Welcoming New Faculty Members: Meet Dr. Heneks, Dr. Manes, Dr. Crider, and Dr. Thielman

The Texas A&M Department of English proudly welcomes four new faculty members this fall. They were kind enough to answer a few questions to help their students and other faculty members to get to know them.

Dr. Grace Heneks is a new lecturer for the English department. She received her PhD from Texas A&M (whoop!) in May 2021. In addition to her work, she also enjoys running and spending time with her husband and two dogs.

Q: What is your focus area within English?

My focus area within the field of English is contemporary African American and multiethnic American literature with an emphasis in humor and critical race studies.

Q: What is your favorite class to teach so far?

My favorite class to teach so far has been ENGL 362: US Latinx Literature.

Q: What excites you most about getting to teach in person?

Seeing my students!

Q: What's a fun fact about yourself?

I'm a twin. My twin brother, Andrew, is only 24 minutes older than me. We weren't close growing up but we're super close now.

Q: What are you reading right now?

In addition to the reading I've assigned for class, I'm currently reading three books:

• Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Andy Cohen, which is about the famous 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Carrie Buck was forcibly sterilized after giving birth to a daughter Vivian whom she conceived after she was raped by the nephew of her adoptive mother. 
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova: It's a novel about two academics in pursuit of their missing friend and fellow academic, all of whom become embroiled in the myth of Dracula/Vlad Tepes who they believe may still be alive. It's a wonderful mix of vampire lore, mystery, travelogue, and history. 
• Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby: This is a new release and I'm actually listening to this on audiobook. It's a revenge plot that centers on two ex-convicts, one black and one white, who decide to go after the person/s who killed their sons, Isaiah and Derek, who were married.

 

Dr. Christopher Manes is a new lecturer for the English department. He was originally born in Louisiana, but he has been living in Dallas for the last eighteen years. He writes and publishes documentary poetry. 

Q: What is your focus area within English? 

My background is in studies in literature and history, mostly American Lit and poetry, but my dissertation and my research emphasis in college included African refugees or the transnational history of refugees and genocide holocaust studies. 

Q: What is your favorite class so far? 

At Texas A&M, my focus is English composition and rhetoric which I must say is not necessarily a research area but that has been an area that I like teaching because I get to know more about the students and topics that truly in some cases I don't know much about. Whereas if I was teaching any of the courses in American Lit, I'd be hearing myself talk a lot and I really like learning new things. I really like teaching English composition and rhetoric. I think the assumption at a university is you're teaching an area that you are an expert in. I'm educated in composition and rhetoric, but, again, if I'm an expert, then all I'm doing is talking to myself. I really like learning about what students are interested in and their perspectives. 

Q: What excites you most about getting to teach in person? 

How I teach online and how I teach in person, much of it has been the same. When I taught online at my prior college, we still had to meet synchronously online, so everything I'd do with the students would still be things I do with them online. The difference though is that when you are in person, you just get a little more body language so I can tell more when a student is really focused on that particular thing. When their cameras are off online you aren't really sure what they are doing. So are they focused on the task at hand? I can far more easily see if it is just that they're thinking or do they not understand something? Those are the kinds of things that you can't tell easily online. 

Q: What's a fun fact about yourself? 

One fun fact students may not know—it may or may not be clear in a classroom setting—is that I really do like to laugh, like I'm not very serious. I make sure not to take myself too seriously, and so, of course, you do want to be careful with humor in the classroom so I don't know if students would know I'm funny, but I really do like to laugh. 

Q: What are you reading right now? 

I'm reading a few things actually. I'm reading The Traveling Queen, which is written by one of our professors here, Michael Collins. It's in the bookcase in [the Liberal Arts and Humanities Building], so I just got his book so I haven't begun to read it. The other book--I usually read several at a time--is a book of African poetry that was compiled by someone from Uganda. I'm just reading to give my opinion. I was asked by the editor to look at it. And the third book I'm reading is a book of poetry by Joy Harjo, and it's a collection of Native American poems called Where the Light of the World is Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. Joy Harjo is the Poet Laureate of the United States, and she is from Oklahoma, and she has collected quite a large amount of poetry, much of it not published, or widely published. These poems are from poets who have died in some cases, so it's really an interesting work. 

Dr. Jason Crider is an assistant professor in the English department. He recently finished his PhD at the University of Florida. Before that, he lived in South Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. 

Q: What is your focus area within English? 

Broadly speaking, I would say my focus is in digital rhetoric and technical writing. More specifically, my research consists of two major trajectories. 

First, I do a lot of work with mixed-media—digital media that moves beyond the desktop and integrates with the "real world," attaches to our bodies, participates in space. Technologies like augmented reality, wearables, and location-based devices create new rhetorical paradigms that demand new bodily dispositions and offer new opportunities for participating in networked space. For example, as a way of modeling this, I created a project called Disney Death Tour, which uses an augmented reality application that works within the space of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, serving as a kind of emplaced countertour of the park. 

My second research trajectory is focused on what I call prosthetic media, or digital media that integrates with or becomes the body. I use my experiences hacking two of my prosthetic devices as a cross section for exploring digital and health rhetorics, technical communication, digital activism, and disability studies. Ultimately, I'm trying to demonstrate what practices of embodied tinkering have to offer our current (and, in my opinion, limited) conception of digital literacy. 

Q: What is your favorite class so far? 

We're only about a week in, but I'm already really loving my Modern Rhetorical Theory class. It's a class with so much urgency to it. We're in a moment saturated with messaging—advertisements, conspiracy theories, social media, news outlets, etc. Being rhetorically equipped doesn't mean being able to understand what all these things mean, but rather being able to diagnose how they work. This class is an opportunity to explore some of the major theories for doing this kind of diagnostic work; it's the kind of stuff you can take with you when you leave the classroom and apply to nearly any aspect of your life. 

Q: What's a fun fact about yourself? 

This one's hard. I like vintage bicycles and making hot sauce. I'm color blind. I collect vinyl records and lost keys. I don't know if any of these things are fun, but they are, in fact, facts. 

Q: What are you reading right now? 

I'm reading a bunch of stuff right now. I just picked up Metabolizing Capital by Christian J. Pulver and Writing Futures: Collaborative, Algorithmic, Autonomous by Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen for a thing I'm writing on artificial intelligence. [I'm] getting into old school cybernetic theory too, like Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom. I also just started Jenny Rice and Casey Boyle's Inventing Place: Lonestar Rhetorics—a Texas-flavored rhetoric collection I've been putting off for too long but figure I should start now that I'm living in Texas. My weekend read right now is Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, probably my favorite living author. 

Dr. Frances Thielman is a new lecturer for the English department. She just graduated from Texas A&M (whoop!) with her PhD! She has a shiny new frame for her diploma. 

Q: What is your focus area within English? 

My dissertation was about representations of trash in Victorian literature, and I got to learn a lot about the public health reforms and how they managed their municipal waste in 19th century Britain. I had a section about Wall-E at the very end to make a connection to the present day. I've also taught a lot of technical writing and worked at the department of Civil Engineering for a year developing the writing component for the introductory course of the new Environmental Engineering major. 

Q: What is your favorite class so far? 

I really enjoy teaching the British Literature survey. 

Q: What excites you most about getting to teach in person? 

I really missed the energy you get from seeing people's faces without a screen between you and watching the "a-ha" moment when a student understands something. I'm enjoying getting to experience that again. 

Q: What's a fun fact about yourself? 

I'm a huge Doctor Who fan, and I spent lockdown watching every episode, from 1963 to the present. 

Q: What are you reading right now? 

Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames by Lara Maiklem and A Cultural History of the Tarot by Helen Farley.