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B.A., Wheaton College; M.A., University of Virginia; Ph.D., University of Virginia

B.A., Miami University; M.A., Ohio State University; Ph.D., Ohio State University

B.A., University of Wisconsin; M.F.A., Washington University

B.A., Western Washington University; M.F.A., University of California, San Diego

Murray Farish
Visiting Assistant Professor
314-246-4294
Extended Faculty Bio

B.A., Webster University; M.F.A., University of Houston

B.A., University of California, Los Angeles; M.A., University of California, Santa Barbara; Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara

B.A., California State University, Fresno; M.F.A., University of Iowa

B.A., Connecticut College; M.A., Middlebury College; M.Litt., Middlebury College at Oxford University, England; Ph.D., Tufts University

Karla Armbruster teaches courses in literature and professional writing and directs the professional writing minor and certificate programs. She is currently chair of the department and also chairs the Environmental Studies Committee. In 2007, she served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.

Before she came to Webster, Karla taught American studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder and American studies-based composition at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of English at the Ohio State University in 1996, where she completed a dissertation on environmental advocacy in 20th- century American literature and culture. She also took graduate coursework in scientific and technical writing at Miami University in Ohio and has worked as a writer and editor for an environmental science textbook.

Karla's primary research areas are ecocriticism and American environmental literature, and she is the author of a number of articles and book chapters on writers including Terry Tempest Williams, Ursula Le Guin, Rick Bass, Josephine Johnson, and Toni Morrison. With Kathleen R. Wallace, she co-edited Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2002). Most recently, she has become very interested in animal studies and is working on a book on literary and popular representations of dogs. This project combines personal narrative, literary and cultural analysis, and scientific information on canine behavior and genetics in order to examine the ways we position dogs on the border between culture and nature. In the process, it explores what our representations of dogs can tell us about our relationship with the natural world as well as what they mean for the lives of dogs themselves.

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David Clewell has published seven collections of poems--most recently, The Low End of Higher Things--and two booklength poems (The Conspiracy Quartet and Jack Ruby's America). His work has appeared regularly in a wide variety of magazines, including Harper's, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Ontario Review, New Letters, and Yankee. His poetry is represented in five-dozen anthologies. He's been the recipient of the Pollak Poetry Prize (for Now We're Getting Somewhere) and the Lavan Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His Blessings in Disguise was a winner in the National Poetry Series.

Clewell teaches poetry workshops (introductory and advanced), 19th & 20th C. literature, and topics-in-poetry seminars. He directs the Creative Writing program and coordinates the attendant Visiting Writer Series, which he started in 1986.

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Michael Erickson's produced plays include Water Music, The Harmattan, Suburban Angst & Anarchy, Dead Souls, and The Watchers. His work has been produced at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Dance Theatre Workshop, and Via Theatre in New York; A Director's Theatre in Los Angeles; the Empty Space Theatre, Pioneer Square Theatre, and the Floating Theatre in Seattle; Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis; the Cleveland Public Theatre in Cleveland; the Imaginary Theatre Co. (St. Louis Repertory Theatre) in St. Louis; and several other theatres in the U.S. and Canada. His collaboration with Malashock Dance & Co. toured the country and was produced on PBS as part of the Dance in America series. His work has won several awards, including a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting, California Arts Council Award, and the Mobil Playwriting Competition International Prize (Royal Exchange Theatre, England). He has also published short plays and essays in publications such as Theater Journal and Arts & Letters. Most recently he completed a dance/theatre collaboration, Josephine: Martinique to Malmaison, with ANNONY Arts in St. Louis.

Erickson teaches classes in playwriting and advanced playwriting as well as a number of topics classes in dramatic literature. He is faculty advisor to Surfacing, the annual student new play festival. He is also faculty advisor to the campus improv club.

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Murray Farish

Murray Farish’s stories have been published in such journals as Epoch, The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Phoebe, Low Rent, The Roanoke Review. He earned his B.A. from Webster University in 1998, and received his M.F.A. in 2003 from the University of Houston, where he was the winner of the Donald Barthelme Fellowship.

Murray teaches introductory and advanced fiction writing, American Literature, Perspectives, Introduction to Literature, and Topics courses, and is the faculty advisor to The Green Fuse, Webster’s student literary magazine.

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Sheila Hwang earned a B.A. with honors from UCLA, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.   In 2003, she joined Webster's English department, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, eighteenth-century world literature, and contemporary multiethnic literature of the United States.   Recent courses include Major British Writers II, History of the British Novel, The Global Eighteenth Century, Love and Intrigue, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Literary Feasts, California Dreamin', and Contemporary Multiethnic Literature of the United States. She has also served as either the Chair or Co-Chair of Multicultural Studies since 2005.  

Sheila has published on the impact of identity on choices in pedagogy as well as on the links between advertising and literature during the consumer revolution.   She has presented her scholarly work at venues such as the Modern Language Association and the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.   In addition, because Sheila strongly believes in the public humanities, she has welcomed the opportunity to give presentations to the general public in conjunction with the Dickens Universe, the Jane Austen Society of North America, and the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

In her current book-in-progress, The Watering Place in Jane Austen's Novels: Space, Language, Consumerism , Sheila layers theories of space, theories of language, and theories of consumer culture in order to re-think the characterization of Austen as a stationary or spatially-limited writer; explores how Austen draws on the watering place's rich and diverse associations; considers the texts' insights into location's effects on language and subjectivity; and shows how watering places in particular present a setting in which characters can change and conventions can be negotiated. Sheila explains that exploring Austen's works in terms of space, language, and consumer society not only broadens our understanding of Austen's engagement with space, but also provides a model for understanding how subjectivity is shaped in dialogue with commercial spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.

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Steve Lattimore earned his B.A. in English from California State University, Fresno and his M.F.A. from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University. His short story collection, Circumnavigation, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, was a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first book of fiction by an American writer. Circumnavigation received a California Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller. His fiction has been published in American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review, and many other magazines in the United States and abroad. He is presently at work finishing a novel and beginning another. Writers whose work he frequently teaches include Anton Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Liza Wieland, Jayne Anne Phillips, Flannery O'Connor, Bernard Malamud, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, George Saunders and Lynda Barry.

Recent representative Topics classes include: Comedy in Fiction; Forms of Fiction; and Writing from The Outside In, which examines fiction originating in subject matter beyond the quotidian worlds of family and relationships: in science, music, history, even literature itself.

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Anne McIlhaney teaches courses in Shakespeare and other early modern British literature, as well as courses in classical literature and Latin American literature in translation. She edits The Mercury, a publication of the best scholarly student essays written in the English Department each year. She is also currently a member of the Women's Studies Committee and faculty advisor of the Students for Gender Equality Club.

In 1998, Anne received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where she wrote her dissertation on the literature and images of angling (fishing) in 16th- and 17th-century British literature. She has published articles on the cultural implications of angling during these centuries, and is currently working on an anthology of writings by and about early modern women anglers. She is also interested in gender in Shakespeare's plays, and has presented lectures on this topic at the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival and the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

Before she came to Webster, Anne learned Spanish and taught English literature at a university in Bolivia, South America. Since then, she has continued to pursue her interest in the literature of Latin America by teaching Latin American authors in translation, attending workshops and conferences in Latin American countries, and, most recently, undertaking research on a Cuban adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

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Meg Sempreora is delighted to be teaching courses that reflect her varied interests--in United States literature, drama, women's literature, the 19th C. British novel, and film. While her dissertation focused on US women's writing at the turn into the 20th C., an earlier M.Litt. degree through Middlebury College at Oxford examined the shift to modernism in the British novel, and course work for an M.A. at Bread Loaf School of English (Middlebury) focused on the study and performance of dramatic literature. Courses Meg frequently teaches include US literature, modern drama, women's literature, and literature into film.

Meg has published an essay on the Nick Adams stories in The Hemingway Review, on Kate Chopin in Louisiana Literature, and on Alice Dunbar-Nelson in Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form, a collection of essays. Working under a grant for teaching film in high schools, she has recorded a video lecture on an early film version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Outside of the Webster classroom, Meg has pursued her love of teaching by bringing Shakespeare to inmates of Missouri prisons for the last four years, and US women writers to students at The Universidad de Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina, where she was a visiting professor in the summer of 2005 and has been invited to return in 2009. Subjects of her current research include regional US women writers, the translation of literature into film, and the effects upon incarcerated men and women of studying and performing the plays of Shakespeare.

In 2007, Meg won the William T. Kemper and the Emerson Awards for Excellence in Teaching.

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