Department Faculty Bios

Assistant Professor of English, specializes in Latino / Latina literature of the United States, and works more generally within cultural geography and literature of the Americas. He is also interested in environmental and regional studies and popular culture, including African-American music. All of these interests appear in his courses in U.S. literature and creative writing.

His recent book The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006) takes an interdisciplinary, ecocritical approach to Midwestern writers such as Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison. He is currently completing an edited collection of essays titled Interior Borderlands:Writings on Latino/a Literature of Chicago and the Midwest and has published many articles on American literature, as well as poems, works of creative nonfiction, and interviews with major contemporary poets.

Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies, specializing in film history and theory, disability studies, and feminist approaches to popular culture. Her other interests include modern drama, contemporary fiction, and the horror genre. She frequently teaches ENG 110 College Writing I; ENG 200 Literature and Human Experience (on disability in literature and film); ENG 220 Women and Popular Culture; and ENG 491 Literature and Film.

Her publications include several articles on representations of disability in film, such as “Touching Scenes and Finishing Touches: Blindness in the Slasher Film” (in Christopher Sharrett's Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, Wayne State University Press, 1999) and “The Noble Ruined Body: Blindness and Visual Prosthetics in Three Science Fiction Films” (in Christopher Smit and Anthony Enns' Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, University Press of America, 2001). In 2000, the University of Michigan Press published a collection of essays, poetry, and fiction which she co-edited: Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture.

Crutchfield received a 2001-2002 Faculty Research Grant to carry out research for a book-length study of media representations of Helen Keller, tentatively titled Miracle Workings: Constructing “Helen Keller” in Multiple Media, 1888-1962.

With Sandi Krajewski, Crutchfield co-organized the Women's Studies Department's Multicultural Women's Film Series for 2001-2002.

Associate Professor; UW-LaCrosse (1984-present) Committees: Athletics, Library, General Education, Graduate Studies, Legislative Affairs, Racquet Advisory (campus newspaper) Search & Screen: Library Director, four hirings for English Department (chair of three searches); requested committee appointment for most recent searches for Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, & Dean of CLS

Scholarship & Publication

•  publication/presentation of more than a hundred articles, with former emphasis in major 19th-century American writers, more recently Wisconsin/Midwestern writers and literary culture (detailed bibliography up-to-date as of mid-1990s, in department files for promotion & tenure)

• associate editor & writer for Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume One: The Authors, Indiana U P, 2001

• assigned chapters for “The Chautauqua” and “Journalism in the Midwest” for DML, Volume two

• currently vice president (conference planner) for The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, a three-day conference of scholarship, poetry and prose readings, annually presented at Michigan State University