Gender Studies

Gender Studies in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma brings together the varied research interests of the faculty from almost all the disciplines of our department. Recently we have offered courses on American Women Writers; Native Women Writers; Blackness, Coloniality & Gender; Contemporary Feminist Theory; Chivalric Masculinity; Transatlantic Women Writers; and Sixteenth-Century Women Writers. Approaches to gender studies in the department are varied in terms of theory, methodology and object of study, with courses focused on different national literatures, film, and rhetoric.

Graduate students in the concentration work closely with faculty to tailor their research and writing projects to their own particular interests in gender studies. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged both within the English Department and with other departments.
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.

Daniela Garofalo Assistant Professor Joined OU English Faculty in 2004.

Daniela Garofalo specializes in British Romantic literature with an interest in the early British Victorian period and Lacanian theory. Her book Manly Leaders in Nineteenth-Century British Literature focuses on political theory and gender studies. Her next book project examines early nineteenth-century representations of romantic love and commodity culture. Daniela Garofalo has published essays on Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, William Godwin, and Emily Bronte. She teaches courses on Romantic and Victorian literature, and critical theory.

Catherine Hobbs Professor Director, First-Year Composition Ph.D., Purdue University, 1989 Joined OU English Faculty in 1992.

Professor Hobbs works in the Composition/Rhetoric/Literacy program. She is also a member of the Women's Studies and Liberal Studies faculties and is an associate with the History of Science program. She is the editor of Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write (University of Virginia Press, 1995), and the author of Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo (Southern Illinois University Press, 2002). Her essays on the history of rhetoric, language, and literacy have appeared in a special feminist issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly as well as journals including Rhetorica, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Journal of Advanced Composition, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, and The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning.

Catherine Hobbs teaches advanced writing instruction, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history and theory of rhetoric and composition, and seminars in modern rhetorical theory and literacy studies. She teaches gender and language in undergraduate courses, ecofeminism in advanced comp, feminist theory of rhetoric in graduate classes, and has taught Progressive Era women's writing. Her research is on Progressive Era Southern women. She is currently working on a textbook on autobiography, on visual theory, and on global and local women's literacy.

Yianna Liatsos Assistant Professor. Ph.D., Rutgers University, 2005. Joined OU English Faculty in 2005.

Yianna Liatsos specializes in post-colonial literature and theory with an emphasis on South Africa. Her teaching and research interests include questions of political agency, historical representation, national memory and human rights. She has published essays on Adorno and Nietzsche, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and in 2003 served as the guest editor for Dialectical Anthropology’s three volumes on European national identity and its contemporary dilemmas. She is currently working on a book project on post-apartheid fiction and historical catharsis.

Su Fang Ng Assistant Professor. Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2001. Joined OU English Faculty in 2001.

Professor Ng specializes in early modern literature with a secondary interest in postcolonial literatures. Her book, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2007), examines how the putatively conservative analogy between state and family was used for radical political ends. She has published essays on Aemilia Lanyer and early Stuart court patronage, the late medieval Bible translations of the Wycliffites and Tyndale, Quaker women, and postcolonial African and Southeast Asian nationalisms in ELH, Studies in Philology, The Seventeenth Century, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and an edited collection on postcolonial women writers. In postcolonial studies, she is particularly interested in Southeast Asian responses to Japanese imperialism. Bringing together interests in early modern England and in colonialism/postcolonialism, her second book project, Global Renaissance: Early Modern Classicism and Empire from the British Isles to the Malay Archipelago, explores how Greek and Roman models of empire became part of native histories of the early modern maritime kingdoms of England and in Southeast Asia.

She teaches courses in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, early modern travel literature, early modern women writers, Shakespeare, Milton, and postcolonial literature. Su Fang Ng’s research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England includes interests in women's religion and their participation in politics, the family and familial political discourse, and more generally, the gendering of the public sphere. She has taught graduate courses on these subjects and published work on early modern women's writing.

Joanna Rapf is the author of Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood, 1995), On the Waterfront (Cambridge, 2002), and Interviews with Sidney Lumet (Univ. of Mississippi Press, 2005). Her articles on film have appeared in such journals as Film Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Film Criticism, Journal of Popular Culture, Studies in American Humor, Western Humanities Review, and in a number of critical anthologies, including an essay on feminism and Jerry Lewis praised by the comedian himself in Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2003). She is currently putting together a collection of essays on "Children of the Hollywood Blacklist" for The Cinema Journal. In addition to writing on film, she has also published on English Romantic poetry in Victorian Poetry (Tennyson & Wordsworth), Studies in Romanticism (John Clare), Studies in English Literature (Byron), Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin (Shelley), and two critical collections: Approaches to Teaching Bryon's Poetry (MLA, 1991) and Influence and Resistance in 19th-Century Poetry (Macmillan, 1993).

Joanna E. Rapf teaches courses on "Women and Film" on the undergraduate level. On the graduate level, her Film Theory seminar emphasizes gender theory, and also includes masculinity studies, queer theory, and issues of race and ethnicity. Her research and publications often involve gender as it relates to film. She believes that today, when we watch more television and see more movies than we read books, visual literacy is the sine qua non of an educated and informed life.

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

Profesor Sawaya's 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.

Her research and teaching interests include the history of feminist thought and women's writing, particularly in the U.S. Her first book, Modern Women, Modern Work, focused on the ways in which women intellectuals and writers at the turn of the twentieth century combined domestic and professional discourse to create new kinds of work for themselves.