Faculty
The English faculty at Guilford represent many research interests and modes of expression - from American "film noir" to the women of classical civilizations, from biographical studies to collections of poetry.
Please take a moment to meet each of these educators by clicking on their name below.
Heather Richardson Hayton -- hhayton@guilford.edu
Heather Hayton teaches early-period British and continental literature and culture. Heather was trained as a comparatist at Penn State University (go Nittany Lions!), and has taught in the Cal State University system as well. Her research focuses on communities in crisis and questions of personal responsibility and loyalty, with her co-edited collection, Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, forthcoming in the MRTS series.
Some of her favorite authors to read and teach include Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer, Dante, Malory, Shakespeare, and Milton. Originally drawn to politics and law, she found her voice and self as an undergrad at UC Davis while reading Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and has been reading "dusty old texts" ever since. She continues to be amazed at how thoroughly current such pre-modern stories of sex, violence, and political betrayal remain. Heather has been nominated twice for university teaching awards and holds a graduate student teaching award as well. She is excited to be at Guilford with her husband Chad, two children (Liz and Colin), Labrador Retriever (Echo), and manx cat (Digit), but misses the ocean in San Diego. She is looking forward to experiencing real weather.
Jim Hood - jhood@guilford.edu
Jim Hood teaches nineteenth-century British literature and environmental studies at Guilford. His research interests focus on nineteenth-century poetry and religion. Recently, he has developed courses on literature and ethics, nineteenth-century novels and film, American nature writing, and cultural constructions of wilderness. Jim received his A.B. degree from Guilford College, his master's from Yale University Divinity School, and his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His publications include Divining Desire: Tennyson and the Poetics of Transcendence (Ashgate Publishing, England, 2000); articles in Victorian Poetry, the Victorian Institutes Journal, and the Tennyson Research Bulletin; and poems in the Southern Humanities Review and The Christian Century.
Carol Hoppe - choppe@guilford.edu
After teaching English to school children in Greece, adult professionals in Munich, foreign students in public North Carolina high schools, and undergraduates at large U.S. universities, I came to Guilford and found my true teaching home. Some of my recent offerings include an FYE course on The Greeks in Love and War, first-year writing courses on identity and the search for meaning, an Historical Perspectives course called Classics Revisited, and an honors course on Greek Myth, Art, and Literature. I have also taught a cross-cultural course on Guilford's semester abroad program to Brunnenburg, where students live in a 13th-century castle, work in its vineyard, and read The Cantos with Ezra Pound's daughter. In the fall I lead groups of incoming students to the N.C. mountains on an Avanti program called "Writes of Passage" in which we keep journals about our past lives and share our hopes and fears for the coming semester.
My passions obviously include reading and discussing literature, writing as a source of self-discovery and meaning, and understanding cultural differences. Invariably, in my work with Guilford students, I find young adults who are also passionate about these areas of study. Many of them later become my teaching assistants, and we share the excitement of welcoming new groups of students to our learning community.
Jeff Jeske - jjeske@guilford.edu
Besides teaching courses in American literature, writing, journalism, and film, I am the faculty adviser to the college's student newspaper, The Guilfordian, which for each of the past three years has tied for first place nationally for best all-around newspaper in its size category in the American Scholastic Press Association's annual competition (come join us!). I am also the author of the college's online writing manual, Writing at Guilford, which you can visit at www.guilford.edu/writing_manual.
I've written articles and delivered papers on such subjects as Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, research writing, editing strategies, gender and style in language, and films such as Predator and 12 Monkeys. Books include Storied Words: The Writer's Vocabulary and Its Origins (2004) and the satiric novel The Return of the War Pigs (2002).
Some fun facts: As a member of the Los Angeles Conservancy and the Hollywood Heritage Association, I gave architectural tours of Los Angeles and its movie palaces (and was the caretaker of Gary Cooper's star on Hollywood Boulevard) . . . I was a founding coach of the UCLA Special Olympics team . . . I have won Guilford's Excellence in Teaching award twice . . . I am the accordionist for Die Quakerhosen, Guilford's oom-pah band . . . I have a brick in my office from the Yellow Brick Road (The Wizard of Oz, 1939).
Nicole McFarlane - nmcfarla@guilford.edu
Most of my academic career has been as a nontraditional student, having completed my BA in political science only after starting my family. As a result, I’ve come to value ways of knowing that take place away from campus settings and recognize such experiences as enriching to creative and critical inquiry. My graduate training in African American literature has drawn me to the college writing classroom where I believe the possibility of greater community assumes its most tangible form.
Douglas Smith - dsmith2@guilford.edu
Douglas Smith was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His first book, Judgments, appeared in 1984, and he has also edited, with George Looney, The Strangest of Tongues, a gathering of work by and about William Goyen. His poems and stories have received seven nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and recent work has been published in Quarterly West, Washington Square, and Lake Effect. Douglas lives in Burlington, North Carolina, with his son, Jordan.
Carolyn Beard Whitlow - cbeardwh@guilford.edu
Recipient of a 2001 and 2002 Yaddo Residency, and a 2004 Residency at the University of Connecticut's Soul Mountain, Carolyn Beard Whitlow, a Cave Canem Fellow, is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, where she teaches courses in creative writing and African-American literature. Finalist for the 1991 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, she wrote her first poem at 30 years old while a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University. Subsequently, she completed the M.F.A. at Brown University, where she won the Rose Low Rome Memorial Prize in Poetry, and was named Phi Beta Kappa Poet in 1989. Lost Roads published her first collection of poems, Wild Meat, in 1986. Her poems have appeared in journals such as 5 A.M., Dos Passos Review, African American Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, 13th Moon, Obsidian II, Callaloo, Many Mountains Moving, Northeast Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Cold Mountain Review, and others. Her poetry and essays have been anthologized in A Formal Feeling Comes: Contemporary Poems in Traditional Forms by Women (1994); Strategy and Structure: Short Readings for Composition (1996; 1998); After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition (1999); Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry (1999); American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (2001); Writing Your Rhythm (2002); Touched by Eros (2002); What Matters (2002);The Paradelle: An Anthology (2005); Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres (2005);Cave Canem 10th Anniversary Reader (2005); and Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry (2005). Selected as one of ten North Carolina poets to appear on the 1997 PBS series "Poetry Live" hosted by Charles Kuralt, her most recent collection of poems, "Vanished," was named a finalist for the 2005 Ohio State University/The Journal Prize in Poetry.
An avid quilter, her self-designed quilts are available for sale at the Echo Gallery in Union Station in Washington, DC. She enjoys spending quality time with her nine-year old grandson, Tyler, and her daughters, Joy and Abby.