Faculty
Our faculty are deeply committed to the creation and transmission of knowledge about literature and its related fields. We teach our students to read and analyze; to write in scholarly, creative, and public ways; and to put their knowledge and skills to work for the benefit of many communities. Visiting scholars and lecturers bring expertise in diverse areas of study, and our graduate students come from all over the globe as both students and graduate assistants/instructors, bringing their unique research interests to their teaching.
Regular Faculty
Aamina Ahmad
Specialties
Creative Writing, Fiction, Drama and Writing for the Screen
Elaine Auyoung
Specialties
Aesthetic Experience; Education and Learning in the Humanities; Methods of Reading; Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture; Psychological Approaches to the Arts; Literature and Philosophy; Epistemic Justice
Beatrice Bradley
Specialties
Early Modern Literature; Critical Theory; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Histories of Embodiment; Health Humanities
Timothy Brennan
Specialties
Philosophy; Intellectuals and the media; Studies of Imperialism and Imperial Culture; Music of the African diaspora; World Comparative Literature; Intellectual history; Cultural and political theory; The Marxist and phenomenological traditions; The avant-gardes; Theories of colonialism and imperialism; Problems of translation; Popular music
Peter Campion
Specialties
Poetry Writing; Poetry and the Visual Arts; Prosody; Narrative Lyric and Lyric Narrative
Siobhan Craig
Specialties
Fascist-era cinema in Italy and Germany; Italian Neorealism; new German cinema; monsters and hybrids; the cinematic body; literary and cultural theory after 1968: psychoanalysis, queer and feminist theories, post-modern theories of language and meaning, film theory
Andrew Elfenbein
Specialties
British literature, history, and culture, 1700-1900; influence study; queer theory; history of English; cognition and reading; the study of authorship; empirical psychology and literary study
Megan Finch
Specialties
20th- and 21st-century American Literature; 20th- and 21st-century African American Literature; Black Feminist Theory
V.V. Ganeshananthan
Specialties
creative writing (fiction, nonfiction); contemporary fiction; journalism; historical fiction; political fiction; reviewing; arts journalism; media criticism
Tosin Gbogi
Specialties
African and African diaspora literatures; Poetry and poetics; Popular culture and hip-hop; Postcolonial and decolonial theories; Critical and cultural theory; Literary and pop cultural linguistics
Brian Goldberg
Specialties
restoration and eighteenth-century literature; nineteenth-century British literature; British romantic literature; poetry and poetic form
Douglas Kearney
Specialties
creative writing (poetry, nonfiction, libretto); black aesthetics, poetics, and literature; experimental writing; writing for performance; popular/cultural criticism; hip hop studies; poetics and prosody
Rebecca Krug
Specialties
religion; culture; women's studies; literacy; nature; Late Medieval literature
Josephine Lee
Specialties
Asian American studies; Theater, drama, and performance studies
Nathaniel Mills
Specialties
20th-century US and African American Literature; Literature and Culture of the Great Depression; The Literary Left and Communism in the US; Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright
Daniel Philippon
Specialties
ideas of nature, culture, and place; environmental literature, history, and ethics; human dimensions of conservation biology; food studies and sustainability
Jani Scandura
Specialties
cultural studies and critical theory, esp. theories of modernity, materiality, subjectivity; 20th century North American literatures, film, visual and mass culture; European, American and (recently) Japanese modernisms; theories of space and place; stuff--theories of matter, objects, things, refuse, trash; sound and acoustic culture, memory; history of science, medicine and its intersections with philosophy; writing in cultures impacted by US imperialisms (especially Cuba)
Andrew Scheil
Specialties
Old English language and literature; literatures and cultures of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages; medieval Latin literature, Celtic and Germanic languages and literatures; Middle English literature and Early Modern/Renaissance literature; folklore and folktales; oral tradition; traditions of exegesis, historiography and geography in the Middle Ages; science-fiction, fantasy, and horror literature/media; reception of classical and biblical literature
Katherine Scheil
Specialties
18th-century literature; Shakespeare; early modern literature; theatre history and performance studies; archival study; history of reading; women's studies/feminist criticism/history of women
Julie Schumacher
Specialties
children's literature; creative writing; contemporary fiction; academic satire
Kim Todd
Specialties
Creative writing (nonfiction); Science writing; Environmental literature; History of journalism/creative nonfiction
Rachel Trocchio
Specialties
17th- through 19th-century American literature; Puritanism and Puritan literary studies; Early Modern studies; religion and cognition; intellectual history
Amit Yahav
Specialties
Eighteenth-century British literature and culture; The novel; Romanticism; Aesthetics; Literary, cultural, and political theory; History of Popular Culture: Leisure
Associate Faculty
Chris Kamerbeek
Specialties
19th and 20th Century American Literature; Popular Culture, Music, and Film; Science & Technology and Literature
Affiliate Faculty
Tony C. Brown
Specialties
Continental and Political Philosophy; Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy, Anthropology and Literature; The Animal, the Human and the Non-Human; The State and Statelessness; Aesthetic Theory and the Sublime; Deconstruction; Marxism; Colonialism and Imperialism; Literature and Literary Theory; Political Theory; The New World; The South Pacific; Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Theory
Keya Ganguly
Specialties
The Frankfurt School; Intellectual History of Vision; Sociology of Culture; Postcolonial Criticism; Global Cinema; Marxism; Peripheral Literature
Laura J. Gurak
Specialties
Rhetorical dynamics of human communication; Internet studies and online research methods; Social aspects of computing; Rhetorics of technology; Technical and professional writing and communication; Trust, ethos, and human communication
Leslie Morris
Specialties
German Jewish studies; Holocaust and Memory studies; Comparative literature and literary theory; 20th- & 21st-century German and Austrian literature and poetry; Experimental poetry; Narrative medicine; psychoanalysis
William Viestenz
Specialties
Contemporary Iberian Literature and Culture; Post-Secularism and the Sacred; Environmental Humanities; Neo-Ruralism; Iberian Studies; Political Theory
Emeriti Faculty
Lois Cucullu
Specialties
popular culture and media; gender studies and theory; modern British and American literature; modernism and modernity; history and production of knowledge; narrative and novel studies; Victorian literature and culture
Maria Damon
Specialties
cultural poetics; cutlural studies; ethnicity and ethnography; experimental writing; literature of trauma; marginalized literatures; mass/popular culture; Modern poetry; contemporary poetry and poetics; American poetry from 1940; diaspora studies
Genevieve Escure
Specialties
Endangered languages (Garifuna in Belize and Honduras); Sociolinguistics; Belizean creole (Central America); Creoles and other contact languages; Pidgins; African-American English, Chinese-English Pidgin English; Garifuna (Belize and Honduras); Chinese language variation; Language, gender and identity
M. Fitzgerald
Specialties
British literature; creative writing; fiction; Italian twentieth century literature; modern and contemporary European writing; world literatures; Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy
Shirley Garner
Specialties
feminist studies in literature; autobiography; feminist psychoanalytic literary theory and criticism; Renaissance literature; Shakespeare
Ramon Gonzalez
Specialties
contemporary American poetry; literature of rock and roll music; Latin American studies; poetry writing; prose poetry, flash fiction and nonfiction; creative writing; U.S. Latino literature; creative nonfiction; editing and publishing journals and anthologies
Edward M. Griffin
Specialties
American literature; American religion; American studies; Colonial literature; Use of early American history and literature by modern American writers
Patricia Hampl
Specialties
personal essay; short fiction and poetry; memoir and autobiography; creative writing; contemporary American poetry and fiction, especially the short story and the novel
Michael Hancher
Specialties
book history; digital humanities; Victorian studies; lexicography; pragmatics, literature, and the law
Calvin Kendall
Specialties
Beowulf; Middle English language and literature; Old English language and literature; Venerable Bede; Medieval Latin
Nabil Matar
Specialties
Arab-Islamic civilization; Seventeenth-Century English Religious literature; Arabic and European travel literature; Captivity Literature; Euro-Islamic contacts (early modern)
Toni Mc Naron
Specialties
Emily Dickinson; Feminist criticism and pedagogy; Milton; Shakespeare; Virginia Woolf
Ellen Messer-Davidow
Specialties
certain areas of contemporary American public policy and law; modern/contemporary American social movements (Civil Rights, New Left, Feminist, and Conservative); literary, cultural, and social theory; the “new knowledge studies“
Valerie Miner
Specialties
Creative writing; Cross-cultural literacy and social criticism; Feminism; Fiction; Journalism; Reportage; Review; Working-class literature
Paula Rabinowitz
Specialties
American women, minority, and working-class writers; visual culture; film, photography, media; US literary radicalism; marxist and feminist theories; modernisms; cultural studies; American Studies
Geoffrey Sirc
Specialties
Technology/writing; Rhetoric and composition; Writing instruction; Trends in writing instruction since the 1960s; Writing technology; Textual forms of blogging; Composition theory and pedagogy; Visual arts and art theory; Hip hop; The modernist era
Madelon Sprengnether
Specialties
creative writing; feminist psychoanalytic criticism; Freud; nonficition; poetry; Shakespeare; women writers
John Watkins
Specialties
historiography; sovereignty and queenship; medieval and early modern diplomacy; premodern political culture; classical and medieval origins of the Renaissance; Mediterranean Studies
John Wright
Specialties
sociology of literature; American and Afro-American literature; Black Arts Movement; feminist criticism; folklore and oral tradition; Harlem Renaissance; intellectual history and popular culture; Langston Hughes
