Overview

The Department of English offers courses in literature, in language, and in writing. The courses in literature have many different focuses: major authors, historical periods, genres, critical theories and methods as well as cultural and multicultural studies. Courses in language offer instruction in both the history and the structure of the English language. Writing courses offer training in both expository and creative writing.

Entry-Level Writing Requirement

Students must have fulfilled the Entry-Level Writing Requirement before taking any course in the Department of English. For further information, see the College Writing Programs or the Undergraduate Education section of this guide.

Undergraduate Programs

English: BA, Minor

Graduate Program

English: PhD

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Courses

English

Faculty and Instructors

+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Faculty

+ Elizabeth Abel, Professor. Feminist theory, psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf, race and gender.
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Charles F. Altieri, Professor. Literature and the visual arts, Wittgenstein, Modern American poetry, Contemporary American poetry, history of aesthetic philosophy.
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Oliver Arnold, Associate Professor.

Stephen Michael Best, Associate Professor. Film, English literature, African American literature, literary culture, legal culture.
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C. D. Blanton, Associate Professor. Modernism, modern poetry, 19th- and 20th-century British literature, aesthetic and critical theory.
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+ Mitchell Breitwieser, Professor. American literature, philosophy and religion.
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Mark D. Danner, Professor. Central America, politics, Balkans, foreign affairs, journalism, Haiti, documentaries.
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+ Kathleen Donegan, Associate Professor. Colonial America, early America, Native America, early Caribbean.
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+ Ian Duncan, Professor. English, the novel, British literature 1750-1900, Scottish literature, history and theory of fiction, Scottish enlightenment/romanticism, Scott, literature and the human sciences, Darwin.
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Nadia Ellis, Associate Professor. Black diaspora literature and culture, queer studies, the city.
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Eric Falci, Associate Professor. 20th-Century Irish and British literature, contemporary Irish and British poetry, poetry and music.
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Catherine Flynn, Assistant Professor. Modernism, Irish, British, comparative literature, critical theory, Avant-Gardes, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien.
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Anne-Lise Francois, Associate Professor. Popular culture, English, comparative literature, the modern period, comparative romanticisms; lyric poetry; the psychological novel, novel of manners; gender, critical theory; literature, philosophy; fashion.
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Joshua Gang, Assistant Professor. 20th- and 21st-century British literature, literature and the sciences of mind, literature and the history of philosophy (especially mind and language), modernism, contemporary literature, literary history, literary theory and criticism.
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Cecil S. Giscombe, Professor.

Mark A. Goble, Associate Professor.

+ Steven Goldsmith, Professor.

Marcial Gonzalez, Associate Professor. Chicano and Chicana literature, twentieth-century American ethnic literatures, theory of the novel, marxism, critical theory, farm worker social movements.
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+ Kevis Goodman, Associate Professor. 18th-century and Romantic British literature, Milton, literature and the history of science, especially medicine.
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Dorothy J. Hale, Professor. English literature, American literature, the novel, narrative theory, critical theory, Henry James, William Faulkner, the modern novel of consciousness.
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Kristin Hanson, Associate Professor. Linguistics, English, poetry, meter, rhyme, and alliteration, phonological theory, English grammar and usage.
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Robert L. Hass, Professor. English, poetry, poetry writing, American poetry, history of the short poem in English, contemporary literature, translation, environmental writing, literature and the environment, the natural history tradition in American writing.
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Lyn Hejinian, Professor. English, American literature, poetry writing, translation, modernist and postmodern literature, American postwar experimental literature, Gertrude Stein, the objectivists, language writing, Soviet Russian poetry, small press publishing, feminism.
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Abdul R. Janmohamed, Professor. Critical theory; theory of subjection; postcolonial literature, culture, and theory; African American fiction; and minority discourse.
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Donna V. Jones, Associate Professor. Critical theory, English, modernism, literature and philosophy, literature of the Americas, literature of the African Diaspora, postcolonial literature and theory, narrative and historiography.
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Steven Justice, Professor. English, late medieval literature, medieval Latin, Chaucer, hagiography, Latin religious thought, literary criticism.
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Victoria Kahn, Professor. Rhetoric, comparative literature, Renaissance literature, poetics, early modern political theory, the Frankfurt School.
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+ Jeffrey Knapp, Professor. Religion, nationalism, theater, English literature, Shakespeare, English renaissance, Spenser, drama, imperialism, epic poetry, authorship, mass entertainment.
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David Landreth, Associate Professor. English Renaissance literature 1500-1660.
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Celeste Langan, Associate Professor. English, romantic poetry, 19th century literature, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Hardy, Rousseau, the French Revolution, Marxist theory, literature and the social sciences.
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Joseph Lavery, Assistant Professor.

Steven Sunwoo Lee, Associate Professor. Twentieth-century American literature, comparative ethnic studies, diaspora, Soviet and post-Soviet studies.
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Colleen Lye, Associate Professor. Postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies, Asian American literature, 20th and 21st century literature, world literature.
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David Marno, Assistant Professor.

Jennifer Miller, Associate Professor. English, philology, paleography, hagiography, medieval literature, literature in old & middle English, historiography, medieval rhetorical culture, insular political relations, multilingualism, translation & textual transmission, dialectology.
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Maura Bridget Nolan, Associate Professor. Chaucer, drama, Middle English literature, Gower, Lydgate, medieval, 16th century, literary form, style.
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Geoffrey O'Brien, Associate Professor. Modernism, Creative Writing, 20th and 21st century poetry and poetics.
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Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Professor. Old English language and literature, textual criticism, Medieval Studies.
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Samuel Otter, Professor. English, African American literature, 19th century American literature, 17th and 18th century American literature, Herman Melville, race in American culture, literature and history, discourse and ideology, close reading.
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Genaro M. Padilla, Professor. American literature, Chicano/Latino literary and cultural studies, American autobiography.
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+ Joanna M. Picciotto, Associate Professor.

+ Kent Puckett, Associate Professor. English, the novel, nineteenth-century British literature and literary theory, sociability, psychoanalysis and affect.
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Poulomi Saha, Assistant Professor.

Scott Andrew Saul, Professor. English, African American studies, 20th century American literature and culture, performance studies, jazz studies, histories of the avante-garde.
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+ Susan Schweik, Professor. Feminist theory, cultural studies, English, American poetry, disability studies, 20th-century poetry, literature and politics, war literature.
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C. Namwali Serpell, Associate Professor. Theory, aesthetics, affect, ethics, uncertainty, the novel, film, 20th and 21st century Anglophone fiction, the face.
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Katherine Snyder, Associate Professor. 19th- through 21st-century Literature in English, narrative and the novel, gender studies, post-traumatic and post-apocalyptic fiction.
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Janet Linda Sorensen, Associate Professor.

George A. Starr, Professor. 18th-century English literary, social and intellectual history; prose style; bibliography and textual criticism, literature of California and the west.
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Elisa C. Tamarkin, Associate Professor. American literature to 1900.
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Emily Thornbury, Associate Professor. Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature.
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James G. Turner, Professor. Gender, sexuality, English, 16th-18th-Century English, Italian and French literature, art and literature, 17th-Century political writing, landscape and the city, Enlightenment materialism, sexuality in Renaissance Italian art and Antiquity.
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Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor. Critical theory, African American literature, historiography.
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Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Associate Professor. English, American literature, native American literature, autobiography, ethnic American literature.
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Dora Zhang, Assistant Professor. Critical theory, linguistics, narrative & the novel, 20th and 21st century Britain.
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Lecturers

Melanie Abrams, Lecturer.

Vikram Chandra, Senior Lecturer SOE.

Thomas Farber, Senior Lecturer.

+ Georgina Kleege, Lecturer SOE.

John Shoptaw, Lecturer.

Emeritus Faculty

Joel B. Altman, Professor Emeritus. Rhetoric, Shakespeare, English renaissance, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, history of literary theory.
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Julia Bader, Professor Emeritus. Comedy, English novel, modern American literature, women writers, feminist criticism.
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Ann Banfield, Professor Emeritus. Virginia Woolf, English, the novel, literary and linguistic theory, the industrial novel, recent French literary theory, literature and philosophy.
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John Bishop, Professor Emeritus. Psychoanalysis, English, the novel, modernism, 20th-Century literature, Joyce, experimental fiction.
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Robert Bloom, Professor Emeritus.

+ Stephen Booth, Professor Emeritus. English, aesthetics, Renaissance literature.
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Carol T. Christ, Professor Emeritus.

+ Frederick Crews, Professor Emeritus.

Richard Feingold, Professor Emeritus.

+ Donald M. Friedman, Professor Emeritus.

Catherine Gallagher, Professor Emeritus. English, 19th century British literature, British novels, victorian non-fiction prose, British women's literature, history and literature of the victorians, history of the novel, Victorian popular culture.
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Richard Hutson, Professor Emeritus. Literature.
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Maxine Hong Kingston, Professor Emeritus.

Ojars Kratins, Professor Emeritus.

Donald McQuade, Professor Emeritus. English, advertising, 20th century American literature and culture, theory and practice of non-fiction, literature and popular culture, the American Renaissance, the essay as literature.
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D.A. Miller, Professor Emeritus. The novel, gay and cultural studies, classic cinema, Hitchcock.
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Alan H. Nelson, Professor Emeritus. English, history of drama, medieval and Renaissance English literature, English Corpus Christi plays, English morality plays, medieval art and literature, history of staging in the middle ages and renaissance, medieval and early Renaissance paleography.
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John D. Niles, Professor Emeritus.

Raymond Oliver, Professor Emeritus.

Morton D. Paley, Professor Emeritus. British Romanticism, William Blake, literature and art.
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Carolyn Porter, Professor Emeritus. English, American literature, American intellectual history, American Renaissance, Faulkner, James, Fitzgerald, Henry Adams, American Literature of the 1930s.
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Ishmael Reed, Professor Emeritus.

+ Hugh M. Richmond, Professor Emeritus. Shakespeare, Theatre, Comparative Literature (European).
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Peter Scott, Professor Emeritus.

Robert Tracy, Professor Emeritus.

Alex Zwerdling, Professor Emeritus.