Biographies

(Click on the links below to see video interviews)

Video 1:
Caryl Phillips on the goals of the course

Video 2:
Caryl Phillips on his writing

Caryl Phillips, the novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and professor, has written about race, identity and belonging in both fiction and non-fiction. His new novel, Dancing in the Dark, will be published in the fall of 2005. Phillips is the author of seven other novels; The Final Passage, A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River, The Nature of Blood and A Distant Shore. His three books of nonfiction are; The European Tribe, The Atlantic Sound, and A New World Order. He also writes for television, radio, theater, and film. Phillips is a recipient of numerous awards including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize for A Distant Shore. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Phillips taught at Amherst College for eight years, and then at Barnard College for seven years. He has also taught at universities in Ghana, India, Singapore, Barbados, and Sweden. He is presently Professor of English at Yale, but during the fall of 2005 he will also be a Visiting Professor of English at Barnard.

Video:
Maire Jaanus on student excitement for the course

Maire Jaanus, Chair of the English Department and Professor of English, has written and taught extensively on figures other than Anglo-Americans in literature and their relation to literary theory. One of her current course offerings is a seminar on Body and Language , which examines interpretations of the female body and feminine sexuality in relation to various issues as presented in postmodern literature and theory. Jaanus has been teaching at Barnard and Columbia University since 1968, and has also published a number of books, among them She, a Novel (Doubleday, 1984), and Literature and Negation (Columbia University Press, 1979).   She is co-editor of three publications on Lacanian theory. Her forthcoming writing includes "The Concept of Jouissance and its Significance for the Humanities," and "The Passion for Death in Kincaid's My Brother and Autobiography of My Mother ."   In 1998, Jaanus accepted the Vilis Vitolis Prize for her essay "Estonia's Time and Monumental Time," selected as best essay in The Journal of Baltic Studies .   She was named "Author of Significant Merit" by the AAUW in 1985. Jaanus is a graduate of Vassar College, studied on a Fulbright at Cambridge University, and received a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Video:
Elizabeth Schmidt on Ghana

Elizabeth Schmidt, a Lecturer in the English Department, specializes in the colonial, immigrant, and urban experience in her teaching. She has been teaching First Year English at Barnard College since 2002 and is assistant director of The Barnard Forum on Migration.  In 2003, Schmidt worked with Caryl Phillips to bring international scholars to "The Caribbean in New York and Paris," an academic and literary conference in Bellagio, Italy.  In 2002, Schmidt edited and wrote an introduction for Poems of New York (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series, Alfred A. Knopf). Schmidt was a poetry editor for The New York Times Book Review from 2002-2004 and was the editor of its "Bookend" poetry page from 1995-2002. Schmidt has written numerous book reviews for Vogue, The New York Times Book Review , and The Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement. Schmidt received her B.A. in English from Wesleyan University, where she received the Olin Fellowship, and has a Ph. D in Literature from NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science.

Video:
James Basker on his writings

James G. Basker is the author of the critically acclaimed book Amazing Grace: Slavery in English Poetry 1660-1819 (Yale University Press, 2002), which was lauded as an important and timely collection in the study of the literature of slavery and abolition. Basker, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English at Barnard College, specializes in 18 th century cultural history, the history of slavery and abolition, and the history of journalism. His book Tobias Smollett, Critic and Journalist , was the Choice award winner as of one the outstanding academic books of 1998-89. His forthcoming book is The Adventures of Roderick Random , a scholarly edition for The Works of Tobias Smollett (University of Georgia Press, 2004) and his articles include "Johnson, Boswell, and the Abolition of Slavery" ( The New Rambler: Journal of the Johnson Society of London , 2004). Basker is President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York, which creates history programs in high schools, and sponsors national book prizes and scholarly fellowship programs. He is also founder and director of Oxbridge Academics Programs that sponsors academic summer schools for high school students and professional seminars for teachers at Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris. Basker was educated at Harvard College (B.A.), Cambridge Unversity (M.A.), and as a Rhodes Scholar, at Oxford University (D.Phil).

Kaiama L. Glover has been an assistant professor in the French and Africa and African Diaspora Studies Departments at Barnard College since 2001. She specializes in Francophone Studies and the African Diaspora and will teach Intro to Francophone Studies II as well as Intro to the African Diaspora in the fall. Since 1995, Glover has been a member of the President's Fellowship at Columbia University, where she earned a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology, as well as an M.Phil. and an M.A. After receiving a B.A. in History and Literature, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University, she studied at the Université de Paris IV, la Sorbonne, in Paris, where she received an M.A. Glover was awarded honorary enrollment in the literature section of the ?cole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She has written extensively in the topic of Caribbean literature and multiculturalism, including the Patrick Chamoiseau selection she contributed to the book Multicultural Writers Since 1945: An A-to-Z Guide . While studying at Harvard, she was a student editor for the W.E.B. Dubois Black Literature Project, a project compiling an anthology of articles on black women's literature from the 1920s through the 1940s.