California Faculty 2025

Amy Rodgers, On-site director. AB, Columbia University; PhD, University of Michigan. Associate Professor of Film, Media, and Theatre and Dean for the Senior Class, Mount Holyoke College.

Amy Rodgers is Associate Professor of Film, Media, and Theatre at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on early modern literature and culture, audience and popular culture studies, theories of adaptation, and dance studies. Among her publications are essays on the Renaissance court masque, Hindi-language cinema director Vishal Bhardwaj, Shakespeare’s history plays’ influence on HBO’s Game of Thrones, and performance genealogies that cross different communicative forms, particularly theater and dance. Her first monograph, A Monster With a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press in February of 2018. She is a co-founder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project, and, before commencing her academic career, danced with the Washington, Atlanta, and Joffrey ballet companies.

Damián Baca, BA, West Texas A&M University; MA, Northern Arizona University; PhD, Syracuse University. Professor of Mexican American Studies, University of Arizona. 

Damián Baca is Professor of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. He is author of Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (2008), and co-editor of Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE (2010), Rhetorics of Difference (2018), and Pluriversal Literacies: Tools for Perseverance and Livable Futures (2024). His 2019 publication, Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions, is Winner of the 2020 CCCC Outstanding Book Award (Edited Collection).

Michelle Burnham, BA, Trinity College, MA, PhD State University of New York at Buffalo; Professor of English at Santa Clara University.

Michelle Burnham is Professor of English at Santa Clara University where she teaches early American literature, world literature, indigenous literature, and cultural studies. She is the author of three monographs: Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific; Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System (2007); and Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature 1682-1861 (1997). She has also edited the 1767 novel The Female American (2014) and A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson (2008). She also edits the Re-Editions series at Lever Press, and is committed to recovering forgotten voices and texts from literary history.

Dennis Denisoff, BA, Simon Fraser University; PhD, McGill University. McFarlin Professor of English and Film, University of Tulsa. Recipient of the 2025 Ruth and Lillian Marino Chair, BLSE.

Dennis Denisoff works in environmental humanities, queer studies, and decadence. His two current projects are a study of the early tentacles of global environmentalism and a set of articles on trans-speciesism and weird fiction. He is the author of four monographs, three books of creative writing, seven edited works, and four co-edited works. Recent publications include Decadent Ecology: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival (Cambridge University Press 2022) and guest-edited special journal issues on “Global Decadence” (Feminist Modernist Studies, 2021) and “Scales of Decadence” (Victorian Literature and Culture, 2021). He is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Literature and the Environment (Cambridge University Press 2024).

Ruth Forman, BA, University of California at Berkeley; MFA, University of Southern California. VONA/Voices Writing Workshop.

Ruth Forman is the author of poetry collections Prayers Like Shoes, Renaissance, We Are the Young Magicians, and children’s book, Young Cornrows Callin Out the Moon.  She’s received the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, The Durfee Artist Fellowship, the NCTE Notable Book Award, and recognition by The ALA.  Ruth is a former teacher of creative writing with the University of Southern California and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley as well as a thirteen-year faculty member with the VONA/Voices program. You can learn more about her at www.ruthforman.com.

Michael Wood, BA, MA, PhD, University of Cambridge. Professor Emeritus, Princeton University. 

Michael Wood was born in Lincoln, England and educated at Cambridge. He taught at Columbia University in New York from 1966 to 1982, then returned to England and Exeter University. In 1995 he took up a post at Princeton University, where he is now Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His books include America in the Movies, Stendhal, The Magician’s Doubts, The Road to Delphi, Yeats and Violence, Alfred Hitchcock and Marcel Proust. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and a number of other publications.