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Learn more about the Literatures and Languages 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, poetry writing, fiction writing, and composition. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Infinity Land: The Untold Story of Jeffrey Dahmer (University Press of Mississippi 2026) and Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels (University Press of Mississippi 2022) for which he and co-author Doug Singsen were nominated for the prestigious Will Eisner Comics Industry Award. He holds creative writing degrees from Missouri State University and the University of South Florida as well as a Ph.D. in literature also from the University of South Florida. For more information, visit josefbenson.com.

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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.

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Jay Mcroy

Professor - English

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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, Conceiving Bodies: Reproduction in Early Medieval English Medicine (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 Conditional Futures: Impossible Intersections in a Medieval Past.

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.

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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, Writing for Business and Industry, 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.

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