Faculty

Eric Caldwell
Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
B.A., University of Iowa
M.A., University of Illinois, Chicago
Ph.D., University of Virginia
ecaldwell@sbc.edu

Professor Caldwell teaches Romantic and Victorian British literature, with a particular emphasis upon the lyric and the novel. His dissertation, The Poetics of Renaissance Subjectivity, explores the ways in which Renaissance writers conceive of subjectivity as a distinctly erotic and specular phenomenon. He is presently completing two articles — one that explores the erotic underpinnings of Richard III's rather disastrous tragedy, and another that examines Augustine's conception of scripture as a specular instrument that redeems the gazer by offering him two very different images: an image of who he is, and one of who he ought to be.

Seth Clabough
Director of the Academic Resource Center and Assistant Professor of English
B.A., Randolph-Macon College
M.A., University of South Carolina
Ph.D., University of Wales, Aberystwyth
sclabough@sbc.edu

Professor Clabough is an assistant editor with The James Dickey Review and a writer of published fiction, poetry and scholarship. Some of his recent work appears in places like New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Fjord's Review, Citron Review, Aesthetica: the Arts & Culture Magazine (UK), Magma Poetry (UK), The Chaffey Review, Sixers Review, Oak Bend Review and Women's Studies (Taylor & Francis Group). In addition to creative writing and scholarship, he is engaged in research-based projects focusing on Writing Center management, teaching composition and the use of technology in the classroom.

Carter Hailey
Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
A.B., The College of William and Mary
M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia
chailey@sbc.edu

Professor Hailey teaches Medieval literature, including courses on Chaucer, Arthurian narrative, Middle English romance, the History of the English Language, and Old English language and literature. He has held several research fellowships, and publishes on the intersection of book and manuscript history with literary culture from the 14th through the 18th centuries, most recently contributing to the first critical edition of the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea (d. 1720). He is the designer/builder of the Hailey’s COMET portable optical collator, a primary tool for critical editors, and is a former Garlic King of Virginia.

Tony Lilly
Assistant Professor of English
A.A., B.A., Simon's Rock College
M.A., Ph.D., Tufts University
alilly@sbc.edu

Professor Lilly teaches 16th- and 17th-century British literature, including Shakespeare. His research interests include religion and sexuality in Early Modern English literature and the construction of the gendered subject through language. His dissertation examined the influence of confession on gender and subjectivity in English Renaissance prose and drama. He is currently working on psychoanalytical approaches to Renaissance drama.

Cheryl Mares
Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor of English
Chair of the Department
B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder
M.A., Ph.D., Princeton University
mares@sbc.edu

Professor Mares teaches modern and contemporary fiction and poetry, including post-colonial literature. Her research interests involve connections between literature, history and politics in contemporary fiction and in works by modernist writers, especially Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, on whom she has published a number of articles. 

Lee Piepho
Sara Shallenberger Brown Research Professor of English
B. A., Kenyon College
M.A., Columbia University
Ph.D., University of Virginia
lpiepho@sbc.edu

Professor Piepho, who retired from teaching in the spring of 2005, taught courses in Renaissance literature and culture. The recipient of several awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a senior research fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, he is the author of numerous scholarly articles and two books, most recently Holofernes' Mantuan, a study of Renaissance humanism in England, published in 2001. At present he is at work on a series of studies of transnational cultural links between Germany and early modern Britain. At Sweet Briar, Professor Piepho twice received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Student Government Association, in 1991 and 2000.  He has recently written "A Sweet Briar Miscellany."

Marcia Robertson
Associate Professor of English
B.A., Augustana College
M.A., Ph.D, Washington University
robertson@sbc.edu

Professor Robertson teaches American literature, including African-American and Native American writers. She also teaches courses in autobiography, nature writing and, most recently, speculative fiction. Her research interests are in regional literature, especially the literature of the South. She writes extensively for Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.