Department of English
Professor
Lowell Heiny Hall
970.248.1104
khaas@coloradomesa.edu

 

I graduated from the University of Nebraska with a Ph.D. in the Summer of 1998 and began working here at Colorado Mesa University in 1999. As a grad student, my areas of emphasis were Medieval Literature (my dissertation was on rhetoric in the Canterbury Tales), Renaissance Literature (think Shakespeare and the like) and Composition and Rhetoric. One of my main intellectual interests is in the relationship between rhetorical or composition rules and the way they cause knowledge to be created in certain ways. More recently, my research has examined the relationship between the idea of game and the literature of the Middle Ages, particularly in Chaucer and the long medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

For better and worse, I come from a very small town of about 700 people in the southeast corner of Iowa. I graduated from high school in 1987, got married in 1993, was blessed with one child in 1998 and another in 2001. I'm a baseball fan (the Royals are my favorite team-- sigh), I like to hike and, of course, I like to read books. Lately, I've been reading very thick books by Gene Woolf for my pleasure reading, but I like to read biography as well. When in Nebraska I became infected by the college football virus and have been an avid Cornhusker fan for a long time now. My family and I like to travel, both close to home and overseas, when we get the chance.

Here at Colorado Mesa, I teach courses in Early British Literatures and English Composition. If you'd like detailed knowledge of my credentials and academic background, here is a link to my curriculum vita.