English Faculty and Staff

Jonathan Rylander is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Writing Excellence (CWE). He teaches first-year writing and courses in the Rhetorics of Science, Technology, and Culture emphasis in the English Department. In the CWE, he mentors student interns and consults with faculty writers and teachers across the university.

Dr. Asha Sen is the Foundation Leadership Faculty Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire where she is Professor of English and an affiliate of the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  She received her PhD in Postcolonial Literature and Theory from Purdue University in 1996 and is the author of Postcolonial Yearning: Reshaping Spiritual and Secular Discourse in Contemporary Literature (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.  She directed the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program from 2013-2016, is interested in international education and has participated in international exchanges with Harlaxton University and Delhi University.

I graduated from Miami University Ohio, with a bachelor's and master's in Philosophy, before completing my PhD in Rhetoric, Scientific, and Technical Communications at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. My research incorporates archival, digital, and autoethnographic studies exploring Bisexual Masculinities, Queer community formation, and effective, multimodal pedagogy through play and digital mediums. I follow the tradition of black feminist pedagogy in modeling vulnerability, trust, and transparency with my students, emphasizing compassionate assessment and student agency. 

Kaia Simon teaches courses in the Rhetorics of Science, Technology, and Culture emphasis in the English Department and directs the Blugold Seminar Writing Program.

As a professor, I teach and write about how material forces -- such as how much access we have to everything we need to live -- shape our lives.  This is the historical materialist half of my work.  In the psychoanalytic half, I teach and write about why material forces don't explain everything about humans.