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, and 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 section of this guide, or the information contained in the Undergraduate Education section of this guide.
Undergraduate Programs
English: BA, Minor
Graduate Programs
English: PhD
Faculty and Instructors
+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.
Faculty
+ Elizabeth Abel, Associate Professor. Feminist theory, psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf, race and gender.
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Oliver Arnold, Associate Professor. Drama, Renaissance and Early Modern.
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Sukanya Banerjee, Associate Professor. 19th-century British literature, South Asian literature, critical theory, cultural studies, narrative and the novel.
Stephen Michael Best, 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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Vikram Chandra, Teaching Professor. Creative writing.
John Alba Cutler, Associate Professor. US Latino/a/x literatures, with special emphasis on modernism, poetry, and print culture.
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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, Professor. 20th-Century Irish and British literature, contemporary Irish and British poetry, poetry and music.
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Catherine Flynn, Associate 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, Associate 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. Creative writing.
Mark A. Goble, Associate Professor. 21st century British literature, narrative and the novel, critical theory, film, 19th, 20th, and 21st century American literature, poetry.
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+ Steven Goldsmith, Professor. 19th-century British literature, critical theory, poetry.
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Amanda Jo Goldstein, Associate Professor. Poetry, 18th- and 19th-Century British Literature, Critical Theory.
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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, Professor. Linguistics, English, poetry, meter, rhyme, and alliteration, phonological theory, English grammar and usage.
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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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+ Georgina Kleege, Professor. Disability studies, creative writing.
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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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Grace Lavery, Associate Professor. 19th-century British literature, pacific literature, cultural studies, critical theory, gender and sexual studies .
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Steven Sunwoo Lee, Associate Professor. Twentieth-century American literature, comparative ethnic studies, diaspora, Soviet and post-Soviet studies.
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Andrew Leong, Assistant Professor. Asian American and Transnational Asian Literatures and Cultures.
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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, Associate Professor. Renaissance and Early Modern literature, drama, poetry, critical theory .
Fiona McFarlane, Associate Professor. Creative writing, the novel, the short story.
Jennifer Miller, Associate Professor. English, philology, paleography, hagiography, medieval literature, literature in old and middle English, historiography, medieval rhetorical culture, insular political relations, multilingualism, translation and 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, Professor. Modernism, creative writing, 20th and 21st century poetry and poetics.
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Samuel Otter, Professor. 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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+ Joanna M. Picciotto, Associate Professor. 18th-century British literature, Renaissance and Earley Modern literature .
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+ Kent Puckett, Professor. The novel, nineteenth-century British literature and literary theory, sociability, psychoanalysis and affect .
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Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor. South Asian literature, critical theory, Asian American literature, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies .
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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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, Professor. 18th-century British literature .
Elisa C. Tamarkin, Associate Professor. American literature to 1900.
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James G. Turner, Professor. Gender, sexuality, 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, Professor. Critical theory, African American literature, historiography.
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Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Professor. English, American literature, Native American literature, autobiography, ethnic American literature.
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Dora Zhang, Associate Professor. Critical theory, linguistics, narrative and the novel, 20th and 21st century Britain.
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Lecturers
Melanie Abrams, Continuing Lecturer.
Thomas Farber, Senior Lecturer.
John Shoptaw, Continuing Lecturer.
Emeritus Faculty
Charles F. Altieri, Professor Emeritus. Literature and the visual arts, Wittgenstein, Modern American poetry, Contemporary American poetry, history of aesthetic philosophy.
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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, the novel, literary and linguistic theory, the industrial novel, recent French literary theory, literature and philosophy .
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Robert Bloom, Professor Emeritus. 20th- and 21st-century British and American literature .
+ Mitchell Breitwieser, Professor Emeritus. American literature, philosophy and religion .
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Carol T. Christ, Professor Emeritus. 19th-century British literature .
+ Frederick Crews, Professor Emeritus. American literature, modern British literature .
Richard Feingold, Professor Emeritus. 18th-century British literature .
Catherine Gallagher, Professor Emeritus. 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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Robert L. Hass, Professor Emeritus. 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 Emeritus. 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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Richard Hutson, Professor Emeritus. 19th- 20th-, and 21st- century American literature, critical theory, African American literature, narrative and the novel .
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Abdul R. JanMohamed, Professor Emeritus. Critical theory, theory of subjection, postcolonial literature, culture, and theory, African American fiction, and minority discourse .
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Maxine Hong Kingston, Professor Emeritus. Prose writing .
Ojars Kratins, Professor Emeritus. Chaucer, Romance, Arthurian literature, utopian literature, theory and practice of teaching .
Donald McQuade, Professor Emeritus. 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. 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. Old English, Scottish literature and poetry .
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Professor Emeritus. Old English, cultural studies, textual criticism.
Raymond Oliver, Professor Emeritus. Beowulf, history and theory of the short poem, 1200-1900, verse .
Genaro M. Padilla, Professor Emeritus. American literature, Chicano/Latino literary and cultural studies, American autobiography.
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Morton D. Paley, Professor Emeritus. British Romanticism, William Blake, literature and art .
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Carolyn Porter, Professor Emeritus. 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. Short fiction and poetry .
+ Hugh M. Richmond, Professor Emeritus. Shakespeare, Theatre, Comparative Literature (European) .
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Peter Scott, Professor Emeritus. Medieval European literature (especially Latin) before 1300, poetry .
George A. Starr, Professor Emeritus. 18th-century English literary, social and intellectual history, prose style, bibliography and textual criticism, literature of California and the west.
Research Profile