Graduate Program - Faculty

Prof. Graham is a John Hope Franklin Fellow, National Humanities Center, and the winner of Ford/ACLS fellowships and eight NEH grants. She is co-founder, Richard Wright circle; founder/director, Project on the History of Black Writing (1983-current). Director, Langston Hughes International Symposium and founder/director, Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, President, Toni Morrison Society (2004-2007).  Other current works in progress include the Cambridge History of the African American Novel and the Cambridge History of African American Literature.

Professor Richard Hardin, Ph.D. (Texas)
Areas of research:  English Renaissance; classical influence on literature, medieval to modern; recent interests are the plays and poetry of Christopher Marlowe and comedy and the reception of the Roman comic dramatist Plautus in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
Selected Publications: Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (1973); ed. Survivals of Pastoral (1979); comp., with Bernard Accardi and other members of the KU Myth Studies Unit, Recent Studies in Myths and Literature, 1970-1990: An Annotated Bibliography (1991); trans. and ed., John Ross, Poems on Events of the Day, 1582-1607 (1991); Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (1992); Love in a Green Shade: Idyllic Romances Ancient to Modern (2000).
Prof. Hardin's Curriculum Vitae

Prof. Hardin's articles have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly journals; he is the Frances Stieffel Teaching Professor of English.

Prof. Harrington was the Walt Whitman Chair in American Literature and Culture, via the Fulbright Distinguished Chairs Program, at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, in the spring of 2005.  He is currently at work on a mixed-genre and -media account of his mother's life and times, entitled Things Come On.  He has published articles on modernism and political philosophy, and the cultural history of poetry in the U.S.

Prof. Harris is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture. Her essays have appeared in collections published by Oxford, Johns Hopkins, and Rutgers University presses, and in journals such as American Literature, New England Quarterly, and Studies in the Novel. She has edited Legacy: A Journal of American Women's Writing, and has served on advisory boards for American Literature, Leviathan: the Melville Society Journal, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Mark Twain, and the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.

Associate Professor William J. Harris, Ph.D. (Stanford)
Areas of research: American Literature, African American Literature, jazz studies, American poetry and creative writing.
Selected Publications: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (1985), Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (1974), and In My Own Dark Way (1977).
Prof. Harris's Curriculum Vitae

Prof. Harris has also published poetry in fifty anthologies and some of the more recent work appears in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004) and Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (2006). He is the editor or co-editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1991, 2000), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of African American Literary Tradition (1997) and a double issue of The African American Review on Amiri Baraka (Summer/Fall 2003). He is an editor or advisory editor for The African American Review, mixed blood, the University of Iowa Press Contemporary North American Poetry Series, Penn Sound: Amiri Baraka (website) and Modern American Poetry: Amiri Baraka (website).  His awards and fellowships include the College of the Liberal Arts Outstanding Teacher Award (Penn State), and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (Harvard University). He is a member of the Jazz Study Group at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies.

Prof. Hartman is the author of articles on American English and consultant to several commercial and scholarly dictionaries. Kemper Teaching Award recipient. Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor.

Prof. Irby contributes to various anthologies; articles and reviews on contemporary poetry. Visiting Professor and Fulbright travel grant, Univ. of Copenhagen. Awards from the Fund for Poetry and the Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry. 

Professor Michael L. Johnson, Ph.D. (Rice)
Areas of research: Poetics, popular culture, modern poetry, New Journalism, technology and humanism, education, Western American culture.
Selected Publications: From Hell to Jackson Hole: A Poetic History of the American West; Hunger for the Wild: A Cultural History of America's Obsession with the Untamed West (2007).
Prof. Johnson's Curriculum Vitae

Prof. Johnson is the author of articles on poetics, popular culture, modern poetry; books on New Journalism, technology and humanism, education, Western American culture; books of poetry and poetic translations. He is the Director of the Freshman-Sophomore English Program. 

Prof. Landsberg is an ACLS fellow. Guest lecturer, University of Paris-Sorbonne, 1975. Byron Caldwell Smith award (joint winner, 1980), University of Kansas, for an outstanding work of scholarship in the preceding seven years. Eugene M. Kayden Award (1982), for the best humanities manuscript submitted to the Colorado Associated University Press. 

Prof. Lester teaches courses in early 20th-century American literature and culture, especially Jewish American, emphasizing narrative constructions of migration and immigration and transnational, multigenerational constructions of family.  She is Director of the American Studies Program at The University of Kansas, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Courtesy Faculty Member of African and African-American Studies, Chair of the Jewish Studies Steering Committee, Editorial Board member of American Studies and author of articles on American literature and critical and cultural theory. With Philip Barnard, she is the co-editor and co-translator of The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1988). With Alice Lieberman, she is the co-editor of the 2003 textbook Social Work Practice with a Difference: Stories, Essays, Cases, and Commentaries. Ongoing projects include research on migration in the writings of William Faulkner, post-Holocaust Jewish family narratives, and Bowen family systems theory. In 1995, she was an NEH fellow, in 1997 she was a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong, and in 1998 she was a visiting professor at the University of Gaston-Bergere in St. Louis, Senegal. In 1998, Lester received a Kemper Teaching Award and a Center for Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In 2000, she received a Center for Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. From 1997 to 2001, she was a fellow in the Postgraduate Program for Bowen Family Systems Theory and Its Applications at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, Washington, D.C., and she is currently a participant in the Postgraduate Seminar at the Kansas City Center for Family & Organization Systems.

Prof. Lim is the founder and artistic director of English Alternative Theatre (EAT), a producing organization based in the English Department devoted primarily to producing plays by students in its creative writing program. He was the Playwriting Chair for Region 5 of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (2000-2003), and was on the KCACTF National Selection Team for Festival 36 (2003-2004). In 1996 he was awarded the Kennedy Center gold medallion for his work with student playwrights. He is also the winner of various university teaching awards, including the Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor (2001-2003), the Kemper Teaching Fellowship (2002), and the Chancellors Club Teaching Professorship (2005- ). He is presently writing a play about his father.

Prof. Lorenz is a novelist and screenwriter. He is author of two novels, several short stories, and screenplays for motion pictures and television. He won the Sue Kaufman Prize for best first novel of 1980, awarded to Guys Like Us by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He currently serves as  Associate Chair of the English Department and is editor of Cottonwood Review.