American Literary and Cultural Studies

American Literary and Cultural Studies is a popular and productive area of research and teaching at the University of Oklahoma. Faculty and students use a variety of methodologies to examine canonical and non-canonical texts and related forms such as film and popular culture, and in the process engage practically and theoretically with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.

Graduate students work closely with faculty to develop their own scholarly and pedagogical skills and projects. Students present their work at regional and national conferences, and seek publication in major journals. The English Department and the Graduate College provide competitive funding sources for conference travel and dissertation research.

Alexander Bain Ph.D., Rutger University, 2004. Joined OU English Faculty in 2007.

Professor Bain’s research and teaching interests include 20th-century British literature and its contexts, literature and culture in Britain and London since WWII, literary modernism in transnational perspective (as well as its British and American varieties), and the political, theoretical, and aesthetic dimensions of globalization. Most broadly, he enjoys working with students on discerning what 20th-century media—literature, film, music, the visual arts, etc.—can tell us about the strange and brutal panorama of wars, human rights, migrations, national and imperial rise and fall, and social practices that shapes everyday life in modern times.

He is working on a book tentatively called Making the Heart of the World, which examines how a group of British and American writers, between 1919 and 1940, tried to tell convincing stories about patriotism and cultural interaction amid crises of imperialism and the coming of total war. “Shocks Americana!: George Schuyler Serializes Black Internationalism,” forthcoming in American Literary History, looks at these issues as they emerge in African-American newspaper fiction during the 1930s war between fascist Italy and the independent nation of Ethiopia. His article “International Settlements: Ishiguro, Shanghai, Humanitarianism,” forthcoming in the journal NOVEL, is a test-run for a projected book-length examination of how fiction and film since the Cold War have dealt with the images and politics of humanitarian and human-rights crises.

Professor Bain received his Ph.D. and M.A. from Rutgers University (2004; 1999), and his B.A. from Duke University (1994). From 2004 to 2007 he was Assistant Professor of English at the California Polytechnic State University."

Eve Tavor Bannet George Lynn Cross Research Professor Professor, Women's Studies Ph.D., Hebrew University, 1979 Joined OU English Faculty in 1994.

Professor Bannet teaches courses on British and Transatlantic British-American literature during the Enlightenment, on British Women's Writing, and on Literary and Cultural Studies. She assigns a fairly heavy work load in all her courses, because she wants students to be able think for themselves on an informed basis, and to develop their reading and writing skills. You have been warned!

Professor Bannet is the author of Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688 - 1820 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000); Postcultural Theory: Critical Theory After the Marxist Paradigm (London Macmillan, 1993); Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan (Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1989; rpt 1991; and Skepticism, Society and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1987). She has also published articles in a variety of journals. She is currently preparing a four volume edition of British and American letter manuals for Pickering & Chatto, to be published in 2008.

Catherine A. John Associate Professor. PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997. Joined OU English Faculty in 1997.

Catherine John is an Associate Professor of Afro-Caribbean & African American and Literature and Culture in the department of English. She is also affiliated with both the African American Studies and the Film and Video Studies programs here at the University of Oklahoma. She is originally from Montego Bay and she spends her summers working in Woodside, Jamaica with writer and historian Erna Brodber’s b l a c k s p a c e program.

Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press (2003) and the University Press of the West Indies (2004). Her current book-in-progress is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She has recently published “From Nielsen Estate to Africa House: Ed“we”cation and Male/Female Relations in Rural Woodside, Jamaica” in Caribbean Quarterly (2006) and “Diaspora Consciousness and the Concept of Plenitude” in Shifting the Geography of Reason: Gender, Science and Religion, Cambridge Scholars Press (2006). She has also previously published "Neo-Coloniality, Literary Representation, and the Problem of Disciplinary Solutions" in Decolonizing the Academy in the Twenty-First Century, Africa World Press (2003) and “Complicity, Revolution, and Black Female Writing” in the journal Race & Class (1999).

Rita Keresztesi Associate Professor. Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1999. Joined OU English Faculty in 2000.

Rita Keresztesi’s research and teaching focus primarily on 20th Century American literature and culture with an emphasis on issues of ethnicity, race, and class. Her interests also include theory, cultural studies, contemporary North American culture (particularly visual culture and the politics of power), theories of modernity and postmodernity, and the politics and poetics of globalization and neocoloniality.

Her articles and publications include: the English translation of an early Hungarian-language essay of György Lukács, "Aesthetic Culture, " with an Introduction by Tyrus Miller, in Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998); “Writing Culture and Performing Race in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood (1927)” in Literature and Racial Ambiguity, edited by Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); and “Romancing the Borderlands: Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village” in Doubled Plots: Romance and History, edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003). Her book, Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2005. She is also affiliated with the Film and Video Studies Program here at the University of Oklahoma.

William Henry McDonald Associate Professor. Ph.D., Graduate Center, City University of New York, 1991. Joined OU English Faculty in 1991.

Professor McDonald has published The Normative Basis of Culture: A Philosophical Investigation (Louisiana State University Press, 1986) and The Ethics of Comparative Religion (University Press of America, 1984). Recent articles on American literature, literary theory, and philosophy have appeared in Surfaces (1995), Texas Studies in Language and Literature (1992), The Henry James Review (1990), The Philosophical Forum (1990), Partisan Review (1989), and The American Scholar (1989). He is completing a book on Theory's Imaginary: Philosophical Tradition and Literary Studies Since The Sixties.

Professor McDonald offers courses in 19th and 20th Century American literature, women's writing, modernism, and the American Renaissance. His graduate teaching covers narrative techniques, narratology, speech-act theory, and contemporary philosophy. He believes that "a good graduate seminar provides an intellectually demanding, open environment in which students can develop the writing and research skills crucial to success in this profession."

Timothy S. Murphy Associate Professor. Director of Graduate Studies. Editor, Genre. Ph.D., UCLA, 1994. Joined OU English Faculty in 1988.

Professor Murphy is the author of Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs(California, 1997), the translator of Antonio Negri’s Subversive Spinoza (Manchester 2004) and *Domination and Sabotage* (Verso 2005), and the general editor of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, succeeding Ronald Schleifer. He is also an executive editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, which won the 1996 Best New Journal Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals; series editor of Angelaki Humanities, a book series from Manchester University Press; and English translation coordinator of the Deleuze Web (www.webdeleuze.com), an internet archive of seminar sessions given by the late philosopher Gilles Deleuze. He has published essays on Henri Bergson and quantum theory, Pierre Boulez and Ornette Coleman, James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche and other subjects related to modern and contemporary culture and theory, and he is currently drafting a book on the Marxist philosopher Antonio Negri. Professor Murphy teaches American literature (with special emphases on experimental writing, music and literature, and the contemporary novel), literary theory (especially Marxism and poststructuralism), and science fiction. Professor Murphy is currently serving as the English Department's Director of Graduate Studies.

Francesca Sawaya Associate Professor. Ph.D., Cornell University, 1992. Joined OU English Faculty in 2000.

Professor Sawaya's research and teaching interests focus on nineteenth-and twentieth-century American literature and culture, women's writing, and feminist criticism and literary theory. Her published work includes essays on Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Frank Norris. Her book manuscript, "Working Through Modernity: Domesticity, Professionalism, and Women's Writing", examines the ways that women from the 1890s to the 1940s combined the discourses of domesticity and professionalism in order to shape interchangeably their writings and their work. Professor Sawaya teaches classes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and in contemporary literary theory.

Jonathan Stalling Assistant Professor. Ph.D., SUNY Buffalo, 2006. Joined OU English Faculty in 2006.

Jonathan Stalling specializes in twentieth-century American poetry and East-West poetics with additional research and teaching interests in multi-ethnic American poetry, cultural theory, and Asian American studies. Stalling's publications include articles, translations, poems, and reviews in Boston Review, CLEAR (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews), Chain, and Verdure, as well as several book chapters on American poetry and poetics. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book entitled The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, A Critical Edition, and is working on a book project entitled Poetics of Emptiness, which traces the contributions and transformations of East Asian philosophy, religion, and poetics in Twentieth Century American poetry and poetics. He is also working on a project that traces the reception and influence of Classical Chinese prosody on American poetry.

A native of Eureka Springs Arkansas, Stalling began his education at the University of Hawaii and Beijing University before finishing his BA at UC Berkeley summa cum laude in Chinese Studies. He received his Masters with highest distinction in English Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) in 2000, and his PhD in poetics at State University of New York at Buffalo (2005).

James Zeigler Assistant Professor. Ph.D., University of California, Irvine. Joined OU English Faculty in 2007.

Jim Zeigler teaches courses in American literature after 1900, literary theory, and rhetoric. His research concentrates on the culture of the early years of the Cold War, with particular attention to the effect of anti-Communism on both liberal political philosophy and the Civil Rights Movement. He has a forthcoming publication in the Arizona Quarterly entitled "Charles Olson’s American Studies: Call Me Ishmael and the Cold War" and his past courses and seminars include "Cold War Culture, From Science Fiction to the Kitchen", "Who's Stupid? A Survey of the Novel", "Honors Rhetoric", and "Inhuman Fiction: Postmodernism, Deconstruction, Animals, and Other Beasts."