Please join the department in welcoming these new faculty members for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Caren Beilin

Assistant Professor

Caren Beilin writes at an intersection of New Narrative, Feminism, and Narrative Medicine. She is the author of Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, 2022), winner of the Vermont Book Award for Fiction, Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). Her latest novel, SEA, POISON— a serious comedy about gynecological malpractice–is forthcoming from New Directions in 2025.

Michael Druffel

Lecturer

Michael Druffel (he/him/his) is an Ohio native who is happy to return to the Buckeye state after working and studying in New York City for ten years. Michael got his PhD in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY (‘23). His dissertation, titled Emancipatory and Retributive Labor, explores how abolitionists in the US and Caribbean appropriated capitalist definitions of labor to emphasize the agency of the enslaved and how enslavers attempted to redefine labor to deny enslaved people’s humanity. Michael’s scholarship has been published or forthcoming in The Nautilus, Structured Equality, and Writing Things Worth Reading. He’s taught literature and writing courses in both the CUNY system and Columbia University on topics such as abolition, medical humanities, and urban studies since 2014. Michael also worked in writing and communication centers at the Graduate Center, CUNY, Baruch College, and the Columbia School of Social Work.

Chiyuma Elliott

Professor

Chiyuma (Chi) Elliott‘s scholarly work focuses on poetry and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the author of The Rural Harlem Renaissance (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) and four books of poetry, most recently Blue in Green (Phoenix Poets series, University of Chicago, 2021). She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, Cave Canem, the Stegner program at Stanford, and the Vermont Studio Center. Chi is co-PI of the African American Intellectual Traditions Initiative and co-host of the podcast Old-School, which celebrates the intersections of African American studies and the classics. A high school career aptitude test said she should be a nuclear or petroleum engineer, but Chi is happiest when reading and writing poems, or slogging through documents from the 1920s and 1930s (because poetry and historical research sometimes feel like portals to other times and places).

Steven Justice

Distinguished Visiting Professor

Steven Justice is Professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1987 to 2021, chairing the department (for his sins) in the last few years. He is author of Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (U of California Press, 1994), Adam Usk’s Secret (IU of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), and some essays. While at Case he will be working on volume 3 of the Penn Commentary of Piers Plowman, begun by his late Berkeley colleague Anne Middleton.

Kevin Lucas

Lecturer

I received a PhD in comparative literature from Emory University in December of 2019. At Emory, I taught writing-intensive courses in several departments. One seminar introduced students to religious, sociological, and literary understandings of community, preparing students to research contemporary social groups.

After leaving Emory, I taught writing, world literature, and interdisciplinary studies as a lecturer in the Department of English and World Languages at Augusta University. Most recently, I was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. My first-year seminars exposed students to critiques of progress developed by philosophers, social critics, environmental activists, and other thinkers.

As a researcher, I have published in Religion and the Arts, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. My dissertation explained why most leftwing thinkers and artists have disavowed tragedy and tragic mentalities. From there, I traced an alternative tradition including figures like Andrei Platonov, Jean Genet, and Amiri Baraka, all of whom wrote tragedies that alienated them from socialist political movements. I’ve also served as a researcher for the Letters of Samuel Beckett for more than a decade, and I am currently on the advisory committee that maintains an online database of the author’s letters.

Ben Mauk

Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism and Media Writing, Associate Professor

Ben Mauk is a writer and filmmaker. For more than a decade, he has worked as a freelance journalist based in Berlin, Germany, reporting on migration, nationalism, and the politics of borders and peripheries. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. His first book, The Fugitive World, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ben is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning journalist whose work has been anthologized three times in the Best American series and twice nominated for the National Magazine Award. His other honors include two Online Journalism Awards, a Deadline Club Award, and the inaugural Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism. He is a 2024 National Fellow at New America and a 2023-24 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.

His first documentary film, Reeducated, is part of “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State,” a multimedia New Yorker project co-developed with Sam Wolson on life inside a Chinese reeducation camp. The film won jury prizes from SXSW and NewImages and has screened at more than 30 festivals.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied fiction, Ben co-founded the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and served as director from 2017 to 2024.

Xixin Qiu

Lecturer

Xixin Qiu received his PhD in Applied Linguistics from Penn State University. He is passionate about bridging the theory-practice gap and making accessible theory-informed pedagogies to multilingual writing at the university level. Currently, he is interested in implementing concept learning, corpus tools and other new technologies in his writing instruction. Some of his recent work can be found in TESOL Quarterly, English for Specific Purposes, and Journal of English for Academic Purposes. When he is not working, you will likely find him in a squash court or trekking through nearby mountains.

Amy Sattler

Lecturer

As a graduate student, I studied early modern literature and wrote a dissertation on the masque genre’s evolution across the seventeenth century. My interest in genre, and its generative and communicative power, have informed my teaching of literature and academic writing as well as my ventures into linguistics and technical writing. I’ve been teaching for twenty years, most recently at Penn State. At Case, I will be teaching an academic inquiry seminar on the pursuit of happiness. The course will explore research from across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, examining forms of inquiry within the disciplines as well as asking larger questions about how we define and pursue happiness.