Melissa Etzler received her Ph.D. in German with a Designated Emphasis in Film from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014 and her M.A. in German from California State University, Long Beach. Her dissertation, Writing from the Periphery: W. G. Sebald and Outsider Art, explores intersections of pathology, marginalization, creative production and politics. While her areas of specialization include contemporary German Film and visual culture as well as crime and psychology in 18th – 21st century literature; Melissa is equally passionate about foreign language pedagogy. In addition to her courses in German language and culture, Melissa also teaches in the Core Curriculum (FYS) on Breaking Bad, focusing on crime, madness and surveillance in German and American texts and Stranger Things, which analyzes the Weird Fiction genre and 1980s culture.

Awards:

2018-2019 Outstanding Professor of the Year Award for Teaching

2018 College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Outstanding Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching

2018 AATG Indiana Post-Secondary Teacher of the Year

Publications:

Edited Volume

With Gabriele Maier. Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs, Routledge, 2021.

With Priscilla Layne. Rebellion and Revolution: Defiance in German Language, History and Art, Cambridge Scholars, 2010.

Refereed Article

“Pernicious Plants: Imitation and Uncanny Ecocritical Thought in Gustav Meyrink’s ‘Die Pflanzen des Dr. Cinderella.’” German Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 459-475.

Book Chapters

“Zombies in the Age of Digital Reproduction – Marvin Kren’s Rammbock: Berlin Undead,” edited by Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez and Martin Sheehan, Berghahn Books (forthcoming)

“‘Mothered by the Arid Sand’: Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Alraune with an Ecofeminist Twist.” Ecofeminist Science Fiction:International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature, edited by D.A. Vakoch, Routledge, 2021.

With Michelle Stigter-Hayden. “Branching Out with STEM inthe German Classroom.” Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs, ed. by Melissa Etzler and Gabriele Maier, Routledge, 2021, pp. 172-88. 

“Peripheral Writing: Psychosis and Prose from Ernst Herbeck to W. G. Sebald.” Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self, edited by Önder Çakırtaş, Cambridge Scholars, 2019, pp. 18-48.

“So ein langes Leben. Rebellious Writing and Philosophical Meanderings in Sebald’s Juvenilia.” Über W. G. Sebald. Beiträge zu einem anderen Bild des Autors [On W. G. Sebald: The Author from a Different Point of View], edited by Uwe Schütte, de Gruyter, 2016, pp. 29-50.

Jason Lantzer serves as the Assistant Director of the Butler University Honors Program.  An historian by training, his research and writing interests generally center on religion, politics, and law, with some work about Disney thrown in for good measure. He is the author of eight books, including Dwight Eisenhower & the Holocaust (DeGruyter, 2023), Mainline Christianity: The Past and Future of America’s Majority Faith (NYU 2012), Dis-History: Uses of the Past at Walt Disney’s Worlds (TPP, 2017), and Rebel Bulldog: The Story of One Family, Two States, and the Civil War (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017), numerous book chapters and articles. He is a three-time graduate of Indiana University (BA, MA, PhD).

Dr Lewellyn received her B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina. She earned her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of California, San Diego studying the process of cell division in the lab of Dr Karen Oegema. Dr Lewellyn then went on to do post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago with Dr Sally Horne-Badovinac. Dr Lewellyn’s research at Butler is focused on the cellular and developmental mechanisms that control the formation of the fruit fly egg. The fruit fly egg is generated from a multicellular structure called an egg chamber. The egg chamber is composed of a cluster of 16 germ cells (15 supporting nurse cells and 1 oocyte) that is surrounded by a layer of somatic cells called follicle cells. The germ cell cluster is formed through four rounds of mitosis, each of which is followed by incomplete cytokinesis. Instead of completely separating the two daughter cells, a connection is maintained through an intercellular bridge, which is called a ring canal. During the course of oogenesis, the ring canals expand ~20-fold; the stability and expansion of the ring canals is necessary to accommodate the transfer of mRNA, protein, and even organelles from the nurse cells to the developing oocyte. At stage 11 of oogenesis, there is a bulk transfer event that occurs in which the nurse cells squeeze their entire cytoplasmic contents into the oocyte, causing the oocyte volume to double in a ~30 minute period. Defects in ring canal stability and expansion block this transfer event and lead to sterility of the fly. The Lewellyn lab is interested in the molecular mechanisms that control formation, expansion, and stability of the ring canals. Because intercellular bridges are observed in the developing sperm and eggs of more complex organisms such as mammals, the fruit fly egg chamber can be used as a simple model system to study the proteins and pathways involved in intercellular bridge structure and regulation.

The Stobart lab aims to identify the fundamental structural and functional determinants that govern RNA virus environmental stability, infectivity, and replication. Studies in the lab focus on 3 different RNA virus systems: respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human metapneumovirus (hMPV), and mouse hepatitis virus (MHV). 

Background

Dr. Stobart is a microbiologist specializing in virus structure, stability, and function. He received his B.S. degrees in biology and chemistry from Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH) in 2008 and his Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN) in 2013. His doctoral thesis was titled “Structural and Functional Analysis of Coronavirus Cysteine Protease nsp5” and was completed in the laboratory of Dr. Mark Denison. He continued his research in virology by completing a postdoctoral research fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Martin Moore at Emory University (Atlanta, GA) where he played a central role in the development of a live-attenuated vaccine candidate for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a major human pathogen among infants and the elderly. Concurrent with his research training, he taught MCAT and DAT test-prep courses with The Princeton Review and was an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Life and Earth Science at Georgia State University – Perimeter College (Dunwoody, GA) before joining the Butler University Department of Biological Sciences in the Fall of 2016.

Research

Pnuemoviruses – RSV and hMPV

RSV is a pneumovirus with a negative-strand RNA genome that is associated with upper and lower respiratory disease in young infants and the elderly. To date, RSV is a leading cause of viral mortality worldwide for children under age 1. Although RSV is a human pathogen, it rarely causes clinical disease in healthy adults due to pre-existing immunity. Despite over 50 years of research, there remains no commercially-available vaccines and considerable work is currently underway to develop one. We recently showed substantial differences in the stability of RSV strains to temperature and that the stability was dependent upon the virus attachment protein (F). Preliminary study of RSV identified mutations in the RSV fusion (F) protein that govern virus thermal stability and contribute to stabilizing the prefusion conformation, which is required for infectivity.  Current research projects on RSV will focus on examining the environmental stability of reconstituted RSV clinical strains and site-directed mutagenesis to identify key regulatory regions governing RSV stability and replication.

HMPV is a pneumovirus that is very closely-related to RSV and is also associated with upper and lower respiratory disease in young infants and the elderly. Discovered in 1989, very little is known regarding its environmental stability and there remain no vaccines available for the prevention of hMPV disease. Current research projects on hMPV will focus on examining the environmental stability of a panel of hMPV clinical isolates. These studies may provide new insight into mechanisms to create stable live-attenuated vaccine candidates and novel approaches to limit hMPV spread in high risk environments.

Coronaviruses

MHV is a viral model for coronavirus biology. Coronaviruses are associated with upper and lower respiratory disease and are the 3rd leading cause of the common cold. Recent outbreaks of SARS-CoV,  MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 (causative agent of COVID-19), three emerging coronaviruses, highlight the pathogenic potential of coronavirus evolution. Our work focuses on understanding the relationship between structure and function of the coronavirus protease nsp5. This work aims to identify key molecular determinants that are critical for coronavirus replication and may be targeted for antiviral or inhibitor design.

Students interested in doing research in the Stobart lab are encouraged to contact Dr. Stobart directly.

Stobart Lab Website

Dr. Stobart’s ResearchGate Profile