(Top to bottom) Amylou Ahava, PhD, Anthony Arnone, PhD, and Marc Blanc, PhD The Xavierite
Edited with PicCollage
Prior to the beginning of the 2025-2026 academic year, Saint Xavier University (SXU) hired three new full-time English faculty members, Amylou Ahava, PhD, Anthony Arnone, PhD, and Marc Blanc, PhD.
SXU English professor Angelo Bonadonna, PhD, commented on the recent additions to the English department. “After several years of retrenchment and attrition in our programs, the university’s hiring of three new English faculty has given us a strong sign of the university’s desire to invest in English and the humanities departments.”
Ahava is a Wisconsin native with a PhD in Film and Media Studies from Texas Tech University with a specialization in horror and disability studies. Ahava’s courses this semester include Critical Thinking and Writing (English 101) and Horror Cinema (English 160), a special topics course.
Arnone is also a Midwestern native hailing from Akron, Ohio with a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University (NYU). Arnone is also teaching Critical Thinking and Writing, as well as a special topics course, Music and Literature (English 160), which, according to Arnone, will cover “all genres of music from the 1700s-present.”
Blanc, like Arnone, is an Ohio native, receiving a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis, where he wrote his dissertation on African American and white working-class literary cultures in the Midwest. He, like the previous two, will be teaching both Critical Thinking and Writing and a special topics course called The Multiethnic Midwest (English 160).
All three professors have experience teaching at other institutions of higher education–Ahava at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College (NWTC), Marquette University, and Texas Tech in addition to “a few online programs,” as Ahava described. Arnone, prior to SXU, taught at NYU as a lecturer, and Blanc at Washington University in St. Louis while he was getting his PhD.
Ahava has experience teaching high school in South Korea.
During interviews with the Xavierite, each professor expressed their different stories of what initially drew them to English, why they became teachers, as well as discussed the varying skill sets each will bring to SXU classrooms.
“At a young age, I heard oral stories from my Seneca and Jewish grandparents, which first taught me how powerful storytelling could be,” Ahava stated. “Later, while I was in the foster system, reading and movies became my main way of connecting with the world since I often didn’t have anyone to interact with,” Ahava further explained.
“I majored in English partly because I recognized that it’s a discipline that allows you to pursue a variety of specializations within it,” Blanc wrote in his response to the Xavierite. “Whether you’re passionate about philosophy, politics, media, history, or language itself, you can develop a deep and unique understanding of any of these topics through studying literature,” he further explained.
Some of SXU’s new English professors are also currently working on other projects related to their field of study.
“Right now I am working on a book project titled ‘Outside the Latin University: Vernacular Rhetoric and College English in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Arnone wrote to the Xavierite. “I am also working on an essay on 18th-century talking dogs,” he later wrote.
More information about the new English professors can be found here.