Faculty and Staff

Danit Brown
Chair and Associate Professor
B.A., Oberlin College
M.F.A., Indiana University
Publications: Ask for a Convertible, a collection of linked short stories. Fiction in StoryQuarterly, Glimmer Train, and Story, among others. She is at work on a novel.
Courses: Introductory Creative Writing, Intermediate Fiction Workshop, Advanced Fiction Workshop, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, Screenwriting Fundamentals, College Writing.
Email: danitbrown@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0438

Lauren Brown
Assistant Professor
B.A. SUNY Geneseo
M.A., Ph.D., Binghamton University
Publications: Lauren’s research interests include American literature of the 20th & 21st centuries, multi-ethnic literature of the U.S., nation in literature, postcolonial theory and literature, immigration and diaspora, women writers, and gender studies. Recent research has been published in The Cormac McCarthy Journal and The New Americanist. She is currently at work on two articles: one on Toni Morrison’s novel Home, and another exploring Latinx immigration and experience in contemporary U.S. literature.
Courses: College Writing, Introduction to Literary Study, Literature Matters, American Literature II.
Email: lmbrown@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0334

Nels Christensen
Associate Professor
B.A., California State University
M.A. & Ph.D. Michigan State University
Research and Writing: Ecocriticism, Ecopedagogy, and Environmental Creative Non-Fiction.
Publications: Learning Where the Weather Is Real: Why Teaching in Bad Weather Is Good. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Facing the Weather in James Galvin’s The Meadow and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) 21:1 (Winter 2014), Leaving a Trace Wake: Great Lakes Thought and Culture, The Art of Stillness Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Way You Do It Sports Afield.
Courses: Composition, The Idea of Nature and the Nature of Ideas, Writing in Place, Terrorists and Treehuggers, Black Environmentalism.
Email: nchristensen@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0349

Ian Reed Kelley
Director of Writing Assessment
BA: Boston University
MA: University of New Mexico
PhD: University of Louisville
Publications: Dr. Ian Kelley’s areas of research interest include lifelong literacy development, fan studies, and writing across the community. Their book, Loving Fanfiction: Exploring the Role of Emotion in Online Fandoms was published by Routledge in 2021. Additionally, their work has been published in journals such as Computers and Writing and Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as The Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in the Digital Humanities and in The Sage Research Methods video series. They are currently working on a project to provide more equitable and ethical education to marginalized students.
Courses: English 101W: College Writing
Email: ikelley@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0828

Ian F. MacInnes
Howard L. McGregor Professor of Humanities
Website: http://aulis.org/
B.A., Swarthmore College
M.A. & Ph.D., University of Virginia
Publications: Ian’s scholarship focuses on representations of animals and the environment in Renaissance literature, particularly in Shakespeare. He has published essays on topics such as horse breeding and geohumoralism in Henry V (2011), on invertebrate bodies in Hamlet (2012), and on animal networks in early modern England (20020). His long-running website and now iPhone app, Ian’s English Calendar, calculates dates for scholars of English history and Literature.
Courses: British Literature I, Greek & Roman Literature, Shakespeare, Age of Elizabeth, Voices of Liberty: Milton and His Age, Redeeming Eve: Early Modern Women’s Writing, Renaissance Ecology, Composition.
Email: imacinnes@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0259

Helena Mesa
Associate Professor
B.A., Indiana University
M.F.A. University of Maryland
Ph.D. University of Houston
Publications: A collection of poems, Horse Dance Underwater. She is also co-editor of Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Pleiades, and Barrow Street. She is currently at work on a new collection of poems.
Courses: Introductory Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Writing (Poetry), Creative Writing Workshop (Poetry), Visual Poetry, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, Latina/o Literature, Composition.
Email: hmesa@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0340

Ashley Miller
Associate Professor
B.A., Vassar College
M.A. & Ph.D., Indiana University
Areas of Interest: 18th- and 19th-century British literature, ecocriticism and the history of science, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of ghost stories.
Publications: Poetry, Media, and the Material Body (Cambridge, 2018). Other recent research includes a chapter in Nineteenth-Century Energies (Routledge, 2016) and essays in Victorian Studies (2019), Victorian Literature and Culture (2018), Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2014), and Studies in Romanticism (2011).
Courses: Writing Essentials, College Writing, Professional Writing, Introduction to Literary Study, The Prehistory of Sherlock, British Literature II, Victorian Sexualities, The Novel and the New, The British Romantics, British Fiction after 1850, Victorian Giants.
Email: ammiller@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0549

Krista Quesenberry
Assistant Professor
B.A., Ball State University
M.A. and dual-title Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University
Research Specialization: Krista’s teaching and research covers a range of fields — professional writing, American literature, feminist and LGBTQ theories, and narrative medicine. Her recent work has appeared in Life Writing, The Hemingway Review, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and American Literary Scholarship. Krista is currently working on editorial and archival projects about American literary figures (Ernest Hemingway, Kay Boyle with James Laughlin, and Margaret Anderson), as well as on a long-term project about the experience of diagnosis as represented in graphic memoirs about illnesses and disabilities.
Courses: Intro to Literature; College Writing; Pleiad Practicum sequence; Professional Writing; Science, Technical, and Medical Writing; Writing in the Non-Profit Sector. Faculty adviser, Albion Pleiad.
Email: kquesenberry@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0310

Jess Roberts
Professor
B.A., Dartmouth College
M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan
Jess has an essay forthcoming in the MLA’s Strategies and Perspectives on Social Justice Work called “Earned Trust and Albion’s Big Read” that is inspired by her work with folks in the city of Albion to build a program that is changing the world by changing young people’s relationship to reading. She created Albion’s Big Read with a group of outstanding people in 2015 and directs it with the help of Nels Christensen. For more information about that program, please visit our website at www.albionbigread.org and follow us on Instagram @albionbigread.
In addition, Jess has published essays on Sarah Piatt in ESQ (2018), A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2017), and The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (2011). You can find her pedagogical essays in south: a scholarly journal 48.2 (2016) and the MLAs Options for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War (2016). Her writing has also appeared in Callaloo and Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature.
Courses: Writing Essentials; College Writing; Professional Writing; Literature Matters; American Literature I & II; Children’s Literature; Racism, Anti-racism, and Children’s Literature; Literature of the American Civil War; Whitman and Dickinson in Context; and Love in the Nineteenth Century
Email: jroberts@albion.edu
Phone: (517) 629-0463

Angela Zito
Director of Writing Consulting
B.A., Albion College
M.A., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Publications: Angela’s scholarship focuses on college writing as a vehicle of learning for both students and instructors. Her work has been published in the peer reviewed journals To Improve the Academy and Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and in edited collections by the WAC Clearinghouse and the IUP Scholarship of Teaching and Learning series. She is currently working on a collaborative research project focusing on the effectiveness and equity of different forms of written feedback on student writing.
Courses: English 101W: College Writing
Office: 204 Stockwell
Email: azito@albion.edu
Phone: 517-629-0339

Staff

Mary Morrow
Department Coordinator
Office: Vulgamore 406
Email: mmorrow@albion.edu
Phone: 517/629-0232

Faculty Emeriti

Scott Hendrix
Professor Emeritus
B.A., Oregon State University; M.F.A., University of Oregon; Ph.D., University of Kansas
Email: shendrix@albion.edu

Sarah (Sally) Jordan
Professor Emeritus
B.A., Salem College; M.A. & Ph.D., Brandeis

Judith Lockyer
Professor Emeritus
B.A., M.A., University of Kentucky; Ph.D., University of Michigan