Kurt Haas Personal Page

None of the information here is particularly relevant to what you'll need to know in the course, but since in a normal classroom you'd likely learn some of these things about me, I thought I'd give you the opportunity to know something about the faceless e-mail that will be giving you feedback on your writing.  (That is, if you're taking an online course with me.  If you're in a traditional classroom, you might as well just wait to discover the information that follows in class.)   If you happen to have a similar venue for sharing information with the class, feel free to offer the URL in the Discussions section (though you're certainly under no obligation to do so).

I do look something like the picture, more or less, depending on the current status of my weight, tan, and facial hair.  The good news is that my kids seem to have not inherited any features from their father.

Professional Information
I graduated from the University of Nebraska with a Ph.D. in the Summer of 1998 and began working here at MSC 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.  If you'd like detailed knowledge of my credentials and academic background, here is a link to my curriculum vita.  (The picture is a scene from a tale adapted by Tennyson from Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, one of my favorite medieval texts.)

Personal Background
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.  That tells you very little about me, of course, except maybe my age.  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 Neal Stephenson for my pleasure reading, but I venture into Harry Potter and other fantasy or science fiction fairly often as well. I also like to read biographies of the Founding Fathers. 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 locally and overseas (the picture below is from a camping trip in Wyoming and South Dakota), when we get the chance.  

Why am I here?
That's a complicated metaphysical question, of course, but the question of why I am at Colorado Mesa University teaching English courses is a fairly easy one.  Since encountering Shakespeare as a sort of camp counselor for gifted junior high kids when I was a freshman in college, I've been hooked on the study of how and why human beings make meaning out of words.  Grand Junction has proven to be a great place to raise a family and engage in fascinating conversations with students and colleagues about the nature of language.

If there are things you find it important to know about me that aren't here, feel free to check out my vita or, if the answer isn't there, ask me in an e-mail at [email protected].