Theory, Media, and Cultural Studies

Theory, Media and Cultural Studies is a very popular and productive area of research and teaching at the University of Oklahoma. Faculty and students regularly explore many different methodologies for the study of texts, film and popular culture, including structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial theory and globalization theory. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged both within the English Department and with other departments.

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 Theory and Media concentration offer courses that span the spectrum of theoretical concerns and approaches. All graduate students are required to take an introductory survey of contemporary theory and criticism, and seminars on modernism/postmodernism, major theoretical authors and diaspora studies are taught regularly.

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).

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.

Vincent B. Leitch Professor. Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English Ph.D., University of Florida, 1972. Joined OU English Faculty in 1997.

Professor Leitch is the author of Deconstructive Criticism (Columbia University Press, 1982), American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s (Columbia University Press, 1988 [which has been translated into four languages]), Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (Columbia University Press, 1992), Postmodernism-Local Effects, Global Flows (SUNY Press, 1996), and Theory Matters (Routledge, 2003). His new book, Living with Theory, is forthcoming in the Manifestos Series from Blackwell. He has also published essays and reviews in journals such as College English, Critical Inquiry, Comparative Literature, MLN, and Philosophy and Literature. He has contributed articles and chapters to various book collections and reference works, including Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century (1983), Feminism and Institutions (1989), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993), John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (1994 and 2005 editions), The Institution of Literature (2002), and Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics (2005). He served as the general editor, along with a five-person editorial team, of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001). Dr. Leitch has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, Big XII Universities, the Fulbright-Hayes Commission, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Oklahoma Humanities Council.

Professor Leitch's teaching focuses on criticism and theory, cultural studies, contemporary U.S. culture, theories of postmodernity, and poetry and comparative poetics. His interdisciplinary interests include contemporary Continental philosophy particularly French poststructuralism and recent visual culture especially painting. In his advanced courses, students typically write critical reviews and argumentative essays, and they make oral presentations and field questions based on critiques of course texts: it is a matter of students going beyond summarizing ideas in order to theorize solutions and invent new knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."