On behalf of Assoc. Dir. Nicholas Taylor and the rest of CRDM‘s Program Committee (Profs. Ingraham, Jameson, Burgess, and Johnston), it is my pleasure to announce that Dept. of English faculty Zachary Beare and John Morillo are the newest members of CRDM’s core faculty. Few of you will know Profs. Beare and Morillo well — this is Zach’s first year at State, and John has only recently been making direct connections with our program; so, I’m including short bios for both of them.
Congratulations to both Zach and John!
Assistant Professor of English Zachary Beare
Zachary Beare is an Assistant Professor of English and the Associate Director of First-Year Writing here at NC State. Zach graduated with his PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in May of 2017. During his time at Nebraska, Zach served as the Associate Director of Composition and as the Associate Director of the Writing Center, and before coming to Nebraska for his doctoral work, Zach spent several years directing the Writing Center and teaching at the University of Washington-Tacoma. Zach’s research centers on teacher and scholar development, and he is especially interested in how scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition “story” the discipline, how they construct narratives about their teaching, their students, and their research on social media, digital platforms, and in other nontraditional spaces of disciplinary knowledge-making. Zach’s other research interests include theories of affect and emotion; issues of embodiment; and feminist and queer rhetorical and pedagogical practices. Zach’s work has appeared in College Composition and Communication and theJournal of Cultural Research, among other locations. Outside of the university, Zach enjoys hiking and the outdoors, loves to cook and is a bit of a foodie, and watches obscene amounts of television.
Associate Professor of English John Morillo
My research areas include eighteenth-century and romantic literature and culture, especially the relationship between neoclassicism and romanticism, including different modes of memory in each of these literary periods. I have worked on the history and theory of emotions and the development of the idea of class. I am interested in the somewhat neglected genres of pastoral and georgic, and in literary and critical theories of many kinds, with some expertise in early Marx and Lacan. Most recently, I have turned my focus to animal studies as a way to explore the European cultural roots of posthumanism. My new book, just out from Delaware/Rowman and Littlefield, is entitled The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660-1800: Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin. It recovers a dynamic discourse of animals in literature, religion, and philosophy wherein definitions of being human and ethical were shifting and caught between a desire for greater kindness to animals, and a fear of too much kinship with them.
-Dr. Rieder