Category: Featured Faculty

An interdisciplinary Chicana feminist teacher and scholar, Dr. Sara Ramírez connects with her Mexican heritage through analyzing and appreciating Chicanx literature. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University where she explores the representations and identities of Chicanx artists and their works. Dr. Ramírez comes from a working-class background, and she is a first-generation college graduate and daughter of immigrants from northern Mexico. She credits her parents as her first teachers who inspired her to pursue a career in higher education.

After attending K-12 public schools, Dr. Ramírez went to the University of Notre Dame where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English with a pre-med concentration. Initially, she entered college with the intention of attending medical school to jump-start her career in gastroenterology. However, she was enamored with English literature and reflected on her career path. Dr. Ramírez states, “I took the MCAT and began applications for medical school, but I realized I liked writing and thinking about literature a lot more.” She notes that Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau were some of her favorite authors to study during her undergraduate degree.

Encouraged by her undergraduate mentor Dr. Theresa Delgadillo, Dr. Ramírez decided to continue her English studies under the mentorship of Dr. Sonia Saldívar-Hull at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s graduate program.  Dr. Ramírez found her passion for Chicana feminist literature while working under the renowned scholars Dr. Saldívar-Hull, Dr. Norma E. Cantú, and Dr. Ben V. Olguín during her English master’s degree at UTSA. She also “trained with intellectual giants” during her second master’s program and doctoral program in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mentors included Paola Bacchetta, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Michael Omi, Laura E. Pérez, José David Saldívar, and Ronald Takaki. In her interview responses, Dr. Ramírez emphasizes her gratitude for her mentors, “I give you these names as one way to honor my academic and professional lineage. No one does this kind of work alone.”

Upon completion of her advanced degrees, Dr. Ramírez enrolled in a postdoc program at the University of Minnesota and applied to Texas State University to work as an English professor. At Texas State, she teaches numerous courses that highlight the narratives of Chicanx authors and women of color. In particular, she is looking forward to teaching an undergraduate course on women in literature in the spring of 2021 where she will “[travel] through time-space” with her students. This course is an extension of Dr. Ramírez’s ongoing research that she describes as an examination of the “sociopolitical and psychological significance of cultural productions by queer Chicanx artists, who strive to decolonize ontological assumptions through their works.”

Dr. Ramírez’s research is outlined in her manuscript that is tentatively titled Lo/Cura: Expanding Subjects of Trauma and Chicanx Cultural Productions, which samples and analyzes the creative works of Gloria E. Anzaldua, Virginia Grise, Adelina Anthony, ire’ne lara silva, Andrea Muñoz Martinez, and Sarah Castillo. Additionally, Dr. Ramírez is working on research that evaluates the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on faculty of color in the United States. Because of the pandemic, she had to postpone her research in Galveston on a nineteenth-century Mexican-American visual artist who she believes is the inspiration for Luis Gonzaga in Jovita González’s historical novel Caballero.

Delainey Alexander, Department of English Teaching Assistant and M.A.in Technical Communication Student

February 2015

After interviewing with other universities across the United States, Dr. Octavio Pimentel accepted an offer from Texas State University. “The obvious change coming to Texas State [from the University of Utah],” Dr. Pimentel explains, “was the cultural thing; I come here and… you have every color; it was nice to see the diversity, not just in ethnicities, but in physical appearance in general.”

Before joining the English Department at Texas State, Dr. Pimentel attended California State University in Chico, where he received his BA in English and Spanish, and an MA in Composition Studies. He continued his career as a doctoral student at the University of Utah, where he received his PHD, studying the social foundation of education, with an emphasis on rhetoric and composition. Since his arrival at Texas State in 2005, he has received numerous awards, most recently the 2014 Texas State Excellence in Diversity Award. Many of the classes Dr. Pimentel instructs are a direct reflection of the diversity this award supports: Language Problems in a Multicultural Environment and Writing for Social Justice, among many others.

In addition to teaching, Dr. Pimentel is a widely published scholar, and just as his courses are a reflection of the Diversity Award, so is his scholarly work. For example, “Shrek 2: An Appraisal of Mainstream Animation’s Influence on Identity,” published in the Journal of Latinos and Education in 2009 discusses the presence of constructs and discourses present in Shrek 2 that perpetuate existing stereotypes, specifically of Latinos and African Americans, in Shrek 2. Two pieces that are currently in progress also maintain this cross-cultural theme. One is a manuscript exploring the variation in definitions of success across cultures. It explores the idea that success is multidimensional and cannot be restricted and defined based on one perspective simply because it is the dominant one. The other piece, which will appear in English in Texas, discusses the need for cross-cultural awareness and inclusiveness in writing centers. Both articles emphasize the importance of recognizing cultural diversity as well as its impact on society and, more specifically, on students.

It is clear that much of Dr. Pimentel’s writing is inspired by experiences and observations he has had as a professor. Discussing the situation of incoming students, particularly freshmen, Dr. Pimentel parallels their experiences and expectations to those of collegiate athletes. “Imagine a good high school player, getting MVP and everything, but then they go to college; most high school players will do terrible in college [and] it’s kind of interesting what sports teams do: they red-shirt you” — they give new players some time to feel things out before really joining the team. In essence, when good students get to college, they tend to be over-confident, and then, after having a rough time during the first round of exams, they get discouraged. “You come here,” Dr. Pimentel continues, “you’re still a high school student; you’re going to get beat up a little bit, but it doesn’t mean you won’t be successful.”

Dr. Aimee Roundtree

Associate Professor Aimee Roundtree, who joined the English Department faculty this year, says she has always been fascinated with moments of translation and interpretation using technical information. As someone who specializes in technical communication, she describes what she does as “focusing on discourse in scientific practice and the public understanding of science.” Dr. Roundtree often works with communications regarding natural sciences and the medical field. “My work takes a rhetorical lens and applies it to technologies that scientists use to construct and disseminate scientific knowledge”

Dr. Roundtree first became interested in technical communication when she worked in public relations for the military and various hospital organizations after earning her bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophy. Additionally, she reported the health beat for a women’s magazine in New York City. There, she wrote health articles that translated medical information for a general audience.

Coming into technical communication from a philosophy background, she often finds ways that philosophy, rhetoric, and technical communication overlapped in her work: “We think science is about facts, but how we get to the facts has a lot to do with how we argue for them, and what to do about them.”

Working as a medical writer and communication specialist, she began seeing interesting patterns in how science and medical information was used; she made this topic her focus when she pursued post-graduate work at the University of Texas-Austin. She found that “rhetoric informs argumentation, which informs dialectic, which informs how scientists make and report scientific data.”

Her current scholarly work includes looking at the rhetoric of supernovas and climate change. Her hobbies include running and playing electric guitar in her spare time.

San Marcos, TX – Dr. Cecily Parks, a new assistant professor in the English Department at Texas State University, cites environmental literature and women writers as her major influences and research interests. Inspired by her own experience in the outdoors, Dr. Parks believed early in her life that there were interesting things happening in the dialogue between literature and the environment. These themes permeate her works; Dr. Parks’s poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O’Nights are both centered on the natural world. O’Nights Is scheduled to come out in April of 2015.

Dr. Parks earned her PhD in English and American Literature at City University of New York, and her MFA in Poetry at Columbia University. Her passion for poetry began when she took a creative writing class during her senior year of college in order to fulfil a credit, and it quickly became a favorite outlet. “I liked that I could write, but it didn’t feel autobiographical,” she states. “It led me to write about things outside myself. Poetry helps me think about the world.”

Although Dr. Parks is new to Texas State University, she has over ten years of experience teaching and has been widely published in poetry anthologies, prestigious literary journals, and essay collections. Her publications this year include Birdlands, which is a poetry and print collaboration with visual artist Ken Buhler; a poem entitled “Plastic Flower” in the anthology The Petroleum Manga; “Conversation Between Fox and Field” in Another Chicago Magazine; and a scholarly publication entitled “The Secret Swamps of Susan Howe in Secret History of the Dividing Line, Thorow, and Personal Narrative,” which appears in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

In her spare time, Dr. Parks enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking and cross-country skiing. She is especially excited about reading Marilynne Robinson’s latest work, Lila, which was released this month.

San Marcos, TX – This year, the Department of English has celebrated the arrival of many talented new faculty members. Among the new professors and lecturers, Texas State University is excited to welcome Chaucer scholar Dr. Leah Schwebel as an assistant professor.

Dr. Schwebel received her MA from McGill University in Montreal, Canada; and her PhD in Medieval literature from the University of Connecticut, focusing on Chaucer and the Italian Renaissance.  However, her interests in medieval literature were not limited to her academic career: “I’ve been a Chaucerian since I was fifteen!” Dr. Schwebel proudly admits with a smile.

Dr. Schwebel’s interest in Chaucer began when she was young and was fed by her fascination with medieval studies and her love of classical myth. She explained that she became intrigued by the ways medieval studies retold classical myths. These interests are especially reflected in her PhD dissertation, “Re-telling Old Stories: Chaucer and an Italian Poetics of Intertextual Commentary.”

She has been published in several medieval literature and Chaucer journals, including Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Chaucer Review, and Dante Studies.  Among her current projects, Dr. Schwebel is co-editing a collection of essays on Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women that should be in print by April, 2017. She also is planning to present at four conferences this year, and will be chairing a session of the Northeastern MLA conference in Toronto with Dr. Kara Gaston.

Explaining her excitement about in her new position, Dr. Schwebel expressed her interest in participating in the Department’s Medieval and Renaissance Society. She stated that she is looking forward to meeting the people in the organization, and taking a leadership role in the Society.

Outside the classroom, Dr. Schwebel enjoys swimming, biking, and running. Last summer, she completed her first full-distance triathlon, the Ironman Lake Placid. Dr. Schwebel, who was always athletic, took up cycling while in Connecticut. She hopes to continue these pursuits while in Texas and plans on participating in Ironman Texas, held in The Woodlands.