Bill Albertini Assistant Professor PhD, University of Virginia

Research interests: Twentieth-century American literature, narratives of contagion and infection in the contemporary United States, cultural studies, cultural theory, queer theory, gender studies, sexuality, and body studies

Teaching interests: 20th-Century American Literature, Contemporary Literary & Cultural Studies, Queer Theory, and Sexuality

Recent publications: "So Wrong It's Right: The Guilty Pleasures of Reality Television." Iris 47 (Fall 2003).

Co-editor of "Is There Life After Identity Politics?" Special issue of New Literary History 31.4 (Autumn 2000).

Khani Begum PhD

Research interests:

Kimberly Coates Assistant Professor PhD, University of Utah

Research interests: 20th century British and American literature and culture, psychoanalysis, feminist theories/gender studies, and trauma/affect studies.

Teaching interests: 20th century British and American Literature, late 19th century American literature, psychoanalysis, literature between the wars, feminist theory, trauma/affect studies.

Graduate courses recently taught: The Space Between: British and American Literature Between the Wars; Feminism and War; Freud's Women, Women's Freud: Feminist Encounters with Psychoanalysis; British Literature and the Rise of Fascism.

Recent publications: "Finding Fantasia: Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and the Aesthetic Subject," PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. Eds. Murray Schwartz and Norman Holland (forthcoming 2010).

"Photographing Violence: Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and Contemporary Feminist Responses to Images of War," The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf's Writings: Essays on Her Political Philosophy. Ed. Jane Wood. Edwin Mellen Press, London and New York. Published November 2009 (UK) and January 20, 2010 (USA).

"Queering London: Virginia Woolf and The Politics of Perception." Woolf in the City: Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Elizabeth E. Evans and Sarah Cornish. Clemson University Press, 2010.

"Eros in the Sick Room: Phosphorescent Form and Aesthetic Ecstasy in D.H. Lawrence's sons and Lovers." Journal of Narrative Theory 38.2 (Summer 2008). Eds. Craig Dionne and Joseph Csicsila. Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan University Press, 2008.

"Regarding Violence: Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and Contemporary Feminist Responses to War." Virginia Woolf: Art, Education Internationalism. Selected Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Diana Royer and Madelyn Detloff. Clemson University Press, 2008.

"Exposing the 'Nerves of Language':  Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness."  Literature and Medicine 21.2 (Fall 2002): 242-263.  Eds. Rita Charon and Maura Spiegel. Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Works in progress: "Phantoms, Fancy (and) Symptoms: Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and the Art of Being Ill," Woolf Studies Annual, Ed. Mark Hussey (under review).

"Sick with the Color of Mother: Aesthetic Transfusions in H.D.'s HERmione."

'Come See My War': Feminism, Politics, and the Performance of Affect in British and American Women's Literature, 1900-1945. [Book project]

Stephannie Gearhart Assistant Professor PhD, Lehigh University

Research interests: Age relations in early modern English literature and culture, early modern English drama, cultural Studies and New Historicism, and Shakespearean adaptations.

Teaching interests: Early modern English drama, Shakespearean adaptations, and contemporary British literature.

Recent publications: "'The More There Is To See': Another Look at James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late," Scottish Literary Review 2.1 (2010): 77-94.

"'Will in Overplus': A Review of Shakespeare Biographies," Quidditas, 30 (2009): 162-201.

"'Take My Part': Using Generational Conflict to Teach King Lear," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, 16:1 (Spring 2009): 91-105.

"'[F]aint and imperfect stamps': The Problem with Adaptations of Shakespeare for Children," Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 27 (2007): 44-68.

Works in progress: A Difficult Age: Drama and the Politics of Generational Conflict in Shakespeare’s England. [Book Manuscript]

"'One, Two, Three, One, Two, Three': Counting and Calculating in Lear’s Daughters."

"'Only He Would Have the Temerity to Rewrite Shakespeare': Douglas Hickox’s Theater of Blood as Adaptation."

Erin Labbie Associate Professor PhD, University of Minnesota

Research interests: Medieval Studies, Middle English, Chaucer studies, Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon studies, Old French, Hagiography, Translation studies, Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Historiography, Marxism, Deconstruction, Feminism and Queer Theory, Post-colonial studies, Meta-criticism, Intellectual History, and Disciplinarity.

Teaching interests:  British literature survey, Introduction to theory, Seminars in
Medieval literature and studies and Topics in theory.

Recent publications: Lacan's Medievalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

"Lear to the Letter: Derrida Before Lacan, Poe Before Shakespeare," co-authored with Autumn Beechler (Undergraduate student). Accepted and forthcoming in Shakespeare Yearbook, Fall 2006/Winter 2007.

"Zizek Avec Lacan: Splitting the Dialectics of Desire," Slovene Studies, Volume 25, numbers 1-2, 2003 [published February 2005]: 23-46.

"Battle Rage and Civility in Beowulf", Co-authored with Tom Wymer. The Heroic Age. Issue 7, Spring 2004, Fifth Anniversary Issue.

"Third Time, Third Being," A translation of Bernard Stiegler's "Tiers-temps, tiers-étant," Forthcoming Rhizomes Issue 8, Spring 2005.

Simon Morgan-Russell Professor Dean, College of Arts & Sciences PhD, Lehigh University

Research interests: Studies in Comedy, Comic Performance and History.

Teaching interests: Early modern British literature, particularly Shakespeare and other dramatists; contemporary British film and television studies; British Cultural Studies, and British Comedy.

Recent publications: Jimmy Perry & David Croft (“The Television Series” Manchester University Press, 2004).

"A Local Shop for Local People: Imbrication and Alienation in British Situation Comedy," Journal of British Cinema and Television 4.2 (2007): 322-336.

Piya Pal-Lapinski Associate Professor Associate Chair PhD, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Research interests: Byron and Poststructuralist theory, theorizing violence, the Romantic and Victorian novel, courtesans and the culture of capitalism, discourses of terror, fashion theory, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, and opera.

Teaching interests: Byron and British/Continental Romanticism, The British and European Gothic, Vampires, Topics in Critical Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Terrorism and Aesthetics, The Victorian Novel with a special emphasis on issues of sensation/empire/orientalism, and Libertine Culture in 18th and 19th century Britain.

Recent publications: The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (University of New England Press, 2005) Reviewed in Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, CHOICE.

"A Night with La Draculetta": Designing/Desiring Romanian Diva Angela Gheorghiu in Vampirettes, Wretches and Amazons, ed. Valentina Glajar and Domnica Radulescu, Columbia University Press, 2005.

Works in progress: "Byron Avec Sade: Material and Spectral Violence in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,Canto IV" in Byron’s Ghosts, ed. Gavin Hopps. (forthcoming)

Byronic Violence: Erotics, Aesthetics, Politics. [Book Manuscript]

Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror, edited collection, co-edited with Dr. Matt Green, University of Nottingham, UK.

"Byronic Terror, Death and Impossible Exchange" From Byron’s Werner to Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism. [Article]

Jolie Sheffer Assistant Professor PhD, University of Virginia

Research interests: Twentieth-Century American Literature & Culture, Race & Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality, and Psychoanalysis.

Teaching interests: Ethnic literature, theories of race and identity, American Studies, and critical theory.

Recent publications: The Romance of Race: The Familial Origins of American Multiculturalism, 1880-1930 (under review). [Book project]

Journal Articles "'Citizen Sure Thing' or 'Jus' Foreigner'?: Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna’s Orientalist Fiction," Journal of Asian American Studies 13.1 (February 2010). 81-105.

"Recollecting, Repeating and Walking Through: Immigration, Trauma, and Spatiality in Mary Antin’s The Promised Land," MELUS 35.1 (Spring 2010).  141-166.

Book Chapters & Contributions "Standing on Top of the World:  Masculinity and Imperialism on Everest." Linda K. Fuller, ed., Sport, Rhetoric, Gender, and Globalization: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations.  New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 293-305.

Essays on Onoto Watanna, Ruth Ozeki, and My Year of Meats.  Felicia Campbell, ed.  Encyclopedia of Asian American Popular Culture.  Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.  (Forthcoming)

Essay on The Promised Land by Mary Antin.  Abby H. P. Werlock, ed., Facts on File Companion to the American Novel.  New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Book Reviews Rev. of Left of the Color Line:  Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst (2003). Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2004.

Rev. of 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism, Mitsuye Yamada, Merle Woo, and Nellie Wong (2003). Iris: A Journal about Women, Fall 2003. 

Maisha Wester Assistant Professor PhD, University of Florida

Research interests:  Constructions and representations of "Blackness" in American popular culture; American gothic literature; representations of otherness and marginalization in contemporary horror films; African-American culture and literature after 1800; womanist theory and literature; and postmodernist theories of narrative and identity.

Teaching interests: Undergrad courses--Film and literature, African American Literature, Cultural Pluralism in the U.S., and 19th Century American Literature; Graduate courses--seminars in race, gender and sexuality, and popular culture and literature.

Recent publications: "Torture Porn and Uneasy Feminisms: Re-thinking (Wo)men in Eli Roth's Hostel Films," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29.4 (forthcoming).

"Forgetting to Re-member: 'Post-racial' Amnesia and Racial History," Reconstruction 9.3 (2009).

"Haunting and Haunted Queerness: Randall Kenan's Re-inscription of Difference in A Visitation of Spirits," Callaloo 30.4 (Fall 2007).

"A Review of Donal Moriarty's The Art of Brian Coffey," Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing 3.1-2 (Spring 2011).

Works in Progress: "Monstrous Race: Reading Racial Abjection in The Skeleton Key," Critical Inquiry (under review).

"St. Domingue/ Haiti, Villain/ Hero: Gothic Revisions of the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's 'The Mulatto,'" Callaloo (under review).

Screams from Shadowed Places: Contemporary African-American Re-visions of Gothic Racial Ideologies. [Book project]