Later British and Anglophone Studies

In the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma the graduate concentration in Later British and Anglophone Studies is one of the most popular areas of study, with an excellent record in recent years in placing its Ph.D.s in tenure-track positions.  Many of the faculty who teach in this concentration also have interests in theory and gender studies, as well as in fields such as science, art, music, film, and history, and so courses are conceived and taught from a wide variety of perspectives.   

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 faculty assist them in seeking publication in major journals. The English Department and the Graduate College provide competitive funding sources for conference travel and dissertation research.  Recent graduates hold assistant or associate professor positions at institutions such as Denison College, Elmira College, the University of Nebraska-Kearney, and King’s College (Pennsylvania).

In addition to period courses in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century literatures in English, including South Asian, Caribbean, African, and African diaspora literature and culture, offerings in this area include more specialized courses such as “Transatlantic Genres” and “Global Fiction.”

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.

Joyce Coleman Associate Professor. Rudolph C. Bambas Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture. Ph.D., University of Edinburgh, 1993. Joined OU English Faculty in 2005.

Professor Coleman's interest in the importance of performance and audience reception for our understanding of medieval literature was fired by the unexpected convergence of a B.A. in Medieval Studies (Barnard College) and an M.A. in Anthropology/Folkore (University of Texas at Austin). She pursued this interest via a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, published in 1996 as Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge University Press, 1996; paperback edition, 2005). In Spring 2006 she and her graduate class on "Medieval Authorship" took the idea to a new level, by creating a short film based on a scene of public reading in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

Professor Coleman has published articles on orality-literacy theory and on medieval literary reception, performance, and patronage in anthologies and in journals such as Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Philological Quarterly, Cahiers de Littérature Orale, and The British Library Journal. Her next major project is a survey of medieval "book-iconography," i.e., of manuscript illuminations that depict the writing, presenting, and reading of books. After that she is planning a book on the aural diction of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur.

Professor Coleman teaches classes on Anglo-Saxon to late medieval literature as well as on modern uses of medieval material, such as "medieval films" and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Professor Cottom is the author of The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott (1985), Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (1987), Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation (1989), Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals (1991), Ravishing Tradition: Cultural Forces and Literary History (1996), Cannibals & Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment (2001), Why Education is Useless (2003), and Unhuman Culture (2006). His essays have appeared in journals such as ELH, Novel, Critical Inquiry, Representations, and SubStance.

His teaching interests include literary and cultural theory, cultural studies, and nineteenth-century English literature. In his courses he emphasizes the importance of student initiative and participation, even at the cost of his own (always precarious) peace of mind.

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 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).

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

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).

Professor Rapf's graduate courses include Film Theory and Criticism, with an emphasis on feminist film theory, and Comic Theory. 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.

Ronald Schleifer George Lynn Cross Research Professor. Co-editor, "The Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory." Ph.D., John Hopkins University, 1975. Joined OU English Faculty in 1975.

Professor Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English and Adjunct Professor in the College of Medicine . From 1976 to 2000 he served as Editor of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture; and from 1986 to 1999 he served as co-editor of The Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, a series of books published by the University of Oklahoma Press . In 1999, he was the Director of the Annual Convention for the Society for Literature and Science, held in Norman . Presently, he is co-editor of Mariner 10: Cross-Disciplinary DVD ROMS, a series of electronic, interactive titles published by the University of Pennsylvania Press . Professor Schleifer has written, translated, or edited sixteen books. The most recent include Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture 1880-1930, (Cambridge , 2000), Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding of Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation (Michigan , 2000), and A Postmodern Bible Reader, co-edited with David Jobling and Tina Pippin (Blackwell, 2001). He is also co-editor of Contemporary Literary Criticism, now in its fourth edition (Longman, 1998). And he is co-author of Medicine and Humanistic Understanding, a DVD-ROM published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2005) that runs for more than 14 hours (700 screens).

Professor Schleifer has authored more than sixty scholarly articles on literary modernism, critical theory, semiotics, science/medicine and literature, and the cultural study of music His recent articles include "The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome: Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry" (New Literature History 2001), “Narrative Discourse and the a New Sense of Value: Meaning and Purpose in the Neoclassical Economics of Alfred Marshall," in Rereading Narrative (Stanford, 2003), and "The Logic of Diagnosis: Peirce, Literary Narrative, and the History of Present Illness" (co-authored, Philosophy and Medicine 2006). In recent years, Professor Schleifer has been invited to lecture in Moscow , Salzburg , Copenhagen , and Korea . He teaches twentieth-century literature and literary and cultural theory at the undergraduate levels and courses on literature and medicine at the OU Health Sciences Center. He has also developed a seminar for scholarly writing for graduate students.