AAP Welcomes Two New Full-Time Faculty

We are pleased to welcome two new faculty members to the Associate in Arts Program! Dr. Christine Grogan and Dr. Matthew Willis joined the AAP's full-time faculty in fall 2018. Read more about Drs. Grogan and Willis below, and join us in welcoming our new colleagues!

Christine Grogan, Ph.D., joins the AAP as an assistant professor of English on the Dover campus. This is something of a homecoming as Grogan earned her B.A. in English, Business and Technical Writing, from the University of Delaware (2002), graduating magna cum laude. She received an M.A. in English literature from the University of Richmond (2004) and a Ph.D. in English literature and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of South Florida (2011).  

Grogan returns to UD after teaching in the Rhetoric and Composition department at Penn State’s main campus for the last three years as an associate teaching professor. Prior to Penn State, she worked as a visiting instructor at the University of South Florida, where she taught courses in writing and literature and also served as the academic advisor for the English department’s M.A. and M.F.A. students.

Her first book, Father-Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Complex Trauma of the Wound and the Voiceless, was recently published with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Her scholarly interests include 20th-century American literature, trauma theory, and women writers. She has published articles on works including the short stories of Zelda Fitzgerald, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, and the Cameroonian-French writer Calixthe Beyala’s Your Name Shall Be Tanga. 

President of the Katherine Anne Porter Society since 2013, Grogan revived the society’s annual newsletter and has edited the last four issues. Two of her three forthcoming articles examine Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”  

As in her scholarship, she includes in her classroom the voices of groups that have been historically marginalized and silenced. One of her main goals in the classroom is to help students transform their personal narratives into better informed and more objective arguments. Grogan credits several of her former professors — many of whom taught her as an undergraduate — for inspiring her to pursue a career in academia.

Matt Willis, Ph.D., joins the AAP as an assistant professor of mathematics on the Georgetown campus. Willis is originally from New Jersey, where he also earned his bachelor's degree at The College of New Jersey. He then earned a master's and Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the supervision of Robert Proctor. Before joining UD, Willis held visiting positions of varying lengths at Hampden-Sydney College, Connecticut College, and, most recently, Wesleyan University.

Willis's research is in the field of Algebraic Combinatorics. In a nutshell, he says, this means that he is interested in counting objects that are of interest to those who study algebra. His thesis introduced a new way to calculate Type A Demazure characters, and more recently he has developed an interest in a new parabolic generalization of the Catalan numbers.

Willis's teaching interests span anything and everything in the field of mathematics. In particular, he has frequently taught the calculus sequence and introductory statistics courses. Outside of the classroom, Matt enjoys both watching and playing sports, board games, and live music. He is also always interested to hear a new math joke.