Adjunct and Visiting Faculty

Michael Burdon received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and has since taught at the University of Rhode Island and the Community College of Rhode Island, where he currently teaches composition, creative and screenplay writing, and a variety of literature classes. His fiction has been published in the Journals Matter and Boneshaker.

Rebecca Karni Rebecca Karni completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UCLA, earned a postdoctoral research fellowship, and was a visiting postdoctoral scholar in Stanford University’s Departments of English and Comparative Literature. Her teaching and research interests include 20th- and 21st-century global Anglophone, world, British, American, Asian British and Asian American, Japanese, Asian Diasporic, and French/Francophone literatures; the novel; narrative and literary theory; global film and visual culture; translation; aesthetics and ethics; affect theory; and ecocritical approaches to the study of literature, film, and culture. Her recent publications have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro, and Kazuo Ishiguro (Twenty-First Century Perspectives). She is currently completing a book-length study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction in a world literary context.

Diane Quaglia Beltran (Ph.D., Rhetorics, Communications, & Information Design, Clemson University) or Prof. QB, as her students call her, has taught a variety of writing and rhetorics courses included First-Year Writing, Genre-based Writing, and Technical Writing. She was selected in 2017 to be Clemson University’s Visiting Scholar at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, were she focused on critical theory & philosophy. She has numerous presentations in the US and Europe about the instruction of writing, theory and application of rhetorical interpretation in writing courses. Her current research seeks to bridge understanding of rhetorics and cultural memory in an effort to expand cultural-material rhetoric’s role in public presentation and interpretation of memorial texts.

Christopher Yates is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Brown University, where he reads early modern poetry and drama. He has taught literature and writing at both Brown and Providence College. Currently, he is working on a dissertation which considers the figure of the “hoarder” in its various manifestations across the Renaissance stage and page — from popular icons of greed or miserliness to less obvious “hoarder” figures like bankers, usurers, idolators, encyclopedia compilers, chroniclers, jailers, “blocking” characters, numismatists, antiquarians, art collectors, and list-makers.