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Mark Letcher, Assistant Professor of English Education and Director of the English Language Arts Teaching Program, joined the ¶¶Òõ»ÆÉ«app faculty in 2015. A former high school English teacher, he earned his PhD in English Education from The Ohio State University. He teaches literature and writing methods courses for ELA Secondary Education majors, drama, as well as courses in the First-Year Writing sequence.Ìý His research interests include adolescent literature and literacy, writing teacher education, and teacher advocacy. He is one of the founding editors of Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care, a peer-reviewed blog advocating for best writing practices in K-16 classrooms.

Dr. Letcher is actively involved with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the Conference on English Education (CEE), and the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN). He is a former young adult literature editor at English Journal, and serves as the chair of the 2015-16 Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award committee of ALAN, which annually selects young adult books representing literary excellence, positivity, and broad appeal. He has also served as a commission chair within CEE and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

Dr. Pramod Mishra, Professor, joined the Department in the fall of 2010. Dr. Mishra came from Augustana College, Rock Island, IL, where he had taught since the fall of 2002 and had been recommended for tenure and promotion by the Faculty Welfare committee, the Dean and the President.  Dr. Mishra earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in English with an emphasis on Postcolonial literature and theory and his M.A. in English from Northern Illinois University.  He teaches courses in the First-Year Writing sequence, in the general education literature curriculum, Non-Western and Postcolonial majors' courses, and American and British literature when needed. He is also available to teach literary theory and courses in Third-World film. He has published articles on international and postcolonial issues in Ariel: A Journal of International English Literature and CR: The New Centennial Review. He has presented papers and given presentations at the MLA and other places both in the US and overseas both for the academic community and the general public.  Since 2009, he has written a regular column on literature, culture, and society under Crossroads for The Kathmandu Post.Ìý He is at work on two book-length manuscripts—his memoirs of growing up in India and Nepal and a collection of essays on the southern plains of Nepal called Madhes.

Dr. Jamil Mustafa, Professor, joined ¶¶Òõ»ÆÉ«app in 2000 after completing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago. He has served as the Department Chair, the Director of Literature and Language, and the Director of the Scholars Academy. He specializes in Victorian literature, the Gothic, and film studies. He has taught Introduction to English Studies, Stories into Film, The Horror Film, British Literature: 1800 to Present, Advanced Study in 18th- and 19th-Century British Literature, and Senior Seminar in English Studies. He has also taught Literary London and Imperial London, and he is one of the leaders of the London Travel Study.

Dr. Mustafa is the author of (University of Wales Press, 2023). His book chapters include “Strange Cases of the Queer Fin de Siècle” (The Queer Gothic, Edinburgh University Press, 2023), “Shadows of the Vampire: Neo-Gothicism in Dracula, Ripper Street and What We Do in the Shadows” (Neo-Gothic Narratives, Anthem Press, 2020), “Haunting ‘The Harlot’s House’” (Wilde’s Worlds, Routledge, 2018), “Lifting the Veil: Allegory, Ambivalence, and the Scottish Gothic in The Bride of Lammermoor” (Gothic Britain, University of Wales Press, 2018), “‘You can’t spell subtext without S-E-X’: Supernatural, Gothic Intertextuality, and the (Queer) Uncanny"' (Supernatural and the Gothic Tradition, McFarland, 2016), and “Rediscovering Pleasure in the English Classroom” (Dimensions of Curiosity, University Press of America, 2004). Forthcoming is a chapter in Ghosts and the Gothic (Manchester University Press). His short story, “Vicious Circle,” was published in the February 2015 issue of The Horror Zine, where he was the featured author. He is currently researching a book on Victorian psychology, cartography, and the Gothic novel.

Dr. Mustafa’s journal articles include “Monsters in Mirrors: Duality and Multiplicity in Two Adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde” (Humanities, 2023), “Obsessional Neurosis, the Paranoid-Schizoid Position, and the Bourgeois Family in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle” (American Imago, 2021), “Penny Dreadful’s Queer Orientalism: The Translations of Ferdinand Lyle” (Humanities, 2020), “The American Gothic and the Carnivalesque in Something Wicked This Way Comes” (The New Ray Bradbury Review, 2019), “Representations of Masculinity in Neo-Victorian Film and Television” (Neo-Victorian Studies, 2018), "'The Lady of the House of Love': Angela Carter's Vampiric Sleeping Beauty" (Cabinet Des Fées: A Fairy Tale Journal, 2007), and “‘A good horror has its place in art': Hardy's Gothic Strategy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles" (Studies in the Humanities, 2005).

Dr. Mustafa regularly presents papers in the United States and abroad at meetings of the Modern Language Association, the International Gothic Association, the North American Victorian Studies Association, the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and other organizations. In 2019, he was invited to address the National Bioethics Symposium on the topic of bioethics in Frankenstein. In 2017, he was the keynote speaker for the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Convocation.

In 2020, Dr. Mustafa served on the Conference Organizing Committee for Gothic in a Time of Contagion, Populism, and Racial Injustice, hosted by Simon Fraser University. In 2019, he hosted Gothic Terror, Gothic Horror, the 15th conference of the International Gothic Association and the first held in the United States. In 2012, he was selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Oscar Wilde and His Circle,” at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. As Director of the Scholars Academy, he hosted the 2011 Annual Spring Student Research Conference of the Honors Council of the Illinois Region. The 2007 records his experiences as a Visiting Associate Professor at Bethlehem University in the West Bank.