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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.
Faculty in
the American
concentration offer courses in a broad range of American literatures
and cultures, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Courses in the modern and contemporary novel, modern and
contemporary poetry, African-American literature, multi-ethnic US
literature, transatlantic studies and regionalism are taught regularly.
Courses taught by the English Department’s renowned Native American
Literature faculty are also available to students concentrating in
American Literary and Cultural Studies
Faculty
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Alexander Bain
Ph.D., Rutger
University,
2004.
Joined OU English Faculty in 2007.
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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."
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Eve Tavor Bannet
George
Lynn Cross Research Professor
Professor,
Women's
Studies
Ph.D.,
Hebrew
University, 1979
Joined OU English Faculty in 1994.
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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.
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Catherine A. John
Associate
Professor.
PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997.
Joined OU English Faculty in 1997.
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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).
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Rita Keresztesi
Associate Professor.
Ph.D.,
University
of California, Santa Cruz, 1999.
Joined OU
English
Faculty in 2000.
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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.
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William Henry McDonald
Associate
Professor.
Ph.D., Graduate Center, City
University of New York, 1991.
Joined OU English Faculty in 1991.
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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."
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Timothy S. Murphy
Associate
Professor.
Director of Graduate Studies.
Editor, Genre.
Ph.D., UCLA, 1994.
Joined OU English Faculty in 1988.
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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.
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Francesca Sawaya
Associate
Professor.
Ph.D., Cornell University, 1992.
Joined OU English Faculty in 2000.
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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.
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Jonathan Stalling
Assistant
Professor.
Ph.D., SUNY Buffalo, 2006.
Joined OU English Faculty in 2006.
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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).
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James Zeigler
Assistant
Professor.
Ph.D., University of California, Irvine.
Joined OU English Faculty in 2007.
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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."
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