Biography
Welcome to my faculty web page. A listing of schools and courses is of interest, I suspect, only to the person who attended those institutions and taught those classes, so I’d like to share a little about the list-maker herself.
I grew up in southeastern Iowa, in an old railroad town on the Mississippi about 120 miles north of Hannibal, Missouri. Yes, that’s the boyhood home of Mark Twain and my parents took us to visit that house (and its famous fence) every summer. My love of language and literature took me to the University of Iowa, where, the saying goes “you can’t throw a brick without hitting a writer.”
Flash forward a few years to the job transfer that brought my family to central Nebraska. Missing the classroom, I enrolled in graduate courses in the English department of what was then Kearney State College. With the support and encouragement of the terrific faculty here, I finished my MAEd and began the commuting regimen to Lincoln to do doctoral work. When I graduated, KSC was now UNK and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to return to the English Department. My children (Brian Kruse and Bonnie Kruse, 2003) are UNK graduates, so we’re a real Loper family.
My teaching responsibilities usually include courses in writing, grammar/linguistics, and children’s literature. Having taught high school in Iowa and Nebraska, I am also interested in education and teacher training. I am currently researching the depiction of displaced female pioneers, especially mothers, in children’s literature of the westward expansion and have begun a book-length project over depictions of the trans-Mississippi migration in children’s/young adult literature.
I try to read a new book every week, so if you come across a must-read title in composition, grammar/linguistics, or children’s/young adult literature, please let me know. And feel free to contact me via email if you have any questions about the courses I teach. I look forward to hearing from you!
Education
- Ph.D., University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Areas of Emphasis: Composition/Rhetoric, Theoretical and Applied Linguistics,
20th Century British and American Literature
- M.Ed., English Education. University of Nebraska, Kearney.
- B.A., English and Spanish Education. University of Iowa.
Courses Taught
- ENG 101/102GS (Expository Writing)
- ENG 251GS (Intro to Lit: American)
- ENG 303/803 (Linguistics)
- ENG 304 (Grammar)
- ENG 311 (Advanced Writing I)
- ENG 411 (Advanced Writing II)
- ENG 424 (Teaching Secondary School English)
- ENG 425 (Children’s Literature)
- ENG 805 (Teaching Composition)
- ENG 849 (Children’s/Young Adult Literature)
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