English Department Faculty 2008-9
 For contact information, please go the Office Hours page.

Faculty Members with additional webpages are highlighted.  Click on the link next to their name.
Some additional publications are listed on the Faculty Bibliography  
at Books Etc.: Celebrating Barnard Writers

  Bashir Abu-Manneh  
Assistant Professor
B.A., University of Haifa, Israel; M.A., University of Warwick, U.K.; D.Phil., University of Oxford, U.K.
Bashir Abu-Manneh, Assistant Professor of English, will teach courses in Global Literature, Palestinian and Israeli literatures, Marxism, and Postcolonialism.  He earned his BA in English Literature from the University of Haifa, Israel, in 1994 and his D.Phil., in English Literature at the University of Oxford, U.K.  In 2003-04, he received a Ford Foundation Post-doctoral Fellowship to conduct research on postcolonial theory at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, where he was a Post-doctoral Fulbright Visiting Scholar the year before.  He has taught at Columbia University and Wadham College, University of Oxford.
  Massimo Bacigalupo Fall 09 English Conference
 

Massimo Bacigalupo is a Professor of American Literature and Chair of Department at the University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy.

M.A., University of Rome; Ph.D., Columbia University.

Massimo Bacigalupo’s research has centered on American and British Romanticism and Modernism. He is a Member of  the  Ligurian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the former President of AISNA, the American Studies Association of Italy. He is the author of The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), Grotta Byron (2001), and the editor of many scholarly volumes, most recently Ezra Pound, Language and Persona (2008),  Ambassadors: American Studies in a Changing World (2006), and America and the Mediterranean (2003). His essays are included in Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic (Palgrave, 2008), T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition  (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean (2006), The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (OUP, 2002), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (1999), etc. He has contributed to The Yale Review, The Modern Language Review, American Literary Scholarship, Journal of Modern Literature, Paideuma, The Paris Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Notes & Queries, etc. In 2003 he was awarded Italy’s National Translation Prize for his translations of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Seamus Heaney, and many others. This is the third time that he is teaching The English Conference at  Barnard. In 1992 his course was called  "Romantics and Modernists"; in 1995 his subject was "Love & Power in Shakespeare and Hemingway."

 

Catherine Barnett

 
 

Adjunct Assistant Professor

M.F.A. in poetry, MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College; B.A., Princeton University

Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2004 Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in spring 2004 by Alice James Books. Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Washington Post, Barrow Street, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and The Iowa Review.

    James Basker  
Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History
President, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
B.A. Harvard (1974), M.A. Cambridge (1976), D.Phil. Oxford (1983). 
Barnard College Specialization: The long 18th century (Restoration to Romanticism); Black Atlantic; Johnson and his circle; Anglo-American history and literature; print culture.

Professor Basker came to Barnard College in 1987, having taught at Harvard for seven years.  He began teaching in the Columbia graduate school in 1990.  Since 1997, he has also been President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City.

A specialist in the 18th century, his interests span the fields of history and literature, including the Black Atlantic and the history of slavery and abolition, the life and works of Johnson, the history of print culture, and women writers. His publications include Tobias Smollett, Critic and Journalist (1988, winner of a 1989 Choice Award); Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed. with Alvaro Ribeiro, S.J. (1996); Samuel Johnson in the Mind of Thomas Jefferson (1999); a modern edition of The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 1756-1763 (2002); and Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery 1660-1810 (2002). A former Rhodes Scholar and recipient of NEH grants, he has been awarded fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, Yale University, and Cambridge University. He is on the Editorial Board of The Age of Johnson and is an elected fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Society of American Historians. He is currently working on a book about Johnson, Boswell, and the problem of slavery and editing a series of reprints of antislavery texts from the period 1760-1820.

  Christopher Baswell
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English at Barnard College and Columbia University

Prof. Baswell specializes in Medieval literature and manuscript studies; Classical tradition; disability studies.

 

 

    Jonathan Beller  
 

Adjunct Associate Professor
Ph.D., Duke University; M.A., B.A. Columbia University

Jonathan Beller, Visiting Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies, received his B.A. in 1985 from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature and his Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University in 1994. He is the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production: Towards A Political Economy of the Society of the Spectacle, (Lebanon: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 2006) and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and The World Media-System, (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006). He has  written numerous articles including “21st Century Fascism, ‘Political’ Killing, and the Crisis of Representation,” Kontra-Gahum: Academics Against Political Killings, ed., Sarah Raymundo, Manila: Ibon Publications, 2006, “Kino-I, Kino World: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production,” in The Visual Culture Reader, Second Edition, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Routledge, 2002 and “Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and  Ishmael Bernal’s Manila By Night,” Positions  9:2 Fall 2001, 331-368. He has also written the entries for “Third Cinema and Visual Culture” in The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, New York: Scribner’s Sons, 2005 and a variety of occasional pieces including film reviews for radio, newspaper and the web. His current book project is entitled, The Tortured Signifier: Signs of the State of Exception.  For his work on Philippine Visual Culture he has been the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award and a Getty Grant. Recent grants and honors include Mellon Research Stipends and Travel Awards in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and the selection of his essay “Paying Attention,” published in Cabinet #24 (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007), for Documenta XII.  He has taught at Barnard College, Pratt Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, and the University of the Philippines. At Barnard he will be teaching “Literary Theory,” and “Women and Film” among other courses.
 

  Constance Brown
Lecturer in English and Registrar
A.B., Barnard; M.A., Ph.D. Columbia University

Constance Brown became Barnard's Registrar in 1992. She has continued to teach one course each semester, most often Critical Writing (now Literary Criticism and Theory) and a senior seminar on T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf. She has a special interest in British literature of and after the First World War.

  Laura Ciolkowski  
 

Lecturer, Associate Director of The Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference
B.A., Columbia University; A.M., Brown University; Ph.D., Brown University

 

Laura E. Ciolkowski is Assistant Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia (www.socialdifference.org) and Lecturer in English at Barnard. She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and is on the faculty of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG). Laura has taught in the English Department and the Women's Studies Program at Yale University, and the English Department at Wesleyan University and NYU, where she is currently

on the faculty of the interdisciplinary Gallatin School for Individualized Study. Her teaching and research interests include feminist theory and cultural studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, travel literature, gender and technology.  Her work has been published in a range of journals, including: Twentieth Century Literature; Studies in the Novel; Genders; Novel: A Forum on Fiction; and Victorian Literature and Culture. In addition to her scholarly research, Laura is a writer and book critic whose articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker Magazine, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle.

 

    Pamela Cobrin   Director of the Writing Program & of the Speaking Program
Senior Lecturer in English,
Ph.D., New York University in Performance Studies.

Pam Cobrin directs the Writing and Speaking programs and teaches writing and dramatic literature courses in the departments of English and Theatre and for Africana Studies and American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU.  Her scholarship includes guest editing an issue of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory  titled “Domestic Disturbances” (November 2006) in which her article “Dangerous Flirtations: Politics, the Parlor and the Nineteenth Century Victorian Amateur Actress” appears, an extended essay about women's relationship to Broadway before World War II in The Encyclopedia of Broadway and American Culture (forthcoming, 2009) and, her book, Taking Place: From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway, Women and the New York Stage, 1880-1927, is due out August, 2009 (University of Delaware Press). She has also published in TDR, American Theatre Magazine and Theatre Insight and currently serves on the editorial board of Women and Performance.

 

  Mary Cregan
 
Lecturer
B.A., Middlebury College; M. Phil., M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

Mary Cregan received her B.A. from Middlebury College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia, with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf, female authorship, and women’s education in Victorian England.  At Barnard she has taught the Modern Novel, Literary Criticism and Theory, Women and Culture, the Legacy of the Mediterranean, and a seminar on Virginia Woolf.  At Columbia she taught Literature Humanities and Modern Irish Literature.  A former book designer, she writes regularly on book cover design for London’s Financial Times.  She is working on a book about ideas of the self in the culture of the psychiatric diagnosis.
  Alice Elliott Dark
   
  Patricia Denison
Senior Lecturer in English
B.A., University of Maryland; Ph.D., University of Virginia
Patricia Denison teaches dramatic literature in the departments of English and Theatre, Barnard College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and has published articles on Victorian drama, modern British drama, and American drama. Her edited collection of essays, John Osborne: A Casebook, was published in 1997, and she is currently finishing a book on Arthur W. Pinero and late-nineteenth century British drama.
    Polly Devlin  
   

Professor Devlin is a graduate of St. Mary's College Belfast where she obtained a degree in Speech and Drama.  She began her first work at Vogue magazine at the age of 21.  She remained the features editor there for three years until she became a full page columnist at the Evening Standard.  She was awarded the OBE for services in literature in 1994.

Professor Devlin has written seven books, one of which was serialized on Radio 4 for over thirteen weeks.  In her four years (1983-1987) at Beaconsfield, a National Film school, Professor Devlin directed a documentary.  She has also been literary judge for the Irish Times and the Booker Prize as well as a roving art critic for the International Herald Tribune.  She is currently a regular panelist on the BBC radio program Round Britain Quiz.  Professor Devlin has been published in over 10 newspapers and magazines.  

    Peggy Ellsberg
  Senior Lecturer in English
B.A., Radcliffe; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University
    Lisa Estreich  
  Associate
B.A, Harvard University; M.A., M.Phil., Columbia University
 
  Georgette Fleischer 
  Lecturer
M.A., M. Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University

 

Georgette Fleischer received her M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts (May 1994), and her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (February 2002). Her scholarly interests are in Modernism, especially women writers’ responses to National Socialism and World War II. Publications include work on Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, published in Studies in the Novel, and numerous review essays in both scholarly and general audience venues, including the Nation and The L.A. Times Book Review.

    Shelly Fredman  
  Associate
M.F.A.W., Washington University; B.A., Boston University
 
    Guy Gallo  
 
Lecturer, Film Studies
A.B. Harvard College, M.A. Hunter College, M.F.A. Yale School of Drama

Guy Gallo's produced screenplays include: an adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano, directed by John Huston; a version of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (PBS); and an episode for Tales from the Darkside based on John Cheever's short story "The Enormous Radio."  In addition, there are a handful of unproduced originals and several adaptations languishing in Hollywood purgatory (turnaround).  His original, Lady in Glass, was a finalist for the F.O.C.U.S. award in 1982.  He also writes plays, including Failing, Rain in Lent, and Antigone in Desire.  His fiction and poetry have appeared in BOMB and the Mississippi Review.

 

    Lisa Gordis Director of First-Year Seminar
 

Professor of English
A.B. Harvard University, 1988. M.A. UCLA 1990. Ph.D. UCLA, 1993.
see http://www.columbia.edu/~lmg21/

Professor Gordis specializes in early American literature, with particular interest in Puritan and Quaker writings.  She is the author of Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and has also published articles on George Herbert, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Woolman.  She is currently working on a book about early Quaker theories of language, and is part of a team of editors preparing Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana for publication.  She has served on the editorial board of Early American Literature.

  Mary Gordon  
Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English
B.A., Barnard; M.A., Syracuse.
Mary Gordon is the author of four bestselling novels: Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, and The Other Side. She has also published a book of novellas, The Rest of Life; a collection of stories, Temporary Shelter; and a book of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls. She is the recipient of a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.


(photo: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office)

    Bina Gogineni  
 
 
  Achsah Guibbory  
Professor of English
B.A., Indiana University; M.A., Ph.D., UCLA.

Achsah Guibbory, Professor of English, teaches courses in Milton and Donne and Renaissance love poetry.  She came to Barnard from the University of Illinois where she taught since receiving her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1970.  She is a recipient of many honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship (2001-02) and the Harriet and Charles Luckman Undergraduate Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Illinois (1995). She has served as the President of the Milton Society of America and the John Donne Society.

In addition to publishing numerous articles on seventeenth-century literature and culture, she has published several books including The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History and Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century English Literature and The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. She is currently working on a book entitled Imagined Identities: The Uses of Judaism in Seventeenth-Century England.
 

    Kim F. Hall   Director of Africana Studies
 
Lucyle Hook Professor of English
B.A., Hood College; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
see
web.mac.com/kimhall/iWeb/Kimfhall/Welcome.html
sign-up for office hours: http://professorhall.pbwiki.com/.
[invite key  is “africana” (no caps)]

Kim F. Hall is also the Director of Africana Studies at Barnard College.  Previously, she held the Thomas F.X. Mullarkey Chair of Literature at Fordham University.  She has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, and Georgetown University.  She teaches courses in 16th and 17th century literature, race studies,  women's studies and drama.  

 

Professor Hall's first book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, helped found the field of early modern race studies and was named a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book. 

 

In addition to her 2006 book Othello: Texts and Contexts, she is has published numerous articles on race in Renaissance/early modern studies and lectures widely on Shakespeare, renaissance women writers, race studies, culinary culture, visual arts, and pedagogy. She is past chair of the Shakespeare Division of the Modern Language Association and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.  Professor Hall has won several prestigious fellowships, including an NEH fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago and an ACLS fellowship.  She is currently working on Sweet Taste of Empire, a study of the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade.

 

Professor Hall is also an avid quilter whose work has been exhibited in Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York.
 

  Ross Hamilton  Director of Film Studies
Assistant Professor of English
B.A. Queen's University; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University; Diplôme, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Ross Hamilton specializes in metahistorical patterns from the Reformation to Romanticism, as well as the shift from natural philosophy to early modern science. He is also interested in the Annales historians, especially Braudel, as well as Foucault's later work. He was a prize teaching fellow at Yale, and held a post-doctorate fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Accident: A Literary and Philosophical History (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press), traces the transformations and mutations of Aristotle's notion of the accidental or inessential from Sophocles to late 20th century film. A second book, Falling: Literature, Science and Social Change, explores literary analogues to the paradigm shift from natural philosophy to early modern science described by Thomas Kuhn, among others. In addition to editing Tom Jones, he has written articles on Wordsworth, Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the eighteenth century culture of gambling, theater and the rise of the novel, and the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

  Saskia Hamilton  Director of Women Poets
Associate Professor of English
B.A., Kenyon College; M.A., New York University.

Saskia Hamilton is the author of As for Dream (Graywolf Press, 2001), Divide These (Graywolf, 2005), and Canal: New and Selected Poems (Arc Publications [UK], 2005).  She is also the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005) and co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).  She directs Women Poets at Barnard.

photo by Julia Hamilton

    Derrick Higginbotham  
  Associate
B.A., Dalhousie University, Halifax; M.A., Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; M. Phil., Columbia University
 
  Maire Jaanus  see http://www.barnard.edu/english/Jaanus/index.htm
Professor of English
A.B., Vassar; Ph.D., Harvard University.

Specialization: 19th-century comparative literature, especially romantic and the novel; 20th-century global English literature; literary theory, especially psychoanalytic (Lacanian); and postmodernism.

Maire Jaanus is the co-editor of Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud (SUNY, 1996) and of Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts (SUNY, 1995).  She is the author of She--a Novel (Doubleday, 1984), Literature and Negation (CU Press, 1979;Rept., 1988), Georg Trakl (CU Press, 1974).

Recent articles include: "Bewilderment as a Symptom," Clinical Studies, vol. 5, no.2 (2000); "Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross' The Czar's Madman," Journal of Baltic Studies XXXI, no.3 (2000); "The Ethics of the Real in Lacan's Seminar VII," Literature and Psychology XXXXII no.1-2 (1997); "Estonia's Time and Monumental Time," Journal of Baltic Studies XXVII, no. 2 (1997); and "Kundera and Lacan: Drive, Desire, and Oneiric Narration," Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Willi Apollon & R. Feldstein (SUNY, 1996).
    Julia Jordan
  Adjunct Assistant Professor
B.A. Barnard, M.Phil Trinity, Juilliard Playwrighting Fellow
 
  Jennie Kassanoff on leave 2009-10
Associate Professor of English
A.B., Harvard; M.Litt., Jesus College, Oxford; Ph.D., Princeton
    Mary Beth Keane  
 
 
    William G. Kenton  
  Lecturer
Ph.D. & M.A., New York University; B.A., Ohio University
 
    Mary Helen Kolisnyk  
Associate
M.A. New York University, M.A.& B.A., University of Toronto
    Kate Levin  
 
Lecturer
B.A., Yale University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Kate Levin specializes in 18th-century British literature, in particular the rise of the novel and women writers.  She has published articles about Shakespeare, Charlotte Lennox, John Cleland, and Eliza Haywood.  At Barnard she teaches Eighteenth-Century Literature, First-Year English and First-Year Seminar (Women & Culture and Legacy of the Mediterranean).

 

    Sandra Luckow  
   Lecturer
B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., New York University

Sandra Luckow (writer/director/producer/editor) is an award-winning filmmaker (primarily documentary) who teaches both narrative and documentary film production at Yale University’s School of Art.  She designed and runs the production arm of the Yale Summer Film Institute. In 2005, Sandra made and donated a 20-minute film to a young nonprofit organization, Peer Health Exchange, to commemorate its first year of operation.  The film just won two 2006 Telly Awards: Outstanding Nonprofit Film and Excellent Low-Budget Production.  She received her MFA at New York University Graduate Film School.  Her documentary film “Belly Talkers,” a cross-country road trip that explored the art of ventriloquism premiered in competition at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.  Sandra has also worked as an associate director on ABC’s “One Life to Live.”   She founded Ojeda Films, Inc., as an independent film company devoted to the development and execution of independent filmmaking. Luckow frequently works as a producer/shooter for Spanish language channels such as Univision and Telemundo and just returned from Miami where she edited a Hispanic research project for Honda. Luckow was one of the producers/shooters on the Mexico leg of Discovery’s “World Birthday” project which premiered in January of 2002.  Occasionally, Sandra is a camera operator for reality television shows such as “Date Patrol” and “Whose Wedding Is It, Anyway?”  Passionate about classic Hollywood cinema, Sandra frequently introduces and lectures on films from the period of 1930-1960.  And finally, Luckow just completed her first feature-length screenplay, “Blind Man’s Bluff.” Like her documentary work, she draws upon the complexities of real-life situations for inspiration, having adapted her screenplay from Dr. Barth Hoogstraten’s memoir “Eyes of the Blind.”  Research for the screenplay took her to Amsterdam’s Institute on War Documentation and Resistance Museum, Hilversum’s Historical Society and Utrecht University.  She is a member of the International Documentary Association and the Director’s Guild of America.

    Stephen Massimilla  
  Lecturer
B.A., Williams College; M.F.A., M.A., M. Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University
 
    David McKenna  
Adjunct Assistant Professor
B.A., University of Texas, M.F.A., Carnegie-Mellon University

Since 1971, David McKenna has directed more than 100 productions on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in regional and university theatres. In addition to writing for off-off-Broadway and radio, he has been co-writing and co-editing projects for Desperate Comfort Films. He has served as a story analyst/consultant for Focus Features, HBO, 20th Century Fox, CBS-Fox Video, New Line, October Films, and numerous private clients. As an acting teacher/coach, he has worked with the NATAS Actors' Workshop, the American Academy, the Yale Dramat, NYU, SUNY Buffalo and the University of South Dakota. He has narrated documentaries for Camera Planet, VH-1, WebMD-TV and Court TV. He has twice adjudicated the American College Theatre Festival and is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and the Ensemble Studio Theatre.

  Ellen McLaughlin
  Adjunct Associate Professor, Playwrighting
B.A. Yale University

Ellen McLaughlin’s plays have received numerous national and international productions. They include Days and Nights Within, A Narrow Bed, Infinity's House, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Tongue of a Bird, The Trojan Women, Helen, The Persians and Oedipus.

Producers include: Actors' Theater of Louisville, The Actors’ Gang L.A., Classic Stage Co. (N.Y.), The Intiman Theater (Seattle), Almeida Theater (London), The Mark Taper Forum (L.A.), the Public Theater in NYC, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The National Actors’ Theater (N.Y.), and The Guthrie Theater (MN), among other venues.

Grants and awards include: Great American Play Contest, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the NEA, the Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the Berilla Kerr Award for playwrighting.

McLaughlin is also an actor. She has worked on and Off Broadway as well as extensively in regional theater. She is most well known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, appearing in every U.S. production from its earliest workshops through its Broadway run.  Other favorite roles include The Homebody in Homebody/Kabul, Pirate Jenny in Threepenny Opera (Elliot Norton Award), Mrs. Alving in Ghosts and Agave in The Bacchae at LaMama.

Her most recent publication, by T.C.G., is The Greek Plays.

  Linn Cary Mehta see http://bc.barnard.columbia.edu/~lmehta/
Lecturer
B.A. in English and French Literature, Yale University, M.A. from St. Hilda's College in Oxford, M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Columbia University


In addition to the degrees above, Linn Mehta has studied at Freie Universität, the Sorbonne, and Universidad Catolica in Lima, Peru.

Her teaching interests are nineteenth and twentieth century Comparative Literature; Literature of the Americas; Core curriculum and historical approaches to European and postcolonial literatures, especially in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and India; Poetry; Modernism and Post-modernism; Literary Theory; Cultural Development; Women's Studies.

    Monica Miller on leave fall 09
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. from Harvard University (2000) and a BA from Dartmouth College (1992).
 

Monica Miller joined the faculty of Barnard in 2001.  In addition to her teaching duties in the department of English, she is affiliated with the Africana Studies, American Studies, and Film Studies programs at Barnard.

Monica L. Miller specializes in African American and American literature and cultural studies.  Her courses include a senior seminar on black stereotypes and performances of race, a seminar on black masculinity in literature and visual culture, and lecture classes on the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary American literature.  

She has recently published articles in Callaloo and in Bad Modernisms. Her book, Slaves to Fashion: The Black Dandy and the Styling of Black Atlantic Identity: A Cultural History of the Black Dandy from Its Origins in Enlightenment England to the Present, will be published by Duke University Press.

Professor Miller is the recipient of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the American Association of University Women.

  John Pagano see http://www.barnard.edu/english/Pagano/index.htm
Lecturer
B.A., M.A., and Ph.D from Columbia
On the verge of completing premedical studies at Columbia College, John Pagano switched his major to English Literature, a decision that surprised many but convinced him he was pursuing the course of study best suited for creative self-realization and humanitarian contribution to society.  The vocational energies that inspired this reorientation guided him  through completion of his degrees at Columbia.  In 1983, he began teaching Literature in Columbia’s School of General Studies, joined the Barnard English Department in 1988. Then he entered the Humanities Department of Manhattan School of Music in 1993, where since 1999, He has served as Chair. 
His major teaching interests include Romantic Literature, Modern Literature, Poetry, Composition, and Fantasy. The magicality of intellectual and imaginative exchange in the classroom continues to be the most compelling aspect of the teaching profession for me—the  opportunity to share with my students the formative insight, wonder, and delight afforded by Literature remains my primary inspiration as a teacher.
    Richard Panek  
  Adjunct Associate Professor
M.F.A., University of Iowa; B.S., Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern Univeristy

Richard Panek is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a grant from the Antarctic Artists and Writers program of the National Science Foundation.  His next book will be Let There Be Dark: At the Dawn of the Next Universe (Houghton Mifflin), about dark matter, dark energy, and the frontiers of cosmology.  He is the author of two books about the history and philosophy of science, The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes (Viking, 2004) and Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Our Minds to the Heavens (Viking, 1998).  He has frequently written about science and culture for The New York Times, as well as for Discover, Smithsonian, Natural History, Esquire, Outside, Seed and many other publications, and his short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares and won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award.  In addition to Barnard, he teaches in the MFA Writing program at Goddard College.
 

    Stefan Pedatella
 

Lecturer
B.A., University of Chicago; M.A., Columbia University; Ph.D., Columbia University

 

Stefan Pedatella has been on the faculty of the English Department since receiving his PhD from Columbia in 2007. His primary research interests include nineteenth-century lyric poetry (primarily in Italian and Anglophone traditions), animal philosophy, and asceticism in literature after Schopenhauer and Leopardi.

 

His awards include Fulbright and Javits fellowships.  Recent publications include the article "Images of Animal Predation in Giacomo Leopardi's Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese." (Italian Culture, Vol. 27 No. 1, March, 2009, 24–41), and the translation, from the Italian, of What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays by Giorgio Agamben (Stanford University Press, 2009). 

 

At Barnard, Pedatella teaches "Literary Criticism and Theory," as well as First-Year Seminar and First-Year English. 

  Peter Platt Department Chair

Professor of English
B.A., Yale; M.A., Middlebury College; D.Phil., Oxford.

see http://www.barnard.edu/english/Platt/index.htm

 

Professor Platt is currently Chair of the Barnard English Department.
 

The author of Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Nebraska, 1997), he also edited Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture (Delaware, 1999).  He has written articles on Shakespeare, Renaissance poetics, and rhetoric.  His new book, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox, will appear from Ashgate in 2009.

    Cary Plotkin  

see http://www.barnard.edu/english/Plotkin/index.html
Senior Lecturer in English
 

B.A., Yale; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia. Also studied at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and, as a Fellow of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich)

Courses at Barnard include Victorian Poetry and Criticism, The Romantic Era, Major English Texts, The Renaissance Colloquium, The Enlightenment Colloquium, A History of Criticism, First-year English, First-year Seminar, and senior seminars on early 19th-century literature, Victorian to Modern literature, "Crises of Modernism," and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

 

He was a visiting professor at the University of Caen (France), where he gave cours magistraux d’agrégation on Robert Browning and George Meredith, a master’s level course on R. Browning, and "undergraduate" courses on Jane Austen and P. B. Shelley.  He also prepared a series of eight radio lectures on Browning and on Austen.

 

His field of scholarly activity covers English, French, and German poetry of the 19th century.  He is the author of The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins   and the editor of the forthcoming Soundings: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Hopkins Quarterly Critics.  His essays and articles include "Ametaphoricity and Presence in Hopkins’s Poetics," "Ist es möglich, philosophisch ‘modern’ zu denken: Der Blick von auβen," "In propria persona: le masque libérateur et carcéral chez Robert Browning," and "Victorian Religious Poetry" in The Columbia History of British Poetry.

 

He has translated Jacques Derrida’s "Scribble (pouvoir/écrire)" and Georg Lukács’ " Die Subjekt-Objekt Beziehung in der Ästhetik."

 

He serves on the Board of Scholars of The Hopkins Quarterly and has written opera librettos.

 

Anne Lake Prescott

see http://www.barnard.edu/english/Prescott/_ALPWebPg_MAIN.htm

Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English
A.B., Barnard; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia

 

Anne Prescott, who also studied at Radcliffe and (as an auditor) at the Sorbonne, began teaching at Barnard in 1959 and was chair of the Barnard English Department from 1988-1992 and in the spring of 2001. She was for many years on the executive board of the Renaissance Society of America and is currently the outgoing president of the Sixteenth Century Society. Currently on the executive board of the John Donne Society and the International Association for Thomas More Scholarship, she serves on the editorial boards of SEL, American Notes and Queries, and Renaissance Studies and is co-editor of Spenser Studies and, with Betty Travitsky, of an Ashgate series of early modern texts by or concerning women. A specialist in the English Renaissance, with a focus on Anglo-French relations, she is the author of French Poets and the English Renaissance (Yale, 1978) and Imagining Rabelais in the English Renaissance (Yale, 1998) as well as co-editor (with Patrick Cheney) of Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry (MLA, 2000), (with Betty Travitsky) of Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England (Columbia 2000), (with James Dutcher) of Renaissance Historicisms (Delaware, 2008), and (with Andrew Hadfield) of a projected new edition of the Norton Spenser. She is the winner of the Spenser Society’s “Colin Clout Lifetime Achievement Award” as well as prizes from the Sidney Society and the John Donne Society. Her current interests include images of David in the Renaissance and early modern almanacs.

  Quandra Prettyman
 
Senior Associate
B.A., Antioch College
  Tom Ratekin
  Lecturer
B.A., Brown University; M.A. & M.Phil., Columbia University; Ph.D. Columbia University
 
  Marie Regan
  Adjunct Assistant Professor
B.S.F.S., Georgetown; M.F.A., Columbia University
Additional coursework: San Francisco Art Institute. Also Adjunct Assistant Professor Columbia and Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College.

MARIE REGAN teaches Film Studies, Screenwriting and Production.  Marie's short film and video work has been screened in film festivals including: the Sao Paolo International Short Film Festival, Zinebi International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao, American Cinemateque among others, and has been shown on television in France, Japan and the United States.  She is currently completing a feature documentary/essay film, COWBOY SONG.
 

  Frances Richard
  Associate

B.A., Oberlin College; M.A., New York University


Frances Richard’s book of poems, See Through, was published by Four Way Books in 2003. She has been a member of the editorial team at Cabinet Magazine and the literary journal Fence, and writes frequently about contemporary art. In 2005, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, she organized an exhibition and accompanying monograph titled Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates”. She teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design.

 

    Jennifer Rosenthal  
  Lecturer
B.A., Barnard College; M.Phil., Columbia University, Ph.D., Columbia University
 
  James Runsdorf  
 
Associate; Assistant Dean of Studies and Junior Class Dean
M.Phil.

 

 

  Aaron Schneider
 
Lecturer in English; Senior Associate Dean of Studies and Senior Class Dean
B.A., Brandeis; M.A., M. Phil., Ph.D., Columbia
    Wendy Schor-Haim  
  Associate
B.A., McGill University; M.A., M. Phil., New York University
 
    Christine Schutt  
Adjunct Associate Professor
B.A. and M.A., University of Wisconsin, Madison, M.F.A. Columbia University

Christine Schutt is the author of two collections of short stories, Nightwork, and most recently, A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer. She has won Pushcart and O'Henry Prizes for her short fiction. Her first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist for 2004. She lives and teaches in New York City.
 

  William Sharpe see http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/wsharpe/
  Professor of English
B.A., Columbia; M.A., Oxford; Ph.D., Columbia.

William Sharpe specializes in the literature, art, and culture of the modern city, particularly New York.  Former Chair of the English Department, he teaches courses in urban literature, modern poetry, Victorian poetry, literary criticism, and American studies.  His work has been sponsored by grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He has published numerous articles on literature, urban studies, and the visual arts.  His books include Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams; Visions of the Modern City: Essays on Art, Literature, and History (co-edited with Leonard Wallock); and The Passing of Arthur: Essays on Loss and Renewal in Arthurian Tradition (co-edited with Christopher Baswell).   He is also editor of  The Victorian Age (Volume 2B of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, now entering its fourth edition.   His latest book, New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, has just been published by Princeton University Press.
 
    Sean Singer  
 
Adjunct Assistant Professor
B.A., Indiana University; M.F.A., Washington University

Sean Singer
’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of an artists’ grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a 2005 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  He is a Ph.D. student in American Studies at Rutgers University - Newark.
   

Alexis Soloski

 
  Associate
B.A., Yale University; M.A., M. Phil., Columbia University
 
  Maura Spiegel
Term Professor of English
B.A., Bennington College; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia.

Specialization:
19th-century British and European novel; 20th-century American fiction and cultural studies; film, film theory; gender theory; European modernism

Professor Spiegel has written on literature and social history; the history of the emotions; film and fashion. She has taught at Bennington College, City College, City University of New York, and the 92nd Street Y. Her book, The Grim Reader, edited with Richard Tristman, was published by Anchor/Doubleday in 1997. She is currently working on a collection of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative and film.

 

    Maxine Swann  
 
Adjunct Assistant Professor

Maxine Swann's short story “Flower Children” won the Cohen Award, the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and was included in The Best American Short Stories 1998. She received degrees in literature from Columbia University and the University of Paris, La Sorbonne. Her first novel, Serious Girls, was published by Picador in 2003.

  Timea Szell  
Senior Lecturer in English
A.B., Barnard; M.A., Columbia; Ph.D., SUNY, Stony Brook.

Dr. Szell serves as the Director of the Creative Writing Program and teaches courses in creative writing, the First-Year Seminar Program, Women's Studies and Medieval Literature.  Her research interests center on medieval saints' lives and recently Human-Animal Studies. Her fiction appeared in THE SOUTHERN REVIEW and assorted literary journals.
 

    Yevgeniya Traps  
 
  Margaret Vandenburg Director of First-Year English
 

Senior Lecturer in English
B.A., U. of Idaho; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia

Dr. Vandenburg also serves as Director of First Year English and was voted the Emily Gregory Award winner for the 2003-2004 academic year.

    Eugene Vydrin  
  Associate
B.A., New York University; M.A., M. Phil., Columbia University
 

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