English Faculty & Staff
Department Chair
Jason Goldsmith is a writer, artist, and educator whose work traces the vexed relationship between art and place from the19th-century Picturesque tradition through today’s twinned unravelling of ecological and social networks. He has published numerous scholarly articles on place-based writing, and his creative nonfiction and art have appeared in River Teeth, Humana Obscura, Grasmere, Indiana Waterways:The Art of Conservation, and on the cover of publications from the University of Iowa Press.
His sense of place sharpened by figures such as Jamaica Kincaid, bell hooks, James Baldwin, and Ross Gay, Goldsmith introduces students to a range of diverse voices to interrogate the limits inherent in literary traditions and to cultivate an inclusive and equitable classroom. He teaches courses on art, literature, and the environment, from Romanticism to 19th-Century British Women Writers, from Jane Austen to Video Game Narrative, from Contemporary Writers to Creative Non-Fiction, and from Urban Sketching to Wilderness Literature.
He is a member of the Etheridge Knight advisory group, sits on the education subcommittee of the Task Force for Indigenous Inclusion and Engagement, is faculty advisor for the undergraduate journal Manuscripts and an editor of The Hopper, an environmental literary magazine.
When not teaching, he enjoys hiking, sitting by a river while sketching, and spending time outdoors with his wife and children.
Department Admin
Bianca has her BS in Rehabilitation Studies with minors in Addiction and Behavior Analysis. She worked for years as a Caseworker with adjudicated juveniles before transitioning to the public school system in nearby Washington Township working primarily with special education students. Bianca came to Butler as an Administrative Specialist because of a real passion for helping others and organization.
Bianca believes being student focused should be a priority and has tried to alter the landscape of the English department to make sure students realize we genuinely care about them. She has created an environment in the English office that reflects this by clearing out all the clutter, adding comfy chairs, music, a lending library and free coffee/tea for her majors and minors. Her efforts were even chronicled in the Butler Collegian as one of the unique spaces on campus in the Butler Burrows segment.
Bianca likes to repurpose items and loves to adopt discarded vinyl and melt them into flowers and bowls. Feel free to stop by her office to see some of her work. Additionally, Bianca likes to find the humor in the day-to-day and you will often see silly displays in the English hallway of Jordan Hall. She loves a pun and isn’t afraid to laugh at most dad jokes. Bianca once tore down a, albeit small, tree with one hand while holding a newborn in the other. Sadly, this unexpected super-power rarely comes in handy.
In her spare time Bianca enjoys reading, horror movies, and sunshine. She has one senior cat and three pandemic cats – because that was the perfect time to add a kitten, or three.
Faculty and Staff
Dan Barden is the author of The Next Right Thing (2012, Dial Press) and John Wayne: A Novel (Doubleday, 1997). He teaches all levels of creative writing in fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic writing.
Bryce Berkowitz is a poet and screenwriter based in Indianapolis via Montana, West Virginia, L.A., Chicago, and southern Illinois. He dropped out of college at 19 to book touring hip hop acts until career shifts took him from restaurant worker to Hollywood literary assistant to professor.
Bryce is part of Butler’s Inclusion Advocate program, the program coordinator for the Visiting Writers’ Series, and faculty advisor for the Screenwriting Club. His course topics range from Writing for Sustainability to Arts-Based Social Justice to the TV Writers’ Room, and his professional development interests include working with students who have ADHD, as well as innovative and inclusive assignment design that reflect pragmatic applications to the work world.
He thinks of the classroom as a practice field where students can figure out who they are and what matters to them, where perfection is an illusion that gets in the way of learning, where mistakes are not failures but are instead part of a greater learning process in the journey toward self-discovery.
As a screenwriter, Bryce is the recipient of the Austin Film Festival AMC TV Pilot Award, a ScreenCraft Fellowship finalist, and an NBC TV Writers’ Program finalist. As a poet, his work has appeared twice in Best New Poets, and he’s the author of Bermuda Ferris Wheel, recipient of the 42 Miles | Indiana University Press Poetry Award.
When not teaching, Bryce enjoys watching movies at Kan-Kan, picking up produce at Mad Farmers Collective, attending First Friday art shows, and supporting Indy’s many great lit hubs, including Dear Mom, Tomorrow, Dream Palace, Loudmouth, Golden Hour, and Indy Reads.
Find out more about him at bryceberkowitz.com
Barbara Campbell received her Ph.D. in English and a certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Connecticut in 2010. She also holds certificates in labor organizing and grievance handling through the AFL-CIO. Her areas of expertise include American literature and culture with an emphasis on US proletarian fiction and modernism, rhetorical theory and composition, and disability studies. Writing creative nonfiction and memoir are recent additions to her repertoire. During her time at Butler, she has taught courses in medical humanities and bioethics, disability studies, and American Literature.
Natalie Carter holds a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in American Literature and Culture from George Washington University. Her research and pedagogical interests include trauma theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the dynamics of race, ethnicity, and violence in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century literary and cultural artifacts. Scholarship includes publications on Dorothy Allison, Julia Alvarez, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as works addressing violence against women and race-related trauma in American society. She teaches American Literature and Culture in addition to courses in the Honors and First-Year Seminar Programs, and is Affiliate Faculty in the Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RGSS) program.
Carter is an elected member of the Faculty Senate; a Social Justice and Diversity (SJD) Faculty Mentor; member of the FYS Advisory Committee; and the advisor for several student organizations. She has been named Butler University’s Woman of Distinction (2019), and received the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ Outstanding Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching (2021).
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J. Rocky Colavito (B.A., M.A. St. Bonaventure University; Ph.D. University of Arizona) is trained as a specialist in rhetorical theory and the teaching of writing, and serves as the Department’s Assessment Coordinator. Much of his research considers the interplay between rhetorical theories and popular culture with a specific interest in horror literature and films. His teaching ranges from First-Year Seminar through Texts and Ideas courses on popular culture, a PCA course on writing horror, introductory and specialized courses on professional writing, Speaking Across the Curriculum courses on popular culture subjects, and advanced courses on rhetorical theory, scholarly research and writing, and monster/horror studies. Specific courses include The Culture of Fear, Haunted Spaces and People, The Frankenstein Myth; Vampires and Vampirism, Global Horror Films, Writing about Film, and Zombie Literature and Film. His current research project is a more extended analysis of global Zombie cinema, and he is readying two collections of horror stories (Time to Let the Monsters Out, and This Infernal Process) for publication as e-books. He has presented papers at domestic and international conferences on global zombie cinema, the appropriation of classical literature in The Walking Dead graphic novel series,body horror, Zombie studies/literature for the classroom, and the Sharknado franchise. When not preoccupied with all things horror and popular culture, Dr.Colavito is an avid follower of college sports, a wide and varied reader (he highly recommends Carl Hiaasen, James Ellroy, and Jon Maberry to those interested, and just finished Ezekiel Boone’s The Hatching, the start of series about prehistoric spiders that create a global menace) and is forever seeking to perfect his chili recipe; he reports that the last batch was close to where he wants it.
Professional Bio
Michael Dahlie teaches in Butler University’s English Department and MFA program. He’s the author of two novels with W.W. Norton and his short fiction has been published in journals and magazines including Harper’s, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He’s received the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Award, and he was a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2020.
Teaching Goals
“My role as a creative writing teacher is to help students say the things they want to say, write about the subjects they think are important, and to do it in a way they value. I assign a wide variety of published work, and my courses emphasize the fact that first-rate narrative comes from a diverse set of sources and in a broad range of forms. Most important, I work hard to ensure my classes give students a sense of belonging, camaraderie, and a feeling of common purpose, all while making sure each person has resources and encouragement to develop and refine their own unique literary vision.”
Mindy Dunn (’05) has a B.A. in English from Butler University and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Purdue University, with a specialty in poetry. Mindy is Academic Program Manager for the MFA program and has taught at Butler in the English, First Year Seminar, and Honors departments.
Chris Forhan is the author of four books of poetry: Black Leapt In, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, winner of the Morse Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award; Forgive Us Our Happiness, winner of the Bakeless Prize; and the forthcoming The Ghost Won’t Go. He has also written two books of nonfiction: My Father Before Me: A Memoir and A Mind Full of Music: Essays on Imagination and Popular Song. He has published three chapbooks, Ransack and Dance, x, and Crumbs of Bread, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus, Georgia Review, Field, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry. He has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, has earned a “Discover Great New Writers” selection from Barnes and Noble, and has been a resident at Yaddo and a fellow at Bread Loaf. He was born and raised in Seattle and lives with his wife, the poet Alessandra Lynch, and their two children, Milo and Shy, in Indianapolis, where he teaches at Butler University. More at http://www.chrisforhan.com.
Author of a couple of novels, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson and Do Not Go On. Co-author (with Sarah Layden) of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing. Editor of a few anthologies, My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Reanimated and An Indiana Christmas. Co-editor (with Michael Martone) of the anthology, Winesburg, Indiana. Stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere, including New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Wishes he was a hawk, believes that breakfast burritos are the perfect food.
Adriana Jones coordinates Butler University’s Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series while also providing administrative support to the English Department’s Peer Tutoring Studio and the undergraduate literary magazine, Manuscripts. She earned her bachelor’s degrees from Indiana University in English, Telecommunications, and French. Adriana’s previous employment includes editorial work at Houghton Mifflin Co. (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in Boston; editorial work at magazine subscription marketer American Family Enterprises in Jersey City, NJ; marketing management and event planning at software manufacturer Made2Manage Systems (later Consona Corp.) of Indianapolis; and admissions assistance at Indiana University.
Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris ميرا عساف كفنتاريس is an Assistant Professor of English and Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Butler University, specializing in Premodern Critical Race Studies, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Culture. She earned her Ph.D. in English from The Ohio State University, her M.A. in English from the American University of Beirut, and her B.A. in English Literature and Language from the Lebanese University. Her trans-historical and cross-disciplinary research explores the intersections of race-making with the politics of royal marriage, foreign queens, and border-crossing in the early modern period and in our current historical moment.
‘Assaf Kafantaris is a 2023-2024 Folger Shakespeare Library Long-Term fellow. She is completing her first manuscript, titled Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens, and Constructions of Race in Early Modern England, which is under contract with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press and will be published in 2026.
With Sonja Drimmer and Treva B. Lindsey, she co-edited an open-access special issue of the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online, titled “Race-ing Queens.” Her book chapters have appeared in Race and/as Affect; The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens; and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (with Richard Dutton). A new commissioned article on the mobility of racialized foreign queens is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Travel, Identity, and Race in Early Modern England, edited by Nandini Das. Her current work includes an edited collection (with Urvashi Chakravarty) on early modern queenship, premodern critical race studies, and queer theory. The volume will be published in 2025.
For the Oxford World Series, she is writing the critical introduction to Antony and Cleopatra.
Her public humanities essays have appeared in several online publications, including Shakespeare Globe, The Sundial, The Millions, Overland Journal, The Rambling, The Conversation, Medium-Equity, and The Platform.
‘Assaf Kafantaris currently serves as Early Modern Section Editor for The Sundial. In 2023-2024, she is serving on the Program Committee for the Shakespeare Association of America. Her work has been supported by generous grants and fellowship from The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Shakespeare Association of America, The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), The Renaissance Society of America, The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University; The Muslim Studies Endowment (Butler), and NEH/Frederic M. Ayres Fund (Butler).
At Butler, ‘Assaf Kafantaris teaches courses on Shakespeare, early British literature, critical race studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies.
Past Awards:
2021: ACMRS Short-Term Fellow.
In 2021-22: Folger Shakespeare Library and Society for the Study of Early Women and Gender Margaret Hannay Fellow.
Author, Huck Finn’s America (2014), A Brain Wider Than The Sky (2009), The First Emancipator (2005), The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (1992), and co-editor of Creating Fiction (1994) and Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (1997). Essays and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, American Scholar, Missouri Review, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Winner of Slatten award for Biography (2005), reviews of work and public appearances include Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered and This American Life, Spin, Sports Illustrated, C-Span, Salon, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and other places. Teaches US literature and culture, speculative fiction and creative writing.
Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer, raised in Las Vegas, NV and Hialeah, FL. She is a first-generation college graduate of Northwestern University and a graduate of the MFA program in creative nonfiction writing at the University of Arizona. Her essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Catapult, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022), Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. Lima’s writing has been honored in Best Small Fictions, and noted twice in Best American Essays. Her work has received support from PEN America Emerging Voices, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshops, the VONA/Voices Workshop, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hedgebrook Writers’ Residency.
Teaching Goals:
As the first in my family to graduate from high school, the world opened up to me in college. I prioritize introducing students to diverse voices, particularly writers from underrepresented communities. I believe that bringing in contemporary work from established and emerging writers, from all backgrounds, better reflects the world we live in today—and celebrates it, too. Having once been a new writer myself, I want to guide my students as they find their own voice without being discouraged or feeling isolated from the literary establishment.
Alessandra Lynch, Senior Lecturer/Poet-in-Residence at Butler University, is the author
of four collections of poems, Sails the Wind Left Behind (Alice James Books), It was a
terrible cloud at twilight (LSU Press, winner of the Lena Miles-Wever Todd Award),
Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment (finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize and the LA
Times Poetry Book Prize, winner of the 2017 Balcones Prize in Poetry, one of The New
York Times’ ten Best Poetry Books of 2017) and Pretty Tripwire (Alice James Books).
Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The New England Review, The
Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and other literary journals. In 2015, Alessandra received
a Creative Renewal Fellowship, from the Indianapolis Council for the Arts. She was
also one of the three poets involved in the Stream / Lines: Reconnecting to Our
Waterways project, funded by the National Science Foundation. Alessandra has received
fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, and Yaddo.
Carol Reeves, Rebecca Clifton Reade Professor of English, came to Butler from Texas in 1989 after receiving her Ph.D. from Texas Christian University.
Professor Reeves investigates how language and rhetoric shape our knowledge and understanding of our world, ourselves, and others. In particular, she examines how language both enables and limits the growth of knowledge and consensus surrounding scientific claims, both inside science and in the public. Her publications on the AIDS epidemic, MadCow Disease or Prion Disease, agricultural chemicals, addiction, and climate change all demonstrate the tenuous relation between “reality” and the language we use to represent that reality. Bias, context, and limited data inevitably lead to imperfect definitions, descriptions, labels, and visual representations that can easily come to“stand in” for an unexplored or unknown totality. She also explores the struggles scientists face when they attempt to describe and establish new phenomena, engage in cross-disciplinary debates over the nature of a phenomenon, when they are entrenched in high stakes disagreements over threats to the environment and human health, when they need to communicate risk to the general public, and when they want to change perceptions of stigmatized conditions.
Professor Reeves’s courses combine Literary study with other fields, such as Medicine, Social Science, and History. Topics include Doctor Writers and Addiction. She also teaches courses in Medical Humanities and Rhetoric.
Professor Reeves has also made contributions to several organizations in Indianapolis and Indiana that have provided opportunities for her students. Working with CAFO Watch,Indiana to increase regulatory oversight for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, Reeves has brought many students into the organization as interns who learn about the legislative process and environmental policymaking. She and students worked with the Riley Hospital Ryan White Pediatric Infectious Disease department to plan a campaign to create awareness of pre- and peri-natal HIV transmission and the importanceof testing. She and her students also work with Women for Change Indianapolis and Planned Parenthood to help build opportunities for women to access educational opportunities and healthcare and to combat discrimination.
Chris Speckman is an adjunct instructor at Butler and the district Writing Center Coordinator for Indianapolis Public Schools. He helped develop and currently serves as director of Butler’s the Writing in the Schools program, a Jefferson Award-winning partnership between Butler and IPS. He received his BA from Butler in Journalism and his MFA from Butler in Creative Writing. His poems and stories have appeared in Cimarron Review, Scoundrel Time, Passages North, and PANK, as well as the anthologies It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop and The Indianapolis Anthology.
Dr. Sunny (as Dr. Romack prefers to be known) holds a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing; a M.A. in English-Literature; and a PhD in English-Rhetoric and Composition. Before coming to Butler, she served as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana, where she also established the River Bend National Writing Project Site, and at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, where she directed the university-wide writing center and the Quality Enhancement Plan to Improve Student Writing. Her areas of scholarship include gender studies, horror film, and composition pedagogy. At Butler, Dr. Sunny directs the Writers’ Studio and teaches courses in English and the Core Curriculum. Her application of Deleuzian schizoanalysis to gender in horror film, The Gynesis of Horror: From Monstrous Births to the Birth of the Monster, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic Press.
Dr. Sunny has recently taught courses on Film as Philosophy, Women’s Rights and Resistance, Curiosity and Creativity, Mindfulness in Everyday Life, and Leading Lives that Matter in the Twenty-First Century. She is also a 200-Hour Registered Yoga Teacher and a certified meditation teacher through Duke University’s Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults.
Ania Spyra grew up in a German and Polish speaking home in Upper Silesia in Southern Poland. She received her MA in Literature and Linguistics from the University of Silesia, and her PhD in English from the University of Iowa. Dr. Spyra’s research looks at the influence of migration on the language of literature. She has published articles on feminist contestations of cosmopolitanism, multilingualism and transnationalism, most recently in Studies in the Novel, Contemporary Literature and Comparative Literature. Dr. Spyra teaches a wide range of courses in Transnational and Postcolonial Literature, Translation and Creative Writing. In her commitment to Global Education, she twice directed Butler University’s Global Adventures in Liberal Arts (GALA) as well as taught short term study abroad courses in Cuba, Ireland, Scotland and Australia.
Robert Stapleton is a proud product of California public schools. He earned his MFA from Long Beach State and has taught at Butler since 2003. He teaches in the MFA program as well as courses in creative writing, graphic novels, and the First-Year Seminar. He is the founder and editor of Booth, and his writing has appeared in various publications.
Teaching Goals: I am a first-generation college student from a working-class family. As a student, I learned to love being in the classroom from teachers who invited thinking and writing on non-traditional subjects in innovative ways. A a teacher, I work to frame my courses with contemporary texts that offer a wide spectrum of voices and class representations while centering student expression in discussions and activities. My classes offer many opportunities for students seeking to integrate their own passions into creative exercises and assignments.
Brynnar Swenson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society (2008). He is Associate Professor and the Director of the M.A. in English. He teaches American literature, literary theory, and cultural studies and his research focuses on literature, continental philosophy, and the history of capitalism. He is the editor of Literature and the Encounter with Immanence (Brill / Rodopi, 2017), and his essays have appeared in Cultural Critique, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, New American Notes Online (NANO), Letterature d’America, and The Baltic Journal of Law and Politics.
Hilene Flanzbaum is a Professor of English and the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. She also holds the Allegra Stewart Chair in Modern Literature. Her specialties include Modern and American Poetry, Jewish-American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature and creative writing. See attached cv for details.
Susan Neville is the author of six works of creative nonfiction: Indiana Winter; Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning; Twilight in Arcadia; Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation; Light, and Sailing the Inland Sea. Her collections of short fiction include The Town of Whispering Dolls, winner of the Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction; In the House of Blue Lights, winner of the Richard Sullivan prize; and Invention of Flight, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology and in anthologies including Extreme Fiction (Longman) and The Story Behind the Story (Norton.) Her story "Here" won the 2015 McGinnis-Ritchie Award from the Southwest Review, and recent stories and essays have appeared or will appear in Ploughshares, Image, North American Review, The Collagist, The Missouri Review, Diagram, and other magazines. She teaches creative writing, a seminar in Willa Cather, and courses in Butler’s First Year Seminar program.