Department of English

Alumni Profiles

About ten percent of undergraduates at the College major in English. Our majors have succeeded in many fields, from journalism to law, acting, and academia. Below are a few profiles of our alums. Let us know what you've been doing!

Keith Clark

Graduated: 1985
Major: English
Graduate school: Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1993)
First job after W&M: My first job was as an instructor at Howard U. in Washington, DC, during the 1987-88 year. I'd just finished my MA at the University of Kentucky and needed a year off. After teaching at Howard, I then began my doctoral studies at UNC in the fall of '88.
Current occupation: Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, George Mason University. Author of Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines and August Wilson (2002) and editor of Contemporary Black Men’s Fiction and Drama (2001), both published by the University of Illinois Press.
Website: http://english.gmu.edu/faculty/bio.php?fname=Keith&lname=Clark&type=full

"As for my experiences at W&M, my years there and specifically my instruction in English were invaluable and provided me with an excellent foundation both as a writer and as an interpreter of literature. I remember a very rigorous and demanding yet nurturing environment; the small class sizes allowed students to work closely with instructors and to get individual instruction. I especially recall several professors and their commitment to my instruction: the late Dr. Cecil McCulley, term instructors David Rosenwasser and Ross Posnock, and especially Professors Walter Wenska and Joanne Braxton; Drs. Braxton, Posnock, and Wenska played a critical role in my decision to pursue graduate study. Dr. Braxton influenced me tremendously and fervently encouraged me to study African American literature on the graduate level. As a professor at GMU, I frequently reiterate for my students the solid training I received as an undergraduate at W&M; not only did W&M hone my critical thinking and writing skills, but it shaped my intellectual development and prepared me for the professoriate."

Tracy Ferrell

Graduated: 1992
Major: English
Graduate school: Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder (2001)

"My dissertation looked at the relationship between alternative sexualities and avant garde writing in the prose of four South American women writers. After working as an Assistant Professor in both Montana and Massachusetts, I returned to the University of Colorado where I currently teach Writing and Rhetoric. I live in a restored mining cabin in the Rocky Mountains with my husband, 20-month old daughter, a dog and a cat."

Jason B. Jones

Graduated: 1993
Major: English
Graduate school: Northwestern (MA, 1994), Emory (Ph.D., 2002)
First job after W&M: I can't remember the exact title, but I was an assistant on a grant-funded project at the Center for Research Libraries (Chicago). After that I worked as a content developer at the Institute for the Learning Sciences, working on corporate training software.
Current occupation: Assistant professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Author of Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature (Ohio State Univ. Press, 2006).
Website: http://www.english.ccsu.edu/jones/ | http://jbj.wordherders.net

"It's not very surprising that, as a professor, I have a trove of anecdotes about being an undergrad that I trot out to divert my students as occasion warrants. That I have long relied upon my memory of the intellectual and personal example of Colleen Kennedy, who kindly directed my honors thesis, is also not surprising.

But what is surprising, in retrospect, is how completely my subsequent career has returned me to my beginnings in English at W&M. My first class in the English department was Deborah Morse's seminar on Dickens, taught in an appropriately gloomy classroom somewhere in the Wren building. I can still remember the essay exam answer I wrote, a slightly dreadful piece on the sexual imagery behind Bill Sikes's murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist. For better and for worse, that was the answer where I began to understand the way metaphors and figurative language work in narrative; that I went on to a graduate degree in Victorian literature & psychoanalytic studies, and that I now teach a Dickens class regularly, is doubtless just an uncanny coincidence. Getting to see Professor Morse annually at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference is an ongoing delight!

But I had another Victorian class at W&M, too: Terry Meyers's junior honors seminar on Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelite poets. This class had a quite different, but equally lasting, impact. Midway through the semester, Professor Meyers invited us as a class to his home, as a kind of opportunity to relax, and he showed us his collection of Swinburne-related materials. One of these was a short prose piece of dubious origins which, since I was taking Robert Maccubbin's drama class at the same time, I recognized as a parody of a play by John Vanbrugh. Professor Meyers showed me how to go about proving this connection, which involved working with his extensive archive of Swinburne correspondence, and then he helped me to shape the results into a note that was published in Notes and Queries a year or so later. This was my first experience with actual academic research, and with the vital ways research can inform, and transform, teaching. But it was also a terrific example of how professors can shape students' lives outside the classroom, too. I now help students write their own honors theses, and I coordinate an undergraduate research and creative achievement day, in hopes of helping to pay down these debts.

At the time, of course, I had no idea that these experiences would register themselves so deeply. But in fact not a day goes by when I do not draw on some aspect of my time in the English department at William and Mary."

Paco Hope
Graduated: 1994
Major: English and Computer Science

"I was a double major in English and Computer Science, and that has helped my career in countless ways. I've written one technical book ("Mastering FreeBSD & OpenBSD Security", O'Reilly, ISBN 0596006268) and I'm engaged with O'Reilly to release another one this Spring. I credit my education in W&M's English department with giving me the discipline and skills to write as well as I do. Although I work in a technical field, I still have to convey meaning and mood along with the substance. I'm now a featured speaker at a variety of technical conferences (STARWEST, STAREAST, Better Software, Software Test & Performance, Software Security Summit, etc.) and it's all a result of the capabilities I developed at W&M.

The company I work for, Cigital, was founded by two W&M grads as well. (Jeff Payne, MBA and Jeff Voas, CS) We value the well-rounded skills that you need in today's competitive tech marketplace. Being able to write convincingly and compellingly distinguishes our technical people from the average. Being W&M grads, we recognize the value of the liberal arts education and we capitalize on it, even in technical fields."

Chris Keirstead

keirstead picGraduated: 1992
Major: English
Graduate school: University of Delaware, Ph.D. 1999
First job after W&M: Assistant Professor of English, Auburn University
Current occupation: Associate Professor, Auburn University. Author of articles on Dickens, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Arthur Hugh Clough in such journals as Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth Century Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, and Nineteenth Century Prose.
Website: http://www.auburn.edu/~keirscm/

"As much as I love Auburn and my work as a professor here, I think William and Mary will always exist in my mind as the Platonic ideal of English departments. My classes were always exciting, challenging, eye-opening, and often quite funny (I seemed to have had a number of professors with great senses of humor). Like Jason Jones, I developed a strong interest in Victorian literature at William and Mary, and was nurtured by some of the same outstanding professors, including Terry Meyers, Adam Potkay, and Deborah Morse, who directed my Honors thesis. I also worked for two years in the Writing Center under the tutelage of Colleen Kennedy, who taught us much about how to respond helpfully to the varieties of concerns and writing abilities that presented themselves there, but also gave us room to grow and develop as counselors. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was learning to listen to students in ways that would have great benefit for me down the road when I began to teach my own classes."

John Kimble
Graduated: 1973
Major: English

"After leaving W&M, I graduated from LSU Medical School, did my Internship at Ochsner Foundation Hospital and my Residency training at Tulane. It is only fitting that my training is in Otolaryngology (Ear, nose and throat) which includes treatment of communicative disorders. I received board certification in 1981.

My only job after graduation has been in private practice in a suburb of New Orleans. I've been here 26 years including the 19 days I stayed in the hospital after Hurricane Katrina. I guess I'm one of the few surgeons who can recite long passages from King Lear, Macbeth and the Canterbury Tales."