Course Descriptions for Fall 2008 are available here.Please send responses to the English Program Self-Study and External Review comments to Steven Kruger.Please click here to see the Friday Forum Schedule |
Program Faculty
Medieval Literature: Renaissance/Early Modern Literature: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Romantic Movement: The Victorian Period: American Literature to 1900: Twentieth-Century Literature:
African American Writings and Poetics: Bibliographical Studies and Textual Theory: Composition Theory and Rhetoric: Feminist Theory and Women's Writings: Gay/Lesbian/Queer Literature and Theory: Literary History, Criticism, and Theory: Postcolonial Literature and Theory:
Ammiel Alcalay: Poet, critic, translator, editor and scholar; Middle East and the Balkans to the imperial context of American culture; King Philip's War to the poetry of Vietnam veterans; 20th century American poetry in its local and international contexts; the ancient Americas; literary, social and political movements from the 1930s to the present; West Coast culture; literatures and cultures of the Middle East; poetics; translation; the social and political roles of writing and culture; New American Poetry; the Objectivists; Black Mountain; San Francisco Renaissance; the Umbra Workshop; Black Arts Movement. Meena Alexander: Poetry and poetics; postcolonial narratives; trauma, migration and memory; Asian American literature; multicultural feminism; British Romanticism. Felicia Bonaparte: Victorian literature; the history of the novel, with special emphasis on all philosophic questions, in particular those questions grounded in epistemological issues and giving, through their concrete expressions, shape and meaning to the narrative by means of frames, structures, images, symbolism, use of literary traditions, use of literary texts, and the embedding of diverse genres. Barbara Bowen: Feminism and materialist theory and criticism; early modern period, especially Shakespeare and women writers; postcolonial literature and theory, with particular interest in African diaspora; African-American literature; editorial board, Found Object; consultant, Women Writers Project (Brown University). John Brenkman: Twentieth-century literature; critical theory. Rachel Brownstein: The 18th- and 19th-century novel; Romanticism in England and France; women's writing and feminist criticism and theory; biography; essays, diaries and letters. Glenn Burger: Medieval English and Scottish literature, especially Chaucer and Chaucerians; medieval cultural studies, especially gender and sexuality; medieval East/West relations; medieval women's writing; queer theory; postcolonial theory. Mary Ann Caws: Modernism and modernist art; comparative poetics and poetry; art and literature in America, England, and France; translation and translation theory; contemporary aesthetics; the essay; autobiography; Bloomsbury; Dada and surrealism; film studies. William Coleman [emeritus]: Medieval studies, with particular interest in the English, Italian, and Latin 14th century (especially Chaucer's sources: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio); medieval manuscript study (paleography, codicology, and text editing); medieval Latin language and literature (especially liturgical drama); incunabula and the history of printing; 18th-century Age of Sensibility (especially the history of the gothic novel). Ashley Dawson: post-colonial literature and theory, cultural studies, contemporary British literature. James L. De Jongh: African-American literature; Harlem Renaissance and Africana literatures of the black awakening; African American literary modernism; American slavery in literature. Morris Dickstein: Contemporary literature and American studies; urban and ethnic fiction; realism and modernism; cultural criticism; English Romantic poetry; film genre and film history; politics and literature; literary journalism, literary criticism, and public intellectuals. Mario DiGangi: Feminist, materialist, and queer criticism; lesbian and gay studies; history of sexuality; early modern period, especially the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; gender and sexuality in the Renaissance; historicism in Renaissance studies. Jacqueline Di Salvo: Early modern literature; the Romantic movement; women's studies/feminist criticism; Marxist/historicist criticism; politics and psychology of poetics/religion; Milton and Blake; culture and politics of the 1960s. Marc Dolan: American literature and culture, 1845-1945; popular genres in literature (for example, detective fiction, science fiction, horror, romance); media studies (particularly film, popular music, and broadcasting); ethnicity in American culture; the literature of New York City; cultural studies and cultural theory. Martin Elsky: Early modern literature and history; Elizabethan/Jacobean print culture and the emergence of authorship; Renaissance language theory; 17th-century religious lyric; early modern trans-Atlanticism; CUNY representative to the Central Executive Committee of the Folger Shakespeare Institute. Edmund Epstein: Modern literature, especially Joyce, Yeats, and Hopkins; linguistics, especially the linguisitics of literature, including prosody and syntax, and the pragmatics of literature (literature as a speech-act, and the functions of literary language). Duncan Faherty: Eighteenth-century American literature; early U.S. literature and culture (1780-1850); American Studies; circum-Atlantic Studies. David Greetham: Interdisciplinary textual theory; interactive technology; textualities; scholarly editing and bibliographical studies; history of the book, authorship, and reception; medieval English literature; history of literary criticism; critical theory and culture criticism; founder of Society for Textual Scholarship. N. John Hall: The 19th-century British novel; literary history; Trollope and Beerbohm; literary biography; scholarly editing; 19th- and 20th-century autobiography; illustrated fiction; caricature. Tom Hayes: Poststructuralism; special interests in the Renaissance, including Shakespeare, Jonson, the metaphysical poets, Milton, mysticism, painting, and popular culture; abiding interests in Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Zizek. Carrie Hintz: Women's writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on life writing (letters, diaries, auto/biography); women and nonconformity in Restoration England; spousal biography from the seventeenth century to the contemporary moment; utopian and dystopian writing; speculative and experimental fiction for children and young adults. Peter Hitchcock: Literary theory, cultural theory, Marxism, Bakhtin, and working-class fiction; world literature; postcolonialism; film studies; associate director, Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. Hildegard Hoeller: Nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature; fiction by African-American and Women Writers; literature and economy; literary traditions (sentimental writing, realism, naturalism, modernism, the Harlem Renaissance). Anne Humpherys: Victorian studies; popular literature; narrative theory; women's studies. Gerhard Joseph: Victorian literature, with specialization in poetry; contemporary theory, and the history of criticism; the contemporary novel; cyberculture and cyberfiction. Fred Kaplan [emeritus]: 19th- and 20th-century British and American literature and culture; biography; the synthesis of lives and works, with emphasis on politics, history, aesthetics, gender, and social context; Dickens, Carlyle, Lincoln, Twain, James, Vidal. Richard Kaye: Victorian and modernist literature and culture; gender and sexuality; history of the novel; literature of the fin de siècle; World War I literature . William Kelly: American literature of the 18th and 19th centuries; American studies; cultural theory. Norman Kelvin [emeritus]: 19th-century English literature and cultural history; early-20th-century modernism; the decorative arts in relation to modern painting and literature; political ideology, including class and gender, and the arts. Wayne Koestenbaum: poetry and poetics; modern and contemporary literature; music; film; visual art; queer studies; cultural studies; performance; the essay; autobiography. Steven Kruger: medieval studies, especially Chaucer and late-medieval narrative poetry; medieval interreligious (Jewish-Christian-Islamic) relations; queer theory and lesbian and gay studies, particularly the AIDS crisis and the construction of racial, sexual, religious, and gender categories. Jane Marcus: Feminist literary criticism; 20th-century British literature and intellectual history (women's suffrage, World War I); transatlantic cultural studies (African diaspora, the 1930s); Virginia Woolf; primitivism and modernism; Nancy Cunard and the Negro anthology; intersections of race, class and culture. Richard McCoy: Late medieval and early modern periods; 16th- and 17th-century English literature; Skelton, More, Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton; Renaissance and Reformation politics, religion, and culture; ritual and iconography; new historicism and cultural poetics. Catherine McKenna[emerita]: Medieval English and European literatures, especially the languages and literatures of Ireland and Wales; Celtic studies. Judith Milhous: Drama and theatrical performance, all periods, but particularly 17th- and 18th-century English. Nancy K. Miller: Contemporary autobiography and autobiography theory; women's writing (American and French); 20th-century cultural history, after 1945; feminist theory. Rebecca Mlynarczyk: Composition/rhetoric, basic and second-language writing, qualitative research methodology, ethnography. George Otte: Basic writing (co-editor, Journal of Basic Writing, 1996-2002); the politics of language use; error analysis; composition and rhetorical theory; literary/critical theory; assessment and evaluation; computer-mediated communication and instruction (Director of Instructional Technology, CUNY). Blanford Parker: Restoration and 18th-century poetry; philosophical prose from Bacon to Burke; history of literary criticism; classical literature; Milton, Johnson, and Coleridge; modernist poetry (Frost, Eliot). Sondra Perl: Composition theory and rhetoric, especially theories of composing and questions of voice; feminist theory, especially of writing and pedagogy; ethnography, especially urban ethnography and classrooms as sites of culture and literacy; urban education; cross-cultural dialogue; teaching as a site of inquiry; embodied knowing; creative nonfiction and memoir; Holocaust studies. Robert Reid-Pharr: Race, gender, sexuality, and American culture; 19th- and 20th-century literature; African-American literature and poetics; film studies. David Reynolds: American literature, particularly before 1900, with special interests in cultural studies, gender studies, historical scholarship, and biography. Joan Richardson: American literature/American studies, focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries; modernism; Wallace Stevens; science and literature; philosophy and literature, especially pragmatism; visual arts and literature; American Colonial period and American religion; poetics; editorial board, The Wallace Stevens Journal; poetry editor, The Grenfell Press. David Richter: Restoration and 18-century literature, especially prose fiction 1660 to 1837; the gothic novel; crime fiction and true crime; the graphic novel; biblical narrative; history of the novel; historical/cultural studies; history of literary criticism and theory; theory of narrative; editorial board, Narrative. Michael Sargent: Medieval literature and cultural studies, with a particular interest in the 15th century. David Savran: American theatre and performance; twentieth-century literature; popular culture; sociology of culture; gender studies; queer studies. Talia Schaffer: Nineteenth-century literature and material culture; decorative arts; noncanonical writers; aestheticism; domestic realism; women’s writing; cultural studies; literature and culture of the fin de siecle; feminism and canon revision. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: The Victorian novel; queer studies; performativity and performance; experimental critical writing; material culture, especially textiles and texture; early modernism and Proust; Romantic fiction; artists' books; non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; Buddhism in the West. Ira Shor: Composition and rhetoric; critical pedagogy and literacy; working-class studies; critical whiteness and cultural studies; Paulo Freire theory and methods. Donald Stone [emeritus]: Victorian literature; history of the novel; visual arts and literature; intercultural relations (James to Rushdie). Jon-Christian Suggs [emeritus]: African-American literature; law and literature; American proletarian culture and working class studies; literary history and theory; editorial board H-AMSTDY; coordinator, Justice studies major, John Jay College. Elizabeth Tenenbaum [emerita]: Modernism; history of the novel; narrative theory; women's studies; particular interests in Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner, James, and contemporary American women writers. Neal Tolchin: 19th-century American literature; contemporary multicultural American fiction, employing an eclectic methodology, a blend of new historicism, psychoanalytic theory, and interdisciplinary and American studies approaches. Alan Vardy: Romanticism; John Clare; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; laboring-class poets; aesthetics and politics. Michele Wallace: African-American literature and poetics; feminist literature and poetics; gender and sexuality; queer theory; literary theory; American cinema and film theory; American visual culture; popular culture; affiliations with MLA, Society of Cinema Studies, Oscar Micheaux Society, and PEN. Jerry Watts: American studies; African American literature; political science. Barbara Webb: Caribbean, African-American, and African literatures; postcolonial and women's studies. Scott Westrem: Medieval studies, especially Latin and European vernacular works relating to geography, cartography, and travel to Asia/Africa; pilgrimage literature; Chaucer, The Book of John Mandeville, and the Alexander legend; Germanic languages; textual editing. E. Gordon Whatley: Medieval literature; Old English, Middle English, medieval Latin, with emphasis on hagiographic texts, sources, and contexts. Joshua Wilner: British and European Romanticism; critical theory; comparative poetry and poetics; autobiography; literature and psychoanalysis; gender studies; literature and philosophy. Joseph Wittreich: Milton, Milton's modernity, twentieth- and twenty-first century reincarnations of his last poems; the Romantics (with special interest in Blake); the Bible and literature, especially biblical hermeneutics, the prophetic books (particularly The Book of Revelation), and apocalypticism; the visionary tradition; theories of influence; reception theory; gay and lesbian literature and queer theory; feminist criticism and theory; narratology. Nancy Yousef: British and European Romanticism; Enlightenment; philosophy and literature; history of psychoanalysis; psychoanalytic theory; feminist criticism; nineteenth-century novel.
|
 |
PhD
Program in English |