Faculty & Staff

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David Davis

Assistant Professor

Office: Groover 118
Office telephone: 478.301.2358
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Originally from Butler, Georgia, David A. Davis studied at Emory University (B.A. 1997) and the University of North Carolina (Ph.D. 2006). He came to Mercer in 2008.

He studies southern literature and culture, and he teaches courses in American literature and southern studies.

Davis has published essays in African American Review, Southern Quarterly, Southern Literary Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, and other journals.

He lives in Macon with his wife, Kris; two sons, Lucas and Ayden; and a little yellow dog.

Richard Fallis

Professor; Dean , College of Liberal Arts

Office: 103 Godsey Administrative Building
Office telephone: 478.301.2915
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A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Dean Fallis earned his B.A. in English and Interdisciplinary Studies from Wake Forest and then did graduate work at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in English. In 1972, he joined the faculty of Syracuse University, where he served at various times as Chair of the English Department and director of the masters and doctoral programs. After twenty-four snowy winters in upstate New York, he moved to Belmont University in Nashville as dean of its college of arts and sciences. He came to Mercer in 2001.

He is the author of The Irish Renaissance, a history of 20th-century Irish writing. He has also edited an "Irish Studies Series" for Syracuse University Press. With more than sixty titles, it is the largest series of scholarly books about Ireland published in this country.

His areas of interest include modernist British literature, cultural history, and literature and music. In his free time, he builds model trains and answers the manifold requests of the family cat.

Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

Baptist Professor of English; Director of Africana Studies

Office: Willingham 204
Office telephone: 478.301.2345
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Fontenot earned a B.A. in Theoretical Math and Political Science from Whittier College in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultures from the University of California at Irvine in 1975. He came to Mercer in 1999.

He is the author or editor of four books, including two works in the influential series, Studies in Black American Literature, and the first book-length study of racial theorist Frantz Fanon. Also an ordained Baptist minister, Dr. Fontenot has worked extensively with black gangs and is currently writing two books growing out of those experiences, Gangs, gods, and gospels: The Appeal of African-American Street Gangs for Youths and Why Stand Ye Gazing: A Critique of African-American Christianity, 1845-1996. Dr. Fontenot was a founding member and first chair of the Modern Language Association African-American Literature Section and editor of the Black American Literature Forum.

Jonathan Glance

Professor

Office: Willingham 306
Office telephone: 478.301.2587
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Born in Charleston, SC and raised in Winston-Salem, NC, Glance earned an A.B. in English at Davidson College(1983) and an M.A.(1986) and Ph.D. (2001) in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He came to Mercer in 1992.

Glance was trained as a Victorianist, with a minor specialty in Medieval literature; his interests also include computers and technology, web design, movies, listening to music and playing saxophone, cooking, and spending time with his wife Cindy and their two children, Carlyle and Ellyson.

Glance regularly teaches the full range of First Year Seminar courses (101 and 102), University 101, and English 264, along with 347 (Romantic Poetry and Prose) and 349 (the English Novel) in alternating years. He has also offered English 380: Special Topic courses on Web Design for Humanities Majors, the Gothic in Fiction and Film, and Dickens's Works and World.

He has published and presented papers analyzing the use of literary dreams in 19th-century British novels, including works by Dickens, Emily Brontë and Mary Shelley, as well as on the supernatural on the 19th-century stage, and teaching with technology and new media.

Carmen Hicks

Senior Administrative Assistant, Department of English, Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Department of Africana Studies

Office: Willingham 201
Office telephone: 478.301.2562, 478.301.2563
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Born in the Canary Islands, Spain, she came to the United States in 1984 and has lived in Arizona, Alaska, Georgia, and Florida.

Interests: Exercising, dancing, music, spending lots of time with her family.

Gordon Johnston

Professor, Director, Creative Writing Track of the English major
Chair, Ferrol A. Sams, Jr. Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Committee

Office: Willingham 304
Office telephone: 478.301.2588
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Johnston was born in Warner Robins, GA and grew up there and in Dearing, GA. He earned a B.A. from Shorter College (1989), an M.A. in British literature and creative writing from the University of Georgia (1991), and a Ph.D. in American literature (Modern and Contemporary Fiction and Poetry and Creative Writing) from the University of Georgia (1995). He came to Mercer in 1996.

He is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who teaches literature. Interests include modern and contemporary fiction (especially the short story) and poetry, linguistics, wilderness writing, creative nonfiction, contemporary art, anagama pottery, Native American mythology, prehistory, and culture, canoeing, hiking, birds, and World War II. Some of his favorite writers: Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Alice Munro, Tolkien, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Tobias Wolff, Charles Baxter, Pattiann Rogers, Stephen Dunn, William Stafford, Rodney Jones, Judson Mitcham, Andre Dubus, Walker Percy, J.M. Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.S. Merwin, Louise Erdrich, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Richard Hugo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Dostoevsky, Rumi, Charles Frazier, Gerald Stern, Margaret Gibson, W.H. Auden, Yeats, Scott Russell Sanders, Ralph Ellison, William Ong, Albert Camus, John Berger, and Thich Nhat Hahn.

Johnston's regularly offered courses are creative writing, Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary Poetry, Wilderness and the American Mind, the Study of Fiction, the Study of Poetry, Senior Capstone: Art and Society, and First Year Seminar. He has recently directed studies and honors theses on individual writers: novelist Tim O'Brien, poets Derek Walcott, Ted Hughes, playwright Samuel Beckett, and composer John Cage. Furthermore, he has directed honors portfolios in poetry and fiction writing.

Mary Alice Morgan

Professor; Chair, Department of Women's and Gender Studies; Senior Vice-Provost for Service Learning

Office: Willingham 205
Office telephone: 478.301.2571
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Morgan earned a B.A. from Duke University (1977), and an M.A. (1979) and a Ph.D. (1992) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She came to Mercer in 1997.

Morgan's interests include 19th-century American literature and Women's issues. She has taught English, Women's and Gender Studies and First year Seminar courses, and recently led a Mercer on a Mission trip to South Africa.

Mary Raschko

Assistant Professor

Office: Willingham 100
Office telephone:478.301.4009
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Raschko earned an A.B. from Georgetown University in 2001 and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in 2004 and 2009 respectively. She came to Mercer in 2009.

Specializing in medieval English literature, her research interests include Middle English alliterative poetry, vernacular scripture, devotional texts, and manuscript studies. Her current book project pertains to interpretation of gospel parables in Middle English.

Raschko primarily teaches courses related to Old and Middle English literature, ranging from the early British literature survey to seminars on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, and History of the English Language.

Originally from Washington state, she enjoys outdoor activities like running and hiking. She is also an avid reader of Harry Potter and a fan of country and bluegrass music.

Gary Richardson

Benjamin W. Griffith, Jr. Professor; Chair, Department of English

Office: Ware 110C
Office telephone: 478.301.2984
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Richardson earned a B.A. (1971) and an M.A. (1975) from Northeast Louisiana University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1983. He came to Mercer in 1983.

His interests include 19th-century Irish and Irish-American drama, 18th-century literature and culture, and the Harry Potter books.

Deneen Senasi

Assistant Professor

Office: Willingham 101
Office telephone: 478.301.2566
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Trained as a classical ballerina before attending graduate school, Senasi earned B.A. degrees in English and Dance Performance at Birmingham-Southern College (1993), an M.A. at the University of Alabama (1996) and a Ph.D. from the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama (2003). She came to Mercer in 2007.

Dr. Senasi's scholarship has appeared in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Religion and Literature, and the book collection, Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism in the New Millennium (SUNY 2008). Some of her recent and upcoming conference presentations include a study of gendered silences and the law in Tudor England at the 2008 Modern Language Association and an exploration of the visual rhetoric of the self from medieval heraldry to polymer preserved bodies for the 2009 South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting. She is currently completing a book on gendered performance, material culture, and the name in early modern England.

Her research and teaching interests include sixteenth and seventeenth century British literature and culture, in particular the works of Shakespeare, Middleton, Donne, and Milton. She also works in the areas of Humanist pedagogy, Renaissance law, the lives of early modern women, and literary theory, in particular gender and performance theory and psychoanalysis. Other interests include Victorian literature, especially the works of Dickens and Rossetti.

Dr. Senasi teaches the following courses: ENG 332 (Shakespeare I: Comedies and Histories); ENG 333 (Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances); ENG 335 (Milton); ENG 342 (Seventeenth-Century Literature); ENG 301 (Introduction to Literary Studies); ENG 263 (Survey of British Literature: Beginnings through the Eighteenth Century); ENG 235 (Study of Poetry); FYS 101 (First Year Seminar: Composing the Self); FYS 102 (First Year Seminar: Engaging the World); ENG 108 (Composition I); and ENG 109 (Composition II).

Andrew Silver

Page Morton Hunter Associate Professor

Office: Willingham 305
Office telephone: 478.301.2564
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Silver was born in the Bronx, New York, and grew up a few minutes south of the city in North Jersey, then considered the armpit of the nation. He earned a B.A. in Religion, with a minor in English, from The George Washington University (1991); and Ph.D. in English from Emory University (1997). He came to Mercer in 1998.

Areas of interest include 19th-century American Literature, Southern literature, religion and literature, drama, and Russian literature

Silver regularly teaches FYS 101 & 102, Christianity and Literature, Introduction to American Literature, Introduction to Drama, American Renaissance, Realism and Naturalism, Modern Drama, Contemporary Drama, Southern Literature to 1945, and English capstone. He dreams of teaching on the sitcom from The Honeymooners to South Park, and on graphic novels and comic books

Silver has written two plays, Combustible/Burn and The Disciples, both of which have been produced and staged at Mercer's Backdoor Theatre. Publications include Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor, 1830-1930 (LSU Press, 2006), and an essay on "Pluralism at a Baptist University"; in addition, he was one of the editors of The Mercer Reader. Presentations include Mercer's 2007 Baccalaureate Address and a Georgia Public Broadcasting interview on sex trafficking.

Silver was selected as Georgia's Professor of the Year (2003), his play Combustible/Burn was nominated for Georgia Book of the Year, and he was nominated for Daddy of the Year.

Anna Silver

Associate Professor

Office: Groover 210
Office telephone: 478.301.5641
Email

Born in Swarthmore, PA, she received a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from Haverford College. Silver's undergraduate thesis examined The Lowell Offering, a 19th century literary journal written and edited by women working in the Lowell textile mills. After graduating, She taught English for a year in a Mississippi public high school as a member of the Mississippi Teacher Corps, and then spent a year working in the National Geographic Society library in Washington, D.C. She missed the classroom and decided to return to graduate school at Emory University, where she earned a Ph.D. in English literature with a specialization in Victorian literature and additional interests in children’s literature, women’s studies, and poetry. Since then, she has been lucky enough to teach at Mercer (since 2000) and spend her days reading and talking about literature.

She is married to fellow Mercer English professor Andrew Silver; they have one son, Noah, who enjoys visiting Jack Tarver library and the UC with his parents. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her family, reading, writing poetry, being a member of St. Francis Episcopal church, and doing yoga.

Among the courses that Silver regularly teaches at Mercer are FYS, Children’s Literature, Study of Fiction, Survey of British Literature, Victorian Poetry and Prose, Images of Women in Literature, Modern Poetry, Multicultural Women Writers, and Feminist Theory.

Silver has published a book of literary criticism, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge UP) and has a book of poetry, The Ninety Third Name of God, forthcoming (Louisiana State UP). She has also published poetry in numerous journals, including Image, Christianity and Literature, The Christian Century, The Anglican Theological Review, Crab Orchard Review, and many others. In academic journals, she has published essays on Christina Rossetti’s poetry, the Victorian children’s writer Lucy Lane Clifford, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and the film The Stepford Wives. An essay about her experiences being pregnant with breast cancer is forthcoming in A Cup of Comfort for Breast Cancer Survivors.