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.

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 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.

Pam Cobrin oversees Studies in Writing and is a specialist in ESL issues. Courses taught at Barnard include: The Writer's Process, Studies in Writing, Essay Writing, and Women and Theatre

Her dissertaion, "Staging Collisions: Victorianism, Suffragism and The New Woman: the Rise of Women on the New York Stage (1880-1927)" explores the intersection of feminist activism and theatre practice. She has published and given conference papers on diverse subjects ranging from feminist theatre historical studies to writing pedagogy (theory and practice).

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 serves on the editorial board of Early American Literature.

Lucyle Hook Professor of English
see web.mac.com/kimhall/iWeb/Kimfhall/Welcome.html

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.

Richard Panek’s 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. He is a 2007 fellow in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition to Barnard, he teaches in the MFA Writing program at Goddard College.
 

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 19^th-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 19^th 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.
 

Adjunct Associate Professor
 

Elizabeth H. Schmidt received her B.A., in English from Wesleyan University in 1989 and her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University in 2005.  She serves as the Associate Director of the Barnard Forum on Migration, has taught the Americas section of Reinventing Literary History as well as Legacy of the Mediterranean, and served as the Administrative Coordinator and Guest Lecturer for the new course "The Literature of the Middle Passage" (2004) at Barnard College.  She has selected poems for, edited, and wrote the introduction to the anthology Poems of New York (2002), Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series, Alfred A. Knopf.  She has contributed an essay on Emily Dickinson, "A Mourner among the Children: Emily Dickinson's Early Religious Crisis" in The American Renaissance, edited by Harold Bloom (2004).  At Barnard, she will be teaching Literary Criticism, First Year Seminar on the Americas, Reinventing Literary History, The Literature of the Middle Passage and Emily Dickinson and her Era.