Learn more about our faculty members.
Geremy Carnes
Geremy Carnes has been a professor at Lindenwood since 2013. He earned his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. in English Language & Literature from the University of Michigan. Carnes’s teaching and research focus on eighteenth-century British literature and history, particularly with regard to English Catholicism and the development of Gothic literature, and on digital humanities pedagogy.
Benjamin Cooper
Professor Cooper’s teaching and research interests center largely on questions of who is (and who is not) an American citizen and how the United States has engaged historically with populations it would much rather avoid. At Lindenwood, he teaches courses in all areas of American literature and heads the program in American Studies. His book, Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction (University of Massachusetts Press, May 2018), traces the unheralded rise of veteran authors from the early republic through the Civil War. Professor Cooper earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and also holds a M.A. from Northwestern University and a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Davidson College.
Susan Edele
Susan Edele earned her Bachelor of Science in Education from Truman State University, majoring in Mass Communications and minoring in English and secondary education. She earned her Master of Arts in English Composition from the University of Missouri – St. Louis, and she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University. She teaches composition courses and creative writing courses. She enjoys flash fiction and nonfiction, as well as short stories and young adult literature. She has published several pieces, including “Blood and Guts” in the Midwest Review (midwestreview.org), and has presented scholarly conference sessions on topics about writing and academic support techniques. Along with teaching, Susan is also the director of the Lindenwood University Writing Center.
Melissa Ridley Elmes
Dr. Melissa Ridley Elmes (B.A., French, The College of William and Mary; ; M.A., English, Longwood University; MFA, Creative Writing, Lindenwood University; Ph.D., English, University of North Carolina Greensboro) is an interdisciplinary literary historian of the medieval period, with particular emphasis on the 10-15th-century Northern European and British Isles literatures and cultures, including Old/Middle English, Welsh, Irish, Anglo-Norman, and Old Norse/Icelandic. Her teaching and research interests include women's and gender studies, violence and trauma, alchemy and magic, monsters and the supernatural, Arthuriana, Chaucer, outlaws and tricksters, and myth, folk, and fairy tales. She is an award-winning instructor as well as a high-profile scholar, with recent articles in Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Modern Philology and Medieval Feminist Forum, an edited collection of essays on the fairy Melusine (Brill, 2017) and a forthcoming volume of essays on Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales (Routledge, 2021) alongside other forthcoming projects on female friendship, fairies and power, gender and violence in medieval drama, ethics in the Arthurian legend, and medieval and Celtic literature pedagogy. Dr. Elmes is also a writer of poetry and fiction, and the author of Arthurian Things: A Collection of Poems (Dark Myth Publications, 2020). She is Associate Editor of The Heroic Age, book reviews editor for Medieval Feminist Forum, serves on the advisory boards of several scholarly presses and organizations, and is currently a member of the MLA executive forum for Celtic Studies and the President of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship.
Elizabeth Fleitz
Elizabeth Fleitz is a professor of English, specializing in rhetoric and composition. She regularly teaches courses on grammar and the teaching of writing, as well as all levels of first-year writing. She developed the Writing and Professional Communication minor, and also teaches technical and business writing. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing from Bowling Green State University in 2009, where she wrote her dissertation studying cookbooks as a multimodal, feminist genre. She has most recently been published in the edited collection Type Matters (Parlor Press, 2017) and was a contributor to the 25th anniversary issue of the journal Peitho. Dr. Fleitz is an editor for the Topoi/Praxis sections of the peer-reviewed journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.
Tracy Flicek
Tracy Flicek has been part of the Lindenwood community since 2006 and is a three-time alumna. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and International Studies in 2010, a Master of Arts in International Studies in 2011, and a Master of Arts in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in 2012. During her time as a student, she was a member of the Lionettes dance team and Sigma Delta Pi Spanish Honor Society. Professor Flicek became a full-time faculty member in January 2013 as an instructor in the English as a Second Language and English Preparedness Programs specializing in reading and writing instruction for multilingual English users. She maintains membership in MidTESOL and TESOL International Association and is currently working on her Ph.D. in Composition and Applied Linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Justine Pas
Dr. Justine Pas earned a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. She is Professor of English, Faculty Sponsor of the Honors Academy, and also teaches courses for the Interdisciplinary Studies program. Her major research interests include American ethnic literature, literature of the Holocaust, and translation studies. She has been published in domestic and international journals as well as in scholarly volumes dedicated to translation theory and practice. She has also earned awards for teaching, including the 2014-2015 President’s Scholar-Teacher Award at Lindenwood University. Her most recent publications include "The Politics of Relay Translation and Language Hierarchies: The Case of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris" and the "Foreword" to a memoir about surviving the Holocaust by Hava Ben-Zvi titled We Who Lived: Two Teenagers in World War II Poland.
Daniel Plate
Daniel Plate earned his B.A. in English and philosophy from Taylor University in Indiana. He followed this with an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arkansas and a Ph.D. in literature from Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation research focused on the effect of positivist ideas in philosophy of science on American literary critics in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the work of the iconoclastic theorist Kenneth Burke. Throughout his career, Dr. Plate has been absorbed with the interactions among several disciplines: literature, philosophy of language, formal logic, gaming, number theory, computer science, and technology. The last of these, tech use for creative writing, is currently at the top of his research interests. Dr. Plate is working to build the Creative Writing Club into a thriving community on campus, hoping to encourage the pursuit of creativity, coding, writing, and learning among students and colleagues.
Elizabeth Ponder Melick
Dr. Melick earned her B.A. from Capital University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Kent State University. The focus of her graduate study was medieval literature, and in 2019 she published an edition of four Middle English romances from the Otuel group with the Middle English Text Series.
Dr. Melick is also an active researcher in the area of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, where her two primary areas of focus are engaged learning and student support. She leads First-Year Writing, which combines her interest in pedagogy with her many years of experience in teaching Composition courses.
Melissa Qualls
After Professor Melissa Qualls graduated from Northeast Missouri State University with a B.A. in English and a B.A. in philosophy & religion, she taught ESL in Taejon, South Korea. She studied Latin American literature, Indian literature, and Asian literature while earning her master's degree in English at Truman State University and introduces her students to diverse perspectives and cultures in many of her classes. She earned her M.F.A. in Writing from Lindenwood in 2018 and strives to recreate the challenging and nurturing creative environment she experienced in her own writing classes. Currently, she teaches courses in composition, creative writing, gender studies, existentialism, and world literature.
Ana Schnellmann
Dr. Ana Schnellmann (B.A., English, College of St. Benedict, M.A., English, Ohio University, MCERT, Women's Studies, Ohio University, Ph.D., English, Saint Louis University) has been a proud member of the Lindenwood faculty since 1995. She considers herself a generalist, although her specialty is in 19th-century novels, particularly those of women writers. Her research interests include examining the socio/political/psychological aspects of literary works and considering and applying different literary theories to those works. She has published both creative and scholarly work in a variety of venues and looks forward to doing more of the same. As a lifelong learner, Dr. Schnellmann completed the MA degree in Art History at Lindenwood University, and she enjoys integrating cross-disciplinary studies into her current courses. She regularly reviews articles for The Confluence and Aletheia and is thrilled at the scholarly acumen and promise shown by Lindenwood students. Dr. Schnellmann has served, and continues to serve, on various committees, but above all else, she loves to teach and is a passionate educator.
Kathi Vosevich
Dr. Kathi Vosevich earned her Ph.D. in English, specializing in Shakespeare, with distinction from the University of Denver and her M.A. in English with distinction from St. Louis University, where she also earned her B.A. in English, graduating summa cum laude. She has more than 10 years of senior administration experience and 15 years of teaching experience, as well as over 150 academic and corporate publications, including a monograph on Joseph Heller, a chapter on the Tudor queens, and an award-winning edited textbook. She was also selected to be editor of the Aletheia (one of the nation’s few peer-reviewed journals for undergraduate scholarship) after a nationwide search, and she serves on the executive board of the Alpha Chi National Honor Society. In addition, she has more than 10 years of corporate experience with such companies as Microsoft, Sprint, and Intel.
