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Literature Faculty: Research Areas

The Department of English is devoted to the teaching of and research on English literatures and cultures as well as Nonfiction Writing. In pursuing research on the literary traditions of England and the United States, we stress the cultural settings in which those literatures were produced and read, their interrelationship with one another and with other literatures written in English, the material conditions under which these literatures were written, published, and distributed, and the political impact of those literatures on the peoples who read them.

The Department of English has designed its undergraduate and graduate curricula to focus on how these issues converge within three different areas of teaching and research:

I. Medieval and Early Modern Literatures and Cultures: The English Department has achieved prominence in both Renaissance literature and colonial American literature. The faculty in this area share an interest in such problems as the ongoing critique and reinterpretation of the canon and how current issues should affect the teaching of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton; the history of print culture; the retrospective construction of the earlier periods; transatlantic literary-cultural relations; the early modern beginnings of modernity; the literature of early modern colonialism; ways of mapping the world and representing its various inhabitants; and definitions of race and gender that emerge in these documents. These issues connect the scholars working in premodern English literatures and cultures to their colleagues whose research focuses on similar issues in the later periods.

Area I Faculty:

II. Enlightenment and the Rise of National Literatures and Cultures: Faculty who specialize in various areas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature work on an equally coherent cluster of literary and cultural questions: How and on what basis did the category of "literature" emerge and become important to the nation's self-conception? What kinds of writing did Enlightenment culture exclude or suppress? What other fictional narrative forms were pushed into relative obscurity by the rise of the novel? How did literature define itself as either English or American in opposition to the other? To what extent did the literary marketplace influence literary form? How did literature define itself in relation to political economy? What part do race and gender play in this process of national self-definition? How did literature authorize and/or critique the expansion of empire? These are not only interlocking questions but also the questions to ask if one wants to do interesting work in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures and cultures.

Area II Faculty:

  • Nancy Armstrong: British and American novel; 18th-century British; Victorian; critical theory (also Comparative Literature, MCM, Gender Studies)
  • Mutlu Blasing: American and Modern Poetry; American (also Area III)
  • Stuart Burrows: 19th- and 20th-century American; literary theory; visual theory (also Area III)
  • Dorothy Denniston: African American; African American women novelists (also Area III)
  • James Egan: Colonial American (also Area I)
  • Philip Gould : 18th- and 19th-century American
  • William Keach: Romantic, Renaissance; poetry and poetics; politics and literature
  • Jacques Khalip: Romantic; 19th- and 20th-century British/American poetry; queer theory; critical theory
  • George Landow: Victorian poetry, fiction, nonfiction; British painting; hypertext
  • Kevin McLaughlin: Victorian, critical theory (also Chair) (also Comparative Literature)
  • Deak Nabers: 19th- and 20th-Century American
  • Melinda Rabb: 18th century (also Area I)
  • Vanessa Ryan: Victorian; 19th- and 20th-century British
  • Leonard Tennenhouse: 18th-century British and American (also Area I)

III. Modern and Contemporary Literatures and Cultures This area brings together faculty whose research focuses on ethnic and African American literatures with those who work on American poetry and British modernism, those who regard theory as a primary "literature," and scholars known for their contribution to film history and theory. These scholars are united by an interest in the way in which literary narratives and tropes go to work in non-literary discourses of the period; the production of cultural categories that subordinate some groups to others; the formal strategies by which the high culture authorizes itself over and against productions of popular and minority cultures; new collaborations between literature and imperialism and the literary means by which various nations, groups, and individuals react to them; the breakdown of national traditions; the critique of identity politics; and the question of how the visual and electronic media inflect all the above.

Area III Faculty:

  • Paul Armstrong: Modernism, critical theory
  • Timothy Bewes: Twentieth century and contemporary British/American fiction; critical, cultural and literary theory
  • Mutlu Blasing: American and modern poetry; American
  • Stuart Burrows: 19th- and 20th-century American; literary theory; visual theory (also Area II)
  • Rey Chow: Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Feminist Theory; Cultural Theory
  • Dorothy Denniston: African American; African American women novelists; modern American (also Area II)
  • Mary Ann Doane: Film; critical theory (also MCM)
  • John Emigh: Modern theater (also Theater, Speech, and Dance)
  • Olakunle George: Anglophone African literature; Black diasporic writing; postcolonial theory; cultural studies
  • Tamar Katz: Modernism
  • Daniel Kim: Asian American; ethnic (also Ethnic Studies)
  • George Landow: Nineteenth-century literature, art, religion, new media & hypertext theory
  • Rolland Murray: African American literature and culture
  • Ravit Reichman: 20th Century British literature, law & literature; war & trauma; literary theory
  • Ralph E. Rodriguez: Latino Studies, Graphic Novels, Literary and Cultural Theory, Gender and Sexuality
  • Ellen Rooney: Critical theory (also MCM and Gender Studies)
  • Philip Rosen: Film; critical theory (also MCM)
  • Barbara Herrnstein Smith: Critical theory, 20th-century intellectual history, philosophy of science, social studies of science