Graduate Program Faculty

Giselle Anatol

Associate Professor

3135 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2530
ganatol@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Pennsylvania)

Associate Professor Anatol teaches a Major Authors course on Toni Morrison's fiction, several Caribbean literature courses, and classes on children's literature. She has published extensively on representations of motherhood in contemporary Caribbean women's writing, and representations of race and ethnicity in contemporary children's literature. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript that explores the cultural implications of vampires in African diasporic folk traditions and investigates the recent proliferation of narratives by writers of African descent who take up the demonic character and reconfigure it to urge for female empowerment and mobility. Associate Professor Anatol was a Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor (2001-2004).

Areas of Research

Caribbean and African-American Literature, children's literature

Selected Publications

Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (Praeger 2003). Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays (Praeger 2009)

Associate Professor Anatol's Curriculum Vitae

G. Douglas Atkins

Professor

3109 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2609
gdatkins@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Virginia)

Areas of Research

History and Composition of the personal and the familiar essay; "creative nonfiction"; T.S. Eliot; Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry and prose; reading and pedagogy; literature and religion.

Selected Publications

On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White; T.S. Eliot and the Essay; Estranging the Familiar (Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year"); Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth; Reading Essays: An Invitation; Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading (Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year"); Geoffrey Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style; The Faith of John Dryden: Change and Continuity; Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems; co-editor of Writing and Reading Differently; co-editor of Contemporary Literary Theory; co-editor of Shakespeare and Deconstruction. Former series editor, Creative Nonfiction, Univ. of Illinois Press.

Professor Atkins is a Kemper award winner, and was a long-time Coordinator of Graduate Studies. He has received the Kenyon Review prize for literary excellence in nonfiction prose, Burlington-Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for Outstanding Classroom Teaching, and Grier Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Philip Barnard

Associate Professor

1092 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2563
philipb@ku.edu

Ph.D. (SUNY, Buffalo)

Areas of Research

U.S. writing and culture before 1900, especially late enlightenment and early national period; cultural politics of the Atlantic world during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period generally; literary theory, poststructuralism, cultural studies, cultural materialism, marxism, and world-systems theory.

Selected Publications

Co-edited edition of Brown's Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (2006; with Shapiro); Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic (2004; with Kamrath and Shapiro).  English translations and editions of Lacoue-Labarthe Nancy, The Literary Absolute (first pub. 1978; with Lester); Sollers, Writing and the Experience of Limits (first pub. 1971); Sarduy, For Voice (first pub. 1969); Guéry & Deleule The Productive Body (first pub. 1972; forthcoming, with Shapiro).

Professor Barnard is the author, editor, and translator of books and articles on U.S. early national period (especially Charles Brockden Brown), poststructuralism, and cultural materialism.  He is the textual Editor of the ongoing “Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition”).

David M. Bergeron

Professor

3120 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3773
bergeron@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Vanderbilt)

Areas of Research

Shakespeare, English civic pageantry, King James, other Renaissance dramatists.

Selected Publications

Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (1985); Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater (1985); Reading and Writing in Shakespeare (1996); King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (1999); Practicing Renaissance Scholarship: Plays and Pageants, Patrons and Politics (2000); English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 (revised edition, 2003); and Textual Patronage and English Drama, 1570-1640 (2006).

Professor Bergeron served on the Editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly for over 30 years; and as Editor of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama for 28 years. He is the winner of university teaching and research awards, including the Higuchi Research Achievement Award (1987), Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor (2001-04), and William Kemper Award for Teaching Excellence (2007). Current research projects include: a book on Shakespeare’s letters; a cultural history of the year 1613 in London.

Michael D. Butler

Associate Professor

2034 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2751
mdbutler@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Illinois)

Areas of Research

19th-century American literature.

Selected Publications

Author of articles on 19th-century American fiction, Western and Midwestern literature, American humor.

Byron Caminero-Santangelo

Associate Professor

2042 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2579
bsantang@ku.edu

Ph.D. (California, Irvine)

Areas of Research

20th-century British and African literature, postcolonial theory and literature, critical theory, ecocriticism.

Selected Publications

"Different Shades of Green: Ecocriticism and African Literature" Anthology of African Literary Theory and Criticism (Blackwell, 2007); "Of Freedom and Oil: Nation, Globalization, and Civil Liberties in the Writing of Ken Saro-Wiwa." Research in English and American Literature (2006); African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality (SUNY Press, 2005).

Associate Professor Caminero-Santangelo has also published other articles on 20th-Century African literature, 19th- and 20th-Century British literature, and Colonial Discourse. He is currently a Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor and has received several teaching awards, including a Kemper Teaching Fellowship, a Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award, and a Mabel Fry Teaching Award. For Fall 2009, Dr. Caminero-Santangelo is a Hall Center Research Fellow, and in Spring 2010 will be a Keeler Family Intra-University Professor.

Associate Professor Caminero-Santangelo's Curriculum Vitae

Marta Caminero-Santangelo

Professor

3128 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2529
camsan@ku.edu

Ph.D. (California, Irvine)

Areas of Research

20th-century American literature, especially women's, U.S. Latino/a, and African-American fiction.

Selected Publications

On Latinidad:  U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (2007); The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive (1998).

In addition to her two books, Professor Caminero-Santangelo has published articles on U.S. Latino/a writers in MELUS, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, World Literature Today, LIT, and Critique. She teaches classes in general American literature, as well as in African American, Latino/a, and ethnic U.S. literature. She is also the founder of the Latino Studies minor at KU. Professor Caminero-Santangelo was a Kemper Teaching Fellow and a Hall Center Research Fellow in Fall 2008, and is currently a Smithsonian Institution Research Fellow.  She is Chair of the English Department.
Professor Caminero-Santangelo's website.

Professor Santangelo's Curriculum Vitae

James Carothers

Professor

3159 Wescoe Hall
785.864.1839
jbc@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Virginia)

Areas of Research

Short fiction and articles and reviews on modern fiction, American humorists, baseball in American literature.

Selected Publications

William Faulkner's Short Stories (1985), Reading Faulkner Collected Stories (2006)

Carothers’ research focuses on the Modern American Novel and short story, especially the fiction of Faulkner and Hemingway, and also modern American humorists and the literature of baseball.  The founding co-editor of The Faulkner Journal, he has served on its editorial board since 1985.

He was a University Honors Program Faculty Fellow from 1997-2005., He received a William T. Kemper Teaching Fellowship in 2001, and the J. Michael Young Academic Advising Award in 2002. 

Michael Cherniss

Professor

3124 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2525
cherniss@ku.edu

Ph.D. (California, Berkely)

Areas of Research

Old and Middle English literature and continental medieval literature.

Selected Publications

Ingeld and Christ: Heroic Concepts and Values in Old English Christian Poetry; Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry.

Kathryn Conrad

Associate Professor

3043 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3314
kconrad@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Pennsylvania)

Areas of Research

20th-century British, Irish, and Northern Irish literature and culture; sexuality; visual culture.

Selected Publications

"Surveillance, Gender, and the Virtual Body in the Information Age," Surveillance & Society, 2009; "The Politics of Camp: Queering Parades, Performance, and the Public in Belfast." Queer Performance in Ireland, forthcoming 2009; "Nothing to Hide…Nothing to Fear":  Discriminatory Surveillance and Queer Visibility in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, forthcoming 2009; "Queering Community:   Reimagining the Public Sphere in Northern Ireland," Critical  Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 2006; "Widening the Frame: The  Politics of Representing Northern Irish Murals," in Postmodern Ireland and  Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2006); Locked in the Family Cell: Gender,  Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (University of  Wisconsin Press, 2004).

Professor Conrad has taught courses on Joyce, the British novel, women's autobiography and bildungsroman, literature of empire, Northern Ireland, and Irish culture, and has served as the KU director of the Queen's University of Belfast Institute for Irish Studies summer study abroad. She has been the recipient of the Conger-Gabel Teaching Professorship (2004-6) and has served as an Honors Faculty Fellow (2006-7; 2008-9). She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary teaching and research.  Her research has focused on gender and sexuality in 20th-century Ireland; her current research explores representations of space in Northern Ireland, and surveillance, sexuality, and gender in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Homepage:  http://people.ku.edu/~kconrad/

Amy Devitt

Professor

3131 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2567
devitt@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Michigan)

Areas of Research

Composition and rhetoric, especially genre studies; English language studies, especially standardization and Standardized Edited English.

Selected Publications

Writing Genres (Southern Illinois University Press 2004, paperback reprint 2008); Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres, with Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff (Pearson Longman 2003); “Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept,” (College Composition and Communication 1993), Standardizing Written English: Diffusion in the Case of Scotland 1520-1659 (Cambridge University Press 1989, paperback reprint 2006).

Professor Devitt’s research has focused on genre, including three books and articles in College Composition and Communication, College English, American Speech, and several edited collections. She teaches courses in composition and rhetoric and in English language studies, including courses in genre theory, language standardization, scholarly writing for publication, grammar and style, first-year and advanced composition, and composition studies. Professor Devitt is a Chancellors Club Teaching Professor and has received several teaching awards, including the Conger-Gabel Teaching Professorship, Kemper Teaching Fellowship, Edward Grier Award, Mabel Frye Teaching Award, and CLAS Graduate Mentor Award.

Professor Devitt's Curriculum Vitae

Dorice Williams Elliott

Associate Professor

3062 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2527
delliott@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins)

Areas of Research

Nineteenth-century British literature and culture; the novel; women's literature and gender studies.

Selected Publications

The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (University Press of Virginia, 2002).

Professor Elliott has published articles on Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sarah Scott, Hannah More, servants in literature, women's philanthropy, gift theory, the history of feminist criticism of the novel, and the Victorian social-problem novel.  Her current project is a book manuscript on class relations in Australian convict literature.  Additional interests include Victorian mental science, the sensation novel, Anglo-Indian and Indian literature, and narrative theory. Her website is http://www.people.ku.edu/~delliott/

Richard Eversole

Associate Professor

3043 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3314
eversole@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Wisconsin)

Areas of Research

20th-century British, Irish, and Northern Irish literature and culture; sexuality; visual culture.

Selected Publications

Author of articles and reviews in this area as well as cartography in literature.

Frank Farmer

Associate Professor

3123 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2524
farmerf@ku.edu

Ph.D. (University of Louisville)

Areas of Research

Dialogics, rhetorical history, and composition.

Selected Publications

Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin (Utah State University Press) and editor of Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric, and Writing (Erlbaum). His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Symploke,The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Associate Professor Farmer is on the Editorial Board of Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists and is a Conger-Gabel teaching professor.

Associate Professor Farmer's Curriculum Vitae

Iris Smith Fischer

Associate Professor

3122 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2511
ifischer@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Indiana)

Areas of Research

Modern and contemporary drama, semiotics, literary theory and performance theory, avant-garde performance. 

Selected Publications

Players at Work: The Early Years of Mabou Mines (under contract to University of Michigan Press, expected 2010); Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (editor, with William Demastes; Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, paper 2009), “Writing, Teaching, Performing America:  Papers from the New Literacies Conference” (special section edited with William W. Demastes, Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism, 2005), "Reconsidering Graduate Education: Pressures, Practices, Prospects" (editor, conference proceedings, The Centennial Review, 1996), American Signatures: Semiotic Inquiry and Method (editor, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).  Articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Theatre Survey, Text and Presentation, American Theatre, New Theatre Quarterly, Semiotica.

Honors and Awards

Senior Administrative Fellow, 2005-2006; John C. Wright Graduate Mentor Award, 2005; Excellence in Teaching Award, Center for Teaching Excellence, 2001; Mabel S. Fry Award for Teaching, 1998; James E. Seaver Lecturer, Western Civilization Program, 1995.

Stephanie Fitzgerald

Assistant Professor

3137 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2586
sfitzger@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Claremount Graduate)

Areas of Research

American Indian and world indigenous literatures, American ethnic literature, American literature.

Selected Publications

Co-editor, Keepers of the Morning Star: An Anthology of Native Women’s Theater,(2003);  “Intimate Geographies: Reclaiming Citizenship and Community in The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero and Bonita Nuñez’s Diaries.”  American Indian Culture and Research Journal (2006).

Doreen Fowler

Professor

3026 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2531
dfowler@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Brown)

Areas of Research

Twentieth-Century American Literature, Literature of the American South, Faulkner Studies, Race and Gender Studies, and Literary Applications of Psychoanalytic theory.

Selected Publications

Faulkner’s Changing Vision (UMI Research Press, 1983) and Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed (University Press of Virginia, 1997; paperback edition 2002). Co-editor of eleven collections of essays on Faulkner. Author of 38 articles in such journals as American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Women’s Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Arizona Quarterly.

Professor Fowler is recipient in 2003 of the Hall Center Humanities Research Fellowship. Executive Committee member, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (1995-98); The Faulkner Society 2006--; and the Hall Center for the Humanities (2002-2006).

Maryemma Graham

Professor

3102 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3314
mgraham@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Cornell)

Areas of Research

African American and 19th Century American literature, history of the book, and cultural studies.

Selected Publications

How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature by Margaret Walker (1990); Conversations with Ralph Ellison (1995); On Being Female, Black and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932-1992 (1997); Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice (1998). Fields Watered With Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2001), Conversations with Margaret Walker (2002), The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker (work in progress).

Professor 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.

Peter J. Grund

Assistant Professor

3111 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2512
pjgrund@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Uppsala, Sweden)

Areas of Research

English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics, early American English, corpus linguistics, editing, vernacularization of science, Salem witch trials.

Selected Publications

“Misticall Wordes and Names Infinite”: An Edition and Study of Humfrey Lock’s Treatise on Alchemy (in press, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University). Associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009, Cambridge University Press). With Merja Kytö and Terry Walker. English Witness Depositions 1560–1760: An Electronic Text Edition [CD and book] (forthcoming, John Benjamins).

Assistant Professor Grund has published articles on early scientific texts (especially alchemical texts), early American English, methodology in historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics in journals such as American Speech, Journal of English Linguistics, Ambix, and Anglia. He is a member of the editorial board of American Speech (2007–2009). He has received two prestigious grants from STINT (the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, 2001–2002, 2005–2006), a grant from the Sweden-America Foundation (2004–2005), and a three-year research grant from the Swedish Research Council (together with Prof. Merja Kytö and Dr. Terry Walker, Uppsala University, Sweden, 2006–2008). His current research projects focus on the use of (un)certainty markers, evidentials, discourse markers, and narrative structuring in Early Modern English speech-related texts; and on producing an electronic edition of witness depositions from England covering the period 1560–1760.

Assistant Professor Grund's Curriculum Vitae

Richard Hardin

Professor

2019 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2548
rhardin@ku.edu

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).

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

Professor Hardin's Curriculum Vitae

Joseph Harrington

Associate Professor

2038 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2575
jharring@ku.edu

Ph.D. (California, Berkely)

Areas of Research

U.S. literatures, 20th-century poetry and poetics, cultural studies. 

Selected Publications

Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, Wesleyan U.P., 2002. 

Associate Professor 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. Professor Harrington currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies.

Susan K, Harris

Professor

3110 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2639
skh5@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Cornell)

Areas of Research

19th-Century American Literature and culture, Mark Twain, American women writers.

Selected Publications

Annie Adams Fields, Mary Gladstone Drew, and The Work of the Late 19th-Century Hostess (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002);(Palgrave, 2002); The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (Cambridge University Press, 1996); 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies (Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Mark Twain's Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (University of Missouri Press, 1982). She has also edited Kate Douglas Wiggins's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Penguin, 2005); Catharine Maria Sedgwick's A New-England Tale (Penguin, 2003); Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (Penguin, 1999); and Mark Twain: Historical Romances (The Library of America, 1994).

Professor 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.

William J. Harris

Associate Professor

3106 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2534
wjh8@ku.edu

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).

Associate Professor 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.

Associate Professor Harris's Curriculum Vitae

James Hartman

Professor

3060 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2580
hartman@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Michigan)

Areas of Research

English language. Teaching interests: English grammar; History of English language; American English history, social and regional variation: Metaphor theory.

Selected Publications

American English editor, English Pronouncing Dictionary 15th,16th,17th editions (Cambridge); pronunciation editor Dictionary of American Regional English; pronunciation editor Dictionary of American Regional English, Vol.I ,(Belknap).

Professor 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.

Kenneth Irby

Associate Professor

2010 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3118
klirby@ku.edu

A.M. (Harvard), M.L.S. (California, Berkeley)

Areas of Research

Poetry

Selected Publications

Call Steps and Antiphonal and Fall to Fall and Ridge to Ridge: Poems 1990-2000

Professor 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. 

Michael L. Johnson

Professor

3001K Wescoe Hall
785.864.2507
newwestr@ku.edu

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).

Professor 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. 

Professor Johnson's Curriculum Vitae

Melvin Landsberg

Professor

3077 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2502
melvinl@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Columbia)

Selected Publications

Dos Passos' Path to "U.S.A." and Dos Passos' Correspondence with Arthur K. McComb.

Professor 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. 

Cheryl Lester

Associate Professor

3078 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2503
chlester@ku.edu

Ph.D. (SUNY, Buffalo)

Areas of Research

20th-century U.S. literature and culture, especially African-American and Jewish-American, literary and cultural theory, Faulkner.

Selected Publications

Her essays have appeared in Criticism, Modern Fiction Studies, American Studies, Faulkner Journal, Faulkner Journal of Japan, and in the books Cambridge Companion to Faulkner (1994), Faulkner in Cultural Context (1997), Faulkner and Postmodernism (2002), The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable (2000), and the Blackwell Companion to Faulkner (2007). She is co-editor and co-translator (with Barnard) of The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1988) by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy and co-editor (with Lieberman) of Social Work Practice with a Difference: A Literary Approach (2003).

Associate Professor Lester was awarded  a Center for Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2001, a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 1998, a Center for Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1998, and an NEH fellowship in 1997. She co-directed (with David Katzman) an NEH Summer Seminar on African-American Migration and American Culture in 1996.  In 1995, she was 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. She contributed to the development of a Jewish Studies minor and to the establishment of the Jewish Studies Program. She has served as a member and officer of numerous associations and boards, including the American Studies Association, the Mid-America American Studies Association, the Faulkner Society, KU Hillel, and the editorial board of American Studies. She was a fellow in the Postgraduate Program at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, Washington, D.C., from 1997-2001 and currently a participant in the Postgraduate Seminar at the Kansas City Center for Family & Organization Systems. Ongoing research includes articles and a book-length project on William Faulkner's literary response to Great Migration in the era of Jim Crow. Prof. Lester currently serves as the Director of the American Studies Program.

Paul Stephen Lim

Professor

3138 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3642
plim@ku.edu

M.A. (Kansas)

Areas of Research

Playwriting, Contemporary and Modern Drama.

Selected Publications

Conpersonas (1977); Points of Departure (1977); Some Arrivals, But Mostly Departures (1982); Flesh, Flash and Frank Harris (1984); Hatchet Club (1985); Homerica (1985); Woeman (1985); Mother Tongue (1992); Figures in Clay (1992); Report to the River (2002).

Professor 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. Professor Lim's personal Website: http://www.paulstephenlim.com

Tom Lorenz

Associate Professor

3001H Wescoe Hall
785.864.2516
tlorenz@ku.edu

M.F.A. (Bowling Green)

Areas of Research

Creative writing

Selected Publications

Guys Like Us, Serious Living

Associate Professor 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.

Laura Mielke

Assistant Professor

3032 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2568
lmielke@ku.edu

Ph.D. (North Carolina)

Areas of Research

19th-Century American Literature and culture, Early American Literature, American Indian Literature, American Studies.

Selected Publications

Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature (2008).

Assistant Professor Mielke's book, Moving Encounters, was the 2009 co-winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Award. Assistant Professor Mielke has also published articles on mid-nineteenth-century theatre, American Indian autobiography, and literary representations of American Indians in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, MELUS, Legacy, American Indian Quarterly, and ATQ. Her current projects include a co-edited collection of essays treating Indian performance in early North America and a monograph on theatrical representations of the orator in the antebellum period. She teaches classes in American Literature, particularly of the nineteenth century.

Assistant Professor Mielke's Curriculum Vitae

Laura Moriarty

Assistant Professor

2023 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2558
lauramo@ku.edu

M.A. (Kansas)

Areas of Research

Fiction writing

Selected Publications

The Rest of Her Life (Hyperion, 2007), The Center of Everything (Hyperion, 2003), While I'm Falling (2009).

Assistant Professor Moriarty won Elle Magazine's Novel of the Year for The Rest of Her Life (2007). She was writer in Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy (2000-2001) and is a winner of the Carlin Graduate Teaching Award.

Assistant Professor Moriarty's Curriculum Vitae

Anna Neill

Associate Professor

2030 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2578
aneill@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Cornell)

Areas of Research

18th- and 19th-century British; discovery literature; Victorian literature and evolutionary science.

Selected Publications

British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce(2002).

Associate Professor Neill is also the author of articles on contemporary and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics and is the winner of a Keeler Intra-university Professorship (2009).

Ann Wierda Rowland

Associate Professor

3044 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2584
arowland@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Yale)

Areas of Research

18th and 19th century British literature, Romanticism, Scottlish literature and the Scottish Enlightenment, gender and postcolonial theory, children in literary culture, the emergence of popular and national literary culture in late 18th-century Britain.

Selected Publications

Published articles on William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, the Romantic ballad revival; written essays on "Sentimental Fiction" and "Poetry and the Novel" in the two forthcoming Cambridge Companions to Romantic Fiction and Romantic Poetry; working on a book about children and theories of childhood in Romantic literary culture.

Associate Professor Rowland is an AAUW (American Association of University Women) American Fellow (2003-2004) and won a Keasbey Fellowship for study at Oxford (1988-1990). She teaches courses in British Romanticism, Gothic fiction, gender and nationalism in 19th-century British literature; Scottish literature; children in literature and children's literature.

Misty Schieberle

Assistant Professor

2002 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2501
mschiebe@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Notre Dame)

Areas of Research

14th and 15th-century English literature, gender and politics in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, medieval French literature in England, manuscript study.

Selected Publications

"Thing which a Man Mai Noght Areche Women and Counsel in Gower’s Confessio Amantis," The Chaucer Review (2007)

Assistant Professor Schieberle’s research analyzes the ways that medieval poets represent women as counselors in order to articulate political advice to powerful figures. Her current project includes texts by Chaucer, Gower, and Christine de Pisan that circulated in late medieval England.

William O. Scott

Professor

3079 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2504
wscott@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Princeton)

Areas of Research

Shakespeare, literary theory and criticism, drama. 

Selected Publications

Author of recent studies on Shakespeare and historical legal concepts, and other work on Shakespeare, Milton, and other topics.

Professor Scott's Curriculum Vitae

Janet Sharistanian

Associate Professor

3075 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2500
sharista@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Brown)

Areas of Research

Modern literature, feminist criticism, literature and history.

Selected Publications

Editor and contributor, Gender, Ideology and Action: Historical Perspectives on Women's Public Lives (1986) and Beyond the Public/Domestic Dichotomy: Contemporary Perspectives on Women's Public Lives (1987); A/B/Auto/Biography Studies (1993), Special Issue, "Feminist Biography". Editor, Oxford UP, Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (2000) and My Antonia (2006); Gender, Modernism, Politics: A Life of Tess Slesinger, under contract.

Associate Professor Sharistanian has published articles on feminist literary theory, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Tess Slesinger, Randall Jarrell, Judith Jamison, and Karole Armitage. She is the founding director of KU Women's Studies Program and the Research Institute on Women. Her awards include Outstanding Woman Teacher Award; Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award; Edward F. Grier Award for the Integration of Research and Teaching, and NEH Summer Stipend. She has directed five NEH Summer Seminars, “American Women as Writers: Wharton and Cather.” 

Geraldo Sousa

Associate Professor

3121 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2535
sousa@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Kansas)

Areas of Research

Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, Early Modern English Studies, Travel Literature, and Global and Cross-Cultural Studies. 

Selected Publications

Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters (Palgrave, 2002); At Home in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (forthcoming); co-author of Shakespeare: A Study and Research Guide; editor, Mediterranean Studies: Journal of the Mediterranean Studies Association.

After several years at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Professor Sousa returned to KU.  He is a Fellow of the Mediterranean Studies Association, and he has published extensively, especially on the cross-cultural interconnectedness of literature and culture. His work explores the intersection of various disciplines, including early modern literature, theater and stage history, early modern history, anthropology, and art history. In Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters, Prof. Sousa explores an ethnographic perspective in Shakespeare’s dramatic representation of ethnic, racial, religious, and gender issues arising from the encounter of a dominant European society and members of foreign cultures. His forthcoming book, At Home in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, taking a markedly interdisciplinary approach, focuses on representations of the house, home, household, and domestic space in Shakespeare and in early modern Europe.

The cross-cultural theme also appears in his various essays, especially in Luso-Brazilian studies.  “Alien Habitats in The Tempest,” for example, addresses ecological issues in England (deforestation) and logging in South America in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  “The Merchant of Venice: Brazil and Cultural Icons” deals with the staging of Shakespeare in Brazil and contemporary Brazilian race relations. “Portugal, North Africa, and Dryden’s Don Sebastian” explores the 1578 conflict between Portugal and Morocco.  Most recently, in “Travel, Imagination, and the Strangest of Theaters,” Prof. Sousa studies representations of Burma and Hindu rituals in 16th-century Portuguese texts.  His work as editor of Mediterranean Studies, published by Manchester University Press, brings together his expertise and interest in global issues.  On a more personal note, Associate Professor Sousa is an avid reader of Victorian novels and a fan of Sheridan Le Fanu.

http://www.mediterraneanstudies.org

Chester Sullivan

Associate Professor

3101 Wescoe Hall
785.864.3287
csull@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Texas Christian)

Areas of Research

Creative writing.

Selected Publications

Alligator Gar (1974), a novel; Sullivan's Hollow (1978), a regional history; Answered Prayers (1992), a novel; and numerous short stories, poems, and reviews.

Marjorie Swann

Associate Professor
Director, Museum Studies Program

3067 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2570
mswann@ku.edu

D.Phil. (Oxford)

Areas of Research

Early modern literature and culture; material culture; gender and sexuality; literature and the environment.

Selected Publications

Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press).  Articles on early modern literature and culture published in edited collections and such journals as English Literary Renaissance, Philological Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, and Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.

Associate Professor Swann, a Conger-Gabel teaching professor, has won a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence (2002) and a J. Michael Young Academic Advisor Award (2008).  She is currently working on a monograph about Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler and its post-Renaissance afterlife.  She teaches courses about Shakespeare; British literature before 1800; material culture and museum studies; and early modern literature and the environment.

John Edgar Tidwell

Professor

3027 Wescoe Hall
785.864.2583
tidwelje@ku.edu

Ph.D. (Minnesota)

Areas of Research

African American and American literatures.

Selected Publications

Livin' the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet (1992) and Black Moods: Collected Poems (2002); Black Moods: Poems by Frank Marshall Davis (2003); After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown (2009); Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press (2007); Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007); and Sterling A. Brown's A Negro Looks at the South (2007).

Professor Tidwell is currently at work on a biography of poet Sterling A. Brown, tentatively entitled Oh, Didn't He Ramble: A Life of Sterling A. Brown. He has served as a resident scholar for the Kansas Humanities Council and as Langston Hughes Visiting Professor (1994). Homepage:  http://people.ku.edu/~kconrad/