Behind the Scenes in the Grad Wing!

Janet Flood, nee Hickey, was born in Oak Park to James, a sheet metal worker and millwright, and Marjorie, a secretary. She was the oldest of three siblings. After living in Chicago for 2 ½ years, her family moved to the western suburbs, where she attended Catholic grade school and high school. The highlight of her youth occurred August, 1965, when she attended the first Beatles’ concert at Comisky Park. “With that huge white bow in my BIG hair, I knew that Ringo could see me in the stands,” Mrs. Flood states matter-of-factly. She then majored in English at Loyola University in Chicago and after graduation taught English at Notre Dame High School for Girls, in Chicago. Five children (Brian, Amy, Bridget, Sheila, and Moira) and feature writing for West Suburban Living and Midwest Living magazines would put her academic career on hold, but in 1996 she returned to the classroom at DePaul, earned her M.A. in Writing degree with distinction, and joined DePaul’s Composition and Rhetoric faculty in 1998.; four years later, she was named Assistant Director of Graduate Programs in English..

Besides being a great personal mentor, she’s a founding member of Convergences, which she modestly describes as “a sennightly writing-faculty colloquium that assembles at Magee’s tavern to explore and perfect pedagogical effectiveness in the classroom.” (Yeah, right!!) Her son Brian is a graduate from DePaul and her youngest daughter Moira may be attending DePaul next year. “Who knows,” she muses, “maybe there will be a Flood Hall on campus… preferably close to Magee’s!”

Anne Clark Bartlett was born in Rochester, New York. Her father Jack worked for General Motors and her mother Joan sold encyclopedias door-to-door. In 1965 the family moved to Dayton, Ohio, where she discovered a passion for music and radio broadcasting. During her junior and senior years in high school, she served as news director for the school’s radio station, hosted a mildly incendiary talk show, and spun records. In 1978, she graduated and landed a job as a disc jockey at WBZI-FM, in Xenia, Ohio.

For the next five years, Dr. Bartlett sang in a rock band, traveled the country by bus, and held numerous minimum wage jobs. After one too many shifts on the assembly line, she enrolled in courses at the State University of New York, and in 1993, she earned her PhD in English from the University of Iowa and took a tenure-track position at DePaul University.

Dr. Bartlett teaches courses in bibliography and literary research, medieval literature, women’s writing, and contemporary literature. Her books include: Male Authors, Female Readers; Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature; Vox Mystica: Essays in Honor of Prof. Valerie Lagorio (edited collection); and Cultures of Piety; Middle English Devotional Literature in Translation (edited collection). Dr. Bartlett has also published essays on medieval mysticism, Arthurian literature, and critical theory. She is currently working on an essay on medieval holy women of the British Isles, for the Yale Guide to Holy Women of the Middle Ages, and a book entitled “Medieval English Women and the Literature of Statecraft.”

In her spare time, Dr. Bartlett loves spending time with her husband (Mark Johnston, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul) and her two greyhounds, Tiger and Joker. She also enjoys gardening, cooking, shopping, and reading.

Craig Sirles is a native of Richmond, Virginia, and he and his three siblings were the first in the long Sirles-family lineage to attend college. His first full-time job was a three-year stint as a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Then on April 30, 1970, four days before the Kent State war-protest massacre, he received his draft notice. Instead of shipping him to Vietnam, the Army sent then-Private Sirles to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for intensive study in German, and he served out his tour of duty as an interpreter, interrogating East Germans who had escaped across the border into the West. After a 6,000-mile motorcycle jaunt through Europe, he returned home, earned a B.A. in English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and then began Ph.D. studies at Northwestern University, where he specialized in linguistics and Arabic. A fellowship to the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes at the University of Tunis led him to his dissertation, "An Evaluative Procedure for Language Planning: The Case of Morocco."

At DePaul Dr. Sirles served first as assistant director of the Reading and Writing Program, now called the Writing Center, and then as director of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Evening College, before joining the English faculty in 1991. Most of his early research focused on post-independence language policy in North Africa, but since the mid-1990s his attention has turned to subjects related to the English language. His more recent articles and papers cover subjects ranging from language death to lexicography to rhetorical punctuation and grammar pedagogy, and his Greek and Latin etymology textbook, Root Awakenings, is in its third printing.

A self-described lover of words, he says his “most favoritest” term in English is floccinaucinihilipilification, meaning ‘the estimation of something as being trivial or worthless,’ but he admits he has yet to find an appropriate context in which to use the word.

So… now that you’ve met the “brain trust” of our graduate programs at DePaul. If you haven’t already done so, please stop by sometime and say “hello.” We’d love to meet you!