Faculty Showcase

Kyle William Bishop is the author of both American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (McFarland, 2010) and How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking Dead in the 21st Century (McFarland, 2015) and has co-edited the collections The Written Dead: Essays on the Literary Zombie (McFarland, 2017) and The Post-Zombie: Essays on the Evolving Undead (McFarland, 2025). He is currently editing a collection of essays on unfaithful adaptations of Frankenstein for McFarland.

His recent publications include:

  • “Therapeutic Gothic Harmony: The Ghosts of Counterfeit Relationships in Fun Home.” American Gothic Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2025.
  • “You Are Who You Eat: iZombie, Passing, and the Role of Food in Modern Zombie Television.” With Charla Strosser. The Post Zombie: The Current and Future State of the Walking Dead, edited by C. Wylie Lenz, Angela Tenga, and Kyle William Bishop, McFarland, 2025.
  • “What a Tangled Web [Adaptors] Weave: iZombie as Multi-Nodal Adaptation.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 1, Winter 2025.
  • “The Subaltern Brides of Frankenstein: Liberating Shelley’s Unrealized Female Creature on Screen.” Creolizing Frankenstein, edited by Michael Paradiso-Michau, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2024, pp. 83–99.
  • “(Un)Death of the Father: Self-Sacrificing Paternity in Modern Zombie Narratives.” The Anthropocene and the Undead, edited by Simon Bacon, Lexington Books, 2022, pp. 17–32.

Nicole Dib has an article titled "Who Benefits from Your Ignorance? Visualizing Black (Super)Heroism and Refuting Respectability Politics in Victor LaValle’s Destroyer" that was published in the Summer 2024 issue of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. She also has an article titled "The Maze Below, The Journey Above: Hernan Diaz’s 'In the Distance' and the Conversation of Silence" which was published in the Fall 2024 issue of Literary Geographies.

In 2024 she gave two conference presentations, one titled “Gone West: John Steinbeck’s Postwar Roadside Regionalisms,” which she presented at the American Literature Association Annual Conference, and another titled “Black (Super)Heroism and Refuted Respectability Politics in Victor LaValle’s Destroyer,” which she presented at the Comics Studies Society Conference. She also co-organized two panels with her colleague Maite Urcaregui (San Jose State University) at the 2024 Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Annual Conference (PAMLA), which were titled “Transmedial Translation in Comics” & “Queer and Feminist Translations in Comics.”

She also took part in a selective NEH workshop in 2024 run by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Landmarks of American History and Culture. This week long workshop was titled “New York as Port City,” and it allowed participants to examine the historical, cultural, economic, and environmental significance of New York City’s waterfront and ports of entry. Across the week-long workshops, participants examined New York’s port history through a variety of humanities disciplines and subject areas, including public history, environmental history, literature, ethnic studies, and the oceanic humanities.

Julie McCown’s book On the Plains, and Among the Peaks: or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection was published by University Press of Colorado in 2021. Her article “Changing the AI Narrative: Embracing Defiant Optimism” was published in The Teaching Professor in 2023. She also gave a keynote speech entitled, “Beyond the Hype: How AI Transforms Writing” in January 2024 for the International Conference on Humanities Studies at Alauddin State Islamic University Makassar. Additionally, Julie McCown presented her paper "AI Associates: Figuring Out How to Work with AI in First Year Writing" at the Digital Humanities Utah conference at Utah Tech University in February 2025.

Ryan Shoemaker's second collection of short stories, The Righteous Road: Stories, is forthcoming from BCC Press in 2025.

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