Kristin Kuhns
Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Dessy-Roffman Myth Collaborative will offer a spring lecture series starting February 18, all free and open to the community.
Programs, which run through May, are all presented via Zoom and offered from 4:00 to 5:15 p.m.
The Dessy-Roffman Myth Collaborative, opened in 2021, is a dynamic, cross-disciplinary resource dedicated to the study of myth in its many forms—literary, visual, musical, and performative—with the intention of fostering dialogue across languages, cultures, and historical periods, supporting innovative research, teaching, and creative projects.
The Collaborative is part of IUP’s Department of Language, Literature, and Writing and is physically located in Jane E. Leonard Hall. The Dessy-Roffman Collaborative is named in honor of Blane Dessy, a 1973 English major graduate, and IUP Professor Emerita of English Rosaly DeMaios Roffman.
Sean McDaniel, IUP professor of Spanish in the Department of Language, Literature, and Writing, is the director of the Dessy-Roffman Myth Collaborative. Kristin Kuhns, a teaching associate in IUP’s Department of Language, Literature and Writing and a PhD candidate in the Literature and Criticism doctoral program, is the associate director of the Collaborative.
“We envision the Collaborative as a living forum where scholars, artists, and students can explore the enduring power of myth—from ancient epics to digital storytelling, from sacred narratives to pop-cultural reinventions,” McDaniel said.
“The Dessy-Roffman Myth Collaborative imagines myth as something alive—something that moves across languages, disciplines, and cultures,” Kuhns said. “Our goal is to create a space where students and faculty can experiment with myth as a shared framework, whether through workshops, seminars, or cocurricular courses that connect literature, history, visual culture, and contemporary media. The Collaborative is about opening conversations and building networks that make myth meaningful across the humanities and beyond.”
Under McDaniels and Kuhn’s leadership, the Collaborative has expanded its initiatives and outreach, including developing a website and mailing list, and getting the word out about the myth collaborative to other local and state academic institutions and organizations. They also plan to reinvigorate Studies in the Humanities, IUP’s English and literary criticism–focused academic journal, by publishing articles developed from lecture series talks and presentations. During the fall 2025 semester, McDaniel and Kuhns collaborated to offer the inaugural German Lecture Series through the Collaborative, highlighting diverse perspectives in German studies.
While the programs are free and open to the community, online registration is requested.
Spring Program Presenters and Topics
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February 18, David von Schlichten, “How It’s Done, Done, Done: Female Shamans Redeeming a Male Demon in KPop Demon Hunters.” von Schlichten is a graduate of IUP’s PhD in English Literature and Criticism Program and is the dean of the School of Humanities, professor of religious studies, and coordinator of the gender and women’s studies program at Seton Hill University.
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February 25, Kelly Stewart, “Through the Looking-Glass, Murkily: Snow White and The Occluded Mirror.” Stewart is a PhD student in Literature and Criticism at IUP. She holds a BA in English literature from the University of Pittsburgh and an MA in composition and literature from IUP. Her research interests include Romantic-era novels and poetry, Old and Middle English literature, and the study of myth and fairy tale.
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March 4: Laura Patterson, “‘Believe in the Medusa equally with Perseus’ Eudora Welty’s Literary and Cultural Mythologies.” Patterson is a professor of English at Seton Hill University. Her work on southern literature, material culture, gender, and feminism has appeared in The Eudora Welty Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies, and Women’s Studies. She is the author of Stirring the Pot: The Kitchen and Domesticity in the Fiction of Southern Women. Her poetry has appeared in WomenArts Quarterly, Lines and Stars, Spry, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Rust and Moth, and The North Carolina Literary Review, and her poem “Learning to Read” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
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March 20: Christopher Kuipers, “Degendering, Book Culture, and Other Myths of ‘The Canon.’” Kuipers has been at IUP for 20 years and teaches English courses in writing, the Bible as literature, classical literature in translation, and myth. He has a doctorate in comparative literature from UC, Irvine.
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April 1: Joshua Calandrella, “The Myth of Being Left Out: Mad Men with Musical Genius in The Phantom of the Opera and Overture to Glory.” Calandrella is a doctoral candidate in the Literature and Criticism program at IUP and an instructor at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. He studies the presence of mystical multilingualism in twentieth-century imaginative literature and translates Yiddish poetry with the surrealist yeshiva.
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April 17: Kirsten Boswell, “Breaking the Chain: Intergenerational Trauma and the Possibility of Repair in Del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025).” Boswell is an adjunct English professor at the University of Saint Francis. She is a published writer with six short stories currently in print. She has a master’s degree from the Citadel in English literature. Her area of study is Medieval literature, particularly Arthurian literature, but she also studies classical and modern Gothic Romantic novels.
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May 1: Katie Condra, “The Sun as Storyteller: Myths of Men and Women in Indigenous Rock Art.” Condra is currently pursuing a PhD in literature and criticism from IUP; she earned a master of arts in literature at Abilene Christian University in 2010. Currently residing in Abilene, Texas, she works as a high school English instructor at ATEMS High School, a public STEM academy, and serves as vice chair of the Education Committee for the Paint Rock Historic Site.
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May 13: Rachel Martin, “Whose Family? Reframing Gender and Myth in Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters.” Martin is a PhD candidate in literature and criticism at IUP. Her research explores multilingual poets, self-translation, and Yiddish literature. She holds two master’s degrees and has taught English on three continents.
Recently named associate director of the Collaborative, Kuhns is an adjunct professor of German studies in the Department of Modern Languages at Seton Hill University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in German language and cultural studies from Smith College in 2001 and her master of arts in teaching from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007.
Her early scholarship on Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, including her 2001 undergraduate honors thesis, is cited in the introduction to Sissi’s World (2018), the landmark volume in contemporary “Sis(s)i” scholarship edited by Hametz and Schlipphacke. In May 2023, Kuhns published The Origin and Development of Empress Elisabeth’s Legend, further establishing her as a scholar of Elisabeth’s cultural mythology.
Kuhns’s work has been recognized by the American Association of Teachers of German, which nominated her for the FL-A-CH Award for her scholarship on Empress Elisabeth. She has also received IUP’s Outstanding Humanities in the Field Literature and Criticism graduate award and the Metzler-Mews Conference Travel Grant from AATG to present at the 2025 German Studies Association Conference in Arlington, Virginia.
In April 2025, Kuhns chaired and coordinated IUP’s Taylor Swift Study Group under the mentorship of IUP faculty member Melanie Holm, an initiative that culminated in IUP’s first international Taylor Swift Symposium. Building on this interdisciplinary work, her forthcoming chapter, “‘The Empress and the Pop Star’: Archetypal Parallels and Patterns between Taylor Swift and Empress Elisabeth,” is scheduled for publication in summer 2026 in Sis(s)i and Us: New Mythologies, an edited collection from the University Editions of Dijon in France.
Kuhns is currently preparing for her doctoral comprehensive examinations, scheduled for May 2026.
McDaniel was appointed director of the Dessy-Roffman Myth Collaborative in 2025. In addition to his Spanish courses, McDaniel teaches courses in the Literature and Criticism doctoral program. He is a specialist in early modern Peninsular Spanish prose fiction, with broad research interests in the nineteenth-century Spanish novel, the literature of the Spanish Civil War, subjectivity studies, “Passing” in Spanish literature, and historicism. He is the author of The Lazarillo Phenomena: Essays on the Adventures of a Classic Text, published by University of Bucknell Press in 2010.
Since its founding in 1875, IUP has evolved from a teacher-training institution into a doctoral research university recognized for its commitment to student success and achievement. As IUP celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2025 and through the Impact 150 comprehensive campaign, the university honors a legacy of educational excellence while looking to its next 150 years of student success, innovation, leadership in healthcare education, and public service.