English and American Literature and Language
The Program
The program takes from four to seven years to complete, with the majority finishing in five or six years. The first two years are devoted to course work and to preparation for the PhD Qualifying Exam (the “General” exam) at the beginning of the second year. The second and third years are devoted to preparing for the Dissertation Qualifying Exam (the “Field” exam) and to writing the Dissertation Prospectus. The fourth, fifth, and, when necessary, sixth years are spent completing the doctoral dissertation. From the third year until the final year (when they are generally supported by Dissertation Completion Fellowships), students also devote time to teaching and to developing teaching skills. Students with prior graduate training or those with a demonstrated ability may complete their dissertations in the fourth or fifth years. Students are strongly discouraged from taking more than seven years to complete the program, except under the most exceptional circumstances.
The program aims to provide the PhD candidate with a broad knowledge of English and American literature and language, including critical and cultural theory. Additional important skills include facility with the tools of scholarship—ancient and modern foreign languages, bibliographic procedures, and textual and editorial methods. The program also emphasizes the ability to write well, to do solid and innovative scholarly and critical work in a specialized field or fields, to teach effectively, and to make articulate presentations at conferences, seminars, and symposia.
Residence
The minimum residence requirement is two years of enrollment in full-time study, with a total of at least fourteen courses completed with honor grades (no grade lower than B-). The minimum standard for satisfactory work in the Graduate School is a B average in each academic year.
Courses
A minimum of fourteen courses must be completed no later than the end of the second year. At least ten courses must be at the 200- (graduate) level, and at least six of these ten must be taken within the Department. Graduate students in the English Department will have priority for admission into 200-level courses. The remaining courses may be either at the 100- or the 200-level. Students typically devote part of their course work in the first year to preparing for the “General” exam, focusing increasingly on their field in the second year.
Independent Study and Creative Writing
Students may petition to take one of the 100-level courses as independent study (English 399) with a professor, but not before the second term of residence. Other independent study courses will be permitted only in exceptional circumstances and with the consent of the professor and Director of Graduate Studies. Only one creative writing course, which counts as a 100-level course, may be taken for credit.
Advanced Standing
Once the student has completed at least three 200-level courses with a grade of A or A-, a maximum of four graduate-level courses may be transferred from other institutions, at the discretion of the Director of Graduate Studies. Transferred courses will not count toward the minimum of ten required 200-level courses, but will be counted as 100-level courses.
Incompletes
No more than one Incomplete may be carried forward at any one time by a graduate student in the English Department. It must be made up no later than six weeks after the start of the next term.
In applying for an incomplete, students must have signed permission from the instructor and the Director of Graduate Studies, or the course in question may not count toward the program requirements. If students do not complete work by the deadline, the course will not count toward the program requirements, unless there are documented extenuating circumstances.
Language Requirements
A reading knowledge of two languages is required. Students will be expected to show proficiency in either two ancient languages, or two modern languages, or one ancient and one modern language. (Normally, Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, and Italian are the accepted languages. Other languages may be acceptable if deemed relevant and appropriate to a student’s program of study.) Should students opt for two modern languages, they must take one term of History and Structure of the Language or of Old English.Students may fulfill the ancient and modern language requirements
- by passing a two-hour translation exam with a dictionary,
- by taking a one-term literature course in the chosen language, or [for the ancient requirement]
- by taking two terms of elementary Latin or Greek.
Any course taken to fulfill the language requirement must be passed with a grade of B- or better. Literature-level language courses count for course credit; elementary language courses do not.
The (Non-Terminal) Master of Arts Degree
In order to apply for the AM degree, students must complete, with a grade of B or better, no fewer than a total of seven (7) courses, including a minimum of four (4) English courses, at least three (3) of which MUST be at the graduate (200-) level, and one (1) additional course which MUST be taken at the graduate level, but may be taken in another department. Students must also fulfill at least one of their departmental language requirements.
General Exam
At the beginning of the second year, students will take a seventy-five minute oral exam, based on a list of authors and/or titles which the Department will make available for each entering class in the summer prior to its arrival. The examiners will be three regular members of the Department (assistant, associate, or full professors), whose names will not be disclosed in advance. Candidates whose performance on the exam is judged inadequate will be marked as “not yet passed” and must retake the exam at a time to be determined. If candidates do not pass on the second attempt, they will not be able to continue in the program.
Note: Students must fulfill at least one language requirement by the end of the first year in order to be eligible to take the General Exam.
Field Oral Exam
The purpose of the Field Oral is twofold: to examine students’ preparation in primary teaching and scholarly fields they mean to claim, and to explore an emerging dissertation topic. The two-hour examination is taken in December of the third year of graduate study, and is conducted by a three-person examination committee, chosen by individual students no later than September of the third year, normally from among the tenured and ladder faculty of the English Department. One faculty member acts as chair of the committee and assists students in selecting its other members. This committee, or some part of it, will likely continue to serve as individual students’ dissertation advisors.
During the exam, students are asked to demonstrate an adequate knowledge of both of the major primary works and selected scholarly works in their chosen fields, and to give a first account of a dissertation project. The exam focuses on a list of primary and scholarly works, drawn up by each student in consultation with the examination committee. When desired by candidates and their respective committees, the fields list may be informed by longer lists of works provided by the Department, augmented by students to accommodate their particular scholarly interests. Each committee meets with its advisee at least four weeks before the exam (i.e., before the Thanksgiving break) to finalize fields lists and discuss the exam format. This exam is graded Pass/Fail.
Dissertation Prospectus
The dissertation prospectus, signed and approved by three advisors (one of whom may be the DGS), is due in the Graduate Office by May 15 of the third year. The prospectus is neither a draft chapter nor a detailed road map of the next two years’ work, but a sketch, no longer than seven to ten pages, of the topic on which students plan to write. It gives a preliminary account of the argument, structure, and scope of the intended treatment of the topic. The overview will be followed by a bibliography.
The prospectus is written in consultation with the dissertation advisors, who will meet students at least once in the spring of the third year to discuss the prospectus and to draw up a timetable for the writing of the dissertation. In planning a timetable, students need to bear in mind (1) that two draft chapters of the dissertation must be completed by the middle of their fourth year if they are to be eligible to apply for fifth-year completion fellowships, and (2) that students generally enter the job market in the fall of the fifth or sixth year, with at least two final chapters and a third draft chapter completed. They should also remember that term-time fellowships and traveling fellowships may be available to them in the fourth year, but that these require applications which are due as early as December or January of the third year.
Dissertation Advising
Students should assemble a group of faculty members to supervise the dissertation. Several supervisory arrangements are possible: students may work with a committee of three faculty members who share nearly equal responsibility for advising, or with a committee consisting of a principal faculty adviser and a second and third reader. If the scope of the project requires it, students should consult the DGS about including a fourth faculty adviser from a department other than English. The advising mode chosen will be indicated to the Department when the prospectus is submitted. Regardless of the structure of advising, three faculty readers are required to certify the completed dissertation.
The Dissertation
After the dissertation prospectus has been approved, candidates work with their dissertation directors or their dissertation committee. All of the designated advisors must approve the final work.
The doctoral dissertation is expected to be an original and substantial work of scholarship or criticism, excellent in form and content. The Department accepts dissertations on a great variety of topics involving a broad range of approaches to literature. It sets no specific page limits, preferring to give students and directors as much freedom as possible.
Teaching
Students begin teaching in their third year. Ordinarily they teach discussion sections in courses and in the Department’s program of tutorials for undergraduate honors majors.
Preparation for a teaching career is a required part of students’ training, and Teaching Fellows benefit from the supervision and guidance of Department members. Teaching Fellows are required to take English 350, the Teaching Colloquium, in their first year of teaching and are encouraged to avail themselves of the facilities at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
General Guidelines for Admission
The following is a set of general guidelines for the English Department’s admissions process. It should be noted that while several areas are emphasized here, the Admissions Committee carefully examines the overall profile of each applicant, taking these and other aspects of the application into consideration:
The Writing Sample: The writing sample is one of the most important portions of the application. Candidates should submit only one double-spaced, fifteen- to twenty-page paper, in twelve-point type with normal margins. The writing sample must be an example of critical writing (rather than creative writing) on a subject directly related to English and American literature and language. Applicants should not send longer papers with instructions to read an excerpt or excerpts, but should edit the sample themselves so that they submit only up to twenty pages. Candidates who know the field in which they expect to specialize should, when possible, submit a writing sample related to that field.
Grades: While candidates’ overall GPA is important, it is more important to have an average of no lower than A- in literature courses (and related courses). In addition, while we encourage applications from candidates in programs other than English, they must have both the requisite critical skills and a foundation in English and American literature for graduate work in English. Most of our successful candidates have some knowledge of all the major fields of English literary study and advanced knowledge of the field in which they intend to study.
Letters of Recommendation: It is important to have strong letters of recommendation from professors who are familiar with candidates’ academic work. Applicants who have been out of school for several years should try to reestablish contact with former professors. Additional letters from employers may also be included. Recommenders should comment not only on the applicant’s academic readiness for our PhD program but also on the applicants’ future potential as teachers and scholars.
GREs: High scores in the Verbal (700) and Subject test (650, i.e., English & American Literature) are positive additions to the application but are by no means the most important aspect of one’s candidacy. (The Quantitative and Analytical scores carry less weight than the Verbal and Subject scores.) Applicants should make timely plans to take these examinations in order to ensure that the scores arrive by the January application deadline. Scores received after mid-January may be too late to be considered.
Statement of Purpose: The Statement of Purpose is not a Personal Statement and should not be heavily weighted down with autobiographical anecdotes. It should focus on giving the admissions committee a clear sense of applicants’ individual interests and strengths. Applicants need not indicate a precise field of specialization, if they do not know, but it is helpful to know something about a candidate’s professional aspirations and sense of their own skills, as well as how the Harvard English Department might help in attaining their goals. Those who already have a research topic in mind should outline it in detail, giving a sense of how they plan their progress through the program. Those who do not should at least attempt to define the questions and interests they foresee driving their work over the next few years.
Languages: While there are no specific prerequisites for admission, a strong language background helps to strengthen the application, and students who lack it should be aware that they will need to address these gaps during their first two years of graduate study.
Please Note: Applicants should make every effort to ensure that all supporting materials (e.g., recommendations, transcripts, etc.) arrive by the application deadline.
No applications for admission in this field will be accepted after the deadline set by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Faculty of the Harvard English Department
DANIEL ALBRIGHT, Professor. BA 1967, Rice University; MPhil 1969, PhD 1970, Yale University.
Interests: 20th-Century Literature, Music, and Painting; 19th-Century Literature, Music, and Painting; Theory of Comparative Arts; Lyric Poetry; Drama; Science and Literature.
Selected Works: Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (2004); Beckett and Aesthetics (2003); Berlioz’s Semi-Operas (2001); Untwisting the Serpent (2000); Quantum Poetics (1997); ed., W. B. Yeats: The Poems (1990); Stravinsky: The Music-Box and the Nightingale (1989); Tennyson: The Muses’ Tug-of-War (1986); Lyricality in English Literature (1985); Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, Schoenberg (1981); Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf, Mann (1978).
HOMI K. BHABHA, Professor. BA 1970, University of Bombay; MPhil, MA, DPhil 1990, Christ Church, Oxford.
Interests: Colonial and Post-Colonial Theory; Cosmopolitanism; 19th- and 20th-Century
British and other English-Language Literatures.
Selected Works: Measure of Dwelling (forthcoming, Harvard University Press); The Right to Narrate (forthcoming, Columbia University Press); The Black Savant and the Dark Princess (2006); Framing Fanon (2005); The Location of Culture (2004, Routledge Classics); Still Life (2004); Adagio (2004); On Writing Rights (2003); Making Difference: The Legacy of the Culture Wars (2003); Democracy De-Realized (2002), V.S. Naipaul (2001), On Cultural Choice (2000).
SVEN BIRKERTS, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Nonfiction. BA, University
of Michigan.
Interests: The Literary Essay; Memoir;
Creative Writing.
Selected Works: My Sky Blue Trades (memoir, 2002); The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994); The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (1990); An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature (1987).
LAWRENCE BUELL, Professor. BA 1961, Princeton; MA 1962, PhD 1966, Cornell.
Interests: American Literature (especially
the 19th Century); Literature and the Environment; Literary and Cultural (Trans)nationalism.
Selected Works: Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Dimock and Buell (2007); American Transcendentalism: Essential Writings (2006); The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005); Emerson (2003); Writing for an Endangered World (2001); The Environmental Imagination (1995); New England Literary Culture (1986); Literary Transcendentalism (1973).
STEPHEN BURT, Associate Professor. BA 1994, Harvard University; PhD 2000, Yale University.
Interests: Poetry, especially but not only 20th and 21st Century; Modern and contemporary American writing; Literature and the other arts; The essay; Comics and graphic novels; Science fiction.
Selected Works: The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence (2007); Parallel Play (poems, 2006); ed., Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (2005); Randall Jarrell and His Age (2002); Popular Music (poems, 1999).
GLENDA CARPIO, Assistant Professor.
BA 1991, Vassar; PhD 2002, University of California at Berkeley.
Interests: The Literature, History and Culture of New World Slavery; African-American Visual Art; Anglophone Caribbean Literature; Theories on Memory and Textuality; Gender and Cultural Studies; Native American and Latino/a US Literature.
Selected Works: “Conjuring the Mysteries of Slavery: Voodoo, Fetishism and Stereotype in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada” (2004); “A Grace Born of Substraction: History and Trauma in Derek Walcott’s Omeros” (forthcoming).
J.D. CONNOR, Assistant Professor. BA 1992, Harvard University; PhD 2000, Johns Hopkins University.
Interests: 20th-Century American Literature and Culture; Film, esp. Hollywood; Cyberculture; Theories of Culture.
Selected Works: “Universal 571: Breaking a Studio’s Code” (2002); “Fraywatch” column for Slate (2002-3); “Sartre and Cinema: The Grammar of Commitment” (2001); “The Projections: Allegories of Industrial Crisis in Neoclassical Hollywood” (2000).
LEO DAMROSCH, Professor. AB 1963, Yale; AB/AM 1966, Cambridge; PhD 1968, Princeton.
Interests: Restoration and 18th-Century Literature; Romanticism; Puritan Imagination; Enlightenment.
Selected Works: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (2005); The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (1996); Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (1989); The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (1987); God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (1985); Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (1980); The Uses of Johnson’s Criticism (1976); Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (1972).
LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE, Assistant Professor. BA 1994, Michigan State University; AM 1998, PhD 2002, Cornell University.
Interests: 19th- and 20th-Century English, American, French, and German Literature; Aesthetics.
Selected Works: Style is Matter. The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, Cornell University Press (2007); “Biographical Illusion and Methodological Reality. On Pierre Bourdieu’s Esquisse pour une auto-analyse.” Diacritics (2006); “The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of Pattern in Vladimir Nabokov” (2006); “Eichmann, Empathy, and Lolita” (2006); “The Cratylic Impulse. Constraint and Work in the Works and Constraints of OuLiPo” (2005); “The Suspended Substantive. Animals and Men in Giorgio Agamben’s The Open” (2005); “On Cynicism, Dogs, Hair, Elfriede Jelinek and the Nobel Prize” (2005); “The Exceptional Life of the State: Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception” (2005).
DANIEL DONOGHUE, Professor. BA 1978, University of Dallas; MPhil 1981, University College Dublin; PhD 1986, Yale.
Interests: Old English; Middle English; History of the Language.
Selected Works: Old English Literature: A Short Introduction (2004); Lady Godiva: The History of a Legend (2003); Beowulf: A Verse Translation, ed. (2002); Style in Old English Poetry (1987).
JAMES ENGELL, Professor. BA 1973,
PhD 1978, Harvard.
Interests: 18th Century and Restoration; Romanticism; Criticism and Critical Theory; Rhetoric.
Selected Works: Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005); The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values (1999); Coleridge: The Early Family Letters (1994); Forming the Critical Mind (1989); ed. (with W.J. Bate) Biographia Literaria for the Collected Coleridge (1983); The Creative Imagination (1981).
CHRISTINE EVANS, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, Playwriting. BA 1993, Murdoch University; MA (Writing) University of Western Sydney, 1997; MFA (Playwriting) Brown University, 2000; Ph.D. Brown University, 2007.
Interests: Playwriting; Screenwriting; Contemporary US and British drama; Post-dramatic theatre; Terror, spectacle and performance.
Selected Works: “Asylum Seekers and ‘Border-Panic’ in Australia” (2003); All Souls’ Day (2002); “The Theatre of War, the Murder of Bridges” (2002); Mothergun (2001).
PHILIP FISHER, Professor. AB 1963, University of Pittsburgh; MA 1966, PhD 1971, Harvard.
Interests: American Novel; English Novel; Cultural Theory; Modernism; American Art and its Cultural Institutions; The Philosophy and Literature of the Passions.
Selected Works: The Vehement Passions (2002); Still the New World: American Literature in
a Culture of Creative Destruction (1998-99); Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare
Experiences (1998); Making and Effacing Art (1991); (ed.) New American Studies (1991); Hard Facts (1986); Making Up Society (1981).
MARJORIE GARBER, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies; Chair, Department of Visual and Environmental Studies; Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. BA 1966, Swarthmore; MPhil, PhD 1969, Yale.
Interests: Shakespeare; Modern Drama, Dramatic Theory, and Performance; Cultural Studies; Psychoanalysis and Literature; Renaissance Drama; Gender Theory; Visual Studies; Media Studies; Detective Fiction; the History and Theory of the Profession.
Selected Works: Shakespeare After All (2004); Quotation Marks (2002); Academic Instincts (2001); Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses (2000); Symptoms of Culture (1998); Dog Love (1996); Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1995); Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992); Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (1987); Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981); Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (1974); ed., The Medusa Reader (2003); ed., Thje Turn to Ethics (2000); ed., Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism and Fifties America (1995); ed., Media Spectacles (1993).
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities. BA 1973, Yale; MA 1979, PhD 1979, University of Cambridge.
Interests: African and African-American Literature; Cultural Theory.
Selected Works: America Behind the Color Line (2004); The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003); The Bondwoman’s Narrative, edited (2002);The African American Century (2000); Wonders of the African World (1999); Co-editor, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999); Co-editor, Encarta Africana (1999); Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997); co-gen. ed.,The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996); co-ed., The Dictionary of Global Culture (1996); The Future of the Race (with Cornel West) (1996); Colored People: A Memoir (1994); Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992); The Signifying Monkey (1988); Figures in Black (1987).
JORIE GRAHAM, Boylston Professor
of Oratory and Rhetoric. BA 1973, New York University; MFA 1978, University of Iowa.
Interests: English Poetry; American Poetry; Contemporary Poetics; Film Theory; Painting.
Selected Works: All poetry: Speaking Subject (2002); Swarm (2000); The Errancy (1997); The Dream of The Unified Field (1996); Ma-terialism (1993); Region of Unlikeness (1991); The End of Beauty (1987); Erosion (1983); Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980).
STEPHEN GREENBLATT, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities. BA 1964, Yale; MPhil 1966, Cambridge; PhD 1969, Yale.
Interests: Shakespeare; Early Modern Literature and Culture; Literature of Travel and Exploration; Religion and Literature; Literature and Anthropology; Literary and Cultural Theory; Literary Biography.
Selected Works: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004); Hamlet in Purgatory (2001); gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2000); Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher, 2000); gen. ed. Norton Shakespeare (1997); ed. New World Encounters (1993); ed. Redrawing the Boundaries (1992); Marvelous Possessions (1991); Learning to Curse (1990); Shakespearean Negotiations (1988); Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980).
JOSEPH C. HARRIS, Francis Lee Higgin-son Professor of English Literature and Professor of Folklore. BA 1961, University of Georgia; BA 1967, Cambridge; MA 1963, PhD 1969, Harvard.
Interests: Old English; Old Norse-Icelandic; Folklore and Mythology.
Selected Works: “Myth and Meaning in the Rök Inscription” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 2 (2006); “Erfikvði—myth, ritual, elegy” Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives (Lund, 2006); “Riesenbaumeister” (2003); “Beowulf’s Name” (2002); “Beowulf as Epic” (2001); “‘Double scene’ and ‘mise en abyme’ in Beowulfian Narrative” (2000); ‘Goðsögn sem hjálp til að lifa af’ í Sonatorreki (1999); Prosimetrum: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (ed. with K. Reichl, 1997); “Guilt and Sacrifice in Sonatorrek” (1994); “A Nativist Approach to Beowulf” (1994).
BRET JOHNSTON, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer. BA 1996, Texas A&M University; MA 2000, Miami University; MFA 2002, University of Iowa.
Interests: Fiction writing.
Selected Works: Corpus Christi: Stories (Random House, 2004).
MATTHEW KAISER, Assistant Professor. BA 1995, University of Oregon; MA 1998, PhD 2004, Rutgers University.
Interests: 19th-Century British Literature and Culture; Victorian Theatre; Gender Studies.
Selected Works: “A History of ‘Ludicrous’” (2004); “Marius at Oxford: Paterian Pedagogy and the Ethics of Seduction” (2002).
JAMAICA KINCAID, Lecturer.
Interests: The Garden and Garden Literature; Literature of Exploration and Explorers; Literature of Domestic Life.
Selected Works: Mr. Potter (2002); Talk Stories (2001); My Garden Book (1999); My Favorite Plant (ed., 1998); My Brother (1997); The Autobiography of My Mother (1996); Lucy (1990); Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip (Illustrated by Eric Fischl, 1989); A Small Place (1988); Annie John (1985); At the Bottom of the River (1983).
BARBARA LEWALSKI, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History and Literature and of English Literature. BSE 1950, Emporia State University; AM 1951, PhD 1956, University of Chicago.
Interests: Renaissance; Milton; Genre Theory and Criticism; Women in the Renaissance.
Selected Works: Ed. John Milton, Paradise Lost (2007); Ed., Norton Anthology of English Literature, “The Seventeenth Century” (2006, 2001, 1993, 1986); The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2000, rev. ed. 2003); Ed., Norton Anthology of English Literature, “The Seventeenth Century” (2001, 1993, 1986); The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2000); Writing Women in Jacobean England (1993); Ed., Renaissance Genres (1986); Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985); Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century English Lyric (1979); Milton’s Brief Epic (1966).
ELIZABETH D. LYMAN, Assistant Professor. AB 1979, Stanford; MA 1999,
PhD 2003, University of Virginia.
Interests: Drama of all periods; 20th-Century Literature; Opera and Music-Theater; Modernism; the Avant Garde; Performance Art; Comic Art and the Graphic Novel; the Material Book; Artists’ Books; Textual Editing and Theory; Theories of Notation.
Selected Works: “The Page Refigured: The Visual and Verbal Languages of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus” (2002).
LOUIS MENAND, Professor. BA 1973, Pomona; MA 1975, PhD 1980, Columbia.
Interests: 19th- and 20th-Century Cultural History.
Selected Works: American Studies (2002);
The Metaphysical Club (2001); The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the New Criticism, co-ed. (2000); The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. (1997); Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. (1996); Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (1987).
ELISA NEW, Professor. BA 1980, Brandeis University; MA 1982, PhD 1988, Columbia University.
Interests: American poetry; American Literature-1900; Religion and Literature; Jewish Literature.
Selected Works: Where the Meanings Are:
The Literature of New England Re-Appraised (forthcoming); The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (1999); The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (1993).
PETER NOHRNBERG, Assistant Professor. AB 1993, Harvard; M.Phil. 1995, Magdalen College, Oxford; MA, M.Phil. 1998, Yale; PhD 2003, Yale.
Interests: Modernism; Modern British Novel; 20th-Century and Contemporary Poetry; Irish Literature; Satire; Theories of Reader Response.
Selected Works: “‘I Wish He’d Never Been to School’: Stevie, Newspapers, and the Reader in Conrad’s The Secret Agent” (2003); The Book the Poet Makes: Collection and Re-Collection in W. B. Yeats’s “The Tower” and Robert Lowell’s “Life Studies” (1994).
JOHN PICKER, Associate Professor. BA 1992, Swarthmore; MA 1995, PhD 2001, University of Virginia.
Interests: 19th-Century British and American Literature (especially Victorian); Drama; Cultural Studies; Literature, Media, and Technology; Digital Studies.
Selected Works: “Victorian Soundscapes Revisited” (forthcoming); “George Eliot and the Sequel Question” (2006); Victorian Soundscapes (2003); “The Two Voices” (2003); “The Tramp of a Fly’s Footstep, or, the Shriek, Rattle, and Roar of a Victorian Sound Track” (2002); “The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice” (2001); “The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise” (2000); “‘Red War Is My Song’: Whitman, Higginson, and Civil War Music” (2000); “Disturbing Surfaces: Representations of the Fragment in The School for Scandal” (1998); “Shylock and the Struggle for Closure” (1994).
LEAH PRICE, Professor. AB 1991, Harvard; MPhil 1995, PhD 1998, Yale University.
Interests: 18th- and 19th-Century British Literature; the Novel; History of the Book; Journalism; Information Technology; Histories and Theories of Reading.
Selected Works: The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000, reprint 2003); The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature (co-ed., 2005); Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (2005); “Reading: The State of the Discipline” (2005); “Reader’s Block” (2004); “Stenographic Masculinity” (2005); “Genre et lectorat” (2003); “Reading (and Not Reading) Richardson” (2000); “Ferrier’s Pedantic Poetics” (2000); “George Eliot and the Production of Consumers” (1997); “Genlis’ Fictions of Calumny” (1997); “The Executor’s Hand in Sir Charles Grandison” (1996); “The Life of Charlotte Brontë and the Death of Miss Eyre” (1995); “‘Vies Privées et scandaleuses’: Marie-Antoinette and the Public Interest” (1992).
PETER SACKS, Professor. BA 1973, Princeton; M. Phil. 1976, Oxford; PhD
1980, Yale.
Interests: English Language Lyric Poetry; Writing of Poetry; Art and Literature.
Selected Works: Necessity (2002); O Wheel (poems, 2000); Natal Command (poems, 1997); Woody Gwyn: an Approach to the Landscape (1995); Promised Lands (poems, 1990); The English Elegy: Studies in the
Genre from Spenser to Yeats (1986); In
These Mountains (poems, 1986).
ROBERT SCANLAN, Professor of the Practice of Theater. BS 1971, M.I.T.; MA 1974, Rutgers University; PhD 1976, Rutgers University.
Interests: Theatre Directing; Formal Theory; Development of New Work for the Stage; Contemporary Plays and Performance; Playwriting; Dramaturgy, Samuel Beckett.
Selected Works: Principles of Dramaturgy (forthcoming)
Recent Directing: Whatever Happened to Toby Wing? by Karl Kirchway (2001); A Chapter of Thanatos by Karl Kirchway (2000); The Philosopher’s Stone by Mozart (1998); The Inferno of Dante translation by Robert Pinsky (1998); In Her Sight by Carol Mack (world premiere, 1997).
ELAINE SCARRY, Professor. AB 1968, Chatham College; AM, PhD 1974, University of Connecticut.
Interests: 19th-Century British Novel; 20th-Century Drama; Theory of Representation; Language of Physical Pain; Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science, and
the Law.
Selected Works: On Beauty and Being Just (1999); Dreaming by the Book (1999); ed. Fins de Siècle (1995); Resisting Representation (1994); ed., Literature and the Body (1988); The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985).
MARC SHELL, Professor. BA 1968, Stanford; PhD 1975, Yale.
Interests: Economics and Literature; Kinship and Language; Nationalism; Renaissance.
Selected Works: Art & Money (1995); Children of the Earth (1993); Elizabeth’s Glass (1993); The End of Kinship (1988); Money, Language, and Thought (1982); The Economy of Literature (1978); “Babel in America” (1995).
MICHAEL SHINAGEL, Senior Lecturer; Dean of Continuing Education and University Extension. AB 1957, Oberlin; AM 1959, PhD 1964, Harvard.
Interests: 18th-Century English Literature; Rise of the Novel; Satire.
Selected Works: Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe (1975, revised 1993); Concordance to the Poems of Jonathan Swift (1972); Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (1968).
JAMES SIMPSON, Donald P. & Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Professor. BA (Hons) 1976, University of Melbourne; M. Phil. 1980, University of Oxford; PhD 1996, University of Cambridge.
Interests: Late Medieval Western European Literature, 1150-1550; Images and Idolatry; Hermeneutics and the History of Reading; History of Idleness.
Selected Works: Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (2007); Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350-1547 (2002); (co-ed.) Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (2002); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (1995); Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (1990).
WERNER SOLLORS, Professor. DPhil 1975, Freie Universität Berlin.
Interests: American Literature; African American Studies; Ethnicity; Comparative Literature; Themes and Motifs.
Selected Works: “Ethnic Modernism” (2003); ed., An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New (2004); Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997); “For a Multilingual Turn in American Studies” (1997) <www.georgetown.edu/
crossroads/interroads/sollors1.html>; “Americans All: ‘Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island’” (1997) <www.nyupress.org/americansall>; ed., The Return of Thematic Criticism (1993); Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986).
JOHN STAUFFER, Professor. BSE 1987, Duke; MALS 1991, Wesleyan; MA 1993, Purdue; PhD 1999, Yale.
Interests: American Literature and Culture (especially the 19th Century); American Studies; Civil War; Slavery and Abolitionism; Protest Literature; Religion and Literature;American Novel; Autobiography.
Selected Works: The Problem of Evil (2007); James McCune Smith, Black Intellectual and Abolitionist (2006); Prophets of Protest: New Essays on American Abolitionism (ed., 2006); Meteor at War: The John Brown Story (2004); The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002); “Daguerreotyping the National Soul: The Portraits of Southworth and Hawes” (1997, 2005).
JASON STEVENS, Assistant Professor. BA 1997, Haverford College; PhD 2005, Columbia University.
Interests: 20th-Century American Literature; Religious Studies; American Intellectual History; Film and Mass Culture Studies; Native American Literature; Crime Fiction.
Selected Works: “Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology and the Ethnic Subjectivity of N. Scott Momaday” (2001).
GORDON TESKEY, Professor. BA 1976, Trent University; MA 1977, PhD 1981, University of Toronto.
Interests: English Renaissance Poetry, especially Spenser, Donne, and Milton.
Selected Works: Delirious Milton (2006); Norton Critical Edition of “Paradise Lost” (2005); Allegory and Violence (1996).
KATHERINE VAZ, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer. BA 1977, University of California, Santa Barbara; MFA 1991, University of California, Irvine.
Interests: Fiction writing; Portuguese and Luso-American Literature.
Selected Works: Mariana (1998); Fado & Other Stories (1997); Saudade (1994).
HELEN VENDLER, University Professor. AB 1954, Emmanuel College; PhD 1960, Harvard.
Interests: English and American Lyric Poetry.
Selected Works: Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (2004); Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (2003); Seamus Heaney (1998); The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997); Soul Says (1995); The Odes of John Keats (1983).
NICHOLAS WATSON, Professor. BA, MA 1980, Cambridge; MPhil 1984, Oxford; PhD 1987, Toronto.
Interests: Medieval English Literature, Theology, and Intellectual History; Poetry; Hagiography; Medieval Latin; Mysticism, Visionary Writing, Magic, Medieval Women’s Writing and Literary Culture.
Selected Works: Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (co-ed., 2005); The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularities (co-ed., 2003); The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520 (coauthor, 1999); “Censorship and Cultural Change: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409” (1995); Richard Rolle’s “Emendatio Vitae” (edition, 1994); “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love” (1993); Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (1991); Anchoritic Spirituality: “Ancrene Wisse” and Associated Works (translation, coauthor, 1991).
JAMES WOOD, Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism. MA 1988, Jesus College, Cambridge.
Interests: 20th Century Literature; Religion and Literature.
Selected Works: The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief (Modern Library, 1999); Selected Shorter Fiction of D.H. Lawrence (Modern Library, 1999); The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus, 2003); The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus, 2004).