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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.
Faculty
Dan Cottom
Professor.
David A Burr Chair of Letters
Ph.D., SUNY-Buffalo, 1978.
Joined OU English Faculty in 1995.
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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.
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Daniela Garofalo
Assistant
Professor.
Joined OU English Faculty in 2004.
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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.
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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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Vincent B.
Leitch
Professor.
Paul and
Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English
Ph.D.,
University of Florida, 1972.
Joined OU
English Faculty in 1997.
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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.
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Yianna Liatsos
Assistant
Professor.
Ph.D.,
Rutgers University, 2005.
Joined OU
English Faculty in 2005.
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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.
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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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Su Fang Ng
Assistant
Professor.
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2001.
Joined OU English Faculty in 2001.
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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 E. Rapf
Professor.
Ph.D., Brown University, 1973
Joined OU English Faculty in 1974
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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