Instructor
M.A., Writing, Northern Michigan University
caanders@nmu.edu

Teaching Specialties

-  Learning Skills Development
-  Reading Improvement
-  Technical Writing

Carol Anderson first joined the NMU English Department in 1999 as a Teaching Assistant, following nearly two decades of service in the financial and medical fields.  She has taught remedial and developmental courses, as well as all levels of composition.  Her areas of interest include pop culture, politics and the classics.  She has published poetry and is currently drafting a series of grammar exercises using humor as a teaching technique.  Carol holds a B.A. in Secondary Education, with majors in both English and Business Education, and an M.A. in Writing from Northern Michigan University.  She is a past Excellence in Education grant recipient.       

Carol Ann Bays

Professor
Ph.D., Comparative Literature
Wayne State University
cbays@nmu.edu

Teaching Specialties

- World Literature: Non-Western, Japanese
- 19th and 20th Century American  Literature
- Modernism
- Critical Thinking

Dr. Carol Ann Bays (Candy) began teaching at NMU in 1976. Having spent several years as an undergraduate in Tokyo, Japan, she then majored in Japanese Linguistics at the University of Michigan (BA), English at North Texas State University (MA), and Comparative Literature at Wayne State University (PhD). Her interests have always been global: looking for connections among cultures, in particular between East and West. In recent years her research has focused on pedagogy; she has presented several papers on the role of world literature in the undergraduate curriculum (ACLA, MMLA) and has experimented here at NMU with interdisciplinary course models. After serving the NMU/AAUP Chapter as grievance officer and chief negotiator in the 80's, followed by several terms on the Marquette County Board in the early 90's, she now serves as an Arbitrator on the Panel of the American Arbitration Association and regularly hears cases involving labor-management disputes.

David Boe

Associate Professor
Ph.D., Linguistics
Indiana University
dboe@nmu.edu

Teaching Specialties

- Applied Linguistics
- Descriptive English Grammar
- History of The English Language

Professor Boe has been teaching at Northern Michigan University since 2001. Prior to joining the NMU faculty, he was a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at the University of Nevada at Reno (1999-2001), and before that he was a Fulbright lecturer in linguistics at Vilnius University in Lithuania (1996-1998). He completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1996, with a concentration in syntax and second language acquisition. He currently serves as the Secretary/Newsletter Editor of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS), and is a regular presenter at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). At NMU, he serves as the Director of the Program in Liberal Arts and Sciences, and is an English Department representative on the university's Academic Senate. In his free time, he enjoys mountain biking, skiing (both downhill and cross-country), and playing the piano.

Faye Bowers

Instructor
B.S., Boston University
fbowers@nmu.edu

Journalist Faye Bowers comes to NMU after 20 years of distinguished service at The Christian Science Monitor, where her accomplishments included editing the Monitor’s 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the mass killings of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

Until June 2005, Bowers was based in the Monitor’s Washington Bureau, where she reported on  national security issues, focusing mainly on U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. She spent most of her earlier career in the Monitor’s international news department, where she served as deputy international news editor, as a staff writer reporting on national security and social issues, and as the staff editor responsible for the Monitor’s Middle East and Balkans coverage. In January 2007, Bowers helped the Monitor recover kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll, who had been taken captive by members of Al Qaeda in Baghdad. Earlier, she helped negotiate the release of another Monitor journalist who was captured in the Balkans in 1995.

Bowers has been working as a free-lance journalist for the past three years from Phoenix, Arizona. She has written numerous stories focusing mainly on immigration and other social issues for the Monitor, and also has filled in as an editor on the foreign desk of The Los Angeles Times.

A native of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Bowers received a BS in interdisciplinary studies (majoring in international relations and English) from Boston University. She is a member of the International Women’s Media Foundation, and a member of the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants.

Gabriel Noah Brahm, Jr.

Assistant Professor
M.A., Ph.D., University of California - Santa Cruz
B.A., University of California - Los Angeles
gbrahm@nmu.edu

Teaching Specialties 

- History of Criticism and Theory
- American Literature and Popular Culture
- Political Philosophy and Literature
- World Literature and Israel Studies

Gabriel Brahm received his PhD and MA degrees in Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California—Santa Cruz, and his BA in English from UCLA.  He has been a research fellow in Israel Studies at Brandeis University, and holds a teaching certificate in Composition and Rhetoric from San Francisco State University.  Before joining the faculty at Northern, he taught as Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz; Professor of Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey; and Visiting Professor of American Culture at University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia.  His published work on literature and politics has appeared in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Democratiya, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Poetics Today, Rethinking History, and elsewhere.  He is co-editor of the cultural studies anthology, Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies (Westview Press), and serves as Associate Editor for the journal, Politics & Culture.  

Stephen Burn

Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Durham (UK)
sburn@nmu.edu

Teaching Specialties

- European Modernism
- American Literature
- The Contemporary Novel

Stephen Burn completed a PhD at the University of Durham in 2001, concentrating on the encyclopedic novel. He is the author of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2003), Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (Continuum, 2008), and co-editor of Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008).

Sandra Burr

Associate Professor
Ph.D., College of William and Mary
M.A., College of William and Mary
B.A., University of Oregon
sburr@nmu.edu

Teaching Specialties

- American Studies
- American Literature
- African-American Literature

Professor Burr has completed her dissertation in American Studies at the College of William and Mary, from which she also received her M.A. Her B.A. is from the University of Oregon. An experienced teacher of American literature, she has also served in editorial positions for Eighteenth-Century Life and Private Libraries in Renaissance England. Her publications include the widely acclaimed anthology Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century, which she co-edited with Adam Potkay, as well as several on-line and print journal publications.

Peter H. Goodrich

Professor and Assistant Head
M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan
B.A., Dartmouth College
pgoodric@nmu.edu

Teaching Specialties

- Medieval British Literature
- Modernist British and American Literature
- Irish literature
- Arthurian Literature, Mythology, Fantasy
- Technical Communication and Rhetoric

Peter Goodrich came to Northern Michigan University in 1984 as a literary generalist and technical writing instructor. Before joining the NMU faculty he studied Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland; taught at the German universities of Mainz, Marburg, and Kassel, at Quinebaug Community College in Connecticut, and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His scholarship has primarily explored the figure of Merlin in Arthurian legend through all literary periods and genres. In addition to individual published essays and conference presentations on Arthurian literature and related subjects such as New Age cultism, mad scientists, young adult and heroic fantasy, he has edited and published The Romance of Merlin (Garland, 1991) and is editor of Merlin: A Casebook (Garland, forthcoming). He has also contributed articles on masque to The New Arthurian Encyclopedia (Garland, 1991) and on Merlin to Medieval Folklore: an Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs (ABC-CLIO, 2000), and coedits Nuntia, the newsletter of the Medieval Association of the Midwest, with Zacharias Thundy. Peter caught the hifi bug as an undergraduate and moonlighted as a sales associate in Boston area and Ann Arbor hifi stores before coming to Marquette and eventually founding his own high performance audio-video retail business, Sound Surroundings. When not occupied with academic matters, business, family, walking his dog and keeping up a Victorian home, he may be caught dreaming of travel to exotic places.