Faculty and Staff

Dr. Kristina Hochwender

Professor and Chair of English and Creative Writing

Room 330, Olmsted Hall
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.

Dr. Robert Baines

(he/him/his)

Associate Professor/English

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

Robert Baines has earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin, and an MA in Digital Humanities from Concordia University Ann Arbor. He specializes in twentieth-century British and Irish literature, and his research focuses on James Joyce. He is the author of Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (Oxford University Press, 2023) and he has also 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 project titled How to Read Finnegans Wake, which will culminate in a book and a video website. He teaches twentieth-century literature, the second and third British literature surveys, modern Irish literature, Shakespeare, Critical Theory, and Digital Literary Studies.

Dr. Mark Cirino

Professor and Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature

Room 325, Olmsted Hall
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.

Ms. Kristina Groves

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

Room 253, University Libraries
812-488-5212
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. Sara Petrosillo

(she/her/hers)

Associate Professor/English

Room 326, Olmsted Hall
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, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies program. She received UE’s Exemplary Teacher Award in 2021.

Ms. Clara Strong

Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing

Room 328, Olmsted Hall
812-488-1125
cs566@evansville.edu

Clara Strong was born in Virginia, and grew up primarily in rural New Hampshire. She received her BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, and received an MFA in Literature and Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2020. She is currently working to finish her first collection of poems, and her work has appeared in Rascal, Cutleaf, and Bloodroot Literary Magazine. She has been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poet twice. Clara lives in Evansville with her husband and their two children.

Academic Programs English and Creative Writing

Staff

Academic Programs
English and Creative Writing