College of Arts and Sciences

Daniel Hipp

Daniel Hipp received his B.A. from the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, his M.A. in English from Villanova University, and his Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University in 1998. Since 2000, Hipp has been teaching courses at Aurora University in composition, poetry, the introduction to literature, historical surveys of British literature, the history of the English language, and comparative literature. His areas of specialization include poetics and the British and American modernist periods. He is the author of a forthcoming book from McFarland Publishers adapted from his dissertation which studies the poetry of three British soldier-poets of the First World War, and he has given presentations on poets such as Wilfred Owen, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Frost.

Richard Westphal
Professor of English
Chair, Fine Arts division of the College of Arts and Sciences
630-844-4881
rwestpha@aurora.edu

Richard Westphal earned an A.B. at Boston College, an M.Phil. At Yale University, and a D.A. at Illinois State University. He has been a member of the Aurora University English Department since 1971. Over the last three-and-a-half decades, he has, to the best of his recollection, taught freshman and advanced composition courses, courses in British and American literature, contemporary world literature, the novel, poetry, semantics, and grammar. He introduced film studies courses into the curriculum and developed a course built around a week's theatre-going in London. Starting in the mid '70s, Westphal regularly appeared in student and faculty-staff drama productions on campus (a practice resumed since the renovation of the Perry Theatre) and, more recently, participated in productions staged by a professional theatre company in residence at the university.

Patrick Dunn
Assistant Professor of English
pdunn@aurora.edu
630-844-5417

Patrick Dunn has a B.A. from the University of Dubuque and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University. In addition toteaching literature and composition courses at NIU, he has taught composition for Waubonsee Community College and reading improvement and GED preparation for Kishwaukee Community College. His research interests include 20th Century British and American literature, poetry, stylistics, and oral literature. His dissertation was a stylistic analysis of linguistic features of orality in Allen Ginsberg's poetry. Dunn also writes poetry, fiction, and commercial nonfiction.

Sara Elliott

Sara Elliott has a B.A. in English from Wheaton College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Northern Illinois University. Her literary studies and research have focused on American literature, and her dissertation, titled "Dead Bodies, Burned Letters, and Burial Grounds" examines the nature of regionalism in contemporary southern fiction. She has presented at a variety of conferences, including a paper on Wim Wenders' film adaptation of The Scarlet Letter at the Annual Conference on Literature and Film and a paper on the postmodern grotesque in southern fiction at the International Conference on the Hideous and the Sublime. Elliott teaches courses on first-year composition, creative writing, American literature, and interdisciplinary studies.

Donovan Gwinner
Assistant Professor of English
630-844-5228
dgwinner@aurora.edu

Donovan Gwinner teaches composition, literature, and interdisciplinary studies. He earned a B.A. in Arts and Letters at the University of Oregon and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature at the University of Arizona. In addition to having taught as a graduate student at the University of Arizona, Gwinner has taught writing, literature, and humanities courses at Portland Community College (OR), Clark College (WA), Washington State University at Vancouver, Chemeketa Community College (OR), and the University of Oregon. Particular areas of interest include research-based writing, multi-ethnic literatures, and twentieth-century literature and culture.

Julie Hipp
Pro-rata Assistant Professor of English
630-844-4883
jhipp@aurora.edu

Julie Hipp earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame. She was awarded her Ph.D. inEnglish from Vanderbilt University in 2001. From 2000 to 2003 Julie taught English at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. Since 2003 she has been at AU and held a variety of positions here, including Secondary Education Liaison between the College of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences. She currently teaches composition and interdisciplinary courses in addition to the English secondary methods class. Her literary interests include British literature from the Romantic and Victorian eras.   

Jarrett Neal
Pro-rata Instructor of English

Jarrett Neal joined the faculty at Aurora University in 2006. The following year he was named a pro rata instructor in the English department, in addition to working in the Center for Teaching and Learning as a writing specialist. He was awarded a BA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. His graduate thesis, a novel titled /A Dangerous Man/, is a 2007 semi-finalist for the William Faulkner- William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

Heidi Rosenberg
Assistant Professor of English
Assistant Director of Center for Teaching and Learning
630-844-4934
hrosenbe@aurora.edu

Heidi Rosenberg received her B.A. from State University of New York at Binghamton in English and Creative Writing. She received her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Ph.D. in fiction from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Rosenberg joins Aurora University this fall after teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Barron County, where she taught creative writing and composition.  Rosenberg’s teaching interests include first-year composition, advanced composition including advanced academic writing, creative writing (both poetry and fiction), business and professional communications, and nineteenth-century British literature. She splits her teaching, research, and writing interests between creative writing and composition and is interested in how better bridges may be built between the two disciplines. Rosenberg is the 2005 winner of Pearl magazine’s Fiction Prize for her short story “The Weight of It.” Additionally, she has also published fiction and poetry in The Oyez Review, Sistersong, 5 A.M, Pearl, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  She has also been an artist in residence at the Ragdale Foundation, and she is a past recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission grant for fiction.