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[Dr. Dickson is Director of the Humanities Program. Except for a leave of two years, he has taught at Stetson since 1968. He received the William Hugh McEniry Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1994. He is the current holder of the Kathleen Johnson Chair in Humanities.]
I have been at Stetson off and on since 1960. In 1960 I came as an undergraduate, taking my AB degree in 1964. I returned to teach from 1968 to 1971, left for two years to complete my graduate education, and came back for good in 1973. I took my MA and PhD from Duke University, with additional study at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and Duke Divinity School.
My graduate degrees are in American Literature, but a number of years back I switched my full commitment to directing the Humanities Program and teaching interdisciplinary arts courses. (As I tell my students, I always preferred reading books with pictures in them.) I like teaching a combination of introductory and more specialized courses. The former comprise Freshman Honors Humanities and Introduction to Music and the Visual Arts. The latter include Classical Mythology and the Arts, Technology and the Arts, and Dada and Surrealism.
I am fortunate enough to have lived for three months in Italy and to have traveled extensively to other parts of Europe, helping my daughter with research for her dissertation on portraits of the much maligned Agrippina Minor, Nero's mother. My currently ongoing projects include incorporating those experiences in my teaching; expanding hard copy and on-line/CD-ROM versions of A Handbook for Humanities Students; and maintaining and expanding Web sites for the Humanities Program, and for my individual Humanities courses. I am also working on helping the Humanities Program make the transition from analogue to digital presentation of resources. That includes creating a number of multimedia presentations and interactive programs. I can be contacted at wdickson@stetson.edu.
Thomas J. Farrell, Professor of English
[In addition to his teaching duties, Dr. Farrell also serves as chair of the English department.]
My primary teaching interests are Chaucer and other medieval literature like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Dante's Divine Comedy, but I frequently teach other courses like Detective Fiction, History of the Language, and Honors Humanities. I enjoy teaching, and learning about, a wide range of materials, so that some courses may include authors as apparently dissimilar as Toni Morrison and Edmund Spenser. Currently I am interested in exploring multi-media teaching techniques.
I received my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, whose emphasis on medieval language and textual questions has helped prepare me for my primary scholarly project, an edition of one source for Chaucer's Clerk's Tale written by Petrarch, for the Chaucer Sources Analogues Project. I have a long-standing interest in the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin; that pursuit led me to edit Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, a volume of critical essays published by the University Press of Florida in July, 1996. I also have had the fun of developing the English Department's web pages. You can get in touch with me via e-mail to tjfarrell@stetson.edu.
Karen Kaivola, Associate Professor of English
[In addition to her scholarship and teaching, Dr. Kaivola also serves as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.]
I’ve just resumed teaching after an incredibly invigorating and rejuvenating sabbatical. During that time I spent three months in Seattle in relative solitude, thinking and writing about how the interconnections among race, gender, sexuality, and nation in 19th-century thought influenced Virginia Woolf. I also traveled to North Carolina to participate in a National Humanities Center seminar on Universal Human Rights in Multicultural Contexts. Finally, I had the opportunity to spend some time in London. That trip included a long (but all too short) weekend in Paris, where I took in as many museums as I possibly could. While my sabbatical couldn't have been better, I'm excited to return to teaching and look forward to working in the Humanities program.
I earned my A.B. degree from Georgetown University, and my M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. In addition to the project described above, I've published articles on Virginia Woolf and other 20th-century women writers. My dissertation was published by the University of Iowa Press in 1991 (All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras). You can email me at kkaivola@stetson.edu.
John H. Pearson, Professor of English
[Dr. Pearson has also served as Chair of the English Department.]
My areas of expertise are American literature, particularly nineteenth- and early-twentieth century fiction, autobiography, and literary theory and criticism. I am also interested in, and often teach classes on horror fiction, gender studies, and modernism.
I am originally from Massachusetts, but I did my undergraduate work at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, before returning to Boston to get my Ph.D. at Boston University. My scholarship has been varied. I've written on frame theory in literature and the other arts, autobiography, American colonial literature, and Henry James. My book, Framing the Modern Reader: The Prefaces of Henry James, has just been published by the Penn State Press. I can be contacted at jpearson@stetson.edu.
Joseph Witek, Associate Professor of English
[Dr. Witek, who goes by his lifelong nickname, Rusty, is in charge of the English graduate program.]
My teaching interests center on the whole spectrum of ways stories are told, including ancient epics, medieval sagas, the novel and modernist fiction, and popular narratives, especially comic books and strips. I sometimes teach the history of literary theory and criticism, and I've taught extensively in the Humanities program, which has reinforced my interest in music and the visual arts.
I received my B.A. at Franklin & Marshall college in my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and my Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University. My research has focused in the growing area of scholarship on comics and other visual narratives; I published one book, Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Harvey Pekar, and Art Spiegelman, in 1989, and I'm working on another on the narrative techniques of the comics medium. I also serve on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Culture and INKS: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies. I can be contacted at jwitek@stetson.edu.
This site is maintained by Wayne Dickson. Please contact him if you have corrections or improvements to suggest. Last updated