Jonathan Franzen for inclusion in Best American Essays 2016. Her work has also appeared in Los Angeles Review, Brevity, Gulf Coast online, Passages North, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Nimrod, The Greensboro Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her work has been runner-up or honorable mention for numerous prizes, including the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Gulf Coast Prize, the Lamar York Prize for Fiction, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Prose, the Calvino Prize, the Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize, and she has won both A Room Of Her Own's Orlando Prize and The Briar Cliff Review's Nonfiction Prize. In 2017, she was given the Exemplary Teacher Award by the University of Evansville.

Dr. Sara Petrosillo

Assistant Professor/English

Olmsted Hall, Room 326
812-488-2010
sp220@evansville.edu

Sara Petrosillo received her BA in English and Italian Literature from Colby College, and her PhD in English from the University of California, Davis. Her scholarship focuses on medieval literature and feminism and she has published articles on medieval poetry and drama in the Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, Medieval Feminist Forum, and in a 2018 essay collection, Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication (Palgrave-Macmillan). Her book about the cultural influence of falconry on medieval reading practices, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture, will be released in 2023. She teaches first year seminars, the first half of the British literature survey, world classics, renaissance and 17^th century writers, the Romantics, and medieval literature. She also chairs and teaches the introductory class to the Gender and Women’s Studies program. She received UE’s Exemplary Teacher Award in 2021.

Staff

Mrs. Michelle Lehman

Administrative Assistant, Department of English and Creative Writing and Department of History, Politics, and Social Change

Olmsted Hall, Room OH 322
812-488-2963
ml281@evansville.edu

Office Phone
812-488-2963

Office Email
ML281@evansville.edu

Office Location
Room 329, Olmsted Administration Hall

University of Evansville

Academic Programs
English and Creative Writing