Faculty
Department Chair
Ana Raquel Rojas specializes in Decadent and Victorian Literature, with an emphasis on feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.
- Cornell University, PhD
- Cornell University, MA
- University of California, Irvine, BA
- Decadent literature
- Representations of feminine sexuality in late-nineteenth-century fiction
Program Coordinator
Kimberly Garrett has worked for over 24 years at the University of San Francisco. She has worked as a Program Assistant in the Department of English, the Honors Program in the Humanities, the Peace Review Journal, the MFA in Writing Program, and the Comparative Literature and Culture. From 2021-2024 she served as a Program Assistant Lead, ably managing 2 diverse teams of fellow PAs and creating a professional development training and retreat calendar. She is an USF alumna, having graduated with...
- University of San Francisco, BA in Politics and History, 2000
- Administrative support
- Event planning
- Creative & administrative technology
Full-Time Faculty
- University of Massachusetts, Amherst, PhD in English, 1993
- University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA in English, 1989
- Pacific Lutheran University, English and Communication, BA in English, 1983
- Intersectional feminism
- African American literature
- Native American literature
- Jewish American literature
- Modernism
- Early 20th century women's journalism
- Critical pedagogy
Eileen Fung is the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of San Francisco. Provost Eileen has dedicated over 26 years to USF, including significant time in academic leadership. She is responsible for the university’s five schools, libraries, academic affairs, enrollment management, online programs, international relations, and diversity and community outreach for the university’s 10,000 students, 1,000 faculty, and 1,000 staff.
Provost Fung was awarded the James...
- PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara
Christina Garcia Lopez holds a PhD in American Studies with a portfolio in Mexican American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her BA in English Literature at the University of North Texas and an MA in American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds. Previous to joining USF, she held a lectureship at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her teaching and research interests include: Latinx and Chicanx literature; Ethnic...
- BA, English Literature, University of North Texas
- MA, American Literature and Culture, University of Leeds
- PhD, American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Chloe Hunt is Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. She received her Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies from the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. She specializes in Black speculative fiction and contemporary Black literature and culture. Her dissertation, Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Restructuring of Blackness, explores speculative fiction as a critical site of theorization where...
- University of Massachusetts Amherst, PhD in Afro-American Studies, 2022
- Black studies
- Gender and sexuality studies
- Black feminism
- Critical theory
Dr. Omar F. Miranda is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He received his PhD in English and American Literature from New York University and specializes in the literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on their transnational, global, and diasporic dimensions. His current scholarly book project investigates the cultural infrastructures and obscured dynamics that underwrote the rise of transnational celebrity culture during the...
- New York University, PhD in English and American Literature
- Boston College, MA in English Literature
- University of Miami (Florida), BA in German, Political Science, and English
Dean Rader has authored or co-authored thirteen books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was published in April of 2023 and was named by Book Riot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry. His work has been supported...
- State University of New York - Binghamton, PhD in Comparative Literature, 1995
- Poetry
- American Indian studies
- Art & visual culture
Susan Steinberg is the author of four books of fiction: Machine (Graywolf Press), Spectacle (Graywolf Press), Hydroplane (FC2), and The End of Free Love (FC2).
The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a United States Artists Fellowship, Professor Steinberg has also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, The...
- MFA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
- BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art
Part-Time Faculty
- UC Davis, PhD in Comparative Literature, 2010
- San Francisco State College, MA in Comparative Literature, 2004
- American University of Paris, BA in Comparative Literature, 1998
- Comparative literature
- Feminist and gender studies
- The Novel
- Trauma
- Literary representations of war and conflict
Peter Kline teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and with Stanford University's Master of Liberal Arts program.
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House, James Merrill House, Marble House Project, Artsmith Orcas Island, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse...
- Northwestern University, B.A.
- University of Virginia, M.F.A.
- Stanford University, Wallace Stegner Fellowship
Sara Marinelli grew up in Italy, where she received her PhD in Anglophone Literatures from the University of Rome, "La Sapienza." After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at UC Santa Cruz, she decided to make the Bay Area her home, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.
She is a fiction and nonfiction writer, a Teaching Artist at the San Francisco Opera, and the 2024-2025 Brown Handler Writer in Residence at the San Francisco Public Library. Sara is also...
- San Francisco State University, MFA in Creative Writing
- The University of Rome, "La Sapienza," PhD in Literatures in English
- Literary studies
- Creative writing
- Italian studies
Natacha is an award-winning storyteller, media producer, and educator. She strives to use text, film, sound, and live performance to deepen our understanding of the world we live in and foster action.
Her documentary work has appeared at the MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as on National Geographic, NBC NY, and Link TV. Her radio work has appeared on public radio affiliates nationally and locally. She is currently the showrunner for Adonde Media’s acclaimed Duolingo...
Faculty Emeritus
Carolyn Brown received her PhD in English from the University of California–Davis. Her specialization is Shakespeare and Renaissance / Early Modern literature, from a feminist, psychoanalytic, historicist, and /or political perspective. She has published in several anthologies on Shakespeare and the following journals: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900; Texas Studies in Literature and Language; Studies in Philology; American Imago; Literature and Psychology; Clio: A Journal of Literature...
- PhD, University of California, Davis
- Shakespeare and psychoanalytic theory
Alan Heineman taught Introduction to Literary Studies; Period Course (19th and 20th Century American Lit); Special Topics in Literature (Faulkner); Honors in Humanities Seminar. He has written a textbook, Writing Term Papers (with Hulon Willis) (Harcourt Brace), which went into three editions. He’s also published scholarly articles and reviews of contemporary fiction. He has been Senior Editor of the San Francisco Review of Books, and written more than 100 articles, columns, and reviews of...
Patricia Liggins Hill earned her PhD in English from Stanford. She is the general editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. She has also published articles on Etheridge Knight and Francis Watkins Harper. She teaches African American Literature and curates student involvement in the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco.
- PhD, Stanford University
- African American Literature