New Faculty in EML

We have more than a few new faces in English and Modern Languages this fall. Welcome to all of our new colleagues!

Janice Cools-Stephens, our new assistant professor in technical communication, was born in Saint Lucia, a Caribbean island. She earned her a PhD in English from the University of the West Indies-Mona and an MA in Rhetoric and Professional Communication from New Mexico State University. Her Writing Studies work in Composition and Technical Communication has appeared in CEA Forum, the Wisconsin English Journal, and book chapters. Her Men’s Studies and Masculinities work has been published in the Journal of Men’s Studies, and Culture, Society and Masculinity. Her research interests in writing studies include Academic Literacies, ethnography, and transferable skills. She is co-author with Gregory Stephens of Communicative Cultures in Writing Studies: Ethnographic Approaches, Transferrable Skills and Non-Academic Genres, forthcoming from University Press of Colorado.

Pauline Destouches is a French Fulbright teacher from Paris who recently completed her Master's degree in English studies, major Translation. She has always been fascinated by languages and especially English since her first foreign languages classes in primary school, and has since travelled to English-speaking countries as often as she could. After spending a year in Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland with the program Erasmus for her last year of degree, she has now come to Missouri Western to teach French to American students and learn about the Midwestern way of life!

Carla Kluth, a German Fulbright teacher, is originally from Cologne, a city located in western Germany. She strives to share her language and culture with students of Missouri Western State University. She has taught German as a foreign language to Chinese students in Guangzhou, China, as well as to refugees in Germany. At the University of Cologne Carla Kluth obtained her bachelor’s degree in English and Art. She majored in printmaking and is currently waiting for the results of her master’s thesis. At Missouri Western State University, Carla wishes to strengthen German language teaching and encourages students to learn any language apart from their own mother tongue.

Gregory Stephens, half-time instructor of Spanish, is on leave 2018-19 from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, where he is an Associate Professor of English. He teaches Creative Writing, literature, film, and seminars in Cultural Studies and Writing Studies. Before grad school Stephens was an award-winning songwriter in Austin, Texas. He is the author of On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (Cambridge UP). Trilogies as Cultural Analysis: Literary Re-imaginings of Sea Crossings, Animals, and Fathering is published by Cambridge Scholars Press (2018). The monograph Three Birds Sing a New Song: A Puerto Rican trilogy about Dystopia, Precarity, and Resistance, which combines ethnography and literary nonfiction, is in production with Intermezzo.

Alyssa Striplin, a new Instructor of English, is from Independence, Missouri, but she’s fresh off the plane from Minnesota after earning an M.F.A. in fiction from Minnesota State University, Mankato. She spent three years finishing the first draft of a novel about cryptids under three feet of snow, surviving only on hot dishes and horror movies. Before that, she received her bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English from Northwest Missouri State University. This means that she’ll have to splice a bearcat, a maverick bull, and a griffon together into some kind of beastly amalgamation of alma maters, which is to her liking. She’s a huge fan of monsters, mythology, magic, and the macabre. This is evident in some of her short stories, which have been published in The Molotov Cocktail, Luna Station Quarterly, Blue River Review, and Midwestern Gothic. Feel free to stop by her office in Eder Hall to hear stories about her black cat, Loki, and whatever horror movie she’s forced her partner, Kevin, to watch.

Lili Wang is our visiting professor of Chinese from Xi’dian University. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Northwest University (Xi’an, China) and Master’s Degree from Beihang University (Beijing, China) with a focus on American Literature.  She has been teaching at Xi’dian University, China for 10 years. She won the Second Place in the National Foreign Language Teaching Contest and the Grand Prize in Shannxi State Level College English Teaching Competition. She is a huge fan of the NBA, and Kevin Durant is her favorite player.