Faculty and Staff

Jeremy Lopez, professor and chair, comes to the Department of English from the University of Toronto, where he taught from 2005 to 2022. He received his PhD from Cornell University, and from 2002 to 2005 he was Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the College of William & Mary. Professor Lopez is the author of numerous books and essays on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the general editor of the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020). Since 2018, he has served as the Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, the flagship journal in the field of Shakespeare studies.

Jeffrey Gonzalez, assistant professor, received his PhD from Penn State. His research interests include 20th and 21st century American fiction, postmodern narrative and theory, and globalization theory. He has published articles in Mosaic and Critique, and his current project considers the ways contemporary novels deal with neoliberal politics and economics. His courses at Montclair State include American Fiction after 1890, Postwar American Fiction, Black Writers in the United States, and Critical Approaches to English.

Fawzia Afzal-Khan, professor, received a PhD in English Literature from Tufts University. Her research interests include: Third World Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Feminist Theory, Transnational Feminisms, and Cultural and Performance Studies. She teaches courses including: Feminist Theory, Images of Muslim Women, Transnational Feminisms, Women Prose Writers, and World Literature. She is recognized as a University Distinguished Scholar, received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for The Nightingales of Pakistan (2011), and was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Pakistan for AY 2015-16. She is author of five books, her latest a memoir entitled Lahore With Love; Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani-Style (2010).

Lee Behlman, associate professor, received a PhD from the University of Michigan. His research interests include: Victorian poetry and prose; 19-century classicism; motherhood and gender studies; and the Bible as literature. He teaches courses including: Pursuits of English and Victorian Poetry. He recently completed the book Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates with Anne Longmuir (Routledge, 2016).

Steffi Dippold, associate professor, received her PhD from Stanford and taught at Kansas State University before coming to Montclair. Steffi’s teaching and research interests include pre-1900 American literatures, alternative archives, Native American and Indigenous studies, book history, material and visual culture, and early modern global and local cultures of everyday life. Steffi loves working with students in local museums and repositories to explore how nontextual literacies give voice to ordinary and overlooked people. Steffi has published on materials ranging from print ornaments, the cultural logic of actual and textual keys, to early Native American bookbinding and the first North American Indigenous grammar.

Monika Elbert, professor, received a PhD from Rutgers University. Her research interests include: 19th-century women writers; American Romanticism, 19th-century American children’s literature; and American Gothic. She teaches courses including: Early American Literature, Literature of American Resistance, and American Romanticism. Elbert is a University Distinguished Scholar and former editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Recent books include: Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (U of Alabama P, 2017, co-edited and co-intro); Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Routledge, 2017, co-edited and co-intro); Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Routledge, 2014, co-edited and co-intro); and Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2013, co-ed. and co-intro). Her latest book, Hawthorne in Context, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Grover Furr, professor, received his PhD from Princeton University. His research interests include: Medieval English literature and more recently, the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period, roughly 1930 – 1953. He teaches courses including: Medieval English Literature; Chaucer; King Arthur and Arthurian Literature in Medieval England; The English Language; World Literature (non-Western literature); Social Protest Literature in the U.S.; English Literature I: Beginnings to 1660; History of Journalism in America; and Great Books and Ideas, I. Furr has also published many books and articles on the history of the Soviet Union during Stalin period.

David Galef, professor of English and the creative writing program director, received his PhD from Columbia University. His research interests include modern British literature, fantasy and science fiction, and creative writing, all subjects he teaches. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook (Columbia University, 2016), the short story collection My Date with Neanderthal Woman and the poetry collection Kanji Poems. His essays on Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Nabokov, Auden and others have appeared in places ranging from Twentieth Century Literature to The Columbia History of the British Novel. Recent publications include essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Writer’s Chronicle.

Willard Gingerich, Professor of English, joined Montclair State University in 2008 and served as the University Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs from 2008 until 2021. Prior to assuming his position at Montclair State, Gingerich served as Provost, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Before that, he served first as Dean of the Graduate School and then as Vice Provost for Graduate Programs and Research at St. John’s University.

A former Fulbright Scholar in American Literature, Gingerich received a BA in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His graduate studies took him to Mexico where he studied indigenous and colonial literary cultures at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia. His doctorate in English was conferred by the University of Connecticut where he was both an NDEA Fellow and an NDFL Fellow. Read more.

Jonathan Greenberg, professor, received his PhD in English and American Literature from Princeton University and his BA from Harvard University. His research interests include: Modernism; 20th Century British/Anglophone; Comedy and Satire; Darwin and Literature; and Literary Theory. He teaches courses including: Modern British Fiction, James Joyce, The Comic and Satiric Tradition, Pursuits of English, World Literature, English Literature II (1660 to present), and The Art of Poetry. He is the author of Modernism, Satire, and the Novel published by Cambridge University Press (2011) and The Cambridge Introduction to Satire (2019), and the editor (with Nathan Waddell) of Brave New World: Contexts and Legacies (Palgrave, 2016). His most recent book, Mobituaries, co-written with Mo Rocca of CBS Sunday Morning, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2019.

Melinda Knight, professor and director of the Center for Writing Excellence, received her PhD in American Studies from New York University. Her research interests include American Studies and writing within and across the disciplines, including the intersections of class, gender, identity, and race in American literature, manifestations of aestheticism and decadence, and representations of the American West–particularly in the period from the 1890s to WW II. She is working on several grant-funded projects that engage community literacy, and as director of the Center for Writing Excellence, she works to promote of culture of writing to students, faculty, staff, alumni and members of the community. She is also the editor of BPCQ.

Johnny Lorenz, professor, received a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include Brazilian literature, poetry writing and translation. He teaches courses including World Literature, Poetry Writing, and Brazilian Literature. His scholarly articles have appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Luso-Brazilian Review and Brasil/Brazil. His translation of Clarice Lispector’s A BREATH OF LIFE was a finalist for Best Translated Book Award.

Alexios Lykidis has taught film studies at Montclair State University since 2009. His research interests include global cinema, contemporary capitalism, multiculturalism and political filmmaking traditions. His work has been published in journals such as Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, the Journal of Greek Media and Culture and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies and anthologies such as A Companion to Michael Haneke, The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film and Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe. He is the author of Art Cinema and Neoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Patricia Matthew, associate professor, received a PhD in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include: British Romanticism (poetry and fiction), the history of the novel, abolitionist British literature, and women’s writing. She teaches courses in British Romanticism, the history of the novel, and British abolitionist literature. She is the co-editor of a special issue for Romantic Pedagogy Commons and has published essays and reviews in Women’s Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Keats-Shelley Journal. She is also the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). She is currently writing a monograph about sugar, gender, and British abolitionist literature.

Jeffrey Alan Miller, associate professor, received his DPhil in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford. He specializes in the study of early modern literature, history, and theology, with a particular focus on the works of John Milton and his contemporaries. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Milton, early modern literature, literary theory, and critical writing. His published essays have appeared in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Milton Studies, Milton Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other venues, and he is currently completing a monograph entitled “Signifying Shadows: Early Modern Typology, Milton, and the Writer’s Mind at Work.” In 2015, Miller also announced his discovery of what is now the earliest known draft of the King James Bible, and he is in the process of preparing a book-length edition and study of the manuscript. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2019.

Cleyvis Natera is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Neruda on the Park published in 2022 by Ballantine Books at Penguin Random House. Neruda on the Park was awarded a Silver Medal by the International Latino Book Awards for Best First Book of Fiction in 2023. Prior to publication, Natera’s debut was a most anticipated book of the year by TIME, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Entertainment Weekly and Goodreads, among other publications. Upon publication, Neruda on the Park was a May 2022 New York Times Editor’s Choice. Natera studied literature and creative writing at Skidmore College and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from New York University.

Laura Nicosia, professor, received a PhD in American Literature from New York University. Her research and teaching interests include: Modern/Contemporary American fiction and poetry, young adult and children’s literatures, social justice, science fiction, speculative fiction, and collaborative social media. She is the author of Educators Online: Preparing Today’s Educators for Tomorrow’s Digital Literacies by Peter Lang Publishing (2013) and is co-editor of the collection: Through a Distorted Lens: Media as Curricula and Pedagogy in the 21st Century by Sense Publishing (2017). Her upcoming project, Dear Secretary De Vos: What We Want You To Know About Education has an anticipated summer 2018 release (Brill/Sense Publishers). She is also working on two monograph projects—one on Gloria Naylor, the second on the The Posthuman Chimera and Monstrous Other in Young Adult Literature and Popular Culture.

Wendy C. Nielsen, Ph.D. teaches European Romanticism, Science Fiction, Enlightenment literature, and comparative literature at Montclair State University. She earned her B.A. in German Literature from UC San Diego and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis. Her research explores recurring figures in Western cultural history, as seen in her books Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (2012) and Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890 (2022). Wendy has published essays on topics like automata, Romantic theater, and Rousseau. Her current research focuses on race, healing, and women’s illness narratives. She also teaches in the Honors Program and Medical Humanities. Read more.

Michael Robbins, associate professor, received a PhD from University of Chicago. Research interests include modern and contemporary poetry, popular music, critical theory, and political economy. He teaches courses in creative writing such as Introduction to Poetry Writing and Intermediate Poetry Workshop. He is the author of the essay collection Equipment for Living: Poetry and Pop Music (Simon & Schuster, 2017) and the poetry collections Alien vs. Predator (2012) and The Second Sex (2014) both published by Penguin. His poems, critical essays, and reviews have been included in publications such as: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Harper’s, London Review of Books, and BOOKFORUM.

Adam Rzepka, associate professor, received his PhD from the University of Chicago. His research interests include early modern literature and performance, the history of science and cognition, and critical theory. He teaches courses on Shakespeare, early modern poetics, text and image, and literary theory. He is the author of a number of articles and book chapters, including “‘How easy is a bush supposed a bear?’: Differentiating Imaginative Production in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Shakespeare Quarterly and “‘How like a god’: Shakespeare and Early Modern Apprehension,” forthcoming in Shakespeare Studies.

Art Simon, professor, holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University. His research interests include the History of American film and Jewish-American cultural history. He teaches a wide range of courses in the Film Studies Program. Simon is the co-editor of American Film History: Selected Readings, Volumes I and II (Wiley, 2016) and The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, 4 Volumes (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He is also the author of Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film (Temple UP, 2nd printing, 2013 with a new preface); “Make Way for Youth: The American Jewish Committee and the Social Problem Film,” American Jewish History, Vol. 97, N. 4, 2013. His commentary for the DVD of Kid Galahad, in collaboration with Robert Sklar, is part of Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection.

Keith Slocum, professor, received a PhD from University of Pennsylvania. His current research interests include the revision process between genres in selected works by Arthur Miller. He teaches courses including English Lit I: Beginning to 1660 and Art of Fiction. He is the author of the books The English Workshop (2003), Business Spelling and Word Power (2001 with Rosemarie McCauley), and Business English (1993) all published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill.