WHO ARE WE?
As befits our liberal arts setting, the Department of English at Defiance College is intimate and intensive, allowing for very close interaction between students and faculty. Students work closely with one another, with Dr. Todd Comer in literature and theory studies, with Dr. Mary Catherine Harper in writing and literature, and Ms. Dawn Comer in creative writing.
Mary Catherine (MC)
Harper
Ph.D., Bowling Green State University
Mary Catherine Harper is a professor and the endowed McCann Chair in the Humanities at Defiance College, where she teaches literature and creative writing and directs the Composition Program. She received her Ph.D. in literary theory and creative writing at Bowling Green State University and her undergraduate degree at Montana State University.
Her creative projects include both poetry and website design, and she explores ways in which poetry intersects the visual arts and cultural representation. She has worked in Cambodia on a language arts/ethnographic project, is the poetry editor of the online literary magazine VellumRelic, and has had the poetic reader’s theater piece “A Quarrel of Voices” performed at the Interdisciplinary International Women's Studies Conference. Her poetry has appeared in The New England Review, WomenWriters.net, The Cleveland Reader, The Bozeman Er, and Masque.
Professor Harper has published articles on women’s science fiction and has been published in Science Fiction Studies, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Extrapolation, and FemSpec. She is currently researching the narrative structure of Louise Erdrich's novels and is presenting her findings at conferences and in scholarly articles.
See the photo galleries and a sampling of her creative writing at her website.
email: mcharper_at_defiance.edu
Todd Comer
Ph.D., Michigan State University
Prof Todd completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature and film at Michigan State University. Prior to his time at Michigan State University, Todd worked as a reporter, copywriter, and librarian. He earned his B.A. (English and History) at Taylor University and was born and raised in West Virginia. He has two young children and a brilliant wife, Dawn, who also teaches creative writing at Defiance College on occasion.
Todd's strengths lie in the area of 20th-century American and British Commonwealth literature/film/comics and literary theory. Todd has published on Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, and Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds. He has a recent chapter in Peregrinations, Ruminations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who (2010). In November of 2010, he will chair panels on "terror and the cinematic sublime" and "love and sex in the work of Alan Moore" at the Midwest Modern Language Association and Film and History conferences in Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively.
CV and additional information may be found
on his website.
email: tcomer_at_defiance.edu
Dawn Comer
M.F.A., University of Notre Dame
Dawn Comer Dawn Comer received her MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Notre Dame. She teaches Creative Writing at Defiance College (in rotation with MC Harper) and is writing two books, Born Beneath Pedro's Sombrero, Raised in a Corn Palace: Stories from the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors, and Fella With an Umbrella: Discovering Joy on the Autism Spectrum.
The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature has awarded her with The Paul Somers Prize for Creative Prose for the story “Raised in a Corn Palace” (2008) and the memoir “Fella with an Umbrella: Finding Joy on the Autism Spectrum” (2009). She encourages students to present their work at the SSML conference and hosts the annual Arts & Humanities SwampFire Retreat for visual, literary, and photographic artists.
See photos of Comer in action at SwampFire Retreat and Creative Writing Course
email: dcomer_at_defiance.edu