Creative Writing Certificate
English is far more than just a language, it's a multitude of exciting genres waiting to be explored. A creative writing certificate is perfect if you envision a career as a professional writer, or if you are interested in bringing your love of language and writing to rewarding careers in business, industry, or public service.
Learn more about the English Department at Parkside.
DEPARTMENT CONTACT INFO
Literatures and Languages | Rita 278 | 262-595-2331
Josef Benson
Associate Professor - English
Josef Benson offers courses in contemporary literature, African American literature, film, gender studies, poetry writing, fiction writing, and composition. He is the author of Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels (UP of Mississippi 2022), for which he and co-author Doug Singsen were nominated for the prestigious Will Eisner Comics Industry Award; Star Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture (Rowman & Littlefield 2020); J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History (Rowman & Littlefield 2018); and Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin (Rowman & Littlefield 2014). Additionally, his work has appeared in over twenty publications, including: Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990 (Cambridge UP), Journal of Medical Humanities, Journal of Bisexuality, Southwestern American Literature, The Raymond Carver Review, Saw Palm, Moon City Review, and The Adirondack Review. He holds creative writing degrees from Missouri State University and the University of South Florida as well as a Ph.D. in literature with a heavy emphasis in gender theory also from the University of South Florida, where he studied primarily with Susan Mooney, John Henry Fleming, and Jay Hopler. He is currently working on a book-length study of the Jeffrey Dahmer case.
Mary Lenard, Ph.D.
Director of Composition and Associate Professor - English
Mary Lenard grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, has a B.A. from the University of Virginia (1989) and a M.A. (1991) and Ph.D. (1996) from the University of Texas at Austin. She started at UW-Parkside in 1998, after having taught at Alma College in Michigan for two years. Her first book, Preaching Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentality in Victorian Culture, was published in 1999. She lives in Racine, has taught at UW-Parkside for almost twenty years, and is currently serving as the Chair of the English Department.
Jay Mcroy
Professor - English
Dana Oswald, Ph.D.
Department Chair and Professor of English
Dana Oswald is Professor of English, Chair of Literatures and Languages, and Director of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She has published two books, <i>Conceiving Bodies: Reproduction in Early Medieval English Medicine</i> (Manchester UP, 2024) and Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Boydell and Brewer, 2010). She is at work on a third book entitled <i>Conditional Futures: Impossible Intersections in a Medieval Past</i>.
Dr. Oswald teaches courses in medieval literature, gender and sexuality studies, the history of the English language, literary theory, and epic and mythology. Through UW Madison's Odyssey Beyond Bars Prison Education Initiative, she teaches freshman composition at Racine Correctional Institution.
Dr. Oswald teaches courses in medieval literature, gender and sexuality studies, the history of the English language, literary theory, and epic and mythology. Through UW Madison's Odyssey Beyond Bars Prison Education Initiative, she teaches freshman composition at Racine Correctional Institution.
Tara Pedersen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Tara E. Pedersen received her Ph.D. from The University of California at Davis. She teaches Shakespeare, literature surveys, courses in Early Modern literature, The Bible as Literature, Women and Literature, Literature of Science and Magic, Composition, and Advanced Composition (with a Health Humanities focus). Her research focuses on knowledge production in pre-modern England, and her book, _Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England_, was published by Ashgate Press in 2015.
